Table of Contents

ONE - Shock and Awe: How We Got Hit
The World Before September 11
g/n in a Movie-Made World
The Billion-Dollar Gravestone
Looking Forward, Looking Backward

TWO - How to Garrison a Planet

Twenty- First-Century Gunboat Diplomacy
Wonders of the Imperial World
How to Garrison a Planet (and Not Even
Notice)

THREE - Air War, Barbarity, and Collateral Damage
Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq
The Barbarism of War from the Air
An Anatomy of Collateral Damage
Launching the Drone Wars

FOUR - The Language of War, American-Style
Which War Is This Anyway?
The Imperial Unconscious
Fixing What's Wrong in Washington. .. in
Afghanistan

FIVE - The Bush Legacy: What They Did fWrong)
Ponzi Scheme Presidency
With Us or Against Us?
Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a Na-
tional Emergency

SIX - Obama's War

How Safe Do You Want to Be?
General "Manhunter"
Obama and the Imperial Presidency
A War That No Longer Needs a Justification
How the Pentagon Counts Coups in
Washington

SEVEN - Living in the Shadow of War
G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero
Why Military Dreams Fail— and Why It Doesn't
Matter

The Afghan Speech Obama Should f But Won't)
Give

8:01 P.M. EDT

A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority
The Nine Surges of Obama's War
Pentagon Time: Tick. . .Tick.. .Tick. ..

EPILOGUE

Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

Index

About Haymarket Books

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About Tom Engelhardt

Copyright Page

Praise for The American Way
of War

"They may have Blackwater/Xe, Halliburton, air-
craft carrier battle groups, deadly drones by the
score and the world's largest military budget, but we
have Tom Engelhardt— and a more powerful truth-
seeking missile has seldom been invented. Long-
time fans like me will be happy to see some of his
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things that make us most uncomfortable."

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America's Path to Permanent War

"Tom Engelhardt is among our most trenchant crit-
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the core of Tom's TomDispatches for almost a dec-
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Paradise Built in Hell

The American Way of War

How Bush's Wars Became Obama's

TOM ENGELHARDT

<T>

' t '

Haymarket Books

For Chalmers Johnson, the most astute observer of

the American way of war I know. He broke the

ground and made the difference.

INTRODUCTION

Is America Hooked on War?

"War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans
on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue
in "Newspeak," the language invented by George
Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some
sixty years later, a quarter century after Orwell's
imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a
number of ways, eerily applicable to the United
States.

On September 10, 2009, for instance, a New York
Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David E.
Sanger was headlined "Obama Is Facing Doubts in
Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue." It
offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.

"Doubts," of course, imply dissent, and in fact just
the week before there had been a major break in
Washington's ranks, though not among Democrats.
The conservative columnist George Will wrote a
piece offering blunt advice to the Obama adminis-
tration, summed up in its headline: "Time to Get

Out of Afghanistan." In our age of political and
audience fragmentation and polarization, think of
this as the Afghan version of Vietnam's Walter
Cronkite moment.

The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on
the other hand, represented a more typical Wash-
ington moment. Ignored, for instance, was Wiscon-
sin senator Russ Feingold's call for the president to
develop an Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus
of the piece was instead a planned speech by
Michigan senator Carl Levin, chairman of the
Armed Services Committee. He was, Schmitt and
Sanger reported, hoping to push back against well-
placed leaks (in the Times, among other places) in-
dicating that war commander General Stanley
McChrystal was urging the president to commit fif-
teen thousand to forty-five thousand more Americ-
an troops to the Afghan War.

Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist
of Levin's message about what everyone agreed was
a "deteriorating" U.S. position: "[H]e was against
sending more American combat troops to Afgh-
anistan until the United States speeded up the
training and equipping of more Afghan security
forces."

Think of this as the line in the sand within the
Democratic Party. Both positions could be summed
up with the same word: More.

The essence of this "debate" came down to: More
of them versus more of us (and keep in mind that
more of "them"— an expanded training program for
the Afghan National Army— actually meant more of
"us" in the form of extra trainers and advisers). In
other words, however contentious the disputes in
Washington, however dismally the public viewed
the war, however much the president's war coalition
might threaten to crack open, the only choices were
between more and more.

In such a situation, no alternatives are likely to
get a real hearing. Few alternative policy proposals
even exist because alternatives that don't fit with
"more" have ceased to be part of Washington's war
culture. No serious thought, effort, or investment
goes into them. Clearly referring to Will's column,
one of the unnamed "senior officials" who swarm
through our major newspapers made the adminis-
tration's position clear, saying sardonically, accord-
ing to the Washington Post, "I don't anticipate that
the briefing books for the [administration] prin-
cipals on these debates over the next weeks and
months will be filled with submissions from opinion

columnists.... I do anticipate they will be filled with
vigorous discussion... of how successful we've been
to date."

State of War

Because the United States does not look like a
militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp
that Washington is a war capital, that the United
States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the
planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war
somewhere (usually, in fact, many places) at any
moment. Similarly, we've become used to the idea
that, when various forms of force (or threats of
force) don't work, our response, as in Afghanistan,
is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version of
the same under a new or rebranded name— the hot
one now being "counterinsurgency," or COIN— in a
marginally different manner. When it comes to war,
as well as preparations for war, more is now gener-
ally the order of the day.

This wasn't always the case. The early Republic
that the most hawkish conservatives love to cite was
a land whose leaders looked with suspicion on the
very idea of a standing army. They would have
viewed our hundreds of global garrisons, our vast

network of spies, agents, Special Forces teams, sur-
veillance operatives, interrogators, rent-a-guns, and
mercenary corporations— as well as our staggering
Pentagon budget and the constant future-war gam-
ing and planning that accompanies it— with genuine
horror.

The question is: What kind of country do we actu-
ally live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence
Community lists seventeen intelligence services
ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central In-
telligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence
Agency to the National Reconnaissance Office and
the National Security Agency? What could "intelli-
gence" mean once spread over seventeen sizeable,
bureaucratic, often competing outfits with a cumu-
lative 2009 budget estimated at more than $55 bil-
lion (a startling percentage of which is controlled by
the Pentagon)? What exactly is so intelligent about
all that? And why does no one think it even mildly
strange or in any way out of the ordinary?

What does it mean when the most military-ob-
sessed administration in our history, which, year
after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon
budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by
a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar
platform, and who then submitted an even larger

Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about
Washington and about the viability of nonmilitar-
ized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took?
What does it mean when the new administration,
surveying nearly eight years and two wars' worth of
disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces
rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?

What kind of a world do we inhabit when, at a
time of mass unemployment, the American taxpayer
is financing the building of a three-story,
exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop
barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This,
in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220 million
upgrade of the base that includes new "water treat-
ment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms,
and power generating plants." And what about the
U.S. air base built at Balad, north of Baghdad, that
has fifteen bus routes, two fire stations, two water
treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two
power plants, a water bottling plant, and the requis-
ite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well
as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at
Chicago's O'Hare International?

What kind of world are we living in when a plan
to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the
removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of

equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdraw-
al leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar
contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of
private security contractors in that country?

What do you make of a world in which the U.S.
military has robot assassins in the skies over its war
zones, 24/7, and the "pilots" who control them from
thousands of miles away are ready on a moment's
notice to launch missiles— "Hellfire" missiles at
that— into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild,
mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afgh-
anistan? What does it mean when American pilots
can be at war "in" Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote
control, while their bodies remain at a base outside
Las Vegas, and then they can head home past a sign
that warns them to drive carefully because this is
"the most dangerous part of your day"?

What does it mean when, for our security and fu-
ture safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest ideas
imaginable for developing high-tech weapons sys-
tems, many of which sound as if they came straight
out of the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example,
Boeing's advanced coordinated system of handheld
drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield sur-
veillance equipment slated for seven army brigades
within the next two years at a cost of $2 billion and

for the full army by 2025; or the Next Generation
Bomber, an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or
a truly futuristic bomber, "a suborbital semi-space-
craft able to move at hypersonic speed along the
edge of the atmosphere," for 2035? What does it
mean about our world when those people in our
government peering deepest into a blue-skies future
are planning ways to send armed "platforms" up in-
to those skies and kill more than a quarter century
from now?

And do you ever wonder about this: If such
weaponry is being endlessly developed for our
safety and security, and that of our children and
grandchildren, why is it that one of our most suc-
cessful businesses involves the sale of the same
weaponry to other countries? Few Americans are
comfortable thinking about this, which may explain
why global-arms-trade pieces don't tend to make it
onto the front pages of our newspapers. In Septem-
ber 2009, the Times Pentagon correspondent Thom
Shanker, for instance, wrote a rare piece on the sub-
ject, but it appeared inside the paper on a quiet
Labor Day. "Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms
Supplier Grows" was the headline. Perhaps
Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable with his subject,
because he included the following generic

description: "In the highly competitive global arms
market, nations vie for both profit and political in-
fluence through weapons sales, in particular to de-
veloping nations." The figures he cited from a con-
gressional study of that "highly competitive" market
told a different story: The United States, with $37.8
billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007),
controlled 68.4 percent of the global arms market in
2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came "a
distant second" with $3.7 billion. In sales to "devel-
oping nations," the United States inked $29.6 bil-
lion in weapons agreements or 70.1 percent of the
market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at
$3.3 billion, or 7.8 percent of the market. In other
words, with 70 percent of the market, the United
States actually has what, in any other field, would
qualify as a monopoly position— in this case, in
things that go boom in the night. With the American
car industry in a ditch, it seems that this (along with
Hollywood films that go boom in the night) is what
we now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state.
Is that an American accomplishment you're com-
fortable with?

Consider this: War is now the American way,
even if peace is what most Americans experience
while their proxies fight in distant lands. Any

serious alternative to war, which means our "secur-
ity," is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian
terms then, war is indeed peace in the United
States— and peace is war.

American Newspeak

Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever
more constricted form of English that would, sooner
or later, make "all other modes of thought im-
possible." "It was intended," he wrote in an ap-
pendix to his novel, "that when Newspeak had been
adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a
heretical thought.. .should be literally unthinkable."

When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a
world of American Newspeak in which alternatives
to a state of war are not only ever more unaccept-
able, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our
permanent situation, it has also been sundered from
a set of words that once accompanied it. It lacks, for
instance, "victory." After all, when was the last time
the United States actually won a war (unless you in-
clude our "victories" over small countries incapable
of defending themselves, like the tiny Caribbean is-
land of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in
1989)? The smashing "victory" over Saddam

Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a stop-
and-start conflict now almost two decades old that
has proved a catastrophe.

Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and
Korean Wars, and the U.S. military was last truly
victorious in 1945. But achieving victory no longer
seems to matter. War American-style is now con-
ceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When
George W. Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror
(aka World War IV), conceived as a "generational
struggle" like the cold war, he caught a certain
American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war sys-
tem can't absorb victory. Any such endpoint might
indeed prove to be a kind of defeat.

No longer has war anything to do with the taking
of territory either, or even with direct conquest. War
is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a
beginning, an end, and an actual geography.

Similarly drained of its traditional meaning has
been the word "security"— though it has moved from
a state of being (secure) to an eternal, immensely
profitable process whose endpoint is unachievable.
If we ever decided we were either secure enough, or
more willing to live without the unreachable idea of
total security, the American way of war and the

national security state would lose much of their
meaning. In other words, in our world, security is
insecurity.

As for "peace"— war's companion and theoretical
opposite— it, too, has been emptied of meaning and
all but discredited. Appropriately enough, dip-
lomacy, the part of government that classically
would have been associated with peace, or at least
with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means,
has been dwarfed by, subordinated to, or even sub-
sumed by the Pentagon. In recent years, the U.S.
military, with its vast funds, has taken over, or en-
croached upon, a range of activities that once would
have been left to an underfunded State Department,
especially humanitarian aid operations, foreign aid,
and what's now called nation-building.

Diplomacy itself has been militarized and, like
our country, is now hidden behind massive fortifica-
tions, and has been placed under Lord of the Flies-
style guard. The State Department's embassies are
now bunkers and military-style headquarters for the
prosecution of war policies. Its officials, when
enough of them can be found, are now sent out into
the provinces in war zones to do "civilian" things.

And peace itself? Simply put, there's no money in
it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the United States in-
vests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes
to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very
idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to
endless war is so discredited that it's left to Utopi-
ans, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Or-
well's Newspeak, while "peace" remains with us, it's
largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the
opposite of war, it's just a rhetorical flourish embed-
ded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not
just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight
another, but to seriously scale down the American
global mission, close those hundreds of bases— as of
2010, there were almost four hundred of them,
macro to micro, in Afghanistan alone— and bring
our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss
such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an
apostate to America's true religion and addiction,
which is force. However much it might seem that
most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or
computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are
also— always— marching as to war. We may not all
bother to attend the church of our new religion, but

we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live
peaceably in a state of war.

ONE
Shock and Awe: How We Got Hit

The World Before September 11

September 2001. The "usually disengaged" presid-
ent, as columnist Maureen Dowd labeled him, had
just returned from a prolonged, brush-cutting
Crawford vacation to much criticism and a nation in
trouble. One Republican congressman complained
that "it was hard for Mr. Bush to get his message out
if the White House lectern had a 'Gone Fishing' sign
on it."

Democrats were on the attack. Journalistic cover-
age seemed to grow ever bolder. George W. Bush's
poll figures were dropping. A dozen prominent Re-
publicans, fearful of a president out of touch with
the national mood, gathered for a private dinner
with Karl Rove to "offer an unvarnished critique of
Bush's style and strategy." Next year's congressional
elections suddenly seemed up for grabs. The presid-
ent's aides were desperately scrambling to

reposition him as a more "commanding" figure,
while, according to the polls, a majority of Americ-
ans felt the country was headed in the wrong direc-
tion. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld had
"cratered"; in the Middle East "violence was rising."

An editorial in the New York Times caught the
moment this way in its opening sentence: "A simple
truth of human existence is that it is vastly easier to
amplify fear than it is to assuage it." Now, there was
a post-9/11 truth— except that the editorial was
headlined "The Statistical Shark" and its next sen-
tence wasn't about planes smashing into buildings
or the way the Bush administration had since wiel-
ded the fear card, but another hot-button issue en-
tirely. It went: "Consider the shark attacks that have
occurred in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina
this

This was, in fact, September 6, 2001, the waning
days of a man-bites-dog summer in which headlines
had been dominated by the deaths of David Peltier,
a 10-year-old boy in Florida, and Sergei Zaloukaev,
a 28-year-old in North Carolina, in fatal shark at-
tacks. Just the day before, in fact, the Times had
carried a piece by William J. Broad reassuring read-
ers that scientists did not believe the world was fa-
cing a shark "rampage." "If anything," Broad

concluded, "the recent global trend in shark attacks
is down."

It was just past Labor Day. Congress was barely
back in session. Heywood Hale Broun, the
sportswriter, would die at eighty-three that relat-
ively quiet week, while Mexican president Vicente
Fox swept triumphantly into Washington, and a
new book, featured on Newsweek's cover, would
carry the title, The Accidental President. The
Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section was
promoting "the new season" in entertainment, while
that night a highly publicized ten-part miniseries
was premiering on HBO— Band of Brothers, a Tom
Hanks and Steven Spielberg production that fol-
lowed a platoon of "greatest generation" soldiers
deep into Germany. If World War II nostalgia was
on the tube, war elsewhere in the American world
was also largely on screen. On September 7, Times
journalist Thorn Shanker reported on a classified
war game, a computer-generated simulation played
out by "the nation's senior commanders" which de-
termined that the U.S. military could "decisively de-
feat one potential adversary, North Korea, while re-
pelling an attack from Iraq"— even if "terrorists [at-
tacked] New York City with chemical weapons."

All in all, that week before September 11 was a
modestly uneventful one. An afternoon spent revis-
iting the version of it in the New York Times, via a
library microfiche machine, making my way
through that paper, day by day, section by section,
plunged me into a nearly forgotten world in which
the Democrats still controlled the Senate by a single
vote and key Republican senators— it was Texan
Phil Gramm's turn to announce his retirement that
week— were going down like bowling pins. (Jesse
Helms and Strom Thurmond had preceded Gramm,
"adding a new element of uncertainty to the 2002
race.") The president had been met by exceedingly
gloomy economic news as the unemployment rate
jumped that Saturday to 4.9 percent— another
100,000 jobs lost— a full point above election day,
ten months earlier; and Wall Street responded with
a sell-off that dropped the Dow Jones to 9,600. Re-
publicans were "panicked," the administration
adrift, and we wouldn't see the likes of it again for
four years.

Eerie Resonances

A number of post-9/11 subjects were in the paper
that week: Torture was in the headlines— leading off

the culture page that Saturday ("Torture Charge Pits
Professor vs. Professor") in a memory piece, date-
lined Santiago, on Augusto Pinochet's brutal milit-
ary rule in Chile. (The anniversary of his bloody
coup, September 11, 1973, was approaching.)

Then, too, an American citizen had been im-
prisoned without charges for eighteen months— but
it was electrical engineer Fuming Fong and China
was holding him.

Anthrax made the op-ed page— but only because
Russian scientists had developed a new type that
could "overcome the standard Russian and Americ-
an vaccines."

Terrorism in the United States was in the
news— an Oklahoma prosecutor was seeking the
death penalty for Terry L. Nichols in the Oklahoma
City Murrah Federal Building bombing.

"Violence in the Middle East" was on the front
page— but in that week, it had only one meaning:
the endless Israeli/Palestinian conflict. (The first
Israeli-Arab suicide bomber had just struck.)

The Taliban could be found on the front page on
September 7 (and inside on subsequent days)— but
only because the mullahs were trying eight foreign

aid workers for preaching Christianity. The be-
mused articles ("Another Strange Kabul Problem:
Finding a Lawyer") were of the weird-foreigners
variety.

Military recruitment was a topic of interest then
as now— the army, after switching ad agencies and
slogans ("Army of One" for "Be All You Can Be")
had just conducted an "elaborate event" at the
Pentagon, swearing into service its 75,800th recruit
of the year, nineteen-year-old Rodrigo Vasquez III
of Karnes City, Texas, in order to highlight meeting
its recruitment goals a month ahead of schedule in
the "most successful recruiting year since at least
1997."

Howard Dean made the inside pages of the paper
that week— the little-known Vermont governor
(tagged with "fiscal conservativism/social liberal-
ism") announced that he would not seek reelection
to his fifth two-year term. There was "speculation"
that he might even "run for the Democratic nomina-
tion for President."

Missing in Action

And then there were— in terms of what we've been
used to ever since— the missing, or almost missing
issues. Saddam Hussein didn't make it into the pa-
per that week. Kim Jong-il was nowhere in sight.
Osama bin Laden barely slipped into print— twice
deep into articles— as "the accused terrorist" being
hosted by the strange Taliban government. The Axis
of Evil, of course, did not exist, nor did the Global
War on Terror, and the potential enemy of the
week, pushed by Donald Rumsfeld (himself on the
defensive over the military budget and arguments
with his generals), was "the rising China threat."

Iran was scarcely a blip on the news radar screen;
Syria rated not a mention. Also missing were just
about any of the names we came to consider second
nature to the post-9/11 news. No "Scooter" Libby.
No Valerie Plame. No Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton,
or Douglas Feith. In fact, not a neocon made it into
the pages of the paper over those seven days, and
Judy Miller, the neocons' future dream reporter,
who would soon enough storm the front page of the
Times and take it for her own, had two pieces that
week: a September 5 article on page 5 about a
former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

general counsel challenging the administration's
"assertion that the global treaty banning biological
weapons permits nations to test such arms for de-
fensive purposes"; and, two days later, a tiny Israel
piece tucked away at the bottom of page 15 on "the
alleged [online] support for terrorism" by Islamic
groups and charities.

The vice president, silently at the president's side
at a "hastily arranged" and awkward "appearance"
on the White House grounds after the unemploy-
ment figures broke, was otherwise nowhere to be
seen, though the Times speculated on its editorial
page ("The Bush Merry-Go-Round") that he was
"losing influence." ("Mr. Cheney's heart problems
and his ardent embrace of the coal, oil and gas in-
dustries seem to have hobbled him.")

Though the sharks in the world's oceans that
week were feeding on something other than hu-
mans, there were still "sharks" around. Allison
Mitchell began a Sunday lead Week in Review piece
("Face Off: Which Way to Win Control of Con-
gress?") this way: "Talk about shark season. Con-
gress came back into session last week and the
Democrats were circling, sensing blood in the polit-
ical waters." Little wonder. This was, after all, a
non-majoritarian president who had, as Times

writers didn't hesitate to remind people, just
squeaked through with a helping hand from the Su-
preme Court. After managing to get one massive tax
cut by Congress, he began to drift like a lost lifeboat
at sea, while his advisers fretted over polls "showing
that many people still view Mr. Bush not as decisive
but as tentative and perhaps overly scripted." He
was, as a front-page piece by Richard L. Berke and
David E. Sanger put it on September 9, "essentially
out of economic ammunition."

The nature of politics in Washington that week
could be caught in lines like: "Democrats go on the
attack" and "Democrats intensified their attacks
against Mr. Bush." Less than a year into a Bush
presidency, columnist Tom Friedman was already
offering the faltering leader heartfelt advice on how
not to lose the next election. Be "Clinton-minus,"
not "Reagan-squared" was the formula he offered.
As the Mitchell piece made clear, this was a presid-
ency under siege, as well as a Republican Party— so
"everyone" in Washington agreed— "in peril." In the
sort of action not to be seen again for years, a Sen-
ate committee actually cut money from the defense
budget that week, an act Shanker of the Times
termed "another stark challenge" from committee
chairman Carl Levin of Michigan. The political

failure of the president's father was evidently on
Washington minds as well, and so the paper in a
number of pieces linked father and son. The father's
bid for reelection had, after all, gone down in flames
in the nation's previous recession, or, as the head-
line of one story put it, "Like Father, Bush Is Caught
in a Politically Perilous Budget Squeeze."

A few aspects of our post-9/11 political world
were quite recognizable even then. That week, the
Bush administration was easing up on Big Tobacco
("Justice Official Denies Pressure to Settle Tobacco
Suit") and Big Computer ("U.S. Abandoning Its Ef-
fort to Break Apart Microsoft"), while preparing to
bail from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And as
the administration pushed for legislation to open
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a "hobbled"
Dick Cheney was already stonewalling about what
had occurred when his Energy Task Force of Big Oil
met earlier in 2001.

The two days before 9/11 were so quiet that you
could practically hear a news pin drop. In the Times
of September 11— in that moment before the Inter-
net took full possession of us, a day's lag between
events and the news was a print norm— the major
story ("Key Leaders Talk of Possible Deals to Revive
Economy, Bush Is Under Pressure") indicated that

"some Republicans" were anxiously bringing up
1982 when President Reagan "told the nation to
'stay the course' in a recession" and the party
dropped numerous House seats in the midterm
elections.

At the bottom of the front page was a plane hi-
jacking story, though it was thirty years old ("Traced
on Internet, Teacher Is Charged in '71 Jet Hijack-
ing"). Across the rest of the page-bottom on that fi-
nal morning were "In a Nation of Early Risers,
Morning TV Is a Hot Market" and "School Dress
Codes vs. a Sea of Bare Flesh."

For intimations of what was to come, you would
have had to move inside. On page 3, Douglas Frantz
reported, "Suicide Bomb Kills 2 Police Officers in
Istanbul," a bombing for which no one took credit
and which was automatically attributed to "a leftist
terrorist group" (something that would not happen
again soon). On the next page, you could find Barry
Bearak and James Risen's piece "Reports Disagree
on Fate of Anti-Taliban Rebel Chief about the as-
sassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, an anti-
Taliban warlord, by two Arabs posing as journalists
(which we now know was connected to the Septem-
ber 11 plot). In its penultimate paragraph was this:
"If the would-be assassins were indeed Arabs. ..the

fact would lend credibility to those who contend
that foreigners, including Osama bin Laden, are
playing an ever bigger decision-making role among
the Taliban."

Peering further into the future, on page 8, under
World Briefs, was a throwaway paragraph on the
low-level air war even then being conducted against
Saddam Hussein's Iraq: "Iraq said eight civilians
were killed and three wounded when Western
planes attacked farms 100 miles southeast of Bagh-
dad. The Pentagon said American and British war-
planes attacked three surface-to-air missile sites in
the so-called no-fly zone." Another article, "Iran:
Denial on Nuclear Weapons," began: "The govern-
ment rejected charges by the United States that it
was seeking nuclear weapons."

And then, of course, there was nothing to do but
oh-so-slowly turn the microfiche dial and, after a
pitch-black break between days, stumble into those
mile-high headlines— "U.S. Attacked, Hijacked Jets
Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon in Day of
Terror"— and, despite yourself, experience with a
kind of gasp the sky in your brain filling with falling
bodies.

Here, by the way, is how that September 6 Times
shark editorial ended. If it doesn't give you a little
chill for what we've lost, I don't know what will:
"Life is full of things that carry more risk than
swimming in the ocean. Most of them are inevitably
the byproducts of daily life, like falling televisions
and car accidents, because daily life is where we
spend most of our time. It may lack the visceral
fears aroused by the unlikely threat of a shark at-
tack, but it is also far more lethal."

Only five days after that was written, almost three
thousand New Yorkers, some adopted from coun-
tries around the globe, would face a danger far more
shocking— and, until that moment, far less imagin-
able to most of us— than any shark attack. Things
would indeed fall from the sky— and from a history
so many Americans knew nothing about— and vis-
ceral fears would be aroused that would drive us,
like the Pearl Harbor-style headlines that greeted
the audacious act not of a major power but of nine-
teen fanatics in four planes prepared to die, into a
future even more unimaginable.

Put another way, an afternoon spent in the lost
world of September 5-10, 2001, reminds us that the
savage attacks of the following day would, in fact,
buy a faltering, confused, and weak administration,

as well as a dazed and disengaged president, a new
life, a "calling" as he would put it, and almost four
years to do its damnedest. It would be 2004 before
the president's polling figures settled back to the
levels of that long-lost September 10. It would be
the summer of 2005— and the administration's dis-
astrous handling of hurricanes Katrina and
Iraq— before the president would again be criticized
for his "gone fishing" summer vacation; before the
Democrats would again begin to attack; before
newspapers would again be relatively uncowed; be-
fore the Republicans would again gather in those
private (and then public) places and begin to com-
plain; before Congress would again be up for grabs.
Four long years to make it back to September 10,
2001, in an American world now filled to the brim
with horrors, a United States that was no longer a
"country," but a "homeland" and a Homeland Se-
curity State.

9/11 in a Movie-Made World

We knew it was coming. Not, as conspiracy theor-
ists imagine, just a few top officials among us, but

all of us— and not for weeks or months, but for more
than half a century before September 11, 2001.

That's why, for all the shock, it was, in a sense, so
familiar. Americans were already imagining ver-
sions of September 11 soon after the dropping of the
first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
That event set the American imagination boiling.
Within weeks of the destruction of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, as scholar Paul Boyer has shown, all the
familiar signs of nuclear fear were already in place:
newspapers were drawing concentric circles of
atomic destruction outward from fantasy Ground
Zeroes in American cities, and magazines were of-
fering visions of our country as a vaporized waste-
land, while imagining millions of American dead.

And then, suddenly, one clear morning it seemed
to arrive— by air, complete with images of the de-
struction of the mightiest monuments to our power,
and (just as previously experienced) as an onscreen
spectacle. At one point that day, it could be viewed
on more than thirty channels, including some never
previously involved with breaking news, and most
of the country was watching.

Only relatively small numbers of New Yorkers ac-
tually experienced 9/11 firsthand: those at the tip of

Manhattan or close enough to watch the two planes
smash into the World Trade Center towers, to watch
(as some schoolchildren did) people leaping or fall-
ing from the upper floors of those buildings, to be
enveloped in the vast cloud of smoke and ash, in the
tens of thousands of pulverized computers and
copying machines, the asbestos and flesh and plane,
the shredded remains of millions of sheets of paper,
of financial and office life as we know it. For most
Americans, even those like me who were living in
Manhattan, 9/11 arrived on the television screen.
This is why what leapt to mind— and instantan-
eously filled our papers and TV reporting— was pre-
vious screen life, the movies.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the
news was peppered with comments about, thoughts
about, and references to films. Reporters, as Caryn
James wrote in the New York Times that first day,
"compared the events to Hollywood action movies";
as did op-ed writers ("The scenes exceeded the
worst of Hollywood's disaster movies"); columnists
("On TV, two national landmarks... look like the af-
termath in the film Independence Day"); and eye-
witnesses ("It was like one of them Godzilla
movies"; "And then I saw an explosion straight out
of The Towering Inferno "). Meanwhile, in an irony

of the moment, Hollywood scrambled to excise from
upcoming big- and small-screen life anything that
might bring to mind thoughts of 9/11, including, in
the case of Fox, promotion for the premiere episode
of 24, in which "a terrorist blows up an airplane."

In our guts, we had always known it was coming.
Like any errant offspring, Little Boy and Fat Man,
those two atomic packages with which we had paid
them back for Pearl Harbor, were destined to return
home someday. No wonder the single, omnipresent
historical reference in the media in the wake of the
attacks was Pearl Harbor or, as screaming headlines
had it, INFAMY, or A NEW DAY OF INFAMY. We
had just experienced "the Pearl Harbor of the 21st
Century," or, as R. James Woolsey, former CIA dir-
ector (and neocon), said in the Washington Post
that first day, "It is clear now, as it was on Decem-
ber 7, 1941, that the United States is at war.... The
question is: with whom?"

The Day After

No wonder what came instantly to mind was a
nuclear event. No wonder, according to a New York
Times piece, Tom Brokaw, then chairing NBC's

nonstop news coverage, "may have captured it best
when he looked at videotape of people on a street,
everything and everyone so covered with ash... [and
said] it looked 'like a nuclear winter in lower Man-
hattan.'" No wonder the Tennessean and the
Topeka Capital-Journal both used the headline
"The Day After," lifted from a famous 1983 TV
movie about nuclear Armageddon.

No wonder the area where the two towers fell was
quickly dubbed "Ground Zero," a term previously
reserved for the spot where an atomic explosion had
occurred. On September 12, for example, the Los
Angeles Times published a full-page series of illus-
trations of the attacks on the towers headlined:
"Ground Zero." By week's end, it had become the
only name for "the collapse site," as in a September
18 New York Times headline, "Many Come to Bear
Witness at Ground Zero."

No wonder the events seemed so strangely famili-
ar. We had been living with the possible return of
our most powerful weaponry via TV and the movies,
novels and our own dream-life, in the past, the fu-
ture, and even— thanks to a John F. Kennedy TV ap-
pearance on October 22, 1962, during the Cuban
missile crisis to tell us that our world might end to-
morrow—in something like the almost-present.

So many streams of popular culture had fed into
this. So many "previews" had been offered. Every-
where in those decades, you could see yourself or
your compatriots or the enemy "Hiroshimated" (as
Variety termed it back in 1947). Even when Arnold
Schwarzenegger wasn't kissing Jamie Lee Curtis in
True Lies as an atomic explosion went off some-
where in the Florida Keys or a playground filled
with American kids wasn't being atomically
blistered in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, even
when it wasn't literally nuclear, that apocalyptic
sense of destruction lingered as the train, bus,
blimp, explosively armed, headed for us in our un-
knowing innocence; as the towering inferno, air-
port, city, White House was blasted away, as we
were offered Pompeii-scapes of futuristic destruc-
tion in what would, post-9/11, come to be known as
"the homeland."

Sometimes it came from outer space armed with
strange city-blasting rays; other times irradiated
monsters rose from the depths to stomp our cities
(in the 1998 remake of Godzilla— New York City, no
less). After Darth Vader used his Death Star to pul-
verize a whole planet in Star Wars, planets were
regularly nuclearized in Saturday-morning TV

cartoons. In our imaginations, post-1945, we were
always at planetary Ground Zero.

Dystopian Serendipity

Increasingly, from Hamburg to Saudi Arabia to
Afghanistan, others were also watching our spectac-
ulars, our catastrophes, our previews; and so, as
Hollywood historian Neal Gabler would write in the
New York Times only days after 9/11, they were
ready to deliver what we had long dreamed of with
the kind of timing— insuring, for instance, that the
second plane arrived "at a decent interval" after the
first, so that the cameras could be in place— and in a
visual language American viewers would
understand.

But here's the catch: What came, when it came,
on September 11, 2001, wasn't what we thought
came. There was no Ground Zero, because there
was nothing faintly atomic about the attacks. It
wasn't the apocalypse at all. Except in its success, it
hardly differed from the 1993 attack on the World
Trade Center, the one that almost toppled one tower
with a rented Ryder van and a homemade bomb.

What "changed everything," as the phrase would
soon go, was a bit of dystopian serendipity for al-
Qaeda: Nineteen men of much conviction and mid-
dling skills, armed with exceedingly low-tech
weaponry and two hijacked jets, managed to create
an apocalyptic look that, in another context, would
have made the special-effects masters of George Lu-
cas's Industrial Light & Magic proud. And from
that— and the Bush administration's reaction to
it— everything else would follow.

The tiny band of fanatics who planned September
11 essentially lucked out. If the testimony, under
CIA interrogation techniques, of al-Qaeda's master
planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is to be believed,
what happened stunned even him. ("According to
the [CIA] summary, he said he 'had no idea that the
damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic
as it was.'") Those two mighty towers came crum-
bling down in that vast, roiling, near-mushroom
cloud of white smoke before the cameras, in the
fashion of the ultimate Hollywood action film (im-
agery multiplied in its traumatizing power by thou-
sands of replays over a record-setting more than
ninety straight hours of TV coverage). And that im-
agery fit perfectly the secret expectations of

Americans— just as it fit the needs of both al-Qaeda
and the Bush administration.

That's undoubtedly why other parts of the story of
that moment faded from sight. For example, take
American Flight 77, which plowed into the
Pentagon. That destructive but non-apocalyptic-
looking attack didn't satisfy the same built-in ex-
pectations. Though the term "ground zero Washing-
ton" initially floated through the media ether, it
never stuck. Similarly, the unsolved anthrax
murders-by-mail of almost the same moment,
which caused a collective shudder of horror, are
now forgotten. (According to a LexisNexis search,
between October 4 and December 4, 2001, 260 stor-
ies appeared in the New York Times and 246 in the
Washington Post with "anthrax" in the headline.
That's the news equivalent of a high-pitched scream
of horror.) Those envelopes, spilling highly refined
anthrax powder and containing letters dated "9/11/
01" with lines like "Death to America, Death to Is-
rael, Allah Is Great," represented the only use of a
weapon of mass destruction ( WMD) in this period,
yet they were slowly eradicated from our collective
(and media) memory once it became clearer that the
perpetrator or perpetrators were probably
homegrown, possibly out of the very cold war U.S.

weapons labs that produced so many WMD in the
first place.

The 36-Hour War

Indulge me, then, for a moment on an otherwise
grim subject. I've always been a fan of what-if his-
tory and science fiction, which led me to take my
own modest time machine— the IRT subway— back
to September 11, 2001, via the New York Public
Library, a building that— in the realm where sci-fi
and what-if history meld— suffered its own mon-
strous "damage," its own 9/11, only months after the
A-bombing of Hiroshima.

In November 1945, Life magazine published "The
36-Hour War," an overheated what-if tale in which
an unnamed enemy in "equatorial Africa" launched
a surprise atomic missile attack on the United
States, resulting in ten million deaths. A dramatic il-
lustration accompanying the piece showed the lib-
rary's two pockmarked stone lions still standing,
guarding a ground-zero scene of almost total de-
struction, while heavily shielded technicians tested
"the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity."

I passed those same majestic lions, still standing
(as was the library), entered the microfiche room
and began reading the New York Times starting
with the September 12, 2001, issue. Immediately I
was plunged into an apocalypse: "gates of hell," "the
unthinkable," "nightmare world of Hieronymus
Bosch," "hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke, and
leaping victims," "clamorous inferno," "an ashen
shell of itself, all but a Pompeii." But one of the
most common words in the Times and elsewhere
was "vulnerable" (or as a Times piece put it,
"nowhere was safe"). The front page of the Chicago
Tribune caught this mood in a headline, "Feeling of
Invincibility Suddenly Shattered," and a lead sen-
tence, "On Tuesday, America the invincible became
America the vulnerable." We had faced "the kami-
kazes of the 21st century"— a Pearl Harborish phrase
that would gain traction— and we had lost.

A what-if thought came to mind as I slowly rolled
that grainy microfiche; as I passed the photo of a
man, in midair, falling headfirst from a World Trade
Center tower; as I read this observation from a Pearl
Harbor survivor interviewed by the Tribune: "Th-
ings will never be the same again in this country"; as
I reeled section by section, day by day toward our
distinctly changed present; as I read all those words

that boiled up like a linguistic storm around the
photos of those white clouds; as I considered all the
op-eds and columns filled with instant opinions that
poured into the pages of our papers before there
was time to think; as I noted, buried in their pages,
a raft of words and phrases— "preempt," "a new De-
partment of Pre-emption [at the Pentagon],"
"homeland defenses," "homeland security
agency"— readying themselves to be noticed.

Among them all, the word that surfaced fastest on
the heels of that "new Day of Infamy," and to deadli-
est effect, was "war." Senator John McCain, among
many others, labeled the attacks "an act of war" on
the spot, just as Republican senator Richard Shelby
insisted that "this is total war," just as Washington
Post columnist Charles Krauthammer started his
first editorial that first day, "This is not crime. This
is war."

On the night of September 11, the president him-
self, addressing the nation, already spoke of win-
ning "the war against terrorism." By day two, he was
using the phrase "acts of war"; by day three, "the
first war of the twenty-first century" (while the
Times reported "a drumbeat for war" on television);
by week's end, "the long war"; and the following
week, in an address to a joint session of Congress,

while announcing the creation of a cabinet-level Of-
fice of Homeland Security, he wielded "war" twelve
times. ("Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda,
but it does not end there.")

What If?

What if the two hijacked planes, American Flight
11 and United Flight 175, had plunged into those
north and south towers at 8:46 and 9:03, killing all
aboard, causing extensive damage and significant
death tolls, but neither tower had come down?
What if, as a Tribune columnist called it, photogenic
"scenes of apocalypse" had not been produced?
What if, despite two gaping holes and the smoke
and flames pouring out of the towers, the imagery
had been closer to that of 1993? What if there had
been no giant cloud of destruction capable of bring-
ing to mind the look of "the day after," no images of
crumbling towers worthy of Independence Day?

We would surely have had blazing headlines, but
would they have commonly had "war" or "infamy"
in them, as if we had been attacked by another
state? Would the last superpower have gone from
"invincible" to "vulnerable" in a split second? Would

our newspapers instantly have been writing "before"
and "after" editorials, or insisting that this moment
was the ultimate "test" of George W. Bush's until-
then languishing presidency? Would we instantan-
eously have been considering taking what CIA dir-
ector George Tenet would soon call "the shackles"
off our intelligence agencies and the military?
Would we have been reconsidering, as Florida's
Democratic senator Bob Graham suggested that
first day, rescinding the congressional ban on the
assassination of foreign officials and heads of state?
Would a Washington Post journalist have been try-
ing within hours to name the kind of "war" we were
in? (He provisionally labeled it "the Gray War.")
Would New York Times columnist Tom Friedman
on the third day have had us deep into "World War
III"? Would the Times have been headlining and
quoting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
on its front page on September 14, insisting that
"it's not simply a matter of capturing people and
holding them accountable, but removing the sanctu-
aries, removing the support systems, ending states
who sponsor terrorism." (The Times editorial
writers certainly noticed that ominous "s" on
"states" and wrote the next day: "but we trust

[Wolfowitz] does not have in mind invading Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Sudan as well as Afghanistan.")

Would state-to-state "war" and "acts of terror"
have been so quickly conjoined in the media as a
"war on terror" and would that phrase have made it,
in just over a week, into a major presidential ad-
dress? Could the Los Angeles Daily News have pro-
duced the following four-day series of screaming
headlines, beating even the president to the punch:
"Terror"/ "Horror! "/'"This Is War'"/"War on
Terror"?

If it all hadn't seemed so familiar, wouldn't we
have noticed what was actually new in the attacks of
September 11? Wouldn't more people have been as
puzzled as the reporter who asked White House
press secretary Ari Fleischer, "You don't declare war
against an individual, surely"? Wouldn't Congress
have balked at passing, three days later, an almost
totally open-ended resolution granting the presid-
ent the right to use force not against one nation
(Afghanistan) but against "nations," plural and
unnamed?

And how well would the Bush administration's
fear-inspired nuclear agenda have worked, if those
buildings hadn't come down? Would Saddam

Hussein's supposed nuclear program and stores of
WMD have had the same impact? Would the end-
less linking of the Iraqi dictator, al-Qaeda, and 9/11
have penetrated so deeply that, in 2006, half of all
Americans, according to a Harris poll, still believed
Saddam had WMD when the U.S. invasion began,
and 85 percent of American troops stationed in
Iraq, according to a Zogby poll, believed the U.S.
mission there was mainly "to retaliate for Saddam's
role in the 9-11 attacks"?

Without that apocalyptic 9/11 imagery, would
those fantasy Iraqi mushroom clouds pictured by
administration officials rising over American cities,
or those fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles cap-
able of spraying our East Coast with chemical or
biological weapons, or Saddam Hussein's supposed
search for African yellowcake (or even, today, the
Iranian "bomb" that won't exist for perhaps another
decade, if at all) have so dominated American
consciousness?

Would Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri
be sitting in jail cells or be on trial by now? Would
so many things have happened differently?

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

What if the attacks on September 11, 2001, had
not been seen as a new Pearl Harbor? Only three
months earlier, after all, Disney's Pearl Harbor (the
"sanitized" version, as Times columnist Frank Rich
labeled it), a blockbuster made with extensive
Pentagon help, had performed disappointingly at
the multiplexes. As an event, it seemed irrelevant to
American audiences until 9/11, when that ancient
history— and the ancient retribution that went with
it— wiped from the American brain the actual his-
tory of recent decades, including our massive covert
anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, out of which Osama
bin Laden emerged.

Here's the greatest irony: From that time of tri-
umph in 1945, Americans had always secretly sus-
pected that they were not "invincible" but exceed-
ingly vulnerable, something both pop culture and
the deepest fears of the cold war era only reinforced.
Confirmation of that fact arrived with such immedi-
acy on September 11 largely because it was already a
gut truth. The ambulance chasers of the Bush ad-
ministration, who spotted such opportunity in the
attacks, were perhaps the last Americans who
hadn't absorbed this reality. As that New Day of

Infamy scenario played out, the horrific but actual
scale of the damage inflicted in New York and
Washington (and to the U.S. economy) would es-
sentially recede. The attack had been relatively
small, limited in its means and massive only in its
daring and luck— abetted by the fact that the Bush
administration was looking for nothing like such an
attack, despite that CIA briefing given to Bush on a
lazy August day in Crawford ("Bin Ladin
Determined to Strike in US") and so many other
clues.

Only the week before 9/11, the Bush administra-
tion had been in the doldrums with a "detached,"
floundering president criticized by worried mem-
bers of his own party for vacationing far too long at
his Texas ranch while the nation drifted. Moreover,
there was only one group before September 11 with
a "new Pearl Harbor" scenario on the brain. Major
administration figures, including Vice President
Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, had
wanted for years to radically increase the power of
the president and the Pentagon, to roll back the
power of Congress (especially any congressional re-
straints on the presidency left over from the Viet-
nam and Watergate era), and to complete the

overthrow of Saddam Hussein ("regime change")
aborted by the first Bush administration in 1991.

We know as well that some of those plans were on
the table in the 1990s and that those who held them
and promoted them, at the Project for the New
American Century in particular, actually wrote that
"the process of transformation [of the Pentagon],
even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be
a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event— like a new Pearl Harbor."

We also know that within hours of the 9/11 at-
tacks, many of the same people were at work on the
war of their dreams. Within five hours of the attack
on the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was urging his aides to
come up with plans for striking Iraq. (Notes by an
aide transcribe his wishes this way: "best info fast.
Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hus-
sein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin
Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things re-
lated and not.")

We know that by September 12, the president
himself had collared his top counterterrorism ad-
viser on the National Security Council, Richard
Clarke, in a conference room next to the White
House Situation Room and demanded linkages.

('"Look under every rock and do due diligence. ' It
was a very intimidating message which said, 'Iraq.
Give me a memo about Iraq and 9/11.'") We know
that by November, the top officials of the adminis-
tration were already deep into operational planning
for an invasion of Iraq.

And they weren't alone. Others were working fe-
verishly. Only eight days after the attacks, for in-
stance, the complex 342-page Patriot Act would be
rushed over to Congress by Attorney General John
Ashcroft, passed through a cowed Senate in the
dead of night on October 11, unread by at least some
of our representatives, and signed into law on Octo-
ber 26. As its instant appearance indicated, it was
made up of a set of already existing right-wing
hobbyhorses, quickly drafted provisions, and expan-
sions of law-enforcement powers taken off an FBI
"wish list" (previously rejected by Congress). All
these were swept together by people who, like the
president's men on Iraq, saw their main chance
when those buildings went down. As such, it stands
in for much of what happened "in response" to 9/11.

But what if we hadn't been waiting so long for our
own 36-hour war in the most victorious nation on
the planet, its sole "hyperpower," its new Rome?
What if those preexisting frameworks hadn't been

quite so well primed to emerge in no time at all?
What if we (and our enemies as well) hadn't been at
the movies all those years?

Planet of the Apes

Among other things, we've been left with a misbe-
gotten memorial to the attacks of 9/11 planned for
New York's Ground Zero and sporting the kinds of
cost overruns otherwise associated with the occupa-
tion of Iraq. In its ambitions, what it will really me-
morialize is the Bush administration's oversized,
crusading moment that followed the attacks.

Too late now— and no one asked me anyway— but
I know what my memorial would have been.

A few days after 9/11, my daughter and I took a
trip as close to "Ground Zero" as you could get.
With the air still rubbing our throats raw, we
wandered block after block, peering down side
streets to catch glimpses of the sheer enormity of
the destruction. And indeed, in a way that no small
screen could communicate, it did have the look of
the apocalyptic, especially those giant shards of
fallen building sticking up like— remember, I'm a
typical movie-made American on an increasingly

movie-made planet and had movies on the brain
that week— the image of the wrecked Statue of
Liberty that chillingly ends the first Planet of the
Apes film, that cinematic memorial to humanity's
nuclear folly. Left there as it was, that would have
been a sobering monument for the ages, not just to
the slaughter that was 9/11, but to what we had
awaited for so long— and what, sadly, we still wait
for; what, in the world that George W. Bush pro-
duced, has become ever more, rather than less,
likely. And imagine our reaction then.

Safer? Don't be ridiculous.

The Billion-Dollar Gravestone

According to a report commissioned by the
foundation charged with building Reflecting Ab-
sence, the memorial to the dead in the attack on the
World Trade Center, its projected cost was, at one
point, estimated at about a billion dollars. For that
billion, Reflecting Absence was to have two huge
"reflecting pools"— "two voids that reside in the ori-
ginal footprints of the Twin Towers"— fed by water-
falls "from all sides" and surrounded by a "forest" of

oak trees. A visitor would then be able to descend
thirty feet to galleries under the falls "inscribed with
the names of those who died." There was to be an
adjacent, 100,000-square-foot underground me-
morial museum to "retell the events of the day, dis-
play powerful artifacts, and celebrate the lives of
those who died." All of this, as the website for the
memorial stated, would vividly convey "the enorm-
ity of the buildings and the enormity of the loss."
The near-billion-dollar figure did not even include
$80 million for a planned visitor's center or the es-
timated $50-$6o million annual cost of running
such an elaborate memorial and museum.

So what was Reflecting Absence going to reflect?
For one thing, it would mirror its gargantuan twin,
the building that is to symbolically replace the
World Trade Center— the Freedom Tower. As the
Memorial was to be driven deep into the scarred
earth of Ground Zero, so the Freedom Tower was to
soar above it, scaling the imperial heights. To be
precise, it was to reach exactly 1,776 feet into the
heavens, a numerical tribute to the founding spirit
of the Declaration of Independence and the nation
that emerged from it. Its spire would even emit
light— "a new beacon of freedom"— for all the world
to see and admire. Its observation deck would rise a

carefully planned seven feet above that of the old
World Trade Center, and with spire and antennae, it
was meant to be the tallest office building on the
planet.

The revelation of that staggering billion-dollar
price tag for a memorial, whose design has grown
ever larger and more complex, caused the New York
Times to editorialize, "The only thing a $1 billion
memorial would memorialize is a complete collapse
of political and private leadership in Lower Manhat-
tan." Because the subject is such a touchy one,
however, no one went further and explored the ob-
vious—that, even in victimhood, Americans have in
recent years exhibited an unseemly imperial hubris.
Whether the price tag proves to be half a billion or a
billion dollars, one thing can be predicted: the me-
morial will prove less a reminder of how many
Americans happened to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time on that September day, or how
many— firefighters, police officers, bystanders who
stayed to aid others— sacrificed their lives, than of
the terrible path this country ventured down in the
wake of 9/11.

Consider the prospective 9/11 memorial in this
context:

• The National World War II Memorial
(405,000 American dead): $182 million for
all costs

• The Vietnam Memorial (56,000 American
dead):$4.2 million for construction

• The Korean War Veterans Memorial (54,000
American dead): $6 million

• The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor
(2,390 American dead; 1,177 from the Ari-
zona): $532,000

• The Oklahoma City National Memorial (168
American dead): $29 million

• The 1915 USS Maine Mast Memorial at Ar-
lington Cemetery (260 American dead):
$56,147.94

• The Holocaust Museum in Washington (ap-
proximately 6 million dead): $90 million for
construction/ $78 million for exhibitions

Or, imagine a listing of global Ground Zeros that
night go something like this:

• Amount spent on a memorial for the Viet-
namese dead of the Vietnam wars (approx-
imately 3 million): $0

• Amount spent on a memorial to the Afghan
dead in the civil war between competing war-
lords over who would control the capital of

Kabul in the mid-1990s (unknown numbers
of dead, a city reduced to rubble): $0

• Amount spent on a memorial to the victims of

the December 26, 2004, earthquake and
tsunami in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (at
least 188,000 dead): $0

• Amount spent on a memorial to Iraqis con-
firmed dead, many with signs of execution
and torture marks, just in the month of April
2006 in Baghdad alone (almost 1,100), or the
Iraqis confirmed killed countrywide "in war-
related violence" from January through April
ofthat year (3,525): $0

The Victors Are the Victims

The dead, those dear to us, our wives or hus-
bands, brothers, sisters, parents, children, relatives,
friends, those who acted for us or suffered in our
place, should be remembered. This is an essential
human task, almost a duty. What could be more
powerful than the urge to hold onto those taken
from us, especially when their deaths happen in an
unexpected, untimely, and visibly unjust way (only
emphasizing the deeper untimeliness and injustice
of death itself). But where exactly do we remember

the dead? The truth: We remember them in our
hearts, which makes a memorial a living thing only
so long as the dead still live within us.

As an experiment, visit one of the old Civil War or
World War I memorials that dot so many cities and
towns. You might (or might not) admire the foun-
tain, or the elaborate statue of soldiers or a general
or any other set of icons chosen to stand in for the
hallowed dead and their sacrifices. The Grand Army
Plaza, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and
dedicated to the Union Army, that fronts on Central
Park in New York City, my hometown, has always
attracted me, but it is in a sense no longer a me-
morial. Decades ago, it turned back into a somewhat
gaudy, golden decoration, a statue— as all memori-
als, in the end, must. Few today visit it to remember
what some specific individual did or how he died.
To the extent that we remember, we remember first
individually in our hearts in our own lifetimes— and
later, collectively, in our history books.

And, of course, for most human beings in most
places, especially those who are not the victors in
wars, or simply not the victors on this planet, no
matter how unfairly or horrifically or bravely or
fruitlessly their loved ones might be taken from
them, there is only the heart. For those dying in

Kabul or Baghdad, Chechnya, Darfur, the Congo, or
Uzbekistan, the emotions released may be no less
strong, but there will be no statues, no reflecting
pools, no sunken terraces, no walls with carefully
etched names.

There has, in American journalism, been an un-
spoken calculus of the value of a life and a death on
this planet in terms of newsworthiness (which is
also a kind of memorializing, a kind of remember-
ing). Crudely put, it would go something like: one
kidnapped and murdered blond white child in Cali-
fornia equals three hundred Egyptians drowned in a
ferry accident, three thousand Bangladeshis swept
away in a monsoon flood, three hundred thousand
Congolese killed in a bloodletting civil war.

It's also true that, as the recent World War II Me-
morial on the Washington Mall indicates, Americ-
ans have gained something of a taste for Roman
imperial-style memorialization. (To my mind, that
huge construction catches little of the modesty and
stoicism of the veterans of that war who, like my
father, did not come home trumpeting what they
had done.)

Reflecting Absence and the Freedom Tower go
well beyond that. Their particular form of excess, in

which money, elaborateness, and size stand in for
memory, is intimately connected not so much with
September 11, 2001, as with the days, weeks, even
years after that shock.

The Greatest Victim, Survivor, and
Dominator

To grasp this, it's necessary to return to those
now almost forgotten moments after 9/11, after the
president had frozen in an elementary school
classroom in Florida while reading The Pet Goat;
after a panicky crew of his people had headed Air
Force One in the wrong direction, away from Wash-
ington; after Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush
(according to former counterterrorism tsar Richard
Clarke) started rounding up the usual suspects— i.e.,
Saddam Hussein— on September 11 and 12; after the
president insisted, "I don't care what the interna-
tional lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass";
after he took that bullhorn at Ground Zero on
September 14, and— to chants of "USA! USA!
USA!"— promised Americans that "the people who
knocked these buildings down will hear all of us
soon"; after his associates promptly began to

formulate the plans, the "intelligence," the lies, and
the tall tales that would take us into Iraq.

It was in that unformed but quickly forming mo-
ment that, under the shock not just of the murder of
almost three thousand people, but of the apoca-
lyptic images of those two towers crumbling, an
American imperial culture of revenge and domina-
tion was briefly brought to full flower. It was a mo-
ment that reached its zenith when the president
strutted across the deck of the USS Abraham Lin-
coln on May 1, 2003, and, with that Mission Accom-
plished banner over his shoulder, declared "major
combat operations" ended in Iraq.

The gargantuan Freedom Tower and the gargan-
tuan sunken memorial to the dead of 9/11 are really
monuments to that brief year and a half, each pro-
ject now hardly less embattled in controversy, cost
overruns, and ineptitude than were the war in Iraq
or the post-Katrina rescue-and-reconstruction mis-
sion. Each project— as yet unbuilt— is already an in-
creasingly controversial leftover from that extended
moment when so many pundits pictured us proudly
as a wounded Imperial Rome or the inheritor of the
glories of the British Empire, while the administra-
tion, with its attendant neocon cheering squad in
tow, all of them dazzled by our "hyperpower,"

gained confidence that this was their moment, the
one that would take them over the top, that would
make the United States a Republican Party posses-
sion for years, if not generations; the Middle East an
American gas station; the world an American milit-
ary preserve; and a "unitary" commander-in-chief
presidency the recipient of untrammeled powers
previously reserved for kings and emperors. These
were dreams of gargantuan proportions, fantasies of
power and planetary rule worthy of a tower at least
1,776 feet high that would obliterate the memory of
all other buildings anywhere, and of the largest,
most expensive gravestone on Earth that would
quite literally put the sufferings of all other victims
in the shade.

As those two enormous reflecting pools were
meant to mirror the soaring "beacon" of the Free-
dom Tower, so the American people, under the
shock of loss, experiencing a sense of violation that
can only come to the victors in this world, mirrored
the administration's attitude. In a country where
New York City had always been Sodom to Los
Angeles' Gomorrah, everyone suddenly donned "I ?
New York" hats or T-shirts and became involved in
a series of repetitive rites of mourning that, in

arenas nationwide, on every television screen, went
on not for days or weeks but months on end.

From these ceremonies, a clear and simple mes-
sage emerged. In its suffering, the United States was
the greatest victim, the greatest survivor, and the
greatest dominator the globe had ever seen. Impli-
citly, the rest of the world's dead were, in the
Pentagon's classic phrase, "collateral damage." In
those months, in our all-American version of the
global drama, we swept up and repossessed all the
emotional roles available— with the sole exception
of Greatest Evil One. That, then, was the phant-
asmagoric path to invasion, war, and disaster upon
which the Bush administration, with a mighty help-
ing hand from al-Qaeda, pulled back the curtain;
that is the drama still being played out at Ground
Zero in New York City.

But those 2,752 dead can no longer stand in— not
even in the American mind— for all the dead every-
where, not even for the American dead in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Perhaps it's finally time to take a
breath and approach the untimely dead— our own as
well as those of others around the world— with some
genuine humility.

I know that for some, those reflecting pools will
someday touch the heart, but unfortunately they
will mainly memorialize a post-9/11 America that
should not have been using the numbers 1776. Fa-
cing a building so tall, who would even have the
need to approach a declaration so modest— of only
1,322 words— so tiny as to be able to fit on a single
page, so iconic that just about no one bothers to pay
attention to what it says anymore. But perhaps it's
worth quoting a few of the words those men wrote
back in the year 1776 and remembering what the
American dead of that time actually stood for. Here
then are some passages about another George's im-
perial hubris, less well remembered than the declar-
ation's classic beginning:

The history of the present King of Great
Britain is a history of repeated injuries and
usurpations, all having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny over
these States.... He has erected a multitude of
New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Of-
ficers to harass our people and eat out their
substance. He has 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 pre-
tended Legislation.... For depriving us in
many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried
for pretended offences.... For suspending our
own Legislatures, and declaring themselves
invested with power to legislate for us in all
cases whatsoever.

Looking Forward, Looking Backward

Given the last eight years of disaster piled on
catastrophe, who in our American world would
want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in
this country is palpable, but just for a moment let's
not.

Admittedly, we're a people who don't really be-
lieve in history— so messy, so discomforting, so old.
Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the
media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown
crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news,

non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old
blabbing. In turn, any sense of the larger picture
surrounding each flap is, soon enough, dismantled
by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions:
Was Congress adequately informed? Should the
president have suppressed those photos?

The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single
Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the
full scope of the legacy that we— not just the Obama
administration— have inherited. Though we all
know that terrible things happened in recent years,
the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be
found in a single place, no less the same paragraph.
Connecting the dots, or even simply putting
everything in the same vicinity, just hasn't been part
of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let
me give it a little shot.

As a start, remind me: What didn't we do? Let's
review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the
face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured
wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture
techniques— known to the previous administration
and most of the media as "enhanced interrogation
techniques"— were actually demonstrated to an

array of top officials, including the national security
adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of
state, within the White House. We imprisoned
secretly at "black sites" offshore and beyond the
reach of the American legal system, holding prison-
ers without hope of trial or, often, release; we disap-
peared people; we murdered prisoners; we commit-
ted strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation;
we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets
and turned some of them over to some of the worst
people who ran the worst dungeons and torture
chambers on the planet. Unknown but not insigni-
ficant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tor-
tured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually
innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded
without pretext, based on a series of lies and the
manipulation of Congress and the public. We occu-
pied two countries with no clear intent to depart
and built major networks of military bases in both.
Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of ci-
vilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested
thousands of people, some again innocent of any
acts against us, imprisoning them often without tri-
al or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force re-
peatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in
its Global War on Terror. It killed civilians in

significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting
two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hun-
dreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died.
In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic
proportions that involved the "cleansing" of whole
communities and major parts of cities, while un-
leashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size,
involving the uprooting of more than four million
people who fled into exile or became internal
refugees. In these same years, our special forces op-
eratives and our drone aircraft carried out— and still
carry out— assassinations globally, acting as judge,
jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civil-
ians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped
on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the
world on a massive scale whose dimensions we may
not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English lan-
guage, creating an Orwellian terminology that,
among other things, essentially defined "torture"
out of existence (or, at the very least, left its defini-
tional status to the torturer).

And don't think that that's anything like a full list.
Not by a long shot. It's only what comes to my mind
on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even
if I could remember everything done in these years,
it would represent only what has been made public.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was
regularly mocked for saying: "There are known
knowns. These are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are
things that we know we don't know. But there are
also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't
know we don't know."

Actually, he had a point seldom thought about
these days. By definition, we know a good deal
about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an
even darker world of known unknowns. We have no
idea, however, what's missing from a list like the
one above, because so much may indeed remain in
the unknown-unknowns category. If, however, you
think that everything done by Washington or the
U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has
already been leaked, think again. It's a reasonable
bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama admin-
istration inherited would curl your toes.

Nonetheless, what is already known, when
thought about in one place rather than divided up
into separate flaps and argued about separately, is
horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often
say when trying to excuse what we did in these
years, but it should be remembered that, in re-
sponse to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were

the ones who declared "war," made it a near eternal
struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so
much to turn parts of the world into our own private
hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear,
a misreading of the nature of power, delusions of
military and technological omnipotence and omni-
science, and so much more drove us along the way.

Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present mo-
ment is that there is a choice here. We can look for-
ward or backward, turn the page on history or not.
Don't believe it. History matters.

Whatever the Obama administration may want to
do, or think should be done, if we don't face the re-
cord we created, if we only look forward, if we only
round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that
page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we
will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes
over. This was, of course, the lesson— the only one
no one ever bothers to call a lesson— of the Vietnam
years. Because we were so unwilling to confront
what we actually did in Vietnam— and Laos and
Cambodia— because we turned the page on it so
quickly and never dared take a real look back, we
never, in the phrase of George H. W. Bush, "kicked
the Vietnam syndrome." It still haunts us.

However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us
here in this country— and they remain monstrously
large— we do need to make an honest, clear-headed
assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, con-
tinue to do), of the horrors we committed in the
name of.. .well, of us and our "safety." We need to
face who we've been and just how badly we've acted,
if we care to become something better.

Now, read that list again, my list of just the
known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren't we the
people your mother warned you about?

TWO

How to Garrison a Planet

Twenty-First-Century Gunboat
Diplomacy

The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons,
the gunboat, the battleship, and finally the
"airship"— historically, these proved the difference
between global victory and staying at home,
between empire and nothing much at all. In the first
couple of centuries of Europe's burst onto the world
stage, the weaponry of European armies and their
foes was not generally so disparate. It was those
cannons on ships that decisively tipped the balance.
And they continued to do so for a long, long time.
Traditionally, in fact, the modern arms race is con-
sidered to have taken off at the beginning of the
twentieth century with the rush of European powers
to build ever larger, ever more powerful, "all-big-
gun" battleships— the "dreadnoughts" (scared of
nothings).

In "Exterminate All the Brutes," a remarkable
travel book that takes you into the heart of
European darkness (via an actual trip through
Africa), the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist offers
the following comments on that sixteenth-century
seaborne moment when Europe was still a barbaric
outcropping of Euro-Asian civilization:

Preindustrial Europe had little that was in
demand in the rest of the world. Our most
important export was force. All over the rest
of the world, we were regarded at the time as
nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols
and the Tatars. They reigned supreme from
the backs of horses, we from the decks of
ships.

Our cannons met little resistance among
the peoples who were more advanced than
we were. The Moguls in India had no ships
able to withstand artillery fire or carry heavy
guns.... Thus the backward and poorly re-
sourced Europe of the sixteenth century ac-
quired a monopoly on ocean-going ships with
guns capable of spreading death and destruc-
tion across huge distances. Europeans be-
came the gods of cannons that killed long

before the weapons of their opponents could
reach them.

For a while, Europeans ruled the coasts where
nothing could stand up to their shipborne cannons,
and then, in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa,
as well as on the Asian mainland, they moved in-
land, taking their cannons upriver with them. For
those centuries, the ship was, in modern terms, a
floating military base filled with the latest in high-
tech equipment. And yet ships had their limits, as
indicated by a well-known passage about a French
warship off the African coast from Joseph Conrad's
novel about the Congo, Heart of Darkness:

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and
water, there she was, incomprehensible, fir-
ing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the
six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and
vanish, a little white smoke would disappear,
a tiny projectile would give a feeble
screech— and nothing happened. Nothing
could happen. There was a touch of insanity
in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious
drollery in the sight.

Well, maybe it wasn't quite so droll if you
happened to be on land, but the point remains. Of

course, sooner or later the Europeans did make it
inland with the musket, the rifle, the repeating rifle,
the machine gun, artillery, and finally, by the twen-
tieth century, the airplane filled with bombs or
even, as in Iraq, poison gas. Backing up the process
was often the naval vessel— as at the Battle of Om-
durman in the Sudan in 1898, when somewhere
between nine thousand and eleven thousand sol-
diers in the Mahdi's army were killed (with a British
loss of forty-eight troops), thanks to mass rifle fire,
Maxim machine guns, and the batteries of gunboats
floating on the Nile.

Winston Churchill was a reporter with the British
expeditionary force at the time. Here's part of his
description of the slaughter (also from Lindqvist):

The white flags [of the Mahdi's army] were
nearly over the crest. In another minute they
would become visible to the batteries. Did
they realize what would come to meet them?
They were in a dense mass, 2,800 yards from
the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The
ranges were known. It was a matter of ma-
chinery.... About twenty shells struck them in
the first minute. Some burst high in the air,
others exactly in their faces. Others, again,
plunged into the sand, and, exploding,

dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bul-
lets amid the ranks.... It was a terrible sight,
for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it
seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus
cruelly when they could not reply.

And— presto!— before you knew it, three-quarters
of the world was a colony of Europe, the United
States, or Japan. Not bad, all in all, for a few float-
ing centuries. In the latter part of this period, the
phrase "gunboat diplomacy" came into existence, an
oxymoron that nonetheless expressed itself all too
eloquently.

Our Little "Diplomats"

Today, "gunboat diplomacy" seems like a phrase
from some antiquated imperial past, despite our
many aircraft carrier task forces that travel the
world making "friendly" house calls from time to
time. But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats
and try to imagine how we carry out "armed dip-
lomacy"— and under the Bush administration the
Pentagon took over much that might once have
been labeled "diplomacy"— then you can begin to
conjure up our own twenty-first-century version of

gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider
exactly what the "platforms" are upon which we "ex-
port force," upon which we mount our "cannons."

What should immediately come to mind are our
military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast
immobile vessels over the lands of the earth. This
has been especially true since the neocons of the
Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at
the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing
policy globally; set about, that is, creating more
"mobile" versions of the military base, ever more
stripped down for action, ever closer to the "arc of
instability," a vast swath of lands extending from
the former Yugoslavia well into northern Africa, and
all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas
that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy
heartlands of the planet. The Pentagon's so-called
lily pads strategy is meant to encircle and nail down
control of this vast set of interlocking regions— the
thought being that, if the occasion arises, the Amer-
ican frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned
pad to another, knocking off the "flies" as they go.

Thought about a certain way, the military base,
particularly as reconceived in recent years, whether
in Uzbekistan, Kosovo, or Qatar, is our "gunboat," a
"platform" that has been ridden ever deeper into the

land-locked parts of the globe— into regions like the
Middle East, where our access once had some lim-
its, or like the former Yugoslavia and the -stans of
Central Asia, where the lesser superpower of the
cold war era once blocked access entirely. Our new
military bases are essentially the twenty-first-cen-
tury version of those old European warships, the
difference being that, once built, the base remains
in place, while its parts— the modern equivalents of
those sixteenth-century cannons— are capable of
moving over land or water almost anywhere.

As Chalmers Johnson has calculated in his book
The Sorrows of Empire , our global baseworld con-
sists of at least seven hundred military and intelli-
gence bases, possibly— depending on how you count
them up— many more. This is our true "imperial
fleet" (though, of course, we have an actual imperial
fleet, our aircraft carriers alone being like small,
massively armed towns). In the last decade-plus, as
the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we've
left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases
like the droppings of some giant beast marking the
scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi
Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first
Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after
the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan,

Afghanistan, and several Central Asian states after
the Afghan War of 2001; and into Iraq after the
2003 invasion.

The process speeded up under the Bush adminis-
tration, but you would have had almost no way of
knowing this. Basing is generally considered either
a topic not worth writing about or an arcane policy
matter best left to the inside pages of the newspaper
for the policy wonks and news junkies. This is in
part because we Americans— and by extension our
journalists— don't imagine us as garrisoning or oc-
cupying the world, and certainly not as having any-
thing faintly approaching a military empire. Gener-
ally speaking, those more than seven hundred
bases, our little "diplomats" (and the rights of extra-
territoriality that go with them via Status of Forces
Agreements) don't even register on our media's
mental map of our globe.

Enduring Camps

In Iraq, our permanent bases are endearingly re-
ferred to by the military as "enduring camps." Such
bases were almost certainly planned before the
2003 invasion. After all, we were also planning to

withdraw most of our troops from Saudi Ara-
bia—Osama bin Laden had complained bitterly
about the occupation of Islam's holy sites— and they
weren't simply going to be shipped back to the Un-
ited States.

The numbers of those potential enduring camps
in Iraq are startling indeed. As one rare Chicago
Tribune article on the topic noted, early on in the
occupation of Iraq, "From the ashes of abandoned
Iraqi army bases, U.S. military engineers are over-
seeing the building of an enhanced system of Amer-
ican bases designed to last for years." Some of these
bases are already comparable in size and elaborate-
ness to the ones we built in Vietnam four decades
ago. Christine Spolar, who wrote the article,
continues:

As the U.S. scales back its military presence
in Saudi Arabia, Iraq provides an option for
an administration eager to maintain a robust
military presence in the Middle East and in-
tent on a muscular approach to seeding
democracy in the region....

"Is this a swap for the Saudi bases?" asked
Army Brig. Gen. Robert Pollman, chief en-
gineer for base construction in Iraq. "I don't

know.... When we talk about enduring bases
here, we're talking about the present opera-
tion, not in terms of America's global stra-
tegic base. But this makes sense. It makes a
lot of logical sense."

And keep in mind as well that all of this construc-
tion is being done to the tune of billions of dollars
under contracts controlled by the Pentagon and, as
Spolar writes, quite "separate from the State De-
partment and its Embassy in Baghdad" (which is
slated to be the largest embassy in the world).

As the Pentagon planned it, and as we knew via
leaks to the press soon after the invasion began,
newly "liberated" Iraq, once "sovereignty" had been
restored, was to have only a lightly armed military
force of some forty thousand troops and no air
force. The other part of this equation, the given (if
unspoken) part, was that some sort of significant
long-term U.S. military protection of the country
would have to be put in place. And we proceeded ac-
cordingly, emplacing our "little diplomats" right at a
future hub of the global energy superhighway.

But we've made sure to cover the other on- and
off-ramps as well. As James Sterngold of the San

Francisco Chronicle wrote in a rundown of some of
our post-9/11 basing policies:

[T]he administration has instituted what
some experts describe as the most militarized
foreign policy machine in modern history.

The policy has involved not just resorting
to military action, or the threat of action, but
constructing an arc of new facilities in such
places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and
Djibouti that the Pentagon calls "lily pads."
They are seen not merely as a means of de-
fending the host countries— the traditional
Cold War role of such installations— but as
jumping-off points for future "preventive
wars" and military missions.
In fact, our particular version of military empire
is perhaps unique: all "gunboats," no colonies. The
combination of bases we set down in any given
country is referred to in the Pentagon as our "foot-
print" in that country. It's a term that may once
have come from the idea of "boots on the ground,"
but now has congealed, imagistically speaking, into
a single (and assumedly singular) boot print— as if,
as it strode across the planet, the globe's only hyper-
power was so vast that it could place but a single

boot in any given country at any time, an eerie echo
perhaps of that British sun which was never to set
on their vast empire (until, of course, it did).

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith was the main Pentagon architect of a plan to
"realign" our bases so as to "forward deploy" U.S.
forces into the "arc of instability." In a December
2003 speech to the Center for Strategic and Interna-
tional Studies, he offered a Pentagon version of
sensitivity in discussing his forward deployment
plans: "Realigning the U.S. posture will also help
strengthen our alliances by tailoring the physical
U.S. 'footprint' to suit local conditions. The goal is
to reduce friction with host nations, the kind that
results from accidents and other problems relating
to local sensitivities." In the meantime, to ensure
that there will be no consequences if the giant foot,
however enclosed, happens to stamp its print in a
tad clumsily, causing the odd bit of collateral dam-
age, he added:

For this deployability concept to work, U.S.
forces must be able to move smoothly into,
through, and out of host nations, which puts
a premium on establishing legal and support
arrangements with many friendly countries.
We are negotiating or planning to negotiate

with many countries legal protections for
U.S. personnel, through Status of Forces
Agreements and agreements (known as
Article 98 agreements) limiting the jurisdic-
tion of the International Criminal Court with
respect to our forces' activities.
Bradley Graham of the Washington Post offered a
more precise glimpse at Feith's realignment
strategy, which would move us away from our cold
war deployments, especially in Germany, Japan,
and Korea:

The Pentagon has drafted plans to withdraw
as many as half of the 71,000 troops based in
Germany as part of an extensive realignment
of American military forces that moves away
from large concentrations in Europe and
Asia, according to U.S. officials....

U.S. officials have said before that they in-
tended to eliminate a number of large, full-
service Cold War bases abroad and construct
a network of more skeletal outposts closer to
potential trouble spots in the Middle East
and along the Pacific Rim.

In fact, the structure of major bases and "forward
operating sites" in the arc of instability and, from

Eastern Europe to the Central Asian states, inside
the former Soviet empire, is already in place or, as
in Iraq, in the process of being built or negotiated.
As Michael Kilian of the Chicago Tribune writes:

[T]he U.S. now has bases or shares military
installations in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates, Oman, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uzbek-
istan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as
on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian
Ocean.

Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials are soon
expected to unveil plans for a new U.S. milit-
ary "footprint" on the rest of the world. The
plan is expected to include a shift of re-
sources from the huge Cold War- era bases in
Western Europe to new and smaller ones in
Poland and other Eastern Europe nations as
well as a relocation of U.S. troops in South
Korea.

In the meantime, Pentagon strategic planning for
ever more aggressive future war-fighting is likely
only to intensify this process. Los Angeles Times
military analyst William Arkin wrote of the

unveiling of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's plan
for a new military map of the globe:

The Rumsfeld plan envisions what it labels a
"1-4-2-1 defense strategy," in which war plan-
ners prepare to fully defend one country (the
United States), maintain forces capable of
"deterring aggression and coercion" in four
"critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia,
East Asia, and the Middle East and Southw-
est Asia), maintain the ability to defeat ag-
gression in two of these regions simultan-
eously, and be able to "win decisively"— up to
and including forcing regime change and oc-
cupying a country— in one of those conflicts
"at a time and place of our choosing"....

In the Clinton era, the Pentagon planned
for fighting two wars simultaneously (in the
Middle East and Northeast Asia). Under the
new strategy, it must prepare for four....

The planning model Rumsfeld and com-
pany have embraced is certainly more ambi-
tious. It covers domestic and foreign contin-
gencies and favors preemption over dip-
lomacy, and military strikes over peacekeep-
ing operations. The plan signals to the world

that the United States considers nuclear
weapons useful military instruments, to be
employed where warranted.

Twenty-Second-Century Gunboat Diplomacy

At least as imagined in the Pentagon, twenty-
second-century "gunboat diplomacy" will be con-
ducted by what the Air Force's Space Command
refers to as "space-based platforms," and the "can-
nons" will be a range of "exotic" weapons and deliv-
ery systems. In still unweaponized space (if you ex-
clude the various spy satellites overhead), we plan
for our future "ships" to travel the heavens alone,
representatives of a singular version of gunboat dip-
lomacy. Among the "five priorities for national se-
curity space efforts" set out by Peter B. Teets, Bush's
undersecretary of the air force and director of the
National Reconnaissance Office, in an article for Air
& Space Power Journal, the most striking, if also
predictable, was that of "ensuring freedom of action
in space"— as in freedom of action for us, and no ac-
tion at all for anyone else.

Space, long depicted as a void, is now being re-
imagined as the ocean of our imperial future, thanks

to space weaponry on the drawing boards like the
nicknamed "Rods from God." These are to be "orbit-
ing platforms stocked with tungsten rods perhaps
20 feet long and one foot in diameter that could be
satellite-guided to targets anywhere on Earth within
minutes. Accurate within about 25 feet, they would
strike at speeds upwards of 12,000 feet per second,
enough to destroy even hardened bunkers several
stories underground."

Planning among "high frontier" enthusiasts for
the conquest and militarization of space began in
the 1980s during the Reagan administration, but it
has reached new levels of realism (of a mad sort).
Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Inform-
ation, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, de-
scribed a "new U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight
Plan": "The document details a stunning array of
exotic weapons to be pursued over the next decade:
from an air-launched missile designed to knock
satellites out of low orbit, to ground- and space-
based lasers for attacking both missiles and satel-
lites, to 'hypervelocity rod bundles' (nicknamed
Rods from God).... Far from being aimed solely at
the protection of U.S. space capabilities, such
weapons are instead intended for offensive, first-
strike n

Ever since H. G. Wells wrote The War of the
Worlds in 1898, we humans have been imagining
scenarios in which implacable aliens with super-
weapons arrive from space to devastate our planet.
But what if it turns out that the implacable aliens
are actually us— and that, as in the sixteenth cen-
tury, someday in the not-too-distant future U.S.
"ships" will "burst from space" upon the "coasts" of
our planet with devastation imprinted in their pro-
grams. These are, of course, the dreams of modern
Mongols.

Wonders of the Imperial World

Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediter-
ranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were des-
troyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great
Pyramid of Giza today r<

We no longer know who built those fabled monu-
ments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and
gods. Nowadays, at least, it's easier to identify the
various wonders of our world with their architects.
Maya Lin, for instance, spun the moving black

marble Vietnam Memorial from her remarkable
brain for the U.S. veterans of that war. Frank Gehry
dreamt up his visionary titanium-covered museum
in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim. The architec-
tural firm of BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc.), pre-
viously responsible for the Sprint Corporation's
world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, the
Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and
Harrah's Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City,
Missouri, turns out to have designed the biggest
wonder of all— an embassy large enough to embody
Washington's vision of an American-reordered
Middle East. We're talking, of course, about the U.S.
embassy, the largest on the planet, being construc-
ted on a 104-acre stretch of land in the heart of
Baghdad's embattled Green Zone. As Patrick Lena-
han, then Senior Architect and Project Manager at
BDY, put it (according to the firm's website): "We
understand how to involve the client most effect-
ively as we direct our resources to make our client's
vision a reality."

And what a vision it was. What a reality it's
turned out to be.

Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-
Bush administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein's
mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into

terror, based on which, in those last years of his
rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He
ensured that what was soon to become the Green
Zone would be dotted with overheated, Dis-
neyesque, Arabian Nights palaces by the score, filled
with every luxury imaginable in a country whose
population was growing increasingly desperate un-
der the weight of United Nations sanctions. Who
can forget those vast, sculpted hands, "The Hands of
Victory," supposedly modeled on Saddam Hussein's
own, holding twelve-story-high giant crossed
swords (over piles of Iranian helmets) on a vast
Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a
triumph over Iran that the despot never actually
achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled
and a monument to folly.

It is worth remembering that, when the American
commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad
wanted their victory photo snapped, they memor-
ably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a
marble table in one of those captured palaces; that
American soldiers and newly arrived officials
marveled at the former tyrant's exotic symbols of
power; that they swam in Saddam's pools, fed rare
antelopes from his son Uday's private zoo to its
lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and

ate them); and, when in need of someplace to set up
an American embassy, the newly arrived occupation
officials chose— are you surprised? —one of his
former dream palaces. They found nothing strange
in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully
noted by Iraqis), even as they swore they were
bringing liberation and democracy to the benighted
land.

And then, as the Iraqi capital's landscape became
ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained trac-
tion while the administration's dreams of a re-
designed American Middle East remained as strong
as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even a
palace roomy enough for a dictator wasn't faintly
big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for
the representatives of the planet's New Rome.

Hence, BDY. That Midwestern firm's designers
can now be classified as architects to the wildest im-
perial dreamers and schemers of our time. And the
company seems proud of it. You could, in May
2007, go to its website and take a little tour in
sketch form, a blast-resistant spin, through its par-
ticular colossus of the modern world. Imagine this:
At a pricetag of at least $592 million, its proudest
boast was that, unlike almost any other American
construction project in that country, it was coming

in on time and on budget (though, in the end, the
cost overruns for the embassy would be humong-
ous). Of course, with a 30 percent increase in staff-
ing size since Congress first approved the project, it
is estimated that being "represented" in Baghdad
will cost a staggering $1.2 billion per year.

The BDY-designed embassy may lack the gold-
plated faucets installed in some of Hussein's palaces
and villas (and those of his sons), but it was planned
to lack none of the amenities that Americans con-
sider part and parcel of the good life, even in a
"hardship" post. Consider, for instance, the em-
bassy's "pool house." (There was a lovely sketch of it
at the BDY website.) Note the palm trees dotted
around it, the expansive lawns, and those tennis
courts discretely in the background. For an Americ-
an official not likely to leave the constricted, heavily
fortified, four-mile square Green Zone during a
year's tour of duty, practicing his or her serve (on
the taxpayer's dollar) would undoubtedly be no
small thing.

Admittedly, it became harder to think about tak-
ing that refreshing dip or catching a few sets of ten-
nis in Baghdad's heat once the order for all U.S. per-
sonnel in the Green Zone to wear flak jackets and
helmets at all times went into effect. Lucky then for

the massive, largely window-less-looking Recre-
ation Center, one of more than twenty blast-resist-
ant buildings BDY planned for. Perhaps this will
house the promised embassy cinema. Perhaps hours
will be wiled away in the no less massive-looking,
low-slung Post Exchange/Community Center, or in
the promised commissary, the "retail and shopping
areas," the restaurants, or even, so the BDY website
assured visitors, the "schools" (though it's difficult
to imagine the State Department allowing children
at this particular post).

And don't forget the "fire station" (mentioned but
not shown by BDY), surely so handy once the first
rockets hit. Small warning: If you are among the of-
ficials staffing this post, keep in mind that the PX
and commissary might be slightly understocked.
The Washington Post reported at one point in 2007
that "virtually every bite and sip consumed [in the
embassy] is imported from the United States, enter-
ing Iraq via Kuwait in huge truck convoys that bring
fresh and processed food, including a full range of
Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, every seven to 10
days."

When you look at the plans for the complex, you
have to wonder: Can it, in any meaningful sense, be
considered an embassy? And if so, an embassy to

whom? The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland more
aptly termed it a "base," like our other vast,
multibillion-dollar permanent bases in Iraq. It is
also a headquarters. It is neither town, nor quite
city-state, but it could be considered a citadel, with
its own anti-missile defenses, inside the breachable
citadel of the Green Zone. It may already be the last
piece of ground (excepting those other bases) that
the United States, surge or no, can actually claim to
fully occupy and control in Iraq— and yet it already
has something of the look of the Alamo (but with
amenities). Someday, perhaps, it will turn out to be
the "White House" (though, in BDY's sketches, its
buildings look more like those prison-style schools
being constructed in embattled American urban
neighborhoods) for the radical cleric Moqtada al-
Sadr, or some future Shiite party, or even a Sunni
strongman.

What we know is that such an embassy is remark-
ably outsized for Iraq. Even as a headquarters for a
vast, secret set of operations, it doesn't quite add
up. After all, our military headquarters in Iraq are at
Camp Victory, on the outskirts of Baghdad. We can
certainly assume— though no one in our main-
stream media world would think to say such a
thing— that this new embassy will house a rousing

set of CIA (and probably Pentagon) intelligence op-
erations for the country and region, and will be a
massive hive for American spooks of all sorts. But
whatever its specific functions, it might best be de-
scribed as the imperial Mother Ship dropping into
Baghdad.

As an outpost, the vast compound reeks of one
thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be
an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an
oppressed land. From the first thought, the first
sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control cen-
ter suitable for the planet's sole "hyperpower,"
dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the
globe. It was to be Washington's dream and Kansas
City's idea of a palace fit for an embattled American
proconsul— or a khan.

Completed, it will indeed be the perfect folly, as
well as the perfect embassy, for a country that finds
it absolutely normal to build vast base-worlds
across the planet; that considers it just a regular
day's work to send its aircraft carrier "strike forces"
and various battleships through the Straits of Hor-
muz in daylight as a visible warning to a "neighbor-
ing" regional power; whose Central Intelligence
Agency operatives feel free to organize and launch
Baluchi tribal warriors from Pakistan into the

Baluchi areas of Iran to commit acts of terror and
mayhem; whose commander-in-chief president can
sign a "nonlethal presidential finding" that commits
our nation to a "soft power" version of the economic
destabilization of Iran, involving, according to ABC
News, "a coordinated campaign of propaganda, dis-
information and manipulation of Iran's currency
and international financial transactions"; whose
vice president can appear on the deck of the USS
John C. Stennis to address a "rally for the troops,"
while that aircraft carrier is on station in the Persian
Gulf, readying itself to pass through those Straits,
and can insist to the world: "With two carrier strike
groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to
friends and adversaries alike. We'll keep the sea
lanes open. We'll stand with our friends in opposing
extremism and strategic threats. We'll disrupt at-
tacks on our own forces.... And we'll stand with oth-
ers to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons
and dominating this region"; whose military men
can refer to Iraqi insurgents as "anti-Iraqi forces";
members of whose Congress can offer plans for the
dismemberment of Iraq into three or more parts;
and all of whose movers and shakers, participating
in the Washington consensus, can agree that one
"benchmark" the Iraqi government, also locked

inside the Green Zone, must fulfill is signing off on
an oil law designed in Washington and meant to
turn the energy clock in the Middle East back sever-
al decades.

To recognize such imperial impunity and its sym-
bols for what they are, all you really need to do is try
to reverse any of these examples. In most cases,
that's essentially inconceivable. Imagine any coun-
try building the equivalent Mother Ship "embassy"
on the equivalent of two-thirds of the Washington
Mall; or sailing its warships into the Gulf of Mexico
and putting its second-in-command aboard the flag-
ship of the fleet to insist on keeping the sea lanes
"open"; or sending Caribbean terrorists into Florida
to blow up local buses and police stations; or sign-
ing a "finding" to economically destabilize the
American government; or planning the future shape
of our country from a foreign capital. But you get
the idea. Most of these actions, if aimed against the
United States, would be treated as tantamount to
acts of war, and dealt with accordingly, with unbe-
lievable hue and cry.

When it's a matter of other countries halfway
across the planet, however, we largely consider such
things, even if revealed in the news, at worst as tac-
tical errors or miscalculations. The imperial

mindset goes deep. It also thinks unbearably well of
itself and so, naturally, wants to memorialize itself,
to give itself the surroundings that only the great,
the super, the hyper deserve.

Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias," in-
spired by the arrival in London in 1816 of an enorm-
ous statue of the Pharaoh Ramesses II, comes to
mind:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said:— Two vast and trunkless legs of
stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose
frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold com-
mand,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless
things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart
that fed.

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's giant hands are
already on the road to ruin. In New York and Bagh-
dad, our near billion-dollar monuments to our im-
perial moment: a 9/11 memorial, as yet unbuilt, so
grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it will
be a reminder only of a time, already long past,
when we could imagine ourselves as the greatest
victims on the planet, and in Baghdad's Green Zone,
a monument to Washington's conviction that we
were also destined to be the greatest dominators
this world, and history, had ever seen.

From both of these monuments, someday those
lone and level sands will undoubtedly stretch far, far
away.

How to Garrison a Planet (and Not
Even Notice)

In the course of any year, there must be relatively
few countries on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot,
whether with guns blazing, "humanitarian aid" in
hand, or just for a friendly visit. In a startling

number of them, our soldiers not only arrive, but
stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes
they live on military bases built to the tune of bil-
lions of dollars that are comparable to sizeable
American towns (with accompanying amenities),
sometimes on stripped-down forward operating
bases that may not even have showers. When those
troops don't stay, often American equipment
does— carefully stored for further use at tiny "co-
operative security locations."

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans
had an estimated thirty-seven major military bases
scattered around their dominions. At the height of
the British Empire, the British had thirty-six of
them planet wide. Depending on just who you listen
to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases.
According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761
active military "sites" abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south,
east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to
our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers
which, with five thousand to six thousand personnel
aboard— that is, the population of an American
town— are functionally floating bases.

And here's the other half of that simple truth: We
don't care to know about it. We, the American
people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the
Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-
deep in base denial.

Let's face it, we're on an imperial bender— and it's
been a long, long night. Even now, in the wee hours,
the Pentagon continues its massive expansion of re-
cent years; we spend militarily as if there were no
tomorrow; we're still building bases as if the world
were our oyster; and we're still in denial. Someone
should phone the imperial equivalent of Alcoholics
Anonymous.

But let's start in a sunnier time, less than two dec-
ades ago, when it seemed that there would be many
tomorrows, all painted red, white, and blue. Re-
member the 1990s, when the United States was
hailed— or perhaps more accurately, Washington
hailed itself— not just as the planet's "sole super-
power" or even its unique "hyperpower," but as its
"global policeman," the only cop on the block? As it
happened, our leaders took that label seriously and
our central police headquarters, that famed five-
sided building in Washington, D.C., promptly began
dropping police stations— also known as military
bases— in or near the energy centers of the planet

(Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after success-
ful wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian
Gulf.

As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were
embarking on a new, post-Soviet version of "con-
tainment." With the USSR gone, however, what we
were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11,
no one spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in es-
sence, Muslims who happened to live on so many of
the key oil lands of the planet.

Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases
from our triumphant mega-war against Japan and
Germany, and the stalemated "police action" in
South Korea (1950-1953), vast structures that added
up to something like an all-military American ver-
sion of the old British Raj. According to the
Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in Japan,
up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in
South Korea. (Of course, there were setbacks. The
giant bases we built in South Vietnam were lost in
1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our major
bases in the Philippines in 1992.)

But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of be-
ing "global policeman" or "sheriff and marching in-
to a Dodge City that was nothing less than planet

Earth. Naturally, with a whole passel of bad guys
out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," we
armed ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police sta-
tions.. .well, they were often something to be-
hold—and they still are.

Let's start with the basics: Almost seventy years
after World War II, the sun is still incapable of set-
ting on the American "empire of bases"— in
Chalmers Johnson's phrase— which at this moment
stretches from Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar,
Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the Indian Ocean is-
land of Diego Garcia, Romania to Djibouti. And new
bases of various kinds are going up all the time (al-
ways with rumors of more to come).

There are 194 countries on the planet (more or
less), and officially 39 are home to U.S. "facilities."
But those are only the bases the Pentagon publicly
acknowledges. Others simply aren't counted, either
because, as in the case of Jordan, a country finds it
politically preferable not to acknowledge such
bases; or, as in the case of Pakistan, the American
military shares bases that are officially Pakistani.
Bases in war zones, no matter how elaborate, some-
how don't count either, including the approximately
three hundred the United States built in Iraq, ran-
ging from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air

Base and the ill-named Camp Victory, that house
tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, De-
fense Department civilians, and have bus routes,
traffic lights, PXes, big-name fast-food franchises,
and so on.

Some of these bases are, in effect, "American
towns" on foreign soil. In Afghanistan, Bagram Air
Base, previously used by the Soviets in their occupa-
tion of the country, is the largest and best known.
There are, however, many more, large and small, in-
cluding Kandahar Airfield, located in what was once
the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which even has
a hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian contingent
of troops). You would think that all of this would be
genuine news, that the establishment of new bases
would regularly generate significant news stories,
that books by the score would pour out on Amer-
ica's version of imperial control. But here's the
strange thing: We garrison the globe in ways that
really are— not to put too fine a point on it— unpre-
cedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the Un-
ited States, you basically wouldn't know it; or,
thought about another way, you wouldn't have to
know it.

In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so
taken for granted that no one seems to blink when

billions go into a new base in some exotic,
embattled, war-torn land. There's no discussion, no
debate at all. And yet there may be no foreign-policy
subject more deserving of coverage. It has always
been obvious— to me, at least— that any discussion
of Iraq policy, of timelines or "time horizons," draw-
downs or withdrawals, made little sense if those gi-
ant facts on the ground weren't taken into account.
And yet you have to search the U.S. press carefully
to find any reporting on the subject, nor have bases
played any real role in debates in Washington or the
nation over Iraq policy.

Of course, millions of Americans know about our
bases abroad firsthand. In this sense, they may be
the least well-kept secrets on the planet. American
troops, private contractors, and Defense Depart-
ment civilian employees all have spent extended
periods of time on at least one U.S. base abroad.
And yet no one seems to notice the near news black-
out on our global bases or consider it the least bit
strange. In the United States, military bases really
only matter, and so make headlines, when the
Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast num-
bers of them scattered across this country. Then, the
fear of lost jobs and lost income in local communit-
ies leads to headlines and hubbub.

In purely practical terms, though, Americans are
unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the massive
global role the Pentagon and successive administra-
tions have laid out for us. Sooner or later, cutbacks
will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our
base-world abroad. In the meantime, occupying the
planet, base by base, normally simply isn't news.
Americans may pay no attention— and yet, of
course, they do pay an enormous price.

THREE

Air War, Barbarity, and Collateral
Damage

Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over
Iraq

The human imagination is quicker off the mark
than any six-gun, bomb, or missile. Long before hu-
mans made it into airplanes, whole cities were being
destroyed from the air— in an avalanche of popular
fiction. By the late nineteenth century, London had
gone down in flames more than once and New York
soon would follow. Genocidal wars from the air
were repeatedly imagined and described in which
whole nations, whole races, were wiped out. In 1914,
more than three decades before the first atomic
bomb was dropped, H. G. Wells had already ima-
gined and named "atomic weapons" in The World
Set Free, his novel about a future atomic air war.

When it came to fantasies and fears of destruc-
tion, we knew no bounds. As the scholar Spencer
Weart has written in Nuclear Fear: A History of
Images:

Right from the start [the] new idea of atomic
weapons was linked to an even more im-
pressive idea: the end of the world. When
[scientist Frederick] Soddy first told the pub-
lic about atomic energy, in May 1903, he said
that our planet is "a storehouse stuffed with
explosives, inconceivably more powerful than
any we know of, and possibly only awaiting a
suitable detonator to cause the earth to re-
vert to chaos." This was an entirely new idea:
that it might be technically possible for
someone to destroy the world deliberately.
Yet the idea slipped into the public mind with
suspicious ease.... For example, in 1903 the
irrepressible Gustave Le Bon got into news-
paper Sunday supplements in various coun-
tries by imagining a radioactive device that
could "blow up the whole earth" at the touch
of a button.

In fact, for almost half a century before 1945, such
weapons were the property only of science fiction.
In his magisterial The Rise of American Air Power,

Michael Sherry offers this comment on the machine
that delivered the first of those atomic devices of
our imagination to a real city: "More than any other
modern weapon, the bomber was imagined before it
was invented." Should we be amazed or horrified,
proud or ashamed to have so actively imagined a
century or more of future horrors of our own mak-
ing? The imagination worked so quickly, but at least
as miraculous was how quickly the inventors and
the scientists followed.

I doubt that any invention other than the airplane
has so combined the wonder of creation, of defiance
of obvious human limits, and of destruction so in-
timately and for so long. Now, it seems, the wonder
and even the horror of airpower is largely gone, but
the inventions, the destruction, and the carnage

The odd thing is this: No sooner had we human
beings risen above the earth in powered
flight— think Icarus— than we expressed the wonder
of that event by dropping bombs from the planes
that took us into the heavens. After that, it was just
a straight line up (or down?) for the next near
century.

Look at it this way: The Wright Brothers' "whop-
per flying machine" leaves the beach at Kitty Hawk
for the first time on December 17, 1903. That initial
flight lasts all of 12 seconds before the plane hits the
sand 120 feet away. Later the same day, the plane
flies 859 feet in 59 seconds before, on a final flight,
it totals itself and is no more. Only five years later,
the Wright Brothers are demonstrating their new
invention in the skies over Washington for the U.S.
Army Signal Corps. By 1911, the plane is wedded to
the bomb. According to Sven Lindqvist's A History
of Bombing, one Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti "leaned
out of his delicate monoplane and dropped the
bomb— a Danish Haasen hand grenade— on the
North African oasis Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several
moments later, he attacked the oasis Ain Zara. Four
bombs in total, each weighing two kilos, were
dropped during this first air attack." On the
"natives" in the colonies, naturally enough. What
better place to test a new weapon? And that first at-
tack, as perhaps befits our temperaments, was,
Lindqvist tells us, for revenge, a kind of collective
punishment called down upon Arabs who had suc-
cessfully resisted the advanced rationality (and oc-
cupying spirit) of the Italian army. Given where
we've ended up, it would be perfectly reasonable to

consider this moment the beginning of modern his-
tory, even of modernism itself.

A generation, no more, from Kitty Hawk to
thousand-bomber raids over Germany. Another
from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to "shock
and awe" in Iraq. No more than a blink of history's
unseeing eye. Between 1911 and the end of the last
bloody century, villages, towns, and cities across the
earth were destroyed in copious numbers in part or
in full by bombs. Their names could make up a
modern chant: Chechaouen, Guernica, Shanghai,
London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Damascus, Pyongyang,
Haiphong, Grozny, Baghdad, and now Falluja
among too many other places to name (including
the colonial countryside of our planet from Kenya to
Malaya). Millions and millions of tons of bombs
dropped; millions and millions of dead, mostly, of
course, civilians.

And from the Japanese and German cities of
World War II to the devastated Korean peninsula of
the early 1950s, from the ravaged southern Viet-
namese countryside of the late 1960s to the "high-
way of death" on which much of a fleeing Iraqi army
was destroyed in the First Gulf War of 1991, air-
power has been America's signature way of war.

Think of the history of the development of the
plane and of bombing as a giant, extremely top-
heavy diamond. In 1903, one fragile plane flies 120
feet. In 1911, another only slightly less fragile plane
drops a bomb. In 1945, vast air armadas take off to
devastate chosen German and Japanese cities. On
August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas is
compacted into the belly of the Enola Gay, a lone
B-29, which drops its single bomb on Hiroshima,
destroying the city and so many of its inhabitants.
Remarkably, the man who commanded the U.S.
Army Air Forces, both the armadas and the Enola
Gay, General Henry "Hap" Arnold (according to
Robin Neillands in The Bomber War: The Allied Air
Offensive Against Nazi Germany), "had been
taught to fly by none other than Orville Wright, one
of the two men credited with inventing the first vi-
able airplane." Barely more than a generation took
us from those 120 feet at Kitty Hawk to the Enola
Gay and the destruction of one city from the air by
one bomb.

Since 1945, both civilian plane flight and the
killing of enormous numbers of civilians from the
air (now subsumed in the term "collateral damage")
have become completely normal parts of our lives.
Too normal, it seems, to spend a lot of time thinking

about or even writing fiction about. When we get on
a plane now, we close the window shade and watch
a movie on a tiny TV screen or, on certain flights,
TV itself in real time, as if we were still in our living
rooms. So much for either shock or awe. Today,
American planes regularly bomb distant lands and
no one even seems to notice. No one, not even re-
porters on the spot, bothers to comment. No one
writes a significant word about it. Should we be
amazed or horrified, proud or ashamed?

This is not to say the press does not write about
the air war at all. Anodyne press reports on our on-
going air wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond ap-
pear almost daily. Normally, only a few lines are de-
voted to the air war against urban or rural areas,
which is, by the nature of the situation, a war of ter-
ror. We almost never see any cumulative figures on
air strikes in Iraq or Afghanistan per day, week, or
month, maps of the reach of the air war, or more
than a few photos of its results— let alone what it's
been like for people in major cities and rural villages
to experience such periodic attacks, or what kinds of
casualties result (or who the casualties actually are),
or what, if any, may be the limitations on the use of
airpower.

To the extent that we know anything about the
loosing of airpower on heavily populated urban
areas, we only know what an uninquisitive press has
been told by the military and stenographically re-
corded, which means we know remarkably little.
During the war in Iraq, American reporters could be
found embedded with tank or Bradley Fighting Ve-
hicle units: "Captain Paul Fowler sat on the curb
next to a deserted gas station," wrote Anne Barnard
of the Boston Globe.

Behind him, smoke rose over Fallujah. His
company of tanks and Bradley Fighting Ve-
hicles had roamed the eastern third of the
city for 13 days, shooting holes in every
building that might pose a threat, leaving be-
hind a landscape of half-collapsed houses
and factories singed with soot.

"I really hate that it had to be destroyed.
But that was the only way to root these guys
out," said Fowler, 33, the son of a Baptist
preacher in North Carolina. "The only way to
root them out is to destroy everything in your
path."

American reporters could climb aboard SURCs
(Small Unit Riverine Craft), high-tech Swift Boat

equivalents, as John Burns of the New York Times
once did, to "[roar] up the Euphrates on a dawn
raid." They could follow U.S. patrols as they busted
down Iraqi doors looking for insurgents. The only
thing they evidently couldn't do in Iraq was look up,
even though the air space was populated with all
kinds of jets, fearsome AC- 130 Spectre gunships,
Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones, and ubi-
quitous Apache, Cobra, Lynx, and Puma
helicopters.

On Not Looking Up

Given the history of twentieth-century war, which
is, in many ways, simply the history of bombing cit-
ies, should our "war reporters" not have been pre-
pared? Shouldn't anyone have been thinking about
the destruction of cities when it's been such a com-
monplace? Shouldn't major papers have insisted on
embedding reporters in Air Force units (if not on
the planes themselves)? Shouldn't reporters have
visited our air bases and talked to pilots? Does no
one remember the magnitude of the air war in Viet-
nam (or Laos or Cambodia), no less any other major
war experience of our lifetimes?

A glance at the history of American war tells us
airpower is as American as apple pie and that Amer-
icans were dreaming of cities destroyed from the air
long before anyone had the ability to do so. As H.
Bruce Franklin tells us in his book War Stars: The
Superweapon and the American Imagination, as
early as 1881, former naval officer Park Benjamin
wrote a short story called "The End of New York"
that caused a sensation. In it the city was left in ru-
ins by a Spanish naval bombardment. By 1921, air-
power visionary Billy Mitchell was already flying
mock sorties over New York and other East Coast
cities, "pulverizing" them in "raids" sensationalized
in the press, to publicize the need for an independ-
ent air force. ("The sun rose today on a city whose
tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled bits," began a
New York Herald article after Mitchell's "raid" on
New York City, a line that should still send small
shudders through us all and remind us how much
the sensational of the previous century has become
the accepted of our world.)

It would seem hard to forget that the "invasion"
of Iraq began from the air— as much a demonstra-
tion of power meant for viewers around the world as
for Saddam Hussein and his followers. Who could
forget those cameras strategically placed on the

balconies of Baghdad hotels for the shock-and-awe
son-et-lumiere show— dramatic explosions in the
night (only lacking a score to go with it). Does no
one remember air force claims that airpower alone
could win wars?

Is there some secret I'm missing here? Doesn't
anyone find it strange that, back in 1995, our pa-
pers—from their front pages to their editorial and
op-ed pages— were convulsed by a single contested
air-war exhibit being mounted at the Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum on the bombing of
Hiroshima? A historical argument about the use of
air power half a century ago merited such treat-
ment, but the actual— and potentially hardly less
controversial— use of airpower today doesn't merit a
peep?

Near the end of 2004, I could find but a single
press example of an American reporter in the air in
Iraq. On November 17, 2003, the New York Times'
Dexter Filkins wrote an article focusing on the
dangers to American pilots in the Iraqi skies ("It is
not a good time to be a helicopter pilot in the skies
over Iraq"). That, as far as I can tell, is it. Now, it's
true that any air war is harder to report on than a
ground war, especially if reporters aren't allowed in
planes or on helicopters (as they are on the river

boats and in the Bradleys, for instance). But hardly
impossible. Most reporters in Baghdad, after all,
have at least been witnesses to air attacks in the
capital itself. In one case, an American helicopter
even fired a missile into a crowd in a Baghdad street
only a few hundred yards from the heavily fortified
American heartland, the capital's Green Zone,
killing a reporter for al Arabiya satellite network in
footage seen only briefly on American TV but re-
peatedly around the world.

Life under the helicopters is a story that might be
written. At the very least, the subject could be in-
vestigated. Pilots could be interviewed on the
ground. Victims could be found. The literature
could be read because, as it happens, air force
people are thinking carefully about the uses of air-
power in a counterinsurgency war, even if reporters
aren't. Journalists could, for instance, read Thomas
F. Searle's article "Making Air Power Effective
Against Guerrillas." (If I can find it, they can.)
Searle, a military defense analyst with the Airpower
Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in
Alabama, concludes:

Airpower remains the single greatest asym-
metrical advantage the United States has
over its foes. However, by focusing on the

demands of major combat and ignoring
counterguerrilla warfare, we Airmen have
marginalized ourselves in the global war on
terrorism. To make airpower truly effective
against guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait
for the joint force commander or the ground
component commander to tell us what to do.
Rather, we must aggressively develop and
employ airpower's counterguerrilla

capabilities.
Journalists could report on the new airborne
weaponry being deployed and tested by U.S. forces.
After all, like other recent American battlefields,
Iraq has doubled as a laboratory for the corporate
development and testing of ever more advanced
weaponry. A piece, for instance, could be done on
the armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), the
Hunter, being deployed alongside the Predator in
Iraq. (The people who name these things have cer-
tainly seen too many sci-fi movies.) In a piece in De-
fense Daily, a "trade" publication, we read, for
example:

The Army in Iraq is poised to start operations
using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
armed with a precision weapon, Northrop
Grumman's [NOC] Viper Strike munition, a

service official said.... The Army is arming
the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) -Northrop
Grumman [NOC] Hunter UAV, under an ap-
proximately $4 million Quick Reaction Cap-
ability contract with Northrop Grumman
that will be completed in December, John
Miller, Northrop Grumman director of Viper
Strike, told Defense Daily.... The Hunter can
carry two Viper Strike missiles.

The Hunter UAV has been used in Iraq "since
day one," [Lt. Col. Jeff] Gabbert [program
manager of Medium Altitude Endurance]
said. The precise Viper Strike munition is im-
portant because, "it has very low collateral
damage, so it's going to be able to be em-
ployed in places where you might not use
500-pound bombs or might not use a Hellfire
munition, [but] you'll be able to use the Viper
Strike munition."

Of course, it would be a reportorial coup if any re-
porter were to go up in a plane or helicopter and
survey the urban damage in Iraq, for example, as
Jonathan Schell did from the back seat of a small
forward air controller's plane during the Vietnam
War. (From this he wrote a report for the New
Yorker magazine, "The Military Half," which

remains unparalleled in its graphic descriptions of
the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside and
which can be found collected in his book The Real
War.) But that's a lot to hope for these days. The
complete absence of coverage, however, is a little
harder to explain. Along with the vast permanent
military base facilities the United States has been
building in Iraq, the expansion of U.S. airpower is
the great missing story of the post- 9/11 era. Is there
no reporter out there willing to cover it? Is the re-
peated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily
populated civilian urban centers and the partial or
total destruction of cities such a humdrum event,
after the last century of destruction and threatened
destruction, that no one thinks it worth the bother?

The Barbarism of War from the Air

Barbarism seems an obvious enough category.
Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them.
They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive
and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or cap-
ture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his
head. Now, isn't that the definition of barbaric?
Who does that anymore? The word medieval comes

to mind immediately, and to the mass mind of our
media even faster.

To jump a little closer to modernity, they strap on
grenades, plastic explosives, bombs of various in-
genious sorts fashioned in home labs, with nails or
other bits of sharp metal added in to create instant
shrapnel meant to rend human flesh, to maim, and
kill. Then they approach a target— an Israeli bus
filled with civilians and perhaps some soldiers, a
pizza parlor in Jerusalem, a gathering of Shiite or
Sunni worshippers at or near a mosque in Iraq or
Pakistan, or of unemployed potential police or army
recruits in Ramadi or Baghdad, or of shoppers in an
Iraqi market, or perhaps a foreigner on the streets
of Kabul— and they blow themselves up. Or they
arm backpacks or bags and step onto trains in Lon-
don, Madrid, Mumbai, and set them off.

Or, to up the technology and modernity a bit, they
wire a car to explode, put a jihadist in the driver's
seat, and drive it into— well, this is now common
enough that you can pick your target. Or perhaps
they audaciously hijack four just-fueled jets filled
with passengers and run two of them into the World
Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and another
into a field in Pennsylvania. This is, of course, the
very definition of barbaric.

Now, let's jump a step further into our age of
technological destruction, becoming less face to
face, more impersonal, without, in the end, chan-
ging things that much. They send rockets from
southern Lebanon (or even cruder ones from the
Gaza Strip) against Israeli towns and cities. These
rockets can only vaguely be aimed. Some can be
brought into the general vicinity of an inhabited
area; others, more advanced, into specific urban
neighborhoods many tens of miles away— and then
they detonate, killing whoever is in the vicinity,
which normally means civilians just living their
lives, even, in one Hezbollah volley aimed at Naz-
areth, two Israeli Arab children. In this process,
thousands of Israelis have been temporarily driven
from their homes.

In the case of rockets by the hundreds lofted into
Israel by an armed, organized militia, meant to ter-
rorize and harm civilian populations, these are un-
doubtedly war crimes. Above all, they represent a
kind of barbarism that— with the possible exception
of some of those advanced Hezbollah rockets— feels
primitive to us. Despite the explosives, cars, planes,
all so basic to our modern way of life, such acts still
seem redolent of less civilized times when people
did especially cruel things to each other face to face.

The Religion of Airpower

That's them. But what about us? On our we/they
planet, most groups don't consider themselves bar-
barians. Nonetheless, we have largely achieved non-
barbaric status in an interesting way— by removing
the most essential aspect of the American (and Is-
raeli) way of war from the category of the barbaric.
I'm talking, of course, about airpower, about raining
destruction down on the earth from the skies, and
about the belief— so common, so long-lasting, so
deep-seated— that bombing others, including civil-
ian populations, is a "strategic" thing to do, that air-
power can, in relatively swift measure, break the
"will" not just of the enemy, but of that enemy's so-
ciety, and that such a way of war is the royal path to
victory.

This set of beliefs was common to airpower ad-
vocates even before modern air war had been
tested, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to put
these convictions into practice have never really
shaken what is essentially a war-making religion.
The result has been the development of the most
barbaric style of warfare imaginable, one that has
seldom succeeded in breaking any will, though it

has destroyed innumerable bodies, lives, stretches
of countryside, villages, towns, and cities.

Even during the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli milit-
ary strategists were saying things that could have
been put in the mouths of their airpower-loving pre-
decessors decades ago. The New York Times' Steven
Erlanger, for instance, quoted an unnamed senior
Israeli commander this way: "He predicted that Is-
rael would stick largely to air power for now.... 'The
problem is the will to launch. We have to break the
will of Hezbollah.'" Don't hold your breath is the
first lesson history teaches on this particular assess-
ment of the powers of air war. The second is that, a
decade from now, some other senior commander in
some other country will be saying the same thing,
word for word.

When it comes to brutality, the fact is that ancient
times have gotten a bad rap. Nothing in history was
more brutal than the last century's style of war mak-
ing—than those two world wars with their air arma-
das, backed by the most advanced industrial sys-
tems on the planet. Powerful countries then bent
every elbow, every brain, to support the destruction
of other human beings en masse, not to speak of the
Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in an-
other form), and the various colonial and cold war

campaigns that substituted the devastation of air-
power in the third world for a war between the two
superpowers that might have employed the mighti-
est air weaponry of all to scour the earth.

It may be that the human capacity for brutality,
for barbarism, hasn't changed much since the
eighth century, but the industrial revolution— and in
particular the rise of the airplane— opened up new
landscapes to brutality. The view from behind the
gun sight, then the bomb sight, and finally the mis-
sile sight slowly widened until all of humanity was
taken in. From the lofty, godlike vantage point of
the strategic, as well as the literal heavens, the milit-
ary and the civilian began to blur on the ground.
Soldiers and citizens, conscripts and refugees alike,
became nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes
of ants, or nothing at all but the structures that
housed them, or even just concepts, indistinguish-
able one from the other.

One Plane, One Bomb

We have come far from that first bomb dropped
by hand over the Italian colony of Libya. In the case
of Tokyo— then constructed almost totally out of

highly flammable materials— a single raid carrying
incendiary bombs and napalm that began just after
midnight on March 10, 1945, proved capable of in-
cinerating or killing at least 90,000 people, possibly
many more, from such a height that the dead could
not be seen (though the stench of burning flesh car-
ried up to the planes). The first American planes to
arrive over the city, writes historian Michael Sherry,
"carved out an X of flames across one of the world's
most densely packed residential districts; followers
fed and broadened it for some three hours
thereafter."

What descended from the skies, as James Carroll
recounts it in his book House of War, was "1,665
tons of pure fire... the most efficient and deliberate
act of arson in history. The consequent firestorm
obliterated fifteen square miles, which included
both residential and industrial areas. Fires raged for
four days." It was the bonfire of bonfires, and not a
single American plane was shot down.

On August 6, 1945, all the power of that vast air
armada was again reduced to a single bomb, "Little
Boy," dropped near a single bridge in a single city,
Hiroshima, which in a single moment of a sort nev-
er before experienced on the planet did what it had
taken three hundred B-29S and many hours to do to

Tokyo. In those two cities— as well as Dresden and
other German and Japanese cities subjected to
"strategic bombing"— the dead (perhaps 900,000 in
Japan and 600,000 in Germany) were invariably
preponderantly civilian, and far too distant to be
seen by plane crews often dropping their bomb
loads in the dark of night, giving the scene below
the look of hell on earth.

So 1911: one plane, one bomb. 1945: one plane,
one bomb— but this time at least 120,000 dead, pos-
sibly many more. Two bookmarks less than four
decades apart on the first chapter of a history of the
invention of a new kind of warfare, a new kind of
barbarism that, by now, is the way we expect war to
be made, a way that no longer strikes us as barbaric
at all. This wasn't always the case.

The Shock of the New

When military airpower was in its infancy, and si-
lent films still ruled the movie theaters, the first air-
war films presented pilots as knights of the heavens,
engaging in courageous, chivalric, one-on-one com-
bat in the skies. As that image reflects, in the wake
of the meat grinder of trench warfare in World War

I, the medieval actually seemed far less brutal, a
time much preferable to those years in which young
men died by their hundreds of thousands, anonym-
ously, from machine guns, artillery, poison gas, all
the lovely inventions of industrial civilization,
ground into the mud of no-man's-land, often
without managing to move their lines or the en-
emy's more than a few hundred yards.

The image of chivalric knights in planes jousting
in the skies slowly disappeared from American
screens, as after the 1950s would, by and large, air-
power itself, even as the war film went on (and on).
It can last be found perhaps in the film Top Gun; in
old Peanuts comics in which Snoopy imagines him-
self as the Red Baron; and, of course, post-Star
Wars, in the fantasy realm of outer space, where
Jedi Knights took up lethal sky-jousting in the late
1970s, X-wing fighter to X-wing fighter, and in zil-
lions of video games to follow. In the meantime, the
one-way air slaughter in South Vietnam would be
largely left out of the burst of Vietnam films that
started hitting the screen from the late 1970s on.

In the real, off-screen world, that courtly mediev-
al image of airpower disappeared fast indeed. As
World War II came ever closer, and it became more
apparent what airpower was best at— what would

now be called "collateral damage"— the shock set in.
When civilians were first purposely targeted and
bombed in the industrializing world rather than in
colonies like Iraq, the act was widely condemned as
inhuman by a startled world.

People were horrified when, during the Spanish
Civil War in 1937, Hitler's Condor Legion and
planes from fascist Italy repeatedly bombed the
Basque town of Guernica, engulfing most of its
buildings in a firestorm that killed hundreds, if not
thousands, of civilians. If you want to get a sense of
the power of that act to shock then, view Picasso's
famous painting of protest done almost immedi-
ately in response. (When Secretary of State Colin
Powell went to the United Nations in February
2003 to deliver his now infamous speech explaining
what we supposedly knew about Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction, UN officials covered
over a tapestry of the painting that happened to be
positioned where Powell would have to pass on his
way to deliver his speech and where press com-
ments would be offered afterwards.)

Later in 1937, as the Japanese began their cam-
paign to conquer China, they bombed a number of
Chinese cities. A single shot of a Chinese baby wail-
ing amid the ruins, published in Life magazine, was

enough to horrify Americans (even though the actu-
al photo may have been doctored). Airpower was
then seen as nothing but a new kind of barbarism.
According to Sherry, "In 1937 and 1938, [President
Roosevelt] had the State Department condemn
Japanese bombing of civilians in China as 'barbar-
ous' violations of the 'elementary principles' of
modern morality." Meanwhile, observers checking
out what effect the bombing of civilians had on the
"will" of society offered nothing but bad news to the
strategists of airpower. As Sherry writes,

In the Saturday Evening Post, an American
army officer observed that bombing had
proven "disappointing to the theorists of
peacetime." When Franco's rebels bombed
Madrid, "Did the Madrilenos sue for peace?
No, they shook futile fists at the murderers in
the sky and muttered, 'Swine.'" His conclu-
sion: "Terrorism from the air has been tried
and found wanting. Bombing, far from
softening the civil will, hardens it."

Today, however, terms like "barbarism" and "ter-
rorism" are unlikely to be applied to Israel's war
from the heavens over Lebanon, or ours over Iraq
and Afghanistan. New York Times correspondent
Sabrina Tavernise, for instance, reported the

following from the site of an apartment building
destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in the bomb-
shocked southern Lebanese port of Tyre in July
2006:

Whatever the target, the result was an emo-
tional outpouring in support of Hezbollah.
Standing near a cluster of dangling electrical
wires, a group of men began to chant. "By
our blood and our soul, we'll fight for you,
Nasrallah!" they said, referring to Hezbol-
lah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. In a
foggy double image, another small group
chanted the same thing, as if answering, on
the other side of the smoke.
World War II began with the German bombing of
Warsaw. On September 9, 1939, according to Car-
roll, President Roosevelt "beseeched the war leaders
on both sides to 'under no circumstances undertake
the bombardment from the air of civilian popula-
tions or of unfortified cities.'" Then came the terror-
bombing of Rotterdam and Hitler's blitz against
England, in which tens of thousands of British civil-
ians died and many more were displaced, each
event proving but another systemic shock to what
was left of global opinion, another unimaginable act
by the planet's reigning barbarians.

British civilians still retain a deserved reputation
for the stiff-upper-lip-style bravery with which they
comported themselves in the face of a merciless
German air offensive against their cities. No wills
were broken there, nor would they be in Russia
(where, in 1942, perhaps forty thousand were killed
in German air attacks on the city of Stalingrad
alone), any more than they would be in Germany by
the far more massive Allied air offensive against the
German population.

All of this, of course, came before it was clear that
the United States could design and churn out planes
faster, in greater numbers, and with more firepower
than any country on the planet and then wield air-
power far more massively and brutally than anyone
had previously been capable of doing. That was be-
fore the United States and Britain decided to fight
fire with fire by blitz- and terror-bombing Germany
and Japan. (The U.S. military moved more slowly
and awkwardly than the British from "precision
bombing" against targets like factories producing
military equipment or oil-storage depots— cam-
paigns that largely failed— to "area bombing" that
was simply meant to annihilate vast numbers of ci-
vilians and destroy cities. But move American
strategists did.) That was before Dresden and

Hiroshima; before Pyongyang, along with much of
the Korean peninsula, was reduced to rubble from
the air in the Korean War; before the Plain of Jars
was bombed back to the Stone Age in Laos in the
late 1960s and early 1970s; before the B-52S were
sent against the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong in the
terror-bombing of Christmas 1972 to wring conces-
sions out of the North Vietnamese at the peace table
in Paris; before the First President Bush ended the
First Gulf War with a "turkey shoot" on the "high-
way of death" as Saddam Hussein's largely conscript
military fled Kuwait City in whatever vehicles were
at hand; before we bombed the rubble in Afgh-
anistan into further rubble in 2001; and before we
shock-and-awed Baghdad in 2003.

Taking the Sting out of Air War

Somewhere in this process, a new language to de-
scribe air war began to develop— after, in the Viet-
nam era, the first "smart bombs" and "precision-
guided weapons" came on line. From then on, air
attacks would, for instance, be termed "surgical"
and civilian casualties dismissed as "collateral dam-
age." All of this helped removed the sting of barbar-
ity from the form of war we had chosen to make our

own (unless, of course, you happened to be one of
those "collateral" people under those "surgical"
strikes). Just consider, for a moment, that, with the
advent of the First Gulf War, airpower— as it was be-
ing applied— essentially became entertainment, a
Disney-style spectacular over Baghdad to be
watched in real time on television by a population of
noncombatants from thousands of miles away.

With that same war, the Pentagon started calling
press briefings and screening nose-cone photo-
graphy, essentially little Iraqi snuff films, in which
you actually looked through the precision-guided
bomb or missile sights yourself, found your target,
and followed that missile or "smart bomb" right
down to its explosive impact. If you were lucky, the
Pentagon even let you check out the after-mission
damage assessments. These films were so nifty, so
like the high-tech video-game experience just then
coming into being, that they were used by the
Pentagon as reputation enhancers. From then on,
Pentagon officials not only described their air
weaponry as "surgical" in its abilities, but showed
you the "surgery" (just as the Israelis did with their
footage of "precision" attacks in Lebanon). What
you didn't see, of course, was the "collateral

And yet this new form of air war had managed to
move far indeed from the image of the knightly
joust, from the sense, in fact, of battle at all. In
those years, except over the far north of Korea dur-
ing the Korean War or over North Vietnam and
some parts of South Vietnam, American pilots, un-
less in helicopters, went into action knowing that
the dangers to them were usually minimal— or
nonexistent. War from the air was in the process of
becoming a one-way street of destruction.

At an extreme, with the arrival of fleets of
Hellfire-missile-armed unmanned Predator drones
over Iraq, the "warrior" suddenly found himself sev-
en thousand miles away, delivering "precision"
strikes that almost always, somehow, manage to kill
collaterally. In such cases, war and screen war have
indeed merged.

This kind of war has the allure, from a military
point of view, of ever fewer casualties on one end in
return for ever more on the other. It must also in-
still a feeling of bloodless, godlike control over those
enemy "ants" (until, of course, things begin to go
wrong, as they always do), as well as a sense that the
world can truly be "remade" from the air, by remote
control, and at a great remove. This has to be a

powerful, even a transporting fantasy for strategists,
however regularly it may be denied by history.

Despite the cleansed language of air war, and no
matter how good the targeting intelligence or smart
the bomb (neither of which can be counted on), ci-
vilians who make the mistake of simply being alive
and going about their daily business die in profu-
sion whenever war descends from the heavens. This
is the deepest reality of war today.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon...

In fact, the process of removing airpower from
the ranks of the barbaric, of making it, if not glori-
ous (as in those visually startling moments when
Baghdad was shock-and-awed), then completely
humdrum, and so of no note whatsoever, has been
remarkably successful in our world. In fact, we have
loosed our airpower regularly on the countryside of
Afghanistan, and especially on rebellious urban
areas of Iraq in "targeted" and "precise" attacks on
insurgent concentrations and "al-Qaeda safe
houses" (as well as in more wholesale assaults on
the Old City of Najaf and on the city of Falluja)
largely without comment or criticism. In the

process, significant parts of two cities in a country
we occupied and supposedly "liberated" were re-
duced to rubble, and everywhere, civilians, not to
speak of whole wedding parties, were blown away
without our media paying much attention at all.

Until, in December 2005, Seymour Hersh wrote a
piece from Washington for the New Yorker, entitled
"Up in the Air," our reporters had, with rare excep-
tions, simply refused to look up. Yet here is an air
force summary of just a single, nondescript day of
operations in Iraq in July 2006, one of hundreds
and hundreds of such days, some far more intense,
since we invaded that country: "In total, coalition
aircraft flew 46 close-air support missions for Oper-
ation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included sup-
port to coalition troops, infrastructure protection,
reconstruction activities and operations to deter
and disrupt terrorist activities."

And here's the summary of the same day in Afgh-
anistan: "In total, coalition aircraft flew 32 close-air
support missions in support of Operation Enduring
Freedom. These missions included support to coali-
tion and Afghan troops, reconstruction activities
and route patrols." Note that, in Afghanistan, as the
situation began to worsen militarily and politically,
the old Vietnam-era B-52S, the carpet-bombers of

that war, were called back into action, again without
significant attention here.

In summer 2006, using the highest-tech
American precision-guided and bunker-busting
bombs, Israel launched air strike after strike, thou-
sands of them into Lebanon. They hit an interna-
tional airport, the nation's largest milk factories, a
major food factory, aid convoys, Red Cross ambu-
lances, a UN observer post, a power plant, apart-
ment complexes, villages (claiming that they housed
or supported the enemy), branches of banks (be-
cause they might facilitate Hezbollah finances), the
telecommunications system (because of the mes-
sages that might pass along it), highways (because
they might transport weapons to the enemy),
bridges (because they might be crossed by those
transporting weapons), a light-house in Beirut har-
bor (for reasons unknown), trucks (because they
might be transporting those weapons, though they
might also be transporting vegetables), families who
just happen to be jammed into cars or minivans
fleeing at the urging of the attackers, who turned at
least 20 percent of all Lebanese into refugees while
creating a "landscape of death" (in the phrase of the
superb reporter Anthony Shadid) in the southern

part of that country. In this process, civilian casual-
ties were widespread.

As the Israelis rediscovered— though, by now,
you'd think that military planners with half a brain
wouldn't have to destroy a country to do so— it is
impossible to "surgically" separate a movement and
its supporters from the air. When you try, you in-
variably do the opposite, fusing them ever more
closely, while creating an even larger, ever angrier
base for the movement whose essence is, in any
case, never literal geography, never simply a set of
villages or bunkers or military supplies to be taken
and destroyed.

As air wars go, the one in Lebanon in 2006 was
strikingly directed against the civilian infrastructure
and against society; in that, however, it was histor-
ically anything but unique. It might even be said
that war from the air, since first launched in
Europe's colonies early in the last century, has al-
ways been essentially directed against civilians. Air
power— no matter its stated targets— almost invari-
ably turns out to be worst for civilians and, in the
end, to be aimed at society itself. In that way, its
damage is anything but "collateral," never truly
"surgical," and never in its overall effect "precise."
Even when it doesn't start that way, the frustration

of not working as planned, of not breaking the
"will," tends to lead, as with the Israelis in 2006, to
ever wider, ever fiercer versions of the same, which,
if allowed to proceed to their logical conclusion, will
bring down not society's will, but society itself.

Lebanon's prime minister may have described Is-
rael's actions as "barbaric destruction," but, in our
world, airpower has long been robbed of its barbar-
ism. For us, air war involves dumb hits by smart
bombs, collateral damage, and surgery that may do
in the patient, but somehow is not barbaric. For
that, you need to personally cut off a head.

An Anatomy of Collateral Damage

In a little noted passage in her book The Dark
Side, Jane Mayer offered us a vision, just post-9/11,
of the value of one. In October 2001, shaken by a
nerve gas false alarm at the White House, Vice Pres-
ident Dick Cheney, reported Mayer, went under-
ground. He literally bunkered himself in "a secure,
undisclosed location," which she described as "one
of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subter-
ranean bunkers built during the Truman and

Eisenhower Administrations, the nearest of which
were located hundreds of feet below bedrock." That
bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardon-
ically, "The Commander in Chiefs Suite."

Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in
transit, "he was chauffeured in an armored motor-
cade that varied its route to foil possible attackers."
In the backseat of his car (just in case), added May-
er, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and
a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its
head, "Rarely did he travel without a medical doctor
in tow."

When it came to leadership in troubled times, this
wasn't exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps it was
closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but
whatever else it might have been, it was also a
strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any
wartime president— forget the vice president— in-
cluding Abraham Lincoln when Southern armies
might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D.
Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been
so bizarrely overprotected in the nation's capital?
Has any administration ever placed such value on
the preservation of the life of a single official?

On the other hand, the well-armored vice presid-
ent and his aide David Addington played a leading
role, as Mayer documented in grim detail, in loosing
a Global War on Terror that was also a global war of
terror on lands thousands of miles distant. In this
new war, "the gloves came off," "the shackles were
removed"— images much beloved within the admin-
istration and, in the case of those "shackles," by Ge-
orge Tenet's CIA. In the process, no price in human
abasement or human life proved too high to pay— as
long as it was paid by someone else.

The Value of None

If no level of protection was too much for Dick
Cheney, then no protection at all is what Washing-
ton offers civilians who happen to live in the ever
expanding "war zones" of the planet. In the Middle
East, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, the
war— in part from the air, sometimes via pilotless
unmanned aerial vehicles or drones— is, in crucial
ways, aimed at civilians (though this could never be
admitted).

Civilians have few doctors on hand, much less full
chemical body suits or gas masks, when disaster

strikes. Often they are asleep, or going about their
daily business, when death makes its appearance
unannounced.

We have no idea just how many civilians have
been blown away by the U.S. military (and allies) in
recent years, only that the "collateral damage" has
been widespread and far more central than anyone
here generally cares to acknowledge. Collateral
damage has come in myriad ways— from artillery
fire in the initial invasion of Iraq; from repeated
shootings of civilians in vehicles at checkpoints;
from troops (or even private mercenaries) blasting
away from convoys; during raids on private homes;
in village operations; and, significantly, from the

In Afghanistan, air strikes increased tenfold from
2004 to 2007 alone. From 2006 to 2007, civilian
deaths from those air strikes nearly tripled. Accord-
ing to Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official and
military analyst at Human Rights Watch, 317,000
pounds of bombs were dropped in June and
270,000 in July 2008, equaling "the total tonnage
dropped in 2006."

As with all figures relating to casualties, the actual
counts you get on Afghan civilian dead are

approximations and probably undercounts, espe-
cially since the war against the Taliban has been
taking place largely in the backlands of one (or, if
you count Pakistan, two) of the poorest, most re-
mote regions on the planet. And yet we do know
something. For instance, although the media have
seldom attended to the subject, we know that one
subset of innocent civilians has been slaughtered re-
peatedly. While Americans spent days in October
2006 riveted to TV screens following the murders of
five Amish girls by a madman in a one-room school-
house in Pennsylvania, and weeks following the
mass slaughter of thirty-two college students by a
mad boy at Virginia Tech in April 2007, a number of
Afghan wedding parties and at least one Iraqi wed-
ding party were largely wiped out from the air by
American planes to hardly any news coverage at all.

The message of these slaughters is that if you live
in areas where the Taliban exists, which is now
much of Afghanistan, you'd better not gather.

Each of these events was marked by something
else— the uniformity of the U.S. response: initial
claims that U.S. forces had been fired on first and
that those killed were the enemy; a dismissal of the
slaughters as the unavoidable "collateral damage" of
wartime; and, above all, an unwillingness to

genuinely apologize for, or take real responsibility
for, having wiped out groups of celebrating locals.

And keep in mind that such disasters are just sub-
sets of a far larger, barely covered story. In July
2008 alone, for example, the U.S. military and
NATO officials launched investigations into three
air strikes in Afghanistan (including one on a wed-
ding party) in which seventy-eight Afghan civilians
were killed.

Since the Afghan War began in 2001, such "incid-
ents" have occurred again and again. The Global
War on Terror is premised on an unspoken belief
that the lives of others— civilians going about their
business in distant lands— are essentially of no im-
portance when placed against American needs and
desires. That, you might say, is the value of none.

Incident in Azizabad

To take one example: on the night of August 21,
2008, a memorial service was held in Azizabad, a
village in the Shindand District of Afghanistan's
Herat Province, for a tribal leader killed the previ-
ous year, who had been, villagers reported, anti-

Taliban. Hundreds had attended, including "exten-
ded families from two tribes."

That night, a combined party of U.S. Special
Forces and Afghan army troops attacked the village.
They claimed they were "ambushed" and came un-
der "intense fire." What we know is that they called
in repeated air strikes. According to several invest-
igations and the on-the-spot reporting of New York
Times journalist Carlotta Gall, at least ninety civil-
ians, including perhaps fifteen women and up to
sixty children, died that night. As many as seventy-
six members of a single extended family were killed,
along with its head, Reza Khan. His compound
seems to have been specially targeted.

Khan, it turns out, was no Taliban "militant," but
a "wealthy businessman with construction and se-
curity contracts with the nearby American base at
Shindand airport." He reportedly had a private se-
curity company that worked for the U.S. military at
the airport and also owned a cell phone business in
the town of Herat. He had a card "issued by an
American Special Forces officer that designated
[him] as a 'coordinator for the U.S.S.F.'" Eight of
the other men killed that night, according to Gall,
worked as guards for a private American security

firm. At least two dead men had served in the
Afghan police and fought against the Taliban.

The incident in Azizabad represents one of the
deadliest media-verified attacks on civilians by U.S.
forces since the invasion of 2001. Numerous build-
ings were damaged. Many bodies, including those of
children, had to be dug out of the rubble. There may
have been as many as sixty children among the
dead. The U.S. military evidently launched its attack
after being given false information by another per-
son in the area with a grudge against Khan and his
brother. As one tribal elder, who helped bury the
dead, put it: "It is quite obvious, the Americans
bombed the area due to wrong information. I am
100 percent confident that someone gave the in-
formation due to a tribal dispute. The Americans
are foreigners and they do not understand. These
people they killed were enemies of the Taliban."

Repeated U.S. air attacks resulting in civilian
deaths have proven a disaster for Afghan president
Hamid Karzai. He promptly denounced the strikes
against Azizabad, fired two Afghan commanders, in-
cluding the top-ranking officer in western Afgh-
anistan, for "negligence and concealing facts," and
ordered his own investigation of the incident. His
team of investigators concluded that more than

ninety Afghan civilians had indeed died. Along with
the Afghan Council of Ministers, Karzai also deman-
ded a "review" of "the presence of international
forces and agreements with foreign allies, including
NATO and the United States."

Ahmad Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afgh-
anistan Independent Human Rights Commission,
similarly reported that one of the group's research-
ers had "found that 88 people had been killed, in-
cluding 20 women." The UN mission in Afghanistan
then dispatched its own investigative team from
Herat to interview survivors. Its investigation
"found convincing evidence, based on the testimony
of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians
were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15
men." (The 60 children were reportedly "3 months
old to 16 years old, all killed as they slept.")

The American Response

Given the weight of evidence at Azizabad, the on-
site investigations, the many graves, the destroyed
houses, the specificity of survivor accounts, and so
on, this might have seemed like a cut-and-dried
case of mistaken intelligence followed by an errant

assault with disastrous consequences. But accepting
such a conclusion simply isn't in the playbook of the
U.S. military.

Instead, in such cases what you regularly get is a
predictable U.S. narrative about what happened
made up of outlandish claims (or simply lies), fol-
lowed by a strategy of stonewalling, including a
blame-the-victims approach in which civilian
deaths are regularly dismissed as enemy-inspired
"propaganda," followed— if the pressure doesn't
ease up— by the announcement of an "investigation"
(whose results will rarely be released), followed by
an expression of "regrets" or "sorrow" for the loss of
life— both weasel words that can be uttered without
taking actual responsibility for what
happened— never to be followed by a genuine
apology.

Now, let's consider the American response to
Azizabad.

The numbers: Initially, the U.S. military flatly
denied that any civilians had been killed in the vil-
lage. In the operation, they claimed, exactly 30
Taliban "militants" had died. ("Insurgents engaged
the soldiers from multiple points within the com-
pound using small-arms and RPG [rocket-propelled

grenade] fire. The joint forces responded with
small-arms fire and an air strike killing 30
militants.")

Targeted, they said, had been a single compound
holding a local Taliban commander, later identified
as Mullah Sadiq, who was killed. (Sadiq would sub-
sequently call Radio Liberty to indicate that he was
still very much alive and to deny that he had been in
the village that night.) Quickly enough, however,
military spokespeople began backing off. Brigadier
General Richard Blanchette, a NATO spokesperson,
said that "investigators sent to the site immediately
after the bombing" had, in fact, verified the deaths
of three women and two children, who were suspec-
ted of being relatives of the dead Taliban
commander.

After President Karzai's angry denunciation, and
the results of his team's investigation were released,
the U.S. military altered its account slightly, admit-
ting that only twenty-five Taliban fighters had actu-
ally died alongside five Afghans identified as "non-
combatants," including a woman and two children.
The U.S. command, however, remained "very con-
fident" that only thirty Afghans had been killed.
Later, after a military investigation had been
launched, the U.S. command in Afghanistan issued

a vague statement indicating that "coalition forces
are aware of allegations that the engagement in the
Shindand district of Herat Province, Friday, may
have resulted in civilian casualties apart from those
already reported."

On August 28, the U.S. military "investigation"
released its results, confirming that only thirty
Afghans had died. On August 29, however, General
David D. McKiernan, American commander of
NATO forces, raised the number, suggesting that
"up to 40" Afghans might have died, though still in-
sisting that only five of them had been civilians, the
rest being "men of military age." These revised
numbers were still being touted on September 2,
when, according to the Washington Post, "U.S. mil-
itary officials flatly rejected" the Afghan and UN fig-
ures. On September 4, the Los Angeles Times repor-
ted that the U.S. military was now "acknowledging"
thirty-five militants and seven civilians— forty-two
Afghans— had died in the attack. Over a span of two
weeks, the Americans slowly gave way on those pre-
viously definitive figures, moving modestly closer to
the ones offered by the Karzai and UN teams,
without ever giving way on their version of what had
happened.

The investigations: The first investigation, ac-
cording to U.S. military spokespeople, occurred the
morning after the attack, when investigators from
the attacking force supposedly went house to house
"assessing damage and casualties" and "taking pho-
tos." Combat photographers were said to have "doc-
umented the scene." According to Gall, the U.S. mil-
itary claimed its forces had made a "thorough sweep
of this small western hamlet, a building-by-building
search a few hours after the air strikes, and a return
visit on Aug. 26, which villagers insist never
occurred."

As claims of civilian deaths mounted and Karzai
denounced the attacks, Major General Jeffrey J.
Schloesser, then commander of coalition forces in
Afghanistan, ordered an "investigation" into the
episode. ("All allegations of civilian casualties are
taken very seriously. Coalition forces make every ef-
fort to prevent the injury or loss of innocent lives.
An investigation has been directed.")

On August 29, the conclusions of the investiga-
tion, completed in near-record time, were released.
The casualty count— only thirty Afghans, twenty-five
of them Taliban militants— had been definitively
confirmed. A future "joint investigation" with the
Afghan government was, however, proposed. That

same day, General McKiernan suggested that the
UN, too, should be part of the joint investigation.
On September 3, the Afghans accepted the U.S. pro-
posal for what was now a "tripartite investigation."
On September 7, "emerging evidence"— a grainy
video taken on a cell phone by a doctor in Azizabad,
"showing dozens of civilian bodies, including those
of numerous children, prepared for burial"— led
General McKiernan to ask that the U.S. investiga-
tion be reopened. Normally, such investigations,
whose results usually remain classified, are no more
than sops, meant to quiet matters until attention
dies away. In this case, the minimalist military in-
vestigation, which merely backed up the initial
cover-up about the assault on Azizabad, was forced
into the open and, as protest in Afghanistan
widened, was essentially consigned to the trash
heap of history.

The rhetoric: Initially, according to the Washing-
ton Post, "a U.S. military spokeswoman dismissed
as 'outrageous' the Afghan government's assertions
that scores of civilians had been killed in the at-
tack.... A U.S. official in Washington, speaking on
the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban has be-
come adept at spreading false intelligence to draw
U.S. strikes on civilians." In not-for-attribution

comments, U.S. military officials would later sug-
gest "that the villagers fabricated such evidence as
grave sites." Lieutenant Colonel Rumi Nielson-
Green, a spokesperson for the U.S. military, in-
sisted: "We're confident that we struck the right
compound." On August 24, as protests over the
deaths at Azizabad mounted in Afghanistan, White
House spokesperson Tony Fratto said at a press
gaggle: "We regret the loss of life among the inno-
cent Afghanis who we are committed to protect....
Coalition forces take precautions to prevent the loss
of civilians, unlike the Taliban and militants who
target civilians and place civilians in harm's way."

On August 25, Fratto added: "We believe from
what we've heard from officials at the Department
of Defense that they believe it was a good strike.... I
should tell you, though, first of all, we obviously
mourn the loss of any innocent civilians that may
lose their lives in these attacks in— whether they're
in Afghanistan or in Iraq, in any of these conflict
areas." On that same day, Pentagon spokesperson
Bryan Whitman said: "We continue at this point to
believe that this was a legitimate strike against the
Taliban. Unfortunately there were some civilian cas-
ualties, although that figure is in dispute, I would
say. But this is why it is being investigated."

On August 27, at a Pentagon press conference,
Commandant of the Marine Corps General James
Conway said:

[I]f the reports of the Afghan civilian casual-
ties are accurate— and sometimes that is a big
"if because I think we all understand the
Taliban capabilities with regard to informa-
tion operations— but if that proves out, that
will be truly an unfortunate incident. And we
need to avoid that, certainly, at every cost....

You know, air power is the premiere asym-
metric advantage that we hold over both the
Taliban and, for that matter, the al Qaeda in
Iraq.... And when we find that you're up
against hardened people in a hardened type
of compound, before we throw our Marines
or soldiers against that, we're going to take
advantage of our asymmetric advantage....

You don't always know what's in that com-
pound, unfortunately.

And sometimes we think there's been overt
efforts on the part of the Taliban, in particu-
lar, to surround themselves with civilians so
as to, at a minimum, reap an 10 [information
operations] advantage if civilians are killed.

On August 29, General McKiernan reiterated the
American position, while expressing regrets for any
loss of civilian life: "This was a legitimate insurgent
target. We regret the loss of civilian life, but the
numbers that we find on this target area are
nowhere near the number reported in the media,
and that we believe there was a very deliberate in-
formation operation orchestrated by the insurgency,
by the Taliban." He also complained about the UN
investigation, saying, "I am very disappointed in the
United Nations because they have not talked to this
headquarters before they made that release," and he
suggested that President Karzai had been the victim
of bad information.

On September 3, with pressure growing, U.S. am-
bassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad put the dis-
parities in numbers down to the "fog of war," while
urging a new joint investigation: "I believe that
there is a bit of a fog of war involved in some of
these initial reports. Sometimes initial reports can
be wrong. And the best way to deal with it is to have
the kind of investigation that we have proposed,
which is U.S., coalition, plus the Afghan govern-
ment, plus the United Nations." On the same day,
Karzai's office issued a statement indicating that
President Bush had phoned the Afghan president:

"The President of America has expressed his regret
and sympathy for the occurrence of Shindand incid-
ent." They quoted him as saying, "I am a partner in
your loss and that of the Afghan people." Also that
same day, General McKiernan said: "Every death of
a civilian in wartime is a terrible tragedy. Even one
death is too many.... I wish to again express my sin-
cere condolences and apologies to the families
whose loved ones were inadvertently killed in the
cross fire with the insurgents in Azizabad." Though
the Afghans seem to have largely died due to U.S.
air strikes, not in a crossfire, this was as close to an
apology as anyone related to the U.S. government or
military has come.

Under fire for its account of the raid, the U.S. mil-
itary was quick to point out that its now discredited
findings at Azizabad "were corroborated by an inde-
pendent journalist embedded with the U.S. force."
That man turned out to be none other than Oliver
North, working for FOX News. North had not only
gained notoriety as an official of, a defender of, and
a shredder of papers for the Reagan administration
in the Iran-Contra scandal, but had earlier fought in
Vietnam. He actually appeared as a witness for the
defense in the case of one of the marines accused of

carrying out a massacre of Vietnamese at Son Thang
in February 1970.

As now, so in Vietnam, were "hearts and minds"
being hunted both from the air and on the ground;
so, too, civilians were repeatedly blown away there;
and so, too, as in the case of the infamous My Lai
massacre, cover stories were fabricated to explain
how civilians— Vietnamese peasants— had died and
those stories were publicized by the U.S. military,
even though they bore little or no relation to what
had actually happened.

Today, "hearts and minds" are being similarly
hunted across large stretches of the planet, and
people in surprising numbers continue to die while
simply trying to lead their lives.

This sort of "collateral damage" is an ongoing
modern nightmare, which, unlike dead Amish girls
or school shootings, does not fascinate either our
media or, evidently, Americans generally. It seems
we largely don't want to know what happened, and
generally speaking, that's lucky because the media
isn't particularly interested in telling us. This is one
reason the often absurd accounts sometimes offered
by the U.S. military go relatively unchallenged— as,

fortunately, they did not in the case of the incident
at Azizabad.

Of course, it matters what you value and what you
dismiss as valueless. When you overvalue yourself
and undervalue others, you naturally overestimate
your own power and are remarkably blind to the po-
tential power of others.

In this way, not just Vice President Cheney but
President Bush and his top officials remained self-
protectively embunkered throughout their years in
office. The sixty or so children slaughtered in Aziza-
bad, each of whom belonged to some family, did not
matter to them. But those children do matter. And
when you kill them, and so many others like them,
you surely play with fire.

Launching the Drone Wars

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a
future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a "terminator,"
back to our time. His job was to liquidate the wo-
man who would give birth to John Connor, the lead-
er of the underground human resistance of Skynet's
time. You with me so far?

That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminat-
or movie, and for the multimillions who saw it, the
images of future machine war— of hunter-killer
drones flying above a wasted landscape— are unfor-
gettable. Since then, as Hollywood's special effects
took off, there have been three sequels, during
which the original terminator somehow morphed
into a friendlier figure on-screen, and even more
miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid gov-
ernor of California.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven't waited
for Hollywood. Actual unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination
drones armed with Hellfire missiles, are now
patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting
down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the
labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are
already talking about and working on next-genera-
tion machines. Post-2020, according to these
dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, dis-
cern enemies and incinerate them without human
decision-making. They're even discussing just how
to program human ethics— or, rather, American eth-
ics—into them.

It may never happen, but it should still give us
pause that there are people eager to bring the fifth

iteration of Terminator not to local multiplexes, but
to the skies of our perfectly real world— and that the
Pentagon is already funding them to do so.

As futuristic weapons planning went, UAVs star-
ted out pretty low-tech in the 1990s. Even in 2009,
the most commonplace of the two American armed
drones, the Predator, cost only $4.5 million a pop,
while the most advanced model, the Reaper— both
are produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Sys-
tems of San Diego— came in at $15 million. (Com-
pare that to $350 million for a single F-22 Raptor,
which proved essentially useless in America's recent
counterinsurgency wars.) It's lucky UAVs are cheap,
since they are also prone to crashing.

UAVs came to life as surveillance tools during the
wars over the former Yugoslavia, were armed by
February 2001, were hastily pressed into operation
in Afghanistan after 9/11, and like many weapons
systems, began to evolve generationally. As they
did, they developed from surveillance eyes in the
sky into something far more sinister and previously
restricted to terra firma: assassins. One of the earli-
est armed acts of a CIA-piloted Predator, back in
November 2002, was an assassination mission over
Yemen in which a jeep, reputedly transporting six
suspected al-Qaeda operatives, was incinerated.

Today, the advanced UAV, the Reaper, housing
up to four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound
bombs, packs the sort of punch once reserved for a
jet fighter. Dispatched to the skies over the farthest
reaches of the American empire, powered by a
1,000-horsepower turbo prop engine at its rear, the
Reaper can fly at up to 21,000 feet for up to twenty-
two hours (until fuel runs short), streaming back
live footage from three cameras (or sending it to
troops on the ground)— 16,000 hours of video a
month. There is no need to worry about a pilot doz-
ing off during those twenty-two hours. The human
crews "piloting" the drones, often from thousands of
miles away, just change shifts when tired. So the
planes are left to endlessly cruise Iraqi, Afghan, and
Pakistani skies relentlessly seeking out, like so
many terminators, specific enemies whose identities
can, under certain circumstances (or so the claims
go) be determined even through the walls of houses.
When a "target" is found and agreed upon— in
Pakistan, the permission of Pakistani officials to fire
is no longer considered necessary— and a missile or
bomb is unleashed, the cameras are so powerful
that "pilots" can watch the facial expressions of
those being liquidated on their computer monitors
"as the bomb hits."

Approximately 5,500 UAVs, mostly un-
armed—less than 250 of them are Predators and
Reapers— operated in 2009 over Iraq and the so-
called Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of op-
erations. Part of the more than century-long devel-
opment of war in the air, drones have become favor-
ites of U.S. military planners.

And yet, keep in mind that the UAV still remains
in its (frightening) infancy. Such machines are not,
of course, advanced cyborgs. They are in some ways
not even all that advanced. Because someone wants
publicity for the drone-war program, reporters from
the United States and elsewhere have been given
"rare behind-the-scenes" looks at how it works. As a
result, and also because the "covert war" in the skies
over Pakistan makes Washington's secret warriors
proud enough to regularly leak news of its "suc-
cesses," we know something more about how our
drone wars work.

We know, for instance, that at least part of the air
force's Afghan UAV program runs out of Kandahar
Air Base in southern Afghanistan. It turns out that,
pilotless as the planes may be, a pilot does have to
be nearby to guide them into the air and handle
landings. As soon as the drone is up, a two-man
team, a pilot and a "sensor monitor," backed by

intelligence experts and meteorologists, takes over
the controls either at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base
in Tucson, Arizona, or at Creech Air Force Base
northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, some 7,000-odd
miles away. (Other U.S. bases may be involved, as
well, including Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar
facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar from
which the air force evidently oversees its drone
wars.)

According to Christopher Drew of the New York
Times, who visited Davis-Monthan, where Air Na-
tional Guard members handle the controls, the pi-
lots sit unglamorously "at lggos-style computer
banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers."
Depending on the needs of the moment, they can
find themselves "over" either Afghanistan or Iraq,
or even both on the same work shift. All of this is re-
markably mundane— pilot complaints generally run
to problems "transitioning" back to wife and chil-
dren after a day at the joystick over battle
zones— and at the same time, right out of Ali Baba's
One Thousand and One Nights.

In those dimly lit trailers, the UAV teams have
taken on an almost godlike power. Their job is to
survey a place thousands of miles distant (and com-
pletely alien to their lives and experiences), assess

what they see, and spot "targets" to eliminate— even
if on their somewhat antiquated computer systems
it "takes up to 17 steps— including entering data into
pull-down windows— to fire a missile" and inciner-
ate those below. They only face danger when they
leave the job: a sign at Creech warns a pilot to "drive
carefully" because this is "the most dangerous part
of your day." Those involved claim that the fear and
thrill of battle do not completely escape them, but
the descriptions we now have of their world sound
discomfortingly like a cross between the far fronti-
ers of sci-fi and a call center in India.

The most intense of our various drone wars, the
one on the other side of the Afghan border in
Pakistan, is also the most mysterious. We know that
some or all of the drones engaged in it take off from
Pakistani airfields; that this "covert war" (which
regularly makes front-page news) is run by the CIA
out of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia; that its
pilots are also located somewhere in the United
States; and that at least some of them are hired
private contractors.

William Saletan of Slate has described our drones
as engaged in "a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunt-
ing party." Of course, in the twenty-first century
what was once an elite activity performed in person

has been transformed into a 24/7 industrial activity
fit for human drones.

Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in
the history of assassination. Once upon a time, to be
an assassin for a government was a furtive, shame-
ful thing. In those days, of course, an assassin, if
successful, took down a single person, not the tar-
geted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or
simply, if targeting intelligence proves wrong, any-
one in the vicinity). No more poison-dart-tipped
umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic ci-
gars, as in CIA ones. Assassination has taken to the
skies as an everyday, year-round activity. Today, we
increasingly display our assassination wares with
pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for
aerial assassination operations to be a part of an
open discussion in Washington and in the media.
Consider this a new definition of "progress" in our
world.

Proliferation and Sovereignty

One of the truths of our time is that no weapons
system, no matter where first created, can be kept
as private property for long. Today, we talk not of

arms races, but of "proliferation," which is what you
have once a global arms race of one takes hold. But
don't for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer
skies dominated by Predators and Reapers won't
someday fill with the drones of other nations. The
Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis,
the Georgians, and the Iranians, among others,
already have drones. In 2006, Hezbollah flew
drones over Israel. In fact, if you have the skills, you
can create your own drone, more or less in your liv-
ing room (as do-it-yourself drone websites make
clear).

Undoubtedly, the future holds unnerving possib-
ilities not just for states, but for small groups intent
on assassination from the air. Already the skies are
growing more crowded. In March 2009, not long
after coming into office, President Barack Obama is-
sued what Reuters termed "an unprecedented
videotaped appeal to Iran... offering a 'new begin-
ning' of diplomatic engagement to turn the page on
decades of U.S. policy toward America's longtime
foe." It was in the form of a Persian New Year's
greeting. But, as the New York Times also reported,
the U.S. military beat the president to the punch.
They sent their own "greetings" to the Iranians a
couple of days earlier. The U.S. military sent out

Colonel James Hutton to meet the press and "con-
firm" that "allied aircraft" had shot down an "Irani-
an unmanned aerial vehicle" over Iraq on February
25, more than three weeks earlier. Between that day
and mid-March, the relevant Iraqi military and ci-
vilian officials were, the Times tells us, not in-
formed. The reason? That drone was intruding on
our (borrowed) airspace, not theirs. You probably
didn't know it, but according to an Iraqi Defense
Ministry spokesperson, "protection of Iraqi airspace
remains an American responsibility for the next
three years." And naturally enough, we don't want
other countries' drones in "our" airspace, though
that's hardly likely to stop them. The Iranians, for
instance, have already announced the development
of "a new generation of 'spy drones' that provide
real-time surveillance over enemy terrain."

Of course, when you openly control squads of as-
sassination drones patrolling airspace over other
countries, you've already made a mockery of
whatever national sovereignty might once have
meant. It's a precedent that might someday even
make us distinctly uncomfortable. But not right

If you doubt this, check out the stream of self-
congratulatory comments being leaked by

Washington officials about our drone assassins.
These often lead off news pieces about America's
"covert war" over Pakistan ("An intense, six-month
campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken
such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun
turning violently on one another out of confusion
and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terror-
ism officials say"). But be sure to read to the end of
such pieces. Somewhere in them, after the successes
have been touted and toted up, you get the real
news: "In fact, the stepped-up strikes have coin-
cided with a deterioration in the security situation
in Pakistan."

In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly
provoking terror— and terrorism— as well as anger
and hatred among people who are by no means fun-
damentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of
the country.

The Future Awaits Us

If you want to read the single most chilling line
yet uttered about drone warfare American-style, it
comes at the end of Christopher Drew's piece. He
quotes Brookings Institution analyst Peter Singer

saying of our Predators and Reapers, "these systems
today are very much Model T Fords. These things
will only get more advanced." In other words, our
drone wars are being fought with the airborne equi-
valent of cars with cranks, but the "race" to the hori-
zon is already under way. Soon, some Reapers will
have a far more sophisticated sensor system with
twelve cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half
mile round area from twelve different angles. That
program has been dubbed "Gorgon Stare," but it
doesn't compare to the future 92-camera Argus pro-
gram whose initial development is being funded by
the Pentagon's blue-skies outfit, the Defense Ad-
vanced Research Projects Agency.

Soon enough, a single pilot may be capable of
handling not one but perhaps three drones, and
drone armaments will undoubtedly grow progress-
ively more powerful and "precise." In the meantime,
BAE Systems already has a drone four years into de-
velopment, the Taranis, that should someday be
"completely autonomous," meaning it theoretically
will operate without human pilots. Initial trials of a
prototype were scheduled for 2010. By 2020, so
claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in
aerial battle and choosing their victims themselves.
As Robert S. Boyd of McClatchy reported, "The

Defense Department is financing studies of
autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that
could find and destroy targets on their own. On-
board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood
people, would decide whether to fire their
weapons."

It's a particular sadness of our world that, in
Washington, only the military can dream about the
future in this way, and then fund the "arms race" of
2018 or 2035. Rest assured that no one with a gov-
ernmental red cent is researching the health care
system of 2018 or 2035, or the public education sys-
tem of those years.

In the meantime, the skies of our world are filling
with round-the-clock assassins. They will only
evolve and proliferate. Of course, when we check
ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with
John Connor, the human resister, the good guy of
this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere,
however, as we fight our drone wars ever more
openly, as we field mechanical techno-terminators
with all-seeing eyes and loose our missiles from
thousands of miles away ("Hasta la vista, baby!"),
we undoubtedly look like something other than a
nation of John Connors to those living under the
Predators.

True, we can't send our drones into the past to
wipe out the young Ayman al-Zawahiri in Cairo or
the teenage Osama bin Laden speeding down some
Saudi road in his gray Mercedes sedan. True, the
UAV enthusiasts, who are already imagining all-
drone wars run by "ethical" machines, may never
see anything like their fantasies come to pass. Still,
the fact that without the help of a single advanced
cyborg we are already in the process of creating a
Terminator planet should give us pause for
thought.. .or not.

FOUR

The Language of War, American-
Style

Which War Is This Anyway?

Consider this description:

The "rebels" or "freedom fighters" are part of
a nationwide "resistance movement." While
many of them are local, even tribal, and fight
simply because they are outraged by the oc-
cupation of their country, hundreds of others
among the "resistance fighters"— young
Arabs— are arriving from as far away as "Le-
banon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan," not to
speak of Saudi Arabia and Algeria, to engage
in jihad, ready as one of them puts it, to stay
in the war "until I am martyred." Fighting for
their "Islamic ideals," "they are inspired by a
sense of moral outrage and a religious devo-
tion heightened by frequent accounts of di-
vine miracles in the war." They slip across

the country's borders to fight the "invader"
and the "puppet government" its officials
have set up in the capital in their "own im-
age." The invader's sway, however, "extends
little beyond the major cities, and even there
the... freedom fighters often hold sway by
night and sometimes even by day."

Sympathetic as they may be, the rebels are
badly overwhelmed by the firepower of the
occupying superpower and are especially at
risk in their daring raids because the enemy
is "able to operate with virtual impunity in
the air." The superpower's soldiers are sent
out from their bases and the capital to "make
sweeps, but chiefly to search and destroy, not
to clear and hold." Its soldiers, known for
their massive human rights abuses and the
cruelty of their atrocities, have in some cases
been reported to press "on the throats of
prisoners to force them to open their mouths
while the guards urinate into them, [as well
as] setting police dogs on detainees, raping
women in front of family members and other
vile acts."

On their part, the "guerrillas," armed
largely with Russian and Chinese rifles and

rocket propelled grenade launchers, have re-
sponded with the warfare of the weak. They
have formed car-bombing squads and use a
variety of cleverly constructed wheelbarrow,
bicycle, suitcase, and roadside bombs as well
as suicide operations performed by volun-
teers chosen from among the foreign ji-
hadists. They engage in assassinations of, for
example, university intellectuals and other
sabotage activities in the capital and else-
where aimed at killing the occupying troops
and their sympathizers. They behead host-
ages to instill fear in the other side. Funding
for the resistance comes, in part, from sup-
porters in sympathetic Islamic countries, in-
cluding Saudi Arabia. However, "if the muja-
heddin are ever to realize their goal of forcing
[the occupiers] out, they will need more than
better arms and training, more than their
common faith. They will need to develop a
genuinely unified resistance.... Above all, the
analysts say, they will need to make the
war... even costlier and more difficult for the
[occupiers] than it is now."

It's easy enough to identify this composite de-
scription, right? Our recent wars in Iraq or

Afghanistan, as portrayed perhaps in the Arab press
and on Arab websites. As it happens, actually not.
With the exception of the material on bombs, which
comes from Steve Coil's book Ghost Wars, and on
the beheading of hostages, which comes from an
Amnesty International report, all of the above is
taken from either the statements of U.S. officials or
coverage in either the Washington Post or the New
York Times of the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the
1980s, fostered, armed, and funded to the tune of
billions of dollars by the Central Intelligence Agency
with the help of the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence
services.
Well, then try this one:

Thousands of troops of the occupying power
make a second, carefully planned "brutal ad-
vance" into a large city to root out Islamic
"rebels." The first attack on the city failed,
though it all but destroyed neighborhoods in
a "ferocious bombardment." The soldiers ad-
vance behind "relentless air and artillery
strikes." This second attempt to take the city,
the capital of a "rebellious province," defen-
ded by a determined "rebel force" of perhaps
five hundred to three thousand, succeeds,
though the fighting never quite ends. The

result? A "razed" city, "where virtually every
building has been bombed, burned, shelled
beyond recognition or simply obliterated by
war"; a place where occupying "soldiers fire
at anything that moves" and their check-
points are surrounded by "endless ruins of
former homes and gutted, upended automo-
biles." The city has been reduced to "rubble"
and, for the survivors, "rebel" fighters and ci-
vilians alike, it and surrounding areas are
now a "killing field." The city lacks electricity,
water, or much in the way of food, and yet
the rebels hold out in its ruins, and though
amusements are few, "on one occasion,
a.. .singer came and gave an impromptu gui-
tar concert of patriotic and folk tunes [for
them]."

In the carnage involved in the taking of the
city, the resistance showed great fortitude.
'"See you in paradise,' [one] volunteer said.
'God is great.'" Hair-raising news reports
from the occupied city and from refugee
camps describe the "traumatized" and
maimed. ("Here in the remains of Hospital
Number Nine— [the city's] only hospital with
electricity— she sees a ceaseless stream of

mangled bodies, victims of gunfire and
shellings"); press reports also acknowledge
the distance between official promises of re-
construction and life in the gutted but still
resistant city, suggesting "the contrast
between the symbolic peace and security de-
clared by [occupation] officials and the city's
mine-ridden, bullet-flying reality." Headlines
don't hesitate to highlight claims made by
those who fled and survived— "Refugees
Describe Atrocities by Occupation
Troops"— and reports bluntly use the label
given the acts of the occupiers by human
rights organizations— "war crimes." Such or-
ganizations are quoted to devastating effect
on the subject. The rebels may be called
"bandits" by the occupiers, but it's clear in
news reports that they are the ones to be
admired.
No question of the sources here at least. Obvi-
ously the above is a composite account of the 2004
American assault on the Sunni city of Falluja taken
from Arab press reports or sympathetic Arab web-
sites. As it happens, if you believed that, you'd be
zero for two. In fact, all of the above is taken from
contemporary accounts of the January 2000

Russian assault on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya,
that appeared in the Washington Post, the New
York Times, or the Boston Globe.

How to Spot a Terrorist

I put together these descriptions from American
reports on the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the
1980s, written in the midst of the Cold War, and on
the second battle for Grozny ten years after the Cold
War ended, because both seemed to have certain
eerie similarities to events in Iraq after Baghdad fell
to American troops in March 2003, though obvi-
ously neither presents an exact analogy. Both earlier
moments of reportage do, however, highlight cer-
tain limitations in our press coverage of the war in
Iraq (and also Afghanistan).

After all, in the case of Afghanistan in the 1980s,
there was also a fractured and fractious rebellion
against an invading imperial superpower intent on
controlling the country and setting up its own re-
gime in the capital. The anti-Soviet rebellion was
(like the present one in Iraq) conducted in part by
Islamic rebels, many of whom were extremist Sunni
jihadists (and some of whose names, from Osama

bin Laden to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, remain signi-
ficant today). The Afghan guerrilla war was backed
by that other superpower, the United States, for a
decade through its spy agency, the CIA, which pro-
moted methods that, in the Iraq context, would be
called "terrorism."

In the case of the Russian assault on Grozny, the
capital of the breakaway region of Chechnya, you
also have an imperial power, if no longer exactly a
superpower, intent on wresting a city— and a "safe
haven"— from a fractious, largely Islamist insur-
gency and ready to make an example of a major city
to do so. The Russian rubblizing of Grozny may
have been more extreme than the American de-
struction of Falluja (or so it seems), but the events
remain comparable. In the case of Grozny, the U.S.
government did not actively back the rebels as they
had in Afghanistan, but the Bush administration,
made up of former Cold Warriors who had imbibed
the idea of "rolling back" the Soviet Union in their
younger years, was certainly sympathetic to the
rebels.

What, then, are some of the key differences I no-
ticed in reading through examples of this reportage
and comparing it to the products of our present em-
bedded state? Let me list four differences— and

suggest a question: To what degree are American
reporters as a group destined to follow, with only
modest variation, the paths opened for them by our
government's positions on its wars of choice?

Language: Those in rebellion in Iraq today are,
according to our military, "anti-Iraqi forces" (a
phrase that, in quotes, often makes it into news
pieces and is just about never commented upon by
reporters). Other terms, most of them also first issu-
ing from the mouths of U.S. officials, have been
"dead-enders," "bitter enders," "Baathist remnants,"
"terrorists," and most regularly (and neutrally), "in-
surgents" who are fighting in an "insurgency"— but
rarely "guerrillas."

The Afghans in the 1980s, on the other hand,
were almost invariably in "rebellion" and so "rebels"
as headlines at the time made clear ("Officials Say
U.S. Plans to Double Supply of Arms to Afghan
Rebels," New York Times). They were part of a "res-
istance movement" and as their representatives
could write op-eds for our papers, the Washington
Post, for instance, had no hesitation about head-
lining Matthew D. Erulkar's op-ed of January 13,
1987, "Why America Should Recognize the Afghan
Resistance" or identifying its author as working "for
the Afghan resistance."

But the phrase "Afghan resistance" or "the resist-
ance" was no less likely to appear in news pieces, as
in an October 22, 1983, report by Post reporter Wil-
liam Branigin, "Feuding Guerrilla Groups Rely on
Uneasy Pakistan." Nor, as in James Rupert's
"Dreams of Martyrdom Draw Islamic Arabs to Join
Afghan Rebels" (Washington Post, July 21, 1986),
was there any problem calling an Islamic "funda-
mentalist party" that was part of the "Afghan Jihad"
a "resistance party." President Ronald Reagan at the
time regularly referred to fundamentalist Afghans
and their Arab supporters as "freedom fighters"
(while the CIA, through the LSI, the Pakistani intel-
ligence service, shuttled vast sums of money and
stores of weaponry to the most extreme of the
Afghan jihadist parties). "Freedom fighter" was
commonly used in the press, sometimes inter-
changeably with "the Afghan resistance," as in a
March 12, 1981, piece by Post columnist Joseph
Kraft, "The Afghan Chaos" ("Six different organiza-
tions claiming to represent Afghan freedom
fighters").

Similarly, the Chechens in Grozny in 2000 were
normally referred to in U.S. news accounts as
"rebels": "separatist rebels," "rebel ambushes," "a
rebel counterattack," and so on. ("Rebel," as anyone

knows who remembers American rock 'n' roll or
movies of the 1950s and 1960s, is a positive term in
our lexicon.) Official Russian terms for the Chechen
rebels, who were fighting grimly like any group of
outgunned urban guerrillas in a manner similar to
the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq today— "bandits" or
"armed criminals in camouflage and masks"— were
quoted, but then (as "anti-Iraqi forces" and other
Bush administration terms are not) put in context
or contrasted with Chechen versions of reality.

In a typical piece from CNN, you could find the
following quote: '"The [Russians] aren't killing any
bandits,' one refugee said after reaching Ingushetia.
'They're killing old men, women and children. And
they keep on bombing— day and night.'" In a Daniel
Williams piece in the Washington Post, the Russian
government's announcements about the fighting in
Grozny have become a "daily chant," a phrase that
certainly suggests how the reporter feels about their
accuracy.

Here's a quote from a discussion in a Washington
Post editorial of an Associated Press photo of the
destruction in Grozny. The photo was described
elsewhere as "a pastel from hell" and was evidently
of a sort we've seen far too little of in our press from
either Falluja or the Old City of Najaf:

Russian leaders announced with pride
Sunday that their armed forces had captured
Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, five months
into their war to subdue that rebellious
province. Reports from the battle zone sug-
gested that the Russians had not so much lib-
erated the city as destroyed it.... Grozny re-
sembles nothing so much as Stalingrad, re-
duced to rubble by Hitler's troops before the
Red Army inflicted a key defeat that Russian
schoolchildren still celebrate.... All in all, this
is not likely to be a victory that Russian
schoolchildren will celebrate generations
hence.
Similar writing certainly certainly wasn't found
on American editorial pages when it came to the
"razing" of Falluja, nor were those strong adjectives
like "brutal," once wielded in the Grozny accounts,
much to be found either.

Testimony: Perhaps the most striking difference
between news stories about the Afghan revolt, the
destruction of Grozny, and the destruction of Fal-
luja may be that in the cases of the first two, Amer-
ican reporters were willing, even eager, to seek out
refugee accounts, even if the refugees were support-
ers of the rebels or rebels themselves. Such

testimony was, for instance, regularly offered as
evidence of what was happening in Grozny and
more generally in Chechnya (even when the ac-
counts couldn't necessarily be individually con-
firmed). So the Posf's Daniel Williams, for instance,
in "Brutal Retreat from Grozny Led to a Killing
Field" (February 12, 2000) begins by following
Heda Yusupova, mother of two "and a cook for a
group of Chechen rebels" as she flees the city: "[She]
froze in her tracks when she heard the first land
mine explode. It was night, and she and a long file
of rebels were making a dangerous retreat from
Grozny, the Chechen capital, during the final hours
of a brutal Russian advance. Another explosion. Her
children, ages 9 and 10, screamed." It's a piece that
certainly puts the Russian assault on Grozny in a
striking perspective.

Post reporter Sharon LaFraniere wrote a piece on
June 29, 2000, bluntly entitled "Chechen Refugees
Describe Atrocities by Russian Troops," in which
she reported on "atrocities" in what the Russians
labeled a "pro-bandit village": '"I have never ima-
gined such tortures, such cruelty,' [the villager]
said, sitting at a small table in the dim room that
has housed her family here for nearly three years.
'There were a lot of men who were left only half

alive.'" And when Russian operations against indi-
vidual Chechens were described, it was possible to
see them through Chechen eyes: "Three times last
month, Algayeva said, Russian soldiers broke in,
threatening to shoot the school's guard. They
smashed doors, locks and desks. The last time, May
20, they took sugar, plates and a brass bell that was
rung at school ceremonies."

As in a February 29, 2000, Boston Globe piece
("Chechen Horror"), it was also possible for news-
papers to discuss editorially both "the suffering of
the Chechens" and the way "the United States and
the rest of the international community can no
longer ignore their humanitarian obligation to alle-
viate—and end— [that suffering]."

The equivalent pieces for Iraq are largely missing,
though every now and then— as with an Edward
Wong piece in the New York Times on life in resist-
ant Sadr City, Baghdad's huge Shiite slum— there
have been exceptions. Given the dangers Western
reporters face in Iraq and the constricting system of
"embedding" that generally prevails, when you read
of Americans breaking into Iraqi homes, you're or-
dinarily going to see the event from the point of
view of the troops. Iraqi refugees have not been
much valued in our press for their testimony.

(There is a deep irony in this, since the Bush admin-
istration launched its war citing mainly exile— that
is, refugee— testimony.)

We know, of course, that it's difficult for U.S. re-
porters to go in search of such testimony in Iraq,
but not impossible. For instance, Dahr Jamail, a de-
termined freelance journalist, managed to interview
refugees from Falluja, and their testimony sounds
remarkably like the Grozny testimony from major
American newspapers in 2000: "The American war-
planes came continuously through the night and
bombed everywhere in Fallujah! It did not stop even
for a moment! If the American forces did not find a
target to bomb, they used sound bombs just to ter-
rorize the people and children. The city stayed in
fear; I cannot give a picture of how panicked every-

For the "suffering of the Iraqis," you had to turn
to the periodic "testimony" of Iraqi bloggers like the
pseudonymous Riverbend of Baghdad Burning or
perhaps Al Jazeera. The suffering we actually hear
most about in our press is American suffering, in
part because it's the American troops with whom
our reporters are embedded, with whom they bond,
and fighters on battlefields anywhere almost

invariably find themselves in grim and suffering
circumstances.

Human rights evidence: The reports from Grozny
in particular often made extensive use of the invest-
igations of human rights groups of various sorts (in-
cluding Russian ones), and reporters then were will-
ing to put the acts of the Russians in Grozny (as in
Afghanistan) in the context of "war crimes," as in-
deed they were. In Iraq, on the other hand, while
pieces on human rights reports about our occupa-
tion can sometimes be found deep in our papers,
the evidence supplied by human rights groups is
seldom deployed by American reporters as an evid-
entiary part of war pieces.

"Terrorism": Finally, it's interesting to see how,
in different reporting contexts and different mo-
ments, the term "terrorism" is or is not brought to
bear. In Grozny, for instance, the "rebels" used "ra-
dio controlled land mines" and assassinated
Chechens who worked for the Russians (just as
Iraqi insurgents and terrorists explode roadside
IEDs and assassinate those who work for the Amer-
icans) and yet the Chechens remained "rebels."

On this topic, though, Afghanistan in the 1980s is
of special interest. There, as Steve Coll tells us in his

riveting book Ghost Wars, the CIA organized terror
on a major scale in conjunction with the Pakistani
ISI, which trained "freedom fighters" in how to
mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks on
Soviet officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied cit-
ies (techniques personally "endorsed," according to
Coll, by CIA director William Casey). The CIA also
supplied the Afghan rebels with long-range sniper
rifles (meant for assassinations) and delayed-timing
devices for plastic explosives. "The rebels fashioned
booby-trapped bombs from gooey black contact ex-
plosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the
CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or
poured into innocent utensils." Kabul cinemas and
cultural shows were bombed, and suicide operations
mounted using Arab jihadis. "Many tons of C-4
plastic explosives for sabotage operations" were
shipped in, and the CIA took to supplying so-called
dual-use weapons systems that could be used
against military targets, "but also in terror attacks
and assassinations." Much of this was known, at
least to some degree at the time (and some of it re-
ported in press accounts), and yet the Afghans re-
mained "freedom fighters" and a resistance move-
ment, even after the Afghan jihad began to slip

across the other Pakistani border into Indian
Kashmir.

What changed? What made such people, accord-
ing to our press, "terrorists"? The answer is, of
course, that we became their prime enemy and tar-
get. Coll offers this observation:

Ten years later the vast training infrastruc-
ture that [the Pakistani ISI] built with the
enormous budgets endorsed by NSDD-166
[the official American plan for the Afghan ji-
had]— the specialized camps, the sabotage
training manuals, the electronic bomb deton-
ators, and so on— would be referred to
routinely in America as "terrorist
infrastructure."

At the time of its construction, however, it
served a jihadist army that operated openly
on the battlefield, attempted to seize and
hold territory, and exercised sovereignty over
civilian populations

—in Soviet Afghanistan, that is.

In the Afghan anti-Soviet war, the CIA looked fa-
vorably indeed upon the recruitment of thousands
of Arab jihadists and eagerly supported a

particularly unsavory and murderous Afghan ex-
tremist warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who re-
fused at the time to travel to Washington and shake
the hand of our "infidel" president, Ronald Reagan.
(Today, Hekmatyar fights U.S. troops in Afgh-
anistan.) As it turned out, the "freedom fighters" fell
on each other's throats even as Kabul was being
taken, and then, within years, some of them turned
on their former American patrons with murderous
intent. No figure tells the story better, I think, than
this one: "In 1971 there had been only nine hundred
madrassas [Islamic schools] in all of Pakistan. By
the summer of 1988 there were about 8,000 official
religious schools and an estimated 25,000 unre-
gistered ones, many of them clustered along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by
wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
states."

The Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya were
indeed brutes and committed war crimes of almost
every imaginable sort. The language of the Americ-
an press, watching the invading army of a former
superpower turn the capital city of a small border
state into utter rubble, was appropriate indeed, giv-
en what was going on. In both Afghanistan and in
Iraq, on the other hand, where the American

government is actively involved, reporters gener-
ally—and yes, there are always exceptions— have fol-
lowed the government's lead with the termino-
logy— "freedom fighter" versus "terrorist"— falling
into place as befit the moment, even though many
of the acts being described remained the same.

The press is always seen as a weapon of war by of-
ficials, and so it has been seen by the Pentagon and
official Washington. Reporters and editors obvi-
ously feel that and the pressures that flow from it in
all sorts of complex ways. Whether consciously or
not, it's striking how such perceptions shade and
limit even individual stories, alter small language
choices, and the nature of what passes for evidence
as well as news.

The Imperial Unconscious

Sometimes, it's the everyday things, the ones that
fly below the radar, that matter.

Here is an excerpt from a news story about Sec-
retary of Defense Robert Gates's testimony on the
Afghan War before the Senate Armed Services Com-
mittee in January 2009: "U.S. goals in Afghanistan

must be 'modest, realistic,' and 'above all, there
must be an Afghan face on this war,' Gates said.
'The Afghan people must believe this is their war
and we are there to help them. If they think we are
there for our own purposes, then we will go the way
of every other foreign army that has been in
Afghanistan.'"

Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so
obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment.
And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of
it: "there must be an Afghan face on this war." U.S.
military and civilian officials used an equivalent
phrase in 2005 and 2006, when things were going
really wrong in Iraq. It was then common-
place—and no less unremarked upon— for them to
urgently suggest that an "Iraqi face" be put on
events there.

The phrase is revelatory— and oddly blunt. As an
image, there's really only one way to understand it
(not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what
does it mean to "put a face" on something that as-
sumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to
mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know
to be the actual "face" of the Afghan War— ours— a
foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite
correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see.

It's hardly surprising that the secretary of defense
would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington's
everyday arsenal of words and images when it
comes to geopolitics, power, and war. And yet, make
no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style.
It's the language (behind which lies a deeper struc-
ture of argument and thought) that is essential to
Washington's vision of itself as a planet-straddling
Goliath. It is part of the flotsam and jetsam that reg-
ularly bubbles up from the American imperial
unconscious.

Of course, words create realities even though such
language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes
unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it
helps normalize American practices in the world,
comfortably shielding us from certain global realit-
ies. It also has the potential to blind us to those real-
ities, which can be dangerous indeed. So let's con-
sider just a few entries in what might be thought of
as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.

War hidden in plain sight: There has recently
been much reporting on, and even some debate
about, the efficacy of the Obama administration's
decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile at-
tacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a
newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war,

calls "Af-Pak"— the Pashtun tribal borderlands of
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The pace of such attacks
has risen since Barack Obama entered the Oval Of-
fice, as have casualties from the missile strikes, as
well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.

Thanks to Senator Dianne Feinstein, we also
know that, despite strong official Pakistani govern-
ment protests, someone official in that country is
doing more than looking the other way while they
occur. As the senator revealed, at least some of the
CIA's unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the
skies over Af-Pak are evidently stationed at
Pakistani bases. We also learned that American spe-
cial operations units are now regularly making for-
ays inside Pakistan "primarily to gather intelli-
gence"; that a unit of seventy American Special
Forces advisers, a "secret task force, overseen by the
United States Central Command and Special Opera-
tions Command," is aiding and training Pakistani
Army and Frontier Corps paramilitary troops, again
inside Pakistan; and that, despite (or perhaps, in
part, because of) these American efforts, the influ-
ence of the Pakistani Taliban is actually expanding,
even as Pakistan threatens to melt down.

Mystifyingly enough, however, this Pakistani part
of the American war in Afghanistan is still referred

to in major U.S. papers as a "covert war." As news
about it pours out, who it's being hidden from is one
of those questions no one bothers to ask.

On February 20, 2009, Mark Mazzetti and David
E. Sanger of the New York Times typically wrote:
"With two missile strikes over the past week, the
Obama administration has expanded the covert war
run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside
Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to
topple the Pakistani government.... Under standard
policy for covert operations, the CIA. strikes inside
Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged
either by the Obama administration or the Bush
administration."

On February 25, 2009, Mazzetti and Helene
Cooper reported that new CIA head Leon Panetta
essentially bragged to reporters that "the agency's
campaign against militants in Pakistan's tribal areas
was the 'most effective weapon' the Obama admin-
istration had to combat Al Qaeda's top leadership.
... Mr. Panetta stopped short of directly acknow-
ledging the missile strikes, but he said that 'opera-
tional efforts' focusing on Qaeda leaders had been
successful." Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street
Journal reported the next day that Panetta said the
attacks are "probably the most effective weapon we

have to try to disrupt al Qaeda right now." She ad-
ded, "Mr. Obama and National Security Adviser
James Jones have strongly endorsed their use,
[Panetta] said."

"Covert" war? These "operational efforts" have
been front-page news in the Pakistani press for
months, they were part of the U.S. presidential cam-
paign debates, and they certainly can't be a secret
for the Pashtuns in those border areas who must see
drone aircraft overhead relatively regularly, or ex-
perience the missiles arriving in their
neighborhoods.

In the United States, "covert war" has long been a
term for wars that were openly discussed, debated,
and often lauded in this country, such as the U.S.-
backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Ni-
caragua in the 1980s. To a large extent, when as-
pects of these wars have actually been "covert"— that
is, purposely hidden from anyone— it has been from
the U.S. public, not the targets of our intervention.
Such language, however threadbare, may also offer
official Washington a kind of "plausible deniability"
when it comes to thinking about what kind of an
"American face" we present to the world.

Imperial naming practices: In our press, an-
onymous U.S. officials routinely point with pride to
the increasing "precision" and "accuracy" of drone
missile attacks in taking out Taliban or al-Qaeda fig-
ures without (supposedly) taking out the
tribespeople who live in the same villages or neigh-
boring compounds. Such pieces lend our air war an
almost sterile quality. They tend to emphasize the
extraordinary lengths to which planners go to avoid
"collateral damage." To many Americans, it must
then seem strange, even irrational, that perfectly
non-fundamentalist Pakistanis should be so out-
raged about attacks aimed at the world's worst
terrorists.

On the other hand, consider for a moment the
names of those drones now regularly in the skies
over "Pashtunistan." These are no less regularly
published in our press to no comment at all. The
most basic of the armed drones goes by the name of
Predator, a moniker that might as well have come
directly from those nightmarish sci-fi movies about
an alien that feasts on humans. Undoubtedly,
however, it was used in the way Colonel Michael
Steele of the 101st Airborne Division meant it when
he exhorted his brigade deploying to Iraq

(according to Thomas E. Ricks' book The Gamble)
to remember: "You're the predator."

The Predator drone is armed with two missiles.
The more advanced drone, originally called the
Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over Af-
Pak, has been dubbed the Reaper— as in the Grim
Reaper. Now, there's only one thing such a "hunter-
killer UAV" could be reaping, and you know just
what that is: lives. It can be armed with up to four-
teen missiles (or four missiles and two 500-pound
bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly wal-
lop. Those missiles are named as well. They're Hell-
fire missiles. So, if you want to consider the nature
of this covert war in terms of names alone: Predat-
ors and Reapers are bringing down the fire from
some satanic hell upon the peasants, fundamental-
ist guerrillas, and terrorists of the Af-Pak border
regions.

In Washington, when the Af-Pak war is discussed,
it's in the bloodless, bureaucratic language of "glob-
al counterinsurgency" or "irregular warfare," of
"soft power," "hard power," and "smart power." But
flying over the Pashtun wildlands is the blunt-edged
face of predation and death, ready at a moment's
notice to deliver hellfire to those below.

Imperial arguments: Faced with rising numbers
of civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO air strikes
in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged Afghan
public, American officials tend to place the blame
for most skyborne "collateral damage" squarely on
the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mul-
len bluntly explained, "[T]he enemy hides behind
civilians." Hence, so this Empire-speak argument
goes, dead civilians are actually the Taliban's doing.

U.S. military and civilian spokespeople have long
accused Taliban guerrillas of using civilians as
"shields," or even of purposely luring devastating air
strikes down on Afghan wedding parties to create
civilian casualties and inflame the sensibilities of
rural Afghans. This commonplace argument has two
key features: a claim that they made us do it (kill ci-
vilians) and the implication that the Taliban fighters
"hiding" among innocent villagers or wedding revel-
ers are so many cowards, willing to put their fellow
Pashtuns at risk rather than come out and fight like
men— and, of course, given the firepower arrayed
against them, die.

The U.S. media regularly records this argument
without reflecting on it. In this country, in fact, the
evil of combatants "hiding" among civilians seems
so self-evident, especially given the larger evil of the

Taliban and al-Qaeda, that no one thinks twice
about it. And yet like so much of Empire-speak, this
argument is distinctly unidirectional. What's good
for the guerrilla goose, so to speak, is inapplicable to
the imperial gander. To illustrate, consider the
American "pilots" flying those unmanned Predators
and Reapers. We don't know exactly where all of
them are (other than not in the drones), but some
are certainly at Nellis Air Force Base just outside
Las Vegas.

In other words, were the Taliban guerrillas to
leave the protection of those civilians and come out
into the open, there would be no enemy to fight in
the usual sense, not even a predatory one. The pilot
firing that Hellfire missile into some Pakistani bor-
der village or compound is, after all, using the
UAV's cameras, including by next year a new system
hairraisingly dubbed "Gorgon Stare," to locate his
target and then, via console, as in a single-shooter
video game, firing the missile, possibly from many
thousands of miles away.

And yet nowhere in our world will you find any-
one making the argument that those pilots are in
"hiding" like so many cowards. Such a thought
seems absurd to us, as it would if it were applied to
the F-18 pilots taking off from aircraft carriers near

the Afghan coast or the B-i pilots flying out of un-
named Middle Eastern bases or the Indian Ocean
island base of Diego Garcia. And yet, whatever those
pilots may do in Afghan skies, unless they experi-
ence a mechanical malfunction, they are in no more
danger than if they, too, were somewhere outside
Las Vegas. In the last seven years, some helicopters,
but no planes, have gone down in Afghanistan.

When the Afghan mujahedeen fought the Soviets
in the 1980s, the CIA supplied them with handheld
Stinger missiles, and they did indeed start knocking
Soviet helicopters and planes out of the skies (which
proved the beginning of the end for the Russians).
The Afghan or Pakistani Taliban or al-Qaeda terror-
ists have no such capability today, which means, if
you think about it, that what we here imagine as an
"air war" involves none of the dangers we would
normally associate with war. Looked at in another
light, those missile strikes and bombings are really
one-way acts of slaughter.

The Taliban's tactics are, of course, the essence of
guerrilla warfare, which always involves an asym-
metrical battle against more powerful armies and
weaponry, and which, if successful, always depends
on the ability of the guerrilla to blend into the envir-
onment, natural and human, or, as Chinese

Communist leader Mao Zedong so famously put it,
to "swim" in the "sea of the people." If you imagine
your enemy simply using the villagers of Afgh-
anistan as "shields" or "hiding" like so many cow-
ards among them, you are speaking the language of
imperial power but also blinding yourself (or the
American public) to the actual realities of the war
you're fighting.

Imperial thought: To justify those missile attacks
in Pakistan, U.S. officials have been leaking details
on the program's "successes" to reporters. Anonym-
ous officials have offered the "possibly wishful es-
timate" that the CIA "covert war" has led to the
deaths (or capture) of eleven of al-Qaeda's top
twenty commanders, including, according to a Wall
Street Journal report, "Abu Layth al-Libi, whom
U.S. officials described as 'a rising star' in the
group." "Rising star" is such an American phrase,
melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with
the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem
with Empire-speak, and imperial thought more gen-
erally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from
imagining a world not in their own image. So it's
not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they
regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped

version of themselves— hierarchical, overly reliant
on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, U.S. officials spent a remark-
able amount of effort sending troops to search for,
and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cam-
bodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the
so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the
supposed nerve center of the communist enemy,
aka "the bamboo Pentagon." Of course, it wasn't
there to be found. It only existed in Washington's
imperial imagination. In the Af-Pak "theater," we
may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Underpin-
ning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that
the key to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the
Taliban) is destroying its leadership one by one. As
key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the mis-
sile attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda
and Pakistani Taliban figures, as well as whoever
was in their vicinity, are distinctly counterproduct-
ive. The deaths of those figures in no way com-
pensate for the outrage, the destabilization, the rad-
icalization that the attacks engender in the region.
They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening
each of those movements.

What is hard for Washington to grasp is this: "De-
capitation," to use another American imperial term,

is not a particularly effective strategy with a decent-
ralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a
headless guerrilla movement is nowhere near as
brainless or helpless as a headless Washington
would be.

Imperial dreams and nightmares: Americans
have rarely liked to think of themselves as
"imperial," so what is it about Rome in these last
years? First, the neocons, in the flush of seeming
victory in 2002 and 2003, began to imagine the Un-
ited States as a "new Rome" (or new British Em-
pire). As Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as
February 2001 in Time, "America is no mere inter-
national citizen. It is the dominant power in the
world, more dominant than any since Rome."

All roads on this planet, they were then con-
vinced, led ineluctably to Washington. Now, of
course, they visibly don't, and the imperial bragging
about surpassing the Roman or British empires has
long since faded away. When it comes to the Afghan
War, in fact, those (resupply) "roads" seem to lead,
embarrassingly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyz-
stan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Iran. But the compar-
ison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the
brain.

When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike
Mullen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post,
drumming up support for the revised, age-of-
Obama mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn't help
starting off with an inspiring tale about the Romans
and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that they
conquered. As he told it, the ruler the Romans in-
stalled in Locri, a rapacious fellow named Plemini-
us, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen as-
sured us, the Locrians so believed in "the reputation
for equanimity and fairness that Rome had built"
that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate,
knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded
restitution. And indeed, the tyrant was removed.
Admittedly, this may seem like a far-fetched ana-
logy for the United States in Afghanistan (and don't
for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with
Afghan president Hamid Karzai, even though the
Obama-ites have come to consider him corrupt and
replaceable). Still, as Mullen saw it, the point was:
"We don't always get it right. But like the early Ro-
mans, we strive in the end to make it right. We
strive to earn trust. And that makes all the differ-
ence." Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the joint
chiefs of staff and, in his somewhat overheated
brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just)

"early" Romans— before, of course, the fatal rot set
in.

And then there's the Washington Post's Thomas
Ricks. Reflecting on Iraq, where he believes we
could still be fighting in 2015, Ricks writes:

In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest
book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman
Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone
wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill
and studied the two triumphal arches at
either end of the Forum, both commemorat-
ing Roman wars in the Middle East....

...The structures brought home a sad real-
ization: It's simply unrealistic to believe that
the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the
Middle East.

It was a week when U.S. forces had en-
gaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan
and Pakistan— a string of countries stretching
from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian
Ocean— following in the footsteps of Alexan-
der the Great, the Romans and the British.

With the waning of British power, Ricks contin-
ued, it "has been the United States' turn to take the

lead there." And our turn, as it happens, just isn't
over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from
our imperial capital and from our military viceroys
out on the peripheries.

Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys.
They seem to channel the imperial unconscious.
Take CentCom commander General David Petraeus.
For him, too, the duties and dangers of empire evid-
ently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of
key figures, civilian and military, he has begun to is-
sue warnings about Afghanistan's dangers. As the
Washington Post reported, "[Petraeus] suggested
that the odds of success were low, given that foreign
military powers have historically met with defeat in
Afghanistan. 'Afghanistan has been known over the
years as the graveyard of empires,' he said. 'We can-
not take that history lightly.'"

Of course, he's worrying about the graveyard as-
pect of this, but what I find curious— exactly be-
cause no one thinks it odd enough to comment on
here— is the functional admission in the use of this
old adage about Afghanistan that we fall into the
category of empires, whether or not in search of a
graveyard in which to die. And he's not alone in
this. Secretary of Defense Gates put the matter sim-
ilarly, according to Bloomberg News: "Without the

support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the U.S.
would simply 'go the way of every other foreign
army that's ever been in Afghanistan.'"

Imperial blindness: Think of the above as just a
few prospective entries in The Dictionary of Amer-
ican Empire-Speak that will, of course, never be
compiled. We're so used to such language, so inured
to it and to the thinking behind it, so used, in fact,
to living on a one-way planet in which all roads lead
to and from Washington, that it doesn't seem like a
language at all. It's just part of the unexamined
warp and woof of everyday life in a country that still
believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly
fight wars halfway across the globe, and produce
military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the
way a do-it-yourself furniture maker would produce
instructions for constructing a cabinet from a kit.
We don't find it strange to have seventeen intelli-
gence agencies, some devoted to listening in on, and
spying on, the planet, or capable of running "covert
wars" in tribal borderlands thousands of miles dis-
tant, or of flying unmanned drones over those same
borderlands destroying those who come into cam-
era view. We're inured to the bizarreness of it all
and of the language and pretensions that go with it.

If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak
were ever produced, who here would buy it? Who
would feel the need to check out what seems like the
only reasonable and self-evident language for de-
scribing the world? How else, after all, would we op-
erate? How else would any American in a position
of authority talk in Washington or Baghdad or
Islamabad or Rome?

So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too.
And we know what finally happened to their empire
and the language that went with it. Such a language
plays its role in normalizing the running of an em-
pire. It allows officials (and in our case the media as
well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the
smooth functioning of such an enormous undertak-
ing. In the good times, its uses are obvious. On the
other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease
to function well, that same language can suddenly
blind the imperial custodians— which is, after all,
what the foreign policy "team" of the Obama era
is— to necessary realities. At a moment when it
might be important to grasp what the "American
face" in the mirror actually looks like, they can't see
it, and sometimes what you can't bring yourself to
see can hurt you.

Fixing What's Wrong in
Washington... in Afghanistan

Explain something to me.

In the first months of 2010, unless you were in-
sensate, you couldn't help running across someone
talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about
how busted government is in the United States.
State governments are increasingly broke and get-
ting broker. The federal government, while running
up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares,
"paralyzed" and so incapable of acting intelligently
on just about anything.

No less a personage than Vice President Biden as-
sured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, "Wash-
ington, right now, is broken." Indiana senator Evan
Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he an-
nounced that he would not run for reelection and, in
response to his decision, Washington Post media
critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, "The sys-
tem has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two
decades, and everybody knows it." Voters seem to
agree. Two words, "polarization" and "gridlock"— or
hyperbolic cousins like "paralyzing hyperpartisan-
ship"— dominated the news when the media

described that dysfunctionalism. Foreign observers
were similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like
the one in the British magazine the Economist
headlined, "America's Democracy, a Study in
Paralysis."

Washington's incapacity to govern now evidently
seems to ever more Americans at the root of many
looming problems. As the New York Times summed
up one of them in a recent headline: "Party Gridlock
in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis." When
President Obama leaves the confines of Washington
for the campaign trail, he promptly attacks congres-
sional "gridlock" and the "slash and burn politics"
that have left the nation's capital tied in knots.

The Republicans, who ran us into this ditch in the
Bush years, are now perfectly happy to be the party
of "no"— and polls seem to indicate that it may be a
fruitful strategy for the 2010 election. Meanwhile,
special interests rule Washington and lobbying is
king. As if to catch the spirit of this new reality, the
president recently offered his vote of support to the
sort of Wall Street CEOs who took Americans to the
cleaners in the great economic meltdown of 2008
and are once again raking in the millions, while few
have faith that change or improvement of any kind
is in our future. Good governance, in other words,

no longer seems part of the American tool kit and
way of life.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, to the
tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, the U.S. military
is promoting "good governance" with all its might.
In a major campaign in the modest-sized city of
Marja (a place next to no one had heard of) in
Taliban-controlled Helmand Province, Afghanistan,
it placed a bet on its ability to "restore the credibil-
ity" of President Hamid Karzai's government. In the
process, it announced plans to unfurl a functioning
city administration where none existed. According
to its commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, as
soon as the U.S. Army and the marines, along with
British troops and Afghan forces, drove the Taliban
out of town, he was prepared to roll out an Afghan
"government in a box," including police, courts, and
local s

The U.S. military was intent, according to the
Wall Street Journal, on "delivering a new adminis-
tration and millions of dollars in aid to a place
where government employees didn't dare set foot a
week ago." Slated to be the future "mayor" of Marja,
Haji Zahir, a businessman who spent fifteen years
in Germany, was, according to press reports, living
on a U.S. Marine base in the province until, one day

soon, the American military could install him in an
"abandoned government building" or simple "a
clump of ruins" in that city.

He was, we were told, to arrive with four U.S. ci-
vilian advisers, two from the State Department and
two from the U.S. Agency for International Develop-
ment, described (in the typically patronizing lan-
guage of American press reports) as his "mentors."
They were to help him govern, and especially dole
out the millions of dollars that the U.S. military has
available to "reconstruct" Marja. Road-building pro-
jects were to be launched, schools refurbished, and
a new clinic built, all to win Pashtun "hearts and
minds." As soon as the fighting abated, White
House press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested, the
post-military emphasis would be on "economic de-
velopment," with an influx of "military and civilian
workers" who would "show a better way of life" to
the town's inhabitants.

So explain something to me: Why does the milit-
ary of a country convinced it's becoming ungovern-
able think itself so capable of making another un-
governable country governable? What's the milit-
ary's skill set here? What lore, what body of political
knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think
they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the

Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should
Americans be considered the globe's leading experts
in good government anymore? And while we're at it,
fill me in on one other thing: Just what has con-
vinced American officials in Afghanistan and the
nation's capital that they have the special ability to
teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to em-
bark on good governance in their country if we can't
do it in Washington or Sacramento?

Explain something else to me: Why are our milit-
ary and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine
years of occupying the world's leading narco-state,
nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and milit-
ary failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula,
to solve the Afghan mess? Why do leading officials
suddenly believe they can make Afghan president
Hamid Karzai into "a Winston Churchill who can
rally his people," as one unnamed official told Mat-
thew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street
Journal— and all of this only months after Karzai,
returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential
election, overseeing a government riddled with cor-
ruption and drug money, and honeycombed with
warlords sporting derelict reputations, was con-
sidered a discredited figure in Washington? And
why do they think they can turn a man known

mockingly as the "mayor" or "president" of Kabul
(because his government has so little influence out-
side the capital) into a political force in southern
Afghanistan?

And someone tell me: Just who picked the name
Operation Moshtarak for the campaign in Marja?
Why am I not convinced that it was an Afghan?
Though news accounts say that the word means "to-
getherness" in Dari, why do I think that a better
translation might be "crushing embrace"? What
could "togetherness" really mean when, according
to the Wall Street Journal, to make the final de-
cision to launch the operation, already long an-
nounced, General McChrystal "stepped into his ar-
mored car for the short drive.. .to the presidential
palace," and reportedly roused President Karzai
from a nap for "a novel moment." Karzai agreed, of
course, supposedly adding, "No one has ever asked
me to decide before."

This is a black comedy of "governance." So is the
fact that, from the highest administration officials
and military men to those in the field, everyone
speaks, evidently without the slightest self-con-
sciousness, about putting an "Afghan face" on the
(American) Marja campaign. National Security Ad-
viser James Jones, for instance, spoke of the

campaign having '"a much bigger Afghan face,' with
two Afghans for every one U.S. soldier involved."
And this way of thinking is so common that news
reports regularly used the phrase, as in a recent As-
sociated Press story: "Military officials say they are
learning from past mistakes. The offensive is de-
signed with an Afghan face.'"

And here's something else I'd like explained to
me: Why does the U.S. press, at present so fierce
about the lack of both "togetherness" and decent
governance in Washington, report this sort of thing
without comment, even though it reflects the deep-
est American contempt for putative "allies"? Why,
for instance, can those same Wall Street Journal re-
porters write without blinking: "Western officials
also are bringing Afghan cabinet members into
strategy discussions, allowing them to select the of-
ficials who will run Marjah once it is cleared of
Taliban, and pushing them before the cameras to
emphasize the participation of Afghan troops in the
offensive"? Allow? Push? Is this what we mean by
"togetherness"?

Try to imagine all this in reverse— an Afghan gen-
eral motoring over to the White House to wake up
the president and ask whether an operation, already

announced and ready to roll, can leave the starting
gate? But why go on?

Just explain this to me: Why are the representat-
ives of Washington, civilian and military, always so
tone deaf when it comes to other peoples and other
cultures? Why is it so hard for them to imagine
what it might be like to be in someone else's shoes
(or boots or sandals)? Why do they always arrive
not just convinced that they have identified the
right problems and are asking the right questions,
but that they, and only they, have the right answers,
when at home they seem to have none at all?

Thinking about this, I wonder what kind of "face"
should be put on global governance in Washington?

FIVE

The Bush Legacy: What They Did
(Wrong)

Ponzi Scheme Presidency

From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the
palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian
Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled
with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game
maker and often depicting— in almost comic-strip
style— various bloody royal victories and conquests.
At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lop-
ping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling
them into pyramids for an early version of what, in
the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s,
Americans came to know as the "body count." So I
learned by wandering through a traveling exhibit of
ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On
the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert
pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an im-
pressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted

those heads and recorded the numbers for the
greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries,
Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed
hands for victorious pharaohs).

Give credit to art museums. Is there anything
stranger than wandering through one and locking
eyes with a Rembrandt burgher staring out at you
across the centuries? What a reminder of the com-
mon humanity we share with the distant past. In a
darker sense, it's no less a reminder of our kinship
across time to spot a little pyramid of heads 117 on a
frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count,
and— eerily enough— feel at home. What a measure
of just how few miles "the march of civilization" (as
my parents' generation once called it) has actually
covered.

Prejudiced Toward War

If you need an epitaph for the Bush administra-
tion, here's one to test out: They tried. They really
tried. But they couldn't help it. They just had to
count.

In a sense, George W. Bush did the Assyrians
proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced

torture chambers, his officially approved kidnap-
pings, the murders committed by his interrogators,
the massacres committed by his troops and mercen-
aries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered
from the air, it's easy enough to imagine what those
Assyrian scribes would have counted. True, his
White House didn't have friezes of his victories (one
problem being that there were none to glorify). All it
had was Saddam Hussein's captured pistol proudly
stored in a small study off the Oval Office.

Almost three thousand years later, however,
Bush's "scribes," still traveling with the imperial
forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled
ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani bor-
derlands, and elsewhere. Many of those body counts
were duly made public. This record of American
"success" was visible to anyone who visited the
Pentagon's website and viewed its upbeat news art-
icles complete with enumerations of "Taliban fight-
ers" (or, in Iraq, "terrorists"), the air force's news
feed listing the number of sorties against "anti-
Afghan forces," or the U.S. Central Command's stor-
ies of killing "Taliban militants."

On the other hand, history, as we know, doesn't
repeat itself and— unlike the Assyrians— the Bush
administration would have preferred not to count,

or at least not to make its body counts public. One
of its small but tellingly unsuccessful struggles, a
sign of the depth of its failure on its own terms, was
to avoid the release of those counts. This aversion to
the body count made some sense. After all, since the
1950s, body counting for the U.S. military has in-
variably signaled not impending victory, but dis-
aster, and even defeat.

One of the strangest things about the American
empire has been this: Between 1945 and George W.
Bush's second term, the U.S. economy, American
corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable
sway over much of the rest of the world. New York
City has been the planet's financial capital and
Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the
height of the cold war, always came in a provincial
second.) In the same period, the U.S. military effect-
ively garrisoned much of the globe from the Horn of
Africa to Greenland, from South Korea to Qatar,
while its navy controlled the seven seas, its air force
dominated the global skies, its nuclear command
stood ready to unleash the powers of planetary
death, and its space command watched the heavens.
In the wake of the cold war, its various military
commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush
administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in

2007) divided the greater part of the planet into
what were essentially military satrapies. And yet,
the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win
the wars that mattered.

Because the neocons of the Bush administration
brushed aside this counterintuitive fact, they be-
lieved themselves faced with an unparalleled oppor-
tunity triggered by the attacks of 9/11. With the
highest-tech military on the planet, funded at levels
no other set of nations could cumulatively match,
the United States, they were convinced, was
uniquely situated to give the phrase "sole super-
power" historically unprecedented meaning. Even
the Assyrians at their height, the Romans in their
Pax Romana centuries, the British in the endless
decades when the sun could never set on their em-
pire, would prove amateurs by comparison.

In this sense, President Bush, Vice President Dick
Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Na-
tional Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the
various neocons in the administration were funda-
mentalist idolaters— and what they worshipped was
the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were
believers in a church whose main tenet was the ef-
ficacy of force above all else. Though few of them
had the slightest military experience, they gave real

meaning to the word "bellicose." They were preju-
diced toward war. With awesome military power at
their command, they were convinced that they
could go it alone as the dominating force on the
planet. As with true believers everywhere, they had
only contempt for those they couldn't convert to
their worldview. That contempt made "unilateral-
ism" their strategy of choice, and a global Pax Amer-
icana their goal (along with, of course, a Pax Repub-
licanaathome).

The Return of the Body Count

It was in this context that they were not about to
count the enemy dead. In their wars, as these
fervent, inside-the-Beltway Utopians saw it, there
would be no need to do so. With the "shock and
awe" forces at their command, they would refocus
American attention on the real metric of victory, the
taking of territory and of enemy capitals. At the
same time, they were preparing to disarm the only
enemy that truly scared them, the American people,
by making none of the mistakes of the Vietnam era,
including— as the president later admitted— count-
ing bodies.

Of course, both the Pax Americana and the Pax
Republicana would prove will-o'-the-wisps. As it
turned out, the Bush administration, blind to the
actual world it faced, disastrously miscalculated the
nature of American power— especially military
power— and what it was capable of doing. And yet,
had they taken a clear-eyed look at what U.S. milit-
ary power actually achieved in action since 1945,
they might have been sobered. In the major wars
(and even some minor actions) the military fought
in those decades, it had been massively destructive
but never victorious, nor even particularly success-
ful. In many ways, in the classic phrase of Chinese
Communist leader Mao Zedong, it had been a "pa-
per tiger."

Yes, it had "won" largely meaningless victor-
ies—in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the
tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against
the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel
Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Opera-
tion Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against
Saddam Hussein's helpless military in 1990 (in a
war that settled nothing); in NATO's Operation
Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially
defenseless Serbian military in 1995. On the other
hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam,

Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early
1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically,
and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster,
and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least,
should not have been able to stand up to American
power, while also, in more minor operations, run-
ning afoul of Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993.

It was in the context of defeat and then frustra-
tion in Korea that the counting of enemy bodies
began. Once Chinese Communist armies had
entered that war in massive numbers in late 1950,
and inflicted a terrible series of defeats on American
forces without being able to sweep them off the pen-
insula, that conflict settled into a "meat grinder" of
a stalemate in which the hope of taking significant
territory faded. Yet some measure of success was
needed as public frustration mounted in the United
States. In this way began the infamous body count
of enemy dead.

The body count reappeared quite early in the Vi-
etnam War, again as a shorthand way of measuring
success in a conflict in which the taking of territory
was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile
place, the enemy hard to distinguish from the gen-
eral population, and our own in-country allies weak
and largely unable to strengthen themselves. Those

tallies of dead bodies, announced daily by military
spokesmen to increasingly dubious reporters in Sai-
gon, were the public face of American "success" in
the Vietnam era. Each body was to be further evid-
ence of what General William Westmoreland called
"the light at the end of the tunnel." When those
dead bodies and any sense of success began to part
ways, however, when, in the terminology of the
times, a "credibility gap" opened between the met-
rics of victory and reality, the body count morphed
into a symbol of barbarism as well as of defeat,
helping to stoke an antiwar movement.

This was why, in choosing to take on Saddam
Hussein's shattered military in 2003— the adminis-
tration expected a "cakewalk" campaign that would
"shock and awe" enemies throughout the Middle
East— they officially chose not to release any counts
of enemy dead. General Tommy Franks, command-
er of the administration's Afghan operation in 2001
and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, put the party line
succinctly: "We don't do body counts." As the pres-
ident finally admitted in some frustration to a group
of conservative columnists in October 2006, his ad-
ministration had "made a conscious effort not to be
a body-count team." Not intending to repeat the
1960s experience, he and his advisers had planned

out an opposites war on the home front (anything
done in Vietnam would not be done this time
around), and that meant not offering official counts
of the dead that might stoke an antiwar move-
ment—until, that is, frustration truly set in, as in
Korea and Vietnam.

When the taking of Baghdad in April 2003 proved
no more a cap-stone on American victory than the
taking of Kabul in November 2001, when everything
began to go disastrously wrong and the carefully
enumerated count of the U.S. military dead in Iraq
rose precipitously, when "victory" (a word that the
president still invoked fifteen times in a single
speech in November 2005) adamantly refused to
make an appearance, the moment for the body
count had arrived. Despite all the planning, they
just couldn't stop themselves. A frustrated President
Bush expressed it this way: "We don't get to say
that— a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever
the number was. It's happening. You just don't
know it."

Soon enough the Pentagon was regularly releas-
ing such figures in reports on its operations, and, in
December 2006, the president, too, first slipped
such a tally into a press briefing: "Our commanders
report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive

operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against ter-
rorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have
yielded positive results. In the months of October,
November, and the first week of December, we have
killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy."

It wasn't, of course, that no one had been count-
ing. The president, as we know from Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward, kept "his own person-
al scorecard for the [global] war [on terror]"— pho-
tographs with "brief biographies and personality
sketches" of the "Most Wanted Terrorists" ready to
be crossed off when U.S. forces took them out. The
military had been counting bodies as well, but as the
possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel
houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and
the president finally gave in. While this did not
stoke an antiwar movement, it did represent a kind
of surrender. It was as close as an administration
that never owned up to error could come to admit-
ting that two more disastrous wars had been added
to a string of military failures in the truncated
American Century.

That implicit admission, however, took years to
arrive, and, in the meantime, Iraqis and
Afghans— civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police,

and military men— were dying in prodigious
numbers.

The Charnel House of History

As it happened, others were also counting.
Among the earliest of them, Iraq Body Count care-
fully added up Iraqi civilian deaths as documented
in reputable media outlets. (Their estimate has over
the years reached about 100,000— and, circum-
scribed by those words "documented" and "civilian,"
doesn't begin to get at the full scope of Iraqi deaths.)
Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took
up the task, using sophisticated sampling tech-
niques, including door-to-door interviews under ex-
ceedingly dangerous conditions, to arrive at reason-
able approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have
come up with figures ranging from the low hun-
dreds of thousands to a million or more in a country
with a prewar population of perhaps twenty-six mil-
lion. UN representatives have similarly attempted,
under difficult circumstances, to keep a count of
Iraqis fleeing into exile— exile being, after a fashion,
a form of living death— and have estimated that
more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while

another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, were
"internally displaced."

Similar attempts have been made for Afgh-
anistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance,
done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes
in that country. But, of course, the real body count
in either country will never be known. One thing is
certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present
moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a
state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a
whole host of potential conflicts, should routinely
be portrayed as a success, thanks to the Bush ad-
ministration's "surge" policy in 2007-08. Only a
country— or a punditry or a military— incapable of
facing the depths of destruction let loose could
reach such a conclusion.

If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush
administration have led to destruction, and remark-
ably regularly to piles of dead or tortured bodies,
counted or not. In fact, it's reasonable to say that
every Bush administration foreign policy dream, in-
cluding its first-term fantasy about a pacified
"Greater Middle East" and its late second-term vis-
ion of a facilitated "peace process" between the Is-
raelis and Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies
and in failure. The Bush administration's Global

War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afgh-
anistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a giant Ponzi
scheme. At a cost of one trillion taxpayer dollars
(but sure to be in the multitrillions when all is said
and done), Bush's mad "global war" simply sucked
needed money out of our world at levels that made
Bernie Madoff seem like a street-corner hustler.
Madoff, by his own accounting, squandered perhaps
$50 billion of other people's money. The Bush ad-
ministration took a trillion dollars of ours and
handed it out to its crony corporate buddies and to
the Pentagon as down payments on disaster. The
laid off, the pensionless, the foreclosed, the sui-
cides—imagine what that trillion dollars might have
meant to them. And the price tag continues to soar.

Bernie Madoff ended up behind bars, but Bush
administration officials will face no such accountab-
ility. Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated,
abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless
drains; eight years of massive destruction to places
from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of sig-
nificance was ever rebuilt. All this was brought to us
by a president who said the following in his first in-
augural address: "I will live and lead by these prin-
ciples: to advance my convictions with civility... to
call for responsibility and try to live it as well."

Bush ruled, we know, by quite a different code.
Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a
Caesar— of destruction.

Vera, vidi, vastavi...! came, I saw, I devastated.

With Us or Against Us?

On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack ad-
dress to the nation, George W. Bush was already us-
ing the phrase "the war on terror." On September
13, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz an-
nounced that the administration was planning to do
a lot more than just take out those who had attacked
the United States. It was going to go about "remov-
ing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems,
ending states who sponsor terrorism." We were,
Bush said that day, in a state of "war." In fact, we
were already in "the first war of the twenty-first cen-
tury." As R. W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times re-
ported, "[T]he Bush administration today gave the
nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us
against terrorism.. .or face the certain prospect of
death and destruction." Stand with us against ter-
rorism—or else. That would be the measure by

which everything was assessed in the years to come.
That very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell sug-
gested that the United States would "rip [the bin
Laden] network up" and "when we're through with
that network, we will continue with a global assault
on terrorism."

A global assault on terrorism. How quickly the
president's Global War on Terror was on the scene.
And no nation was immune. On September 14, the
news was leaked that "a senior State Department of-
ficial" had met with "15 Arab representatives" and
delivered a stiff "with us or against us" message:
Join "an international coalition against terrorism"
or pay the price. There would be no safe havens. The
choice— as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armit-
age would reportedly inform Pakistan's intelligence
director after the 9/11 attacks— was simple: Join the
fight against al-Qaeda or "be prepared to be
bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age."

From that day to this, the Global War on Terror
would be the organizing principle for the Bush ad-
ministration as it shook off "the constraints," loosed
the CIA, and sent the U.S. military into action— as it
went, in short, for the Stone Age jugular. The phrase
"Global War on Terror," while never quite catching
on with the public, would become so familiar in the

corridors of Washington that it would soon morph
into one of the least elegant acronyms around
(GWOT), sometimes known among neocons as
"World War IV"— they considered the cold war as
World War III— or by military men and administra-
tion officials, after Iraq devolved from fantasy
blitzkrieg into disaster, as "the Long War."

In the administration's eyes, the GWOT was to be
the key to the magic kingdom, the lever with which
the planet could be pried open for American domin-
ion. It gave us an interest everywhere. After all, as
Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke would say in
January 2002, "The estimates are anywhere from
50 or 60 to 70 countries that have al Qaeda cells in
them. The scope extends far beyond Afghanistan."
Administration officials, in other words, were
already talking about a significant portion of exist-
ing states as potential targets. This was not surpris-
ing, since the GWOT was meant to create planetary
free-fire zones. These al-Qaeda targets or breeding
grounds, after all, had to be emptied. We were, as
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top
officials were saying almost immediately after 9/11,
going to "drain" the global "swamp" of terrorists.
And any countries that got in the way had better
watch out.

With us or against us, that was the sum of it, and
terror was its measure. If any connection could be
made— even, as in the case of Saddam Hussein and
al-Qaeda, a thoroughly bogus one— it immediately
offered a compelling home-front explanation for
possible intervention. The safely and security of
Americans was, after all, at stake in every single
place where those terrorist mosquitoes might be
breeding. If you had the oil lands of the planet on
your mind (as was true with Dick Cheney's infam-
ous Energy Task Force), then the threat of terror-
ism, especially nuclear terrorism, was a safe bet. If
you wanted to fortify your position in new oil lands,
then the ticket was to have the Pentagon move in, as
in Africa, to help weak, possibly even failing, states
prepare themselves against the forces of terror.

At home, too, you were for us or against us. Those
few who opposed the Patriot Act, for instance, were
obviously not patriots. The minority who claimed
that you couldn't be at "war" with "terror," that
what was needed in response to 9/11 was firm,
ramped-up police action were simply laughed out of
the room. In the kindliest light, they were wusses; in
the worst light, essentially traitors. They lacked not
only American redbloodedness, but a willingness to
be bloody-minded. End of story.

In the wake of those endlessly replayed,
apocalyptic-looking scenes of huge towers crum-
bling and near-mushroom-clouds of ash billowing
upwards, a chill of end-time fear swept through the
nation. War, whatever name you gave it, was
quickly accepted as the obvious, commensurate an-
swer. In a nation in the grips of the politics of fear, it
seemed reasonable enough that a restoration of "se-
curity"— American security— should be the be-all
and end-all globally. Everything, then, was to be cal-
ibrated against the successes of the GWOT.

From Seattle to Tampa, Toledo to Dallas, fear of
terrorism became a ruling passion, as well as a pure
moneymaker for the mini homeland-industrial
complex that grew up around the new Department
of Homeland Security. A thriving industry of private
security firms, surveillance outfits, and terror con-
sultants proliferated. With their help, the United
States would be locked down in an unprecedented
way— and to do that, we would also have to lock
down the planet by any means necessary. We would
fight "them" everywhere else, as the president
would say again and again, so as not to fight them
here.

A Nation of Cowards?

Most of the things that needed to be done to make
us safer after 9/11 undoubtedly could have been
done without much fuss, without a new, more bur-
eaucratic, less efficient Department of Homeland
Security, without a new, larger U.S. "intelligence
community," without pumping ever more money in-
to the Pentagon, and certainly without invading and
occupying Iraq. Most societies that have dealt with
terror, often far worse campaigns than what we
have experienced, despite 9/11, have faced the
dangers involved without becoming obsessive over
their safety and security, without locking down their
countries, and then attempting to do the same with
the planet, as the Bush administration did. In the
process, we may have turned ourselves into the
functional equivalent of a nation of cowards, ready
to sacrifice so much of value on the altar of the god
of "security."

Think of it: Nineteen fanatics with hijacked
planes, backed and funded by a relatively small
movement based in one of the most impoverished
places on the planet, did all this. Or, put more ac-
curately, faced with the look of the apocalypse and
the dominating urges of the Bush administration,

we did what al-Qaeda's crew never could have done.
Blinding ourselves via the GWOT, we released
American hubris and fear upon the world, in the
process making almost every situation we touched
progressively worse for this country.

The fact is that those who run empires can some-
times turn the right levers in societies far away. His-
torically, they have sometimes been quite capable of
seeing the world and actual power relations as they
are, clearly enough to conquer, occupy, and pacify
other lands. Sometimes, they were quite capable of
dividing and ruling local peoples for long periods, or
hiring native troops to do their dirty work. But
here's the dirty miracle of the Bush administration:
thinking GWOT all the way, its every move seemed
to do more damage than the last, not just to the
world, but to the fabric of the country they claimed
they were protecting.

Opinion polls indicate that terrorism is no longer
at the top of the American agenda of worries. Non-
etheless, don't for a second think that the subject
isn't lodged deep in national consciousness. When
asked "How worried are you that you or someone in
your family will become a victim of terrorism," a
striking 39 percent of Americans were either "very
worried" or "somewhat worried," and another 33

percent registered as "not too worried," according to
the pollsters of CNN/Opinion Research
Corporation.

The obsession with terrorism has also been built
into our institutions, from Guantanamo to the De-
partment of Homeland Security. It's had the time to
sink its roots into fertile soil. It now has its own in-
dustries, lobbying groups, profit centers. Unbuild-
ing it will be a formidable task indeed. It is a Bush
legacy that no president is likely to reverse soon, if
at all.

Ask yourself honestly: Can you imagine a future
America without a Department of Homeland Secur-
ity? Can you imagine a new administration ending
the global lockdown that has become synonymous
with Americanism?

Yet here's the irony. Essential power relations in
the world turn out to have next to nothing to do
with the War on Terror (which may someday be
seen as the last great ideological gasp of American
globalism). In this sense, terrorism, no matter how
frightening, is an ephemeral phenomenon. The fact
is, non-state groups wielding terror as their weapon
of choice can cause terrible pain, harm, and local-
ized mayhem, but they simply don't take down

societies like ours. To think that possible is to mis-
understand power on this planet. In that sense, the
Global War on Terror's greatest achievement— for
American rulers and ruled alike— may simply have
been to block out the world as it was, to block out,
that is, reality.

Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is
Not a National Emergency

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into
context, and then tell me you're not ready to get on
the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward
Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, ac-
cording to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017
fatal vehicle crashes in the United States and, so the
U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by
fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine
flu between April and mid-December 2009, accord-
ing to the Centers for Disease Control and Preven-
tion; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans
die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports
the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die

annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated
1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007;
and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-
related conditions, according to the National
Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67
from riptides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from light-
ning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a
crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, des-
pite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009,
planes certainly went down and people died. In
June, for instance, a French flight on its way from
Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather
over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connec-
tion Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight,
crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that
February, killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S.
commercial flight since August 2006. And in Janu-
ary 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a
flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New
York's Hudson River when disaster might have en-
sued. In none of these years did an airplane go
down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007
two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with
propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow Interna-
tional Airport. (No one was killed.)

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253,
carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his
bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christ-
mas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of
whom survived. Had the inept Abdulmutallab actu-
ally succeeded, the death toll would not have
equaled the 324 traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008;
while the destruction of four Flight 253s from ter-
rorism would not have equaled New York State's
2008 traffic death toll of 1,231 (341 of whom, or 51
more than those on Flight 253, were classified as
"alcohol-impaired fatalities").

Had the twenty-three-year-old Nigerian set off his
bomb, it would have been a nightmare for the
people on board, and if it actually succeeded in tak-
ing the plane down, a tragedy for those who knew
them. It would certainly have represented a safety
and security issue, but it would not have been a na-
tional emergency, nor a national-security crisis.

And yet here's the strange thing: thanks to what
didn't happen on Flight 253, the media essentially
went mad, 24/7. Newspaper coverage of the failed
plot and its ramifications actually grew for two full
weeks after the incident until it had achieved
something like full-spectrum dominance, according
to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence

in Journalism. In the days after Christmas, more
than half the news links in blogs related to Flight
253. At the same time, the Republican criticism ma-
chine (and the media universe that goes with it)
ramped up on the subject of the Obama administra-
tion's terror wimpiness; the global air transport sys-
tem plunked down millions of dollars on new tech-
nology that evidently will not find underwear
bombs; the homeland security-industrial complex
had a field day; and fear, that adrenaline rush from
hell, was further embedded in the American way of
life.

Under the circumstances, you would never know
that Americans living in the United States were in
vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in sig-
nificant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol,
tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse,
murder, and the weather present the sort of poten-
tially fatal problems that might be worth worrying
about, or even changing your behavior over, or per-
haps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so
much.

The few Americans who, since 2001, have died
from anything that could be called a terror attack in
the United States— whether the thirteen killed at
Fort Hood or the soldier murdered outside an army

recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas— were far
outnumbered by the thirty-two dead in a 2007 mass
killing at Virginia Tech, not to speak of the relatively
regular moments when workers or former workers
"go postal." Since September 11, terror in the United
States has rated above fatalities from shark attacks
and not much else. Since the economic meltdown of
2008, it has, in fact, been left in the shade by violent
deaths that stem from reactions to job loss, foreclos-
ure, inability to pay the rent, and so on.

This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely
convulsed by, and that can't seem to get enough of,
fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.

Institutionalizing Fear Inc.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, brought the
fear of terrorism into the American bedroom via the
TV screen. That fear was used with remarkable ef-
fectiveness by the Bush administration, which
color-coded terror for its own ends.

Today, any possible or actual terror attack, any
threat no matter how far-fetched, amateurish,
poorly executed, or ineffective, raises a national
alarm, always seeming to add to the power of the

imperial presidency and threatening to open new
"fronts" in the now-unnamed global war. The latest
is in Yemen, thanks in part to that young Nigerian
who was evidently armed with explosives by a
home-grown organization of a few hundred men
that goes by the name al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula.

The fear of terrorism has, by now, been institu-
tionalized in our society— quite literally so— even if
the thing we're afraid of has, on the scale of human
problems, something of the will-o'-the-wisp about
it. For those who remember their cold war fiction,
it's more specter than SPECTRE.

That fear has been embedded in what once was
an un-American word, more easily associated with
Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany: "homeland." It has
replaced "country," "land," and "nation" in the lan-
guage of the terror-mongers. "The homeland" is the
place that terrorism, and nothing but terrorism, can
violate. In 2002, that terror-embedded word got its
own official government agency: the Department of
Homeland Security, our second "defense" depart-
ment, which has a 2010 budget of $39.4 billion
(while overall "homeland security" spending in the
2010 budget reached $70.2 billion). Around it has
grown up a little-attended-to homeland-security

complex with its own interests, businesses, associ-
ations, and lobbyists (including jostling crowds of
ex-politicians and ex-government bureaucrats).

As a result, more than eight years after 9/11, an
amorphous state of mind has manifested itself in
the actual state as a kind of Fear Inc. A number of
factors have clearly gone into the creation of Fear
Inc. and now ensure that fear is the drug constantly
shot into the American body politic. These would
include:

The imperial presidency: The Bush administra-
tion used fear not only to promote its wars and its
Global War on Terror, but also to unchain the com-
mander in chief of an already imperial presidency
from a host of restraints. The dangers of terror and
of al-Qaeda, which became the global bogeyman,
and the various proposed responses to it, including
kidnapping ("extraordinary rendition"), secret im-
prisonment, and torture, turned out to be the royal
road to the American unconscious and so to a pres-
idency determined, as Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld and others liked to say, to take the gloves
off. It remains so and, as a result, under Barack
Obama, the imperial presidency only seems to gain
ground. Under the pressure of the Flight 253 incid-
ent, for instance, the Obama administration has

adopted the Bush administration's position that a
president, under certain circumstances, has the au-
thority to order the assassination of an American
citizen abroad. In this case, New Mexico-born
Islamic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, who has been linked to
the 9/11 plotters, the Fort Hood killer, and Abdul-
mutallab. The Bush administration opened the door
to this possibility and now a Democratic president
may be stepping through.

The 24/7 media moment: 24/7 blitz coverage was
once reserved for the deaths of presidents (as in the
assassination of John F. Kennedy) and public events
of agreed-upon import. In 1994, however, it became
the coin of the media realm for any event bizarre
enough, sensational enough, celebrity-based
enough to glue eyeballs. That June, O. J. Simpson
engaged in his infamous low-speed car "chase"
through Orange County followed by more than
twenty news helicopters while ninety-five million
viewers tuned in and thousands more gathered at
highway overpasses to watch. No one's ever looked
back. Of course, in a traditional media world that's
shedding foreign and domestic bureaus and axing
hordes of reporters, radically downsizing news-
rooms and shrinking papers to next to nothing, the
advantages of focusing reportorial energies on just

one thing at a time are obvious. Those 24/7 energies
are now regularly focused on the fear of terrorism
and events that contribute to it, like the plot to
down Flight 253.

The Republican criticism machine and the media
that go with it: Once upon a time, even successful
Republican administrations didn't have their own
megaphone. That's why, in the Vietnam era, the
Nixon administration battled the New York Times
so fiercely (and— my own guess— that played a part
in forcing the creation of the first "op-ed" page in
1970, which allowed administration figures like Vice
President Spiro Agnew and ex-Nixon speechwriter
William Safire to gain a voice at the paper). By the
George W. Bush era, the struggle had abated. The
Times and papers like it only had to be pacified or
cut out of the loop, since from TV to talk radio, pub-
lishing to publicity, the Republicans had their own
megaphone ready at hand. This is, by now, a ma-
chine chockablock full of politicians and ex-politi-
cians, publishers, pundits, military "experts," journ-
alists, shock jocks, and the like (categories that have
a tendency to blend into each other). It adds up to a
seamless web of promotion, publicity, and din. It's
capable of gearing up on no notice and going on un-
til a subject— none more popular than terrorism and

Democratic spinelessness in the face of it— is tem-
porarily flogged to death. It ensures that any failed
terror attack, no matter how hopeless or pathetic,
will be in the headlines and in public consciousness.
It circulates constant fantasies about possible future
apocalyptic terror attacks with atomic weaponry or
other weapons of mass destruction. (And in all of
the above, of course, it is helped by a host of ta-
galong pundits and experts, news shows, and news
reports from the more liberal side of the aisle.)

The Democrats who don't dare: It's remarkable
that the sharpest president we've had in a while
didn't dare get up in front of the American people
after Flight 253 landed and tell everyone to calm
down. He didn't, in fact, have a single intelligent
thing to say about the event. He certainly didn't re-
mind Americans that, whatever happened to Flight
253, they stood in far more danger heading out of
their driveways behind the wheel or pulling into a
bar on the way home for a beer or two. Instead, the
Obama administration essentially abjectly apolo-
gized, insisted it would focus yet more effort and
money on making America safe from air terrorism,
widened a new front in the Global War on Terror in
Yemen (speeding extra money and U.S. advisers
that way), and when the din from its critics didn't

end, "pushed back," as Peter Baker of the New York
Times wrote, by claiming "that they were handling
terror suspects much as the previous administration
did." It's striking when a Democratic administration
finds safety in the claim that it's acting like a Repub-
lican one, that it's following the path to the imperial
presidency already cleared by George W. Bush. Fear
does that to you, and the fear of terror has been in-
stitutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of
society.

9/11 Never Ends

Fear has a way of reordering human worlds. That
only a relatively small number of determined fanat-
ics with extraordinarily limited access to American
soil keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvi-
ous. What the fear machine produces is the dark un-
derside of the charming Saul Steinberg New Yorker
cover, "A View of the World from 9th Avenue," in
which Manhattan looms vast as the rest of the plan-
et fades into near nothingness.

When you see the world "from 9th Avenue," or
from an all-al-Qaeda-all-the-time "news" channel,
you see it phantasmagorically. It's out of all realistic

shape and proportion, which means you naturally
make stupid decisions. You become incapable of
sorting out what matters and what doesn't, what's
primary and what's secondary. You become, in
short, manipulable.

This is our situation today.

People always wonder: What would the impact of
a second 9/11-style attack be on this country? Sel-
dom noticed, however, is that all the pinprick terror
events blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up
to a second, third, fourth, fifth 9/11 when it comes
to American consciousness.

So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Re-
publicans go postal, the media morphs into its 24/7
national security disaster mode, the pundits register
red on the terror-news scale, the president defends
himself by reaffirming that he is doing just what the
Bush administration would have done, the home-
land security lobbyists begin calling for yet more
funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much
happens, remember those drunken drivers, arson-
ists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust
devil and say:

Hold onto your underpants, this is not a national
emergency.

SIX

Obama's War

How Safe Do You Want to Be?

Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us
from thousands of miles away, as if from another
universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive
from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever
see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they
appear from a world almost beyond our imagining,
and always they concern death— so many lives
snuffed out so regularly for years now. Unfortu-
nately, those news stories are so unimportant in our
world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of,
the inside pages of our papers. They're so repetitive
that, once you've started reading them, you could
write them in your sleep from thousands of miles
away.

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern.
Often the news initially arrives buried in summary
war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO)

announcements of small triumphs— so many "insur-
gents," or "terrorists," or "foreign militants," or
"anti-Afghan forces" killed in an air strike or a raid
on a house or a village. And these days, often re-
markably quickly, even in the same piece, come the
challenges. Some local official or provincial gov-
ernor or police chief in the area insists that those
dead "terrorists" or "militants" were actually so
many women, children, old men, innocent civilians,
members of a wedding party or a funeral. (A recent
study of the death-dealing weapons of the Iraq war,
published in the New England Journal of Medicine,
indicates that air strikes are notoriously good at tak-
ing out civilians. Eighty-five percent of the deaths
from air strikes in Iraq were, the study estimated,
women and children, and of all methods, including
suicide and car bombs, airpower "killed the most ci-
vilians per event.")

Then come the standard-issue denials from U.S.
military officials or coalition spokespeople: those
killed were insurgents, and the intelligence informa-
tion on which the strike or raid had been based was
accurate. In these years, American spokespeople
have generally retreated from their initial claims
only step by begrudging step. Admittedly, there's
been some change in the assertion/repeated denial/

investigation pattern instituted by American forces.
Now, assertion and denial are sometimes followed
relatively quickly by acknowledgment, apology, and
payment. Now, when the irrefutable meets the un-
challengeable, American spokespeople tend to own
up to it. This new tactic has been a response to
rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of ci-
vilians in U.S. raids and air strikes. But like the
denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended
to make everything go away, while our war it-
self—those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down
in the middle of the night— continues.

Consider just one incident that went almost un-
covered in the U.S. media. According to an Agence
France-Presse account, in a raid in the eastern
Afghan province of Khost, the U.S. military first re-
ported a small success: four "armed militants"
killed. It took next to no time, however, for those
four militants to morph into the family of an Afghan
National Army artillery commander named Awal
Khan. As it happened, Khan himself was on duty in
another province at the time. According to the re-
port, the tally of the slain, some of whom may have
gone to the roof of their house to defend themselves
against armed men they evidently believed to be
robbers or bandits, included Awal Khan's

"schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named
Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother,
who worked for a government department. Another
daughter was wounded." The report continues,
"After the shooting, the pregnant wife of Khan's
cousin, who lived next door, went outside her home
and was shot five times in the abdomen." She sur-
vived, but her fetus, "hit by bullets," didn't. Khan's
wife worked at a school supported by the interna-
tional aid organization CARE, which issued a state-
ment strongly condemning the raid and demanding
that "international military forces operating in
Afghanistan are held accountable for their actions
and avoid all attacks on innocent civilians in the
country."

In accordance with its new policy, the United
States issued an apology:

Further inquiries into the Coalition and
[Afghan National Security Forces] ANSF op-
eration in Khost earlier today suggest that
the people killed and wounded were not en-
emy combatants as previously reported....
Coalition and Afghan forces do not believe
that this family was involved with militant
activities and that they were defending their
home against an unknown threat.... "We

deeply regret the tragic loss of life in this pre-
cious family. Words alone cannot begin to
express our regret and sympathy and we will
ensure the surviving family members are
properly cared for," said Brig. Gen. Michael
A. Ryan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.

A U.S. military spokesman added, "There will un-
doubtedly be some financial assistance and other
types of assistance [to the survivors]."

But the family quite reasonably wanted more
than a press-release apology. The grieving husband,
father, and brother said, "I want the coalition lead-
ers to expose those behind this and punish them,"
adding, "[T]he Afghan government should resign if
it could not protect its people." Afghan president
Hamid Karzai, as he has done many times during
past incidents, repeatedly demanded an explanation
for the deaths and asked that such raids and air
strikes be drastically curtailed.

What Your Safety Is Worth

All of this, however, is little more than a shadow
play against which the ongoing war continues to be
relentlessly prosecuted. In Afghanistan, and

increasingly in Pakistan, civilian deaths are insepar-
able from this war. Though they may be referred to
as "collateral damage," increasingly in all wars, and
certainly in counterinsurgency campaigns involving
air power, the killing of civilians lies at the heart of
the matter, while the killing of soldiers might be
thought of as the true collateral activity.

Pretending that these "mistakes" will cease or be
ameliorated as long as the war is being prosecuted
is little short of folly. After all, "mistake" after "mis-
take" continues to be made. The first Afghan wed-
ding party was obliterated in late December 2001,
when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan
revelers with only 2 survivors. At least 4 more have
been blown away since then. And count on it, there
will be others.

A UN survey tallied up 2,118 civilians killed in
Afghanistan in 2008, a striking rise over the previ-
ous year's figure, of which 828 were ascribed to
U.S., NATO, and Afghan Army actions rather than
to suicide bombers or Taliban guerrillas. Given the
difficulty of counting the dead in wartime, any fig-
ures like these are likely to be significant
undercounts.

By now, we've filled up endless "towers" with
dead Afghan civilians. And that's clearly not going
to change, apologies or not, especially when U.S.
forces are "surging" into the southern and eastern
parts of the country, while the CIA's drone war on
the Pakistani border expands.

And how exactly do we explain this ever-rising
pile of civilian dead to ourselves? It's being done, so
we've been told, for our safety and security here in
the United States. The former vice president has
made clear that among the great achievements of
the Bush administration was the prevention of a
second 9/11. And President Obama continues to
play the 9/11 card heavily. As he reportedly put it,
he is not '"naive about how dangerous this world is'
and... wakes up every day and goes to bed every
night thinking and worrying 'about how to keep the
American people safe.'"

Personally, I always thought that we could have
locked our plane doors and gone home long ago. We
were never in mortal danger from al-Qaeda in the
backlands of Afghanistan, despite the perfervid ima-
gination of the previous administration and the riot-
ous fears of so many Americans. The rag-tag group
that attacked us in September 2001 was then cap-
able of committing acts of terror on a spectacular

scale (two U.S. embassy buildings in Africa, a des-
troyer in a Yemeni harbor, and of course those
towers in New York and the Pentagon), but only
every couple of years. In other words, al-Qaeda was
capable of stunning this country and of killing
Americans, but was never a threat to the nation
itself.

All this, of course, was compounded by the fact
that the Bush administration couldn't have cared
less about al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, that the
"Defense Department" imagined its job to be
"power projection" abroad, not protecting American
shores (or air space), and that our intelligence agen-
cies were in chaos. So those towers came down and
rather than simply going after the group that had
acted against us, we invaded Afghanistan ("no safe
havens for terrorists") and began plans for "regime
change" in Iraq and beyond. In the process, the
Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fet-
ishize our own safety and security, and simultan-
eously turned "security" into a lucrative endeavor.

Of course, elsewhere people have lived through
remarkable paroxysms of violence and terror
without the sort of fuss and fear this nation exhib-
ited, or the money-making that went with it. If you
want to be reminded of just how fetishistic our focus

on our own safely was, consider a 2005 news article
written for a Florida newspaper, "Weeki Wachee
Mermaids in Terrorists' Cross Hairs?" It began:

Who on earth would ever want to harm the
Weeki Wachee mermaids?

It staggers the imagination.

Still, the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security has named Weeki Wachee Springs
as the potential terror target of Hernando
County, according to a theme park official.

The Weeki Wachee staff is teaming up with
the Hernando County Sheriffs Office to
"harden the target" by keeping the mermaid
theater and the rest of the park safe from a
potential terror attack, said marketing and
promotion manager John Athanason....

Terror-prevention plans for Weeki Wachee
may include adding surveillance cameras, in-
stalling lights in the parking lot and securing
areas in the roadside attraction where there
maybe "security breaches," he said.

But Athanason is also realistic. He said
Walt Disney World is a bigger attraction and

is likely to receive more counterterrorism

funds.
This was how, in deepest Florida, distant Utah, or
on the Texas border, all places about as likely to be
hit by an al-Qaeda attack as by a meteor, Americans
were obsessing about keeping everything near and
dear to them safe and secure. At the same time, of
course, the Bush administration was breaking the
bank at the Pentagon and in its Global War on Ter-
ror, while preparing the way for an America that
would be plunged into startling economic
insecurity.

Let's for a moment assume, however, that our
safety really was, and remains, at stake in a war
halfway across the planet. If so, let me ask you a
question: What's your "safety" really worth? Are you
truly willing to trade the lives of Awal Khan's family
for a blanket guarantee of your safety, and not just
his family, but all those Afghan one-year-olds, all
those wedding parties that are— yes, they really
are— going to be blown away in the years to come
for you?

If, in 1979, as the Carter presidency was ending
and our Afghan wars were beginning, you had told
any group of Americans that we would be ever more

disastrously involved in Afghanistan for thirty
years, that, even then, no end would be in sight, and
that we would twice declare victory (in 1989 after
the Soviets withdrew, and again in 2001 when the
Afghan capital Kabul was taken from the Taliban)
only to discover that disaster followed, they un-
doubtedly would have thought you mad. Afgh-
anistan? Please. You might as well have said Mars.
Now, three decades later, it's possible to see that
every step taken from the earliest support for
Afghan jihadis in their anti-Soviet war has only
made things worse for us, and ever so much worse
for the Afghans.

Maybe it's time to put less value on the idea of ab-
solute American safety, since in many ways the
Bush administration definition of our safely and se-
curity, which did not go into retirement with George
and Dick, is now in the process of breaking us. Even
if Dick Cheney and his minions prevented another
9/11 (and there's no evidence they did), in doing so,
look what they brought down around our ears— and
all in the name of our safety, and ours alone.

Ask yourself these questions, then, in the dead of
night: Do we really want stories like Awal Khan's to
float up out of the villages of Afghanistan, Pakistan,
and who knows where else for years, even decades,

to come? Does that seem right? Is your supposed
safety worth that?

General "Manhunter"

Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark
side (and proud of it). So his appointment by Pres-
ident Obama to run the Afghan War seems to signal
an administration going for broke. It's heading
straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known
as "the big muddy," doubling down on the bad de-
ofhisr

General McChrystal comes from a world where
killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of
secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five
years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which,
among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has
described as an "executive assassination wing" out
of Vice President Cheney's office. Cheney returned
the favor by giving McChrystal a ringing endorse-
ment for position of Afghan War commander: "I
think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than
Stan."

McChrystal gained a certain renown when Presid-
ent Bush touted him as the man responsible for
tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Meso-
potamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret
force of "manhunters" he commanded in Iraq had
its own secret detention and interrogation center
near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things
happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force
6-26, had its own slogan: "If you don't make them
bleed, they can't prosecute for it." (Since some of
the task force's members were, in the end, prosec-
uted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.) In the
Bush years, McChrystal was extremely close to Sec-
retary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-
secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of
Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagon-
ize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were
once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted execu-
tions that may run into the hundreds, as well as ac-
cusations of torture and abuse by troops under his
command, not to speak of a role in the cover-up of
the circumstances surrounding the death of army
ranger and former National Football League player
Pat Tillman. The general has reportedly long
thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single

battlefield, which means that he was a premature
adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak— that is, expan-
ded—war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New
York Times reported, he was a "key advocate.. .of a
plan, ultimately approved by President George W.
Bush, to use American commandos to strike at
Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term
Bush program provoked such anger and blow-back
in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two
cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of
"new thinking and new approaches"— to use Secret-
ary of Defense Robert Gates's words— that the
Obama administration expects General McChrystal
to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in
a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of
the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the firstborn
child of Obama-era Washington's growing despera-
tion and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

But none of this matters to what remains of main-
stream news analysis. The press establishment has
had a long-term love affair with McChrystal. Back in
2006, when Bush first touted him, Newsweek re-
porters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him
"a rising star" in the army and one of the "Jedi
Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the

shadows.'" More recently, in that mix of sports
lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that
makes armchair war strategizing just so much fun,
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius claimed
that CentCom commander General David Petraeus,
who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan,
is "assembling an all-star team" and that McChrys-
tal himself is "a rising superstar who, like Petraeus,
has helped reinvent the U.S. Army." Is that all?

When it comes to pure hagiography, however, the
prize goes to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti
of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, "A
General Steps from the Shadows," that painted a
picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between
Superman and a saint. Among other things, it de-
scribed the general as "an ascetic who. ..usually eats
just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid slug-
gishness. He is known for operating on a few hours'
sleep and for running to and from work while listen-
ing to audio books on an iPod.... [He has] an encyc-
lopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives
of terrorists.... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfort-
able with diplomats, politicians." The quotes Bu-
miller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less
spectacular: "He's got all the Special Ops attributes,
plus an intellect." "If you asked me the first thing

that comes to mind about General McChrystaL.I
think of no body fat."

Above all, General McChrystal was praised for be-
ing "more aggressive" than his stick-in-the-mud
predecessor. He would, as Bumiller and Thom
Shanker reported in another piece, bring "a more
aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening
seven-year war." The general, we were assured,
liked operations without body fat, but with plenty of
punch. And though no one quite said this, given his
closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, his
mentality was undoubtedly a GWOT one, which
translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints,
or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist
Gareth Porter pointed out in a thoughtful Asia
Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the
parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command
(SOCOM), "the authority to carry out actions unilat-
erally anywhere on the globe."

McChrystal's appointment, then, represented a
decision by Washington to dispatch the bull directly
to the china shop. The Posf's Ignatius even com-
pared McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's spe-
cial envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two
headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then

concluded his paean to all of them with this pas-
sage: "Obama knows the immense difficulty of try-
ing to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a func-
tioning, modern country. But with his two bulls,
Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presid-
ency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway."
McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated
to start knocking over the tombstones.

Of course, there were now so many bulls in this
particular china shop that smashing was increas-
ingly the name of the game. The early moves of the
Obama administration, when combined with the
momentum of the situation it inherited, resulted in
a surprisingly sweeping expansion of the Af-Pak
War. President Obama has, in fact, opted for a
down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at
least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrys-
tal was the poster boy. Former Afghan commander
General David McKiernan believed that, "as a
NATO commander, my mandate stops at the
[Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of
self-protection to fire across the border, we don't
consider any operations across the border in the tri-
bal areas." Not so Stan McChrystal. The idea that
the "responsibilities" of U.S. generals fighting the
Afghan War "ended at the border with Pakistan,"

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times repor-
ted, was now considered part of an "old mind-set."
McChrystal represented those "fresh eyes" that Sec-
retary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the
press conference announcing the general's appoint-
ment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt pointed out, "Among
[McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint
Special Operations Command was to better co-
ordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency
efforts on both sides of the porous border."

For those old enough to remember, we've been
here before. Administrations that start down a path
of expansion in such a war find themselves
strangely locked in if things don't work out as ex-
pected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In
Vietnam, the result was escalation after escalation.
President Obama and his foreign policy team now
seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact
that the application of force has not only failed for
years, but actually fed that expansion, they also
seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever
greater force, leading to further expansions of what
is already "Obama's war."

Obama and the Imperial Presidency

Let's face it. Barack Obama did not win an elec-
tion to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the
YMCA, or the Ford Foundation. He may be remark-
able in many ways, but he is also president of the
United States, which means that he is head honcho
for the globe's single great garrison state that now,
to a significant extent, lives off war and the prepara-
tions for future war. He is today the proprietor of
U.S. bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military
material (or all of the above) in Djibouti in the Horn
of Africa, in Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emir-
ates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and Iraqi Kurdistan), Tur-
key, Afghanistan, Pakistan (where the U.S. military
and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities), and
a major air force facility on the British-controlled
Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to speak only
of the region extending from North Africa to the
Chinese border that the Bush loyalists used to call
"the Greater Middle East." Some U.S. bases in these
countries are microscopic and solitary, but others,
like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq,
are gigantic installations in a web of embedded

When he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama
also inherited the largest embassy on Earth, built in
Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial
proportions as a regional command center. It now
houses what are politely referred to as a thousand
"diplomats." As it happens, this project wasn't just
an aberration of the Bush era. Another embassy,
just as gigantic, expected to house "a large military
and intelligence contingent," will be constructed by
the Obama administration in its new war capital,
Islamabad, Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns
are added in, it may turn out be the first billion-dol-
lar embassy. Each of these command centers will,
assumedly, anchor the U.S. presence in the Greater
Middle East.

Barack Obama is also now the commander in
chief of eleven aircraft carrier strike groups, which
regularly patrol the planet's sea-lanes. He sits atop a
U.S. Intelligence Community (yes, that's what our
intelligence crew like to call themselves) of at least
sixteen squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily
Pentagonized, and often at each other's throats.
They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of per-
haps $50 billion or more. (Imagine a power so ob-
sessively consumed by the idea of "intelligence" that
it is willing to support sixteen sizeable separate

outfits doing such work, and that's not even count-
ing various smaller offices dedicated to intelligence
activities.)

The new president will preside over a country
that now ponies up almost half the world's total mil-
itary expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon
budget will be marginally higher than the last stag-
gering one from the Bush years.

He now inhabits a Washington in which deep
thinking consists of a pundit like Michael O'Hanlon
of the Brookings Institution whining that these
bloated sums are, in fact, too little to "maintain"
U.S. forces (a budgetary increase of 7 to 8 percent
per year for the next decade would, he claims, be
just adequate); in which forward looking means
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reorienting milit-
ary spending toward preparations for fighting one,
two, many Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-
box, futuristic thinking means letting the blue-skies
crew at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency) loose on far-out problems like how
to turn "programmable matter" into future
Transformer-like weapons of war.

While Obama enthusiasts can take pride in the
appointment of some out-of-the-box thinkers in

domestic areas, including energy, health, and the
science of the environment, in two crucial areas his
appointments are pure old-line Washington and
have been so from the first post-election transition-
al moments. His key economic players and advisers
are largely a crew of former Clintonistas, or Clin-
tonista wannabes or proteges like Secretary of the
Treasury Tim Geithner. They are distinctly inside-
the-boxers, some of them responsible for the think-
ing that, in the 1990s, led directly to global econom-
ic catastrophe.

As for foreign policy, had the November election
results been different, Obama's top team of today
could just as easily have been appointed by Senator
John McCain. National Security Adviser James
Jones was actually a McCain friend, Gates is
someone he admired, and Hillary Clinton is a figure
he could well have picked for a top post after a nar-
row election victory, had he decided to reach out to
the Democrats. As a group, Obama's key foreign
policy figures and advisers are traditional players in
the national security state and pre-Bush-style
Washington guardians of American power, thinking
globally in familiar ways.

The Dream Team in Afghanistan

Barack Obama didn't just inherit the presidency.
He went for it. And he isn't just sitting atop it. He's
actively using it. He's wielding power. In foreign
policy terms, Obama is settling in— and doing so in
largely predictable ways. He may, for example, have
declared a sunshine policy when it comes to trans-
parency in government, but in his war policies in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is
already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly
opaque valley of death. He chose to appoint as his
Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal,
who from 2003 to 2008 ran a special operations
outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that
the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years,
its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing
Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted assassination
program on a large scale. It was, for those who re-
member the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program
in which possibly hundreds of enemies were
assassinated: al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni
insurgents, and Sadrists (not to speak of others,
since informers always settle scores and turn over
their own personal enemies as well). Although he's
being touted in the press as the man to bring the

real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and
"protect" the Afghan population in the bargain), his
actual field is "counterterrorism."

The team McChrystal assembled to lead his oper-
ations in Afghanistan and Pakistan tells you what
you really need to know. It's filled with special oper-
ations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieu-
tenants is, above all, in special ops work. At the
same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox
News, an extra thousand special operations troops
are being "quietly" dispatched to Afghanistan,
bringing the total number there to about five thou-
sand. The special operations forces, with their kick-
down-the-door night raids and air strikes, have
been involved in the most notorious incidents of ci-
vilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Note, by the way, that while the president is sur-
ging into Afghanistan twenty-one thousand troops
and advisers (as well as those special ops forces),
ever more civilian diplomats and advisers, and ever
larger infusions of money, there is now to be a com-
mand surge as well. General McChrystal, according
to the New York Times,

has been given carte blanche to handpick a
dream team of subordinates, including many
special operations veterans....

[He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers
and soldiers who will rotate between the Un-
ited States and Afghanistan for a minimum
of three years. That kind of commitment to
one theater of combat is unknown in the mil-
itary today outside special operations, but re-
flects an approach being imported by Gener-
al McChrystal, who spent five years in charge
of secret commando teams in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Like the new mega-embassy in Pakistan, this fig-
ure tells us a great deal about the top-heavy manner
in which the planet's super-garrison state fights its
wars.

That team of Spartans, according to the New York
Times, is being formed with, minimally, a three-
year time horizon (though the actual Spartans
needed only three hundred warriors in total at the
battle of Thermopylae). This in itself is striking.
After all, the Afghan War started in November
2001. So when the shortest possible Afghan tour of
duty of the four hundred is over, the war will have

been going on for more than ten and a half
years— and no one dares to predict that, three years
from now, the war will actually be at an end. If we
are more honest, the figure cited should be not one
decade, but three. After all, our Afghan adventure
really began in 1980, when, in the jihad against the
Soviets, we were supporting some of the very same
fundamentalist figures now allied with the Taliban
and fighting against us in Afghanistan— just as, once
upon a time, we looked positively upon the Taliban;
just as, once, we looked positively upon Saddam
Hussein, who was for a while seen as our potential
bulwark in the Middle East against the fundament-
alist Islamic Republic of Iran. (Remarkably enough,
only Iran has steadily retained its position as our re-
gional enemy over these decades.)

What a record, then, of blood and war, of great
power politics and imperial hubris, of support for
the heinous (including various fundamentalist
groups and grim, authoritarian Middle Eastern re-
gimes who remain our allies to this day). What a
tale of imperial power frittered away and treasure
squandered. Truly, Rudyard Kipling would have
been able to do something with this.

As for me, I find myself in awe of these decades of
folly. I'm no Kipling, but I am aware that this sorry

tale has taken up almost half of my lifetime with no
end in sight.

In the meantime, our new president has loosed
the manhunters. His manhunters. This is where
charisma disappears into the charnel house of
history.

A War That No Longer Needs a
Justification

The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March
2003 with a force of approximately 130,000 troops.
Top White House and Pentagon officials like Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were convinced
that, by August, those troops, welcomed with open
arms by the oppressed Iraqis, would be drawn down
to 30,000 or 40,000 and housed in newly built, per-
manent military bases largely away from the coun-
try's urban areas. This was to be part of what now is
called a "strategic partnership" in the Middle East.
Almost five and a half years later, the United States
still has approximately 130,000 troops in Iraq. Top
administration officials are now talking about
"modestly accelerated" rates of troop withdrawal, if

all goes well. This is what passes for progress in Iraq
today.

To understand the real prospects for withdrawal,
we would do well to consider some interlocking his-
tories in Iraq.

A history of the bicycle in Iraq: In imagistic
terms, the Bush administration biked into Iraq. Top
Washington officials loved the idea that they were
training the eager Iraqi kid in how to ride the bike
of democracy. President George W. Bush talked reg-
ularly about the moment when we might take the
"training wheels" off the Iraqi bike and let the little
fella ride into the democratic sunset on his own. His
secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, spoke about
the difficult moment when a parent has to decide
whether to take that steadying hand off the bike seat
and let the tyke pedal on his own. "You're running
down the street," as he put it in 2004, "holding onto
the back of the seat. You know that if you take your
hand off, they could fall, so you take a finger off and
then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely
touching it."

Some years later, after kid and parent had made it
around one of those "corners" they were always
turning— on the way to various "tipping

points"— and found themselves instead at the "pre-
cipice," after Rumsfeld had, in fact, been asked to
resign by his president, he wrote a final memo to
the White House, the last of his famed "snowflakes,"
on "new options" in Iraq. In it, he suggested, "Begin
modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces
(start 'taking our hand off the bicycle seat'), so
Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up
and take responsibility for their country."

Rumsfeld's tenure could qualify as the longest
biking lesson in history and still, it seemed, the
Iraqis couldn't do without that hand on the seat.
Even when his president followed him two years
later, their imagery of choice remained behind. In
March 2009, for instance, the chief American milit-
ary spokesperson in Iraq, Major General David G.
Perkins, discussing a possible drawdown of Americ-
an forces, said, "We need to take our hands off the
handlebars, or the training wheels, at some point."

Colonel Timothy R Reese, an American adviser
to the Iraqi military's Baghdad command, created a
stir in summer 2009 in a memorandum leaked to
the New York Times in which he also used the
metaphor. While the official Obama-era target for
an American withdrawal remained then (as in the
last months of the Bush era) the end of 2011, Reese

urged that all U.S. forces be pulled out on an exped-
ited schedule by August 2010. In this, he resurrec-
ted a Vietnam-era suggestion of Vermont Republic-
an senator George Aiken by headlining his memo:
"It's Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go
Home."

And there, in the midst of a generally scathing as-
sessment of the deficiencies of the Iraqi military
(and the Iraqi government), was that bicycle again:

The SA [Bush-era Security Agreement
between the U.S. and Iraq] outlines a series
of gradual steps towards military withdrawal,
analogous to a father teaching his kid to ride
a bike without training wheels.... We now
have an Iraqi government that has gained its
balance and thinks it knows how to ride the
bike in the race. And in fact they probably do
know how to ride, at least well enough for the
road they are on against their current com-
petitors. Our hand on the back of the seat is
holding them back and causing resentment.
We need to let go before we both tumble to
the ground.
It just goes to show. Under the pressure of war,
images that won't go away, like people, have the

capacity to change. The Iraqi child with the training
wheels was now, according to Reese, old enough to
enter an actual bike race.

Who exactly will bike out of Iraq under the
Obama withdrawal plan, however, still remains to
be defined. After all, at the end of his memo, the
most urgent call for withdrawal from Iraq yet to
emerge from the higher levels of the U.S. military,
Colonel Reese offered his version of a full-scale
American withdrawal. "During the withdrawal peri-
od," he wrote, "the USG [United States government]
and GOI [government of Iraq] should develop a new
strategic framework agreement that would include
some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training
bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations. But it
should not include the presence of any combat
forces save those for force protection needs or the
occasional exercise." Moreover, his proposal was,
with rare exceptions, rejected out of hand by all and
sundry, in and out of the military high command
and in Washington. In other words, even the most
Xtreme American biker of this moment still ima-
gines us in Iraq forever and a day.

A history of experts on Iraq: Once upon a time,
the playing field, the stadium, and sports events
were regularly compared to war, even considered

suitable preparation for actual battle. Ever since the
First Gulf War, this has been reversed. Now,
war— or at least its coverage— is based on sports.
And just as, sooner or later, the smoothest players
and sawiest coaches depart the "field of battle" for
the press box and the TV spotlight, for pre-game,
game, and post-game commentary, so the com-
manders of the last war now leave the battlefield for
the TV booth and offer us their expertise on the next
war. As former Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van
Gundy has been paid to discuss the decisions of his
brother Stan, coach of the Orlando Magic, in ESPN
playoff commentary, so the commanders of our pre-
vious wars cover our next wars and their command-
ers, possibly even officers once under their own
command.

We now live with the ESPN version of war,
including slo-mo replays, and the logos, interactive
charts, and fabulous graphics of the sports world.
And once anointed as experts, our John Maddens of
war, like their sports counterparts, never go away.
In April 2008, for instance, New York Times journ-
alist David Barstow wrote a front-page expose fo-
cused on the many retired military officers who had
been hired as media consultants for the Iraq War.
As a group, they made up, he suggested, a "kind of

media Trojan horse," because most of them were
marching to a carefully organized Pentagon cam-
paign of disinformation on the war. In addition,
most of them had ties, not acknowledged on the air,
"to military contractors vested in the very war
policies they are asked to assess."

Barstow's piece concluded:

To the public, these men are members of a
familiar fraternity, presented tens of thou-
sands of times on television and radio as
"military analysts" whose long service has
equipped them to give authoritative and un-
fettered judgments about the most pressing
issues of the post- Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of ob-
jectivity, though, is a Pentagon information
apparatus that has used those analysts in a
campaign to generate favorable news cover-
age of the administration's wartime
performance.

Barstow named names and made connections.
Those names included, for example, retired air force
general and Fox News senior military analyst Tho-
mas G. Mclnerney, retired army general and NBC/
MSNBC military analyst Montgomery Meigs, and

retired army general and NBC/MSNBC military
analyst Barry R. McCaffrey. After the expose ap-
peared, though, they seem to have just carried right
on with their media duties.

Much of the print media has similarly adhered to
the principle of once-an-expert-always-an-expert.
For instance, on the fifth anniversary of Bush's dis-
astrous invasion of Iraq, the New York Times de-
cided to ask a range of "experts on military and for-
eign affairs" to look back on that fiasco— and then
rounded up the usual suspects. Of the nine experts
it came up with, six were intimately involved in that
catastrophe either as drumbeaters for the invasion,
instigators of it, or facilitators of the occupation that
followed— Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka, and
Frederick Kagan (enthusiasts all), Richard Perle
(aka "the prince of darkness"), L. Paul Bremer (the
administration's first viceroy in Baghdad), and Gen-
eral Paul D. Eaton (who trained Iraqi troops in the
early years of the occupation). Notably absent was
anyone who had seriously opposed the invasion.
The closest was Anne-Marie Slaughter, a "liberal
hawk" who wrote a supportive New York Times op-
ed on March 18, 2003, two days before the invasion
began, headlined, "Good Reasons for Going Around
the U.N."

The Times anniversary spread appeared in March
2008. Jump ahead a year-plus and the Times once
again launched what undoubtedly was a mighty
search for experts who might consider Colonel
Reese's suggestion that we take our hand off that
Iraqi bike— and came up with a typical crew of sev-
en: One, retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl,
president of the Center for a New American Secur-
ity, was an adviser to General David Petraeus,
former top U.S. commander in Iraq, now Centcom
commander overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afgh-
anistan. A second, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for
defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations,
was also an adviser to Petraeus and had most re-
cently been on the "team" that advised General
Stanley A. McChrystal in his review of Afghan War
strategy. A third, Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A.
Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, was on the same
McChrystal team. A fourth, Thomas Ricks, former
Washington Post military reporter and now senior
fellow at Nagl's center, was the author of the best-
selling book The Gamble, a highly complimentary
account of Petraeus's role in Iraq in which Nagl is,
of course, a figure. (Ricks, by the way, has long
made it clear that he believes we will be in that

country for years to come.) A fifth, Kori Schake, now
at the Hoover Institution, was a former national se-
curity adviser on defense issues to President George
W. Bush. A sixth, Jonathan Morgenstein, was a
senior national security policy fellow at Third Way,
another Washington think tank, and "was a military
transition team adviser to the Iraqi Army." Not sur-
prisingly, all six of these experts, with the most
modest of caveats, dismissed Reese's suggestion out
of hand, agreeing that it was in no one's interest to
expedite an American departure. ("The pace of pro-
gress in Iraq will be slow, but we can't throw up our
hands and walk away," as one of them commented.)
Only a seventh expert, author and retired colonel
Douglas Macgregor, agreed with Reese.

Consider that a little history of expertise about
our recent wars. There's a corollary. If you're not
anointed an expert, you're never likely to be one.
Among those automatically disqualified for expert-
ise on Iraq: just about anyone who bluntly rejected
the idea of invading Iraq or predicted any version of
the catastrophe that ensued before it happened.
Disqualified above all were any of those antiwar
types who actually took to the streets of cities across
the United States by the hundreds of thousands be-
fore the invasion to raise homemade placards to its

un-wisdom. They obviously knew nothing. Their
very stance indicated a bias that evidently disquali-
fied them on the spot.

Someone— I can't claim to remember who— once
made the point that within any administration you
could afford to be a hawk and be wrong, just not a
dove and right. When it comes to TV war comment-
ators, that seems to hold true as well.

It would, of course, be easy enough to imagine the
antiwar equivalent of those generals-as-analysts. In
our world of expertise, though, it's unthinkable.

A history of the Iraqi Air Force: For all the talk of
"taking the training wheels off," here is an interest-
ing fact: Iraqis will not be able to defend their own
airspace for the foreseeable future. The Iraqi Air
Force will remain the U.S. Air Force for some time
to come, which undoubtedly means the United
States will be running the giant airbase it built at
Balad, as well. The Iraqis have said they want Amer-
ican F-i6s. Unfortunately, according to New York
Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, General Odi-
erno, the top American commander in that country,
has claimed that "it would be impossible to build
and deliver them by the end of 2011, even if the
Iraqis were able to afford them." And even in that

unlikely event, Iraq has no trained pilots to fly
them. In other words, years of work still remain on
the horizon for the U.S.A.F. in Iraq.

Fortunately, Aviation Week reported that the
Iraqis have a plan to overcome their problem. It's a
"three-phase, 11-year improvement plan" that will
move their air force from T-6 trainers to a few
dozen F-i6s by "the middle of the next decade" (in
case you were wondering just how long the U.S.A.F.
is likely to be filling in).

Here, then, is the true tragedy of our moment. We
want to leave Iraq. Maybe not as quickly as Colonel
Reese would like, but really we do. President Obama
has made that clear. Unfortunately, the Iraqis just
won't let us. Imagine! They weren't even thinking
about an air force until recently— and what would a
country in the Middle East be if, as Bumiller points
out, it had "no way to intercept another jet that in-
vades the country's airspace." Just who might in-
vade Iraqi airspace remains a subject for
speculation.

Since it's so easy to obliterate the past, it's helpful
to remind ourselves of the history of the Iraqi Air
Force. Now that Iraq essentially has no air force,
who remembers that Saddam Hussein's Iraq once

had a very large and active one? Baghdad had 950
planes in the 1980s. In 1990, according to the web-
site GlobalSecurity.org , it still had the sixth-largest
air force in the world and plenty of trained pilots to
go with it. During the First Gulf War, nearly half of
that air force fled to neighboring Iran, on which
Iraqi planes had dropped more than their share of
bombs and even poison gas in the 1980s. Those
planes were never returned. Of the relatively small
force that remained, many were destroyed in the
First Gulf War and some of the rest, at Saddam
Hussein's orders, were buried in the desert as the
invasion of 2003 began.

The history that's really been forgotten, though, is
even more recent. The fact is, the Iraqis don't have
an air force because Washington didn't want them
to. Much attention has been paid to the Bush ad-
ministration's lack of planning for the occupation of
Iraq, but relatively little to what it did plan. In May
2003, L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
Authority disbanded the Iraqi Army. Pentagon
plans for rebuilding it called for a future, border-
patrolling Iraqi military-lite of perhaps forty thou-
sand men with minimal armaments and no air force
to speak of. In the Middle East, this had only one
meaning: from a series of mega-bases already on

Pentagon drawing boards as American troops
crossed the Kuwaiti border in 2003, the U.S. Army
and Air Force would fill in as the real Iraqi military
for eons to come. Under the pressure of a fierce
Sunni insurgency, the army part of that plan was
soon jettisoned. But "standing up" the Iraqi milit-
ary— "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," was
long President Bush's mantra— has meant just that:
two feet on the ground.

Until relatively recently, the Iraqis were essen-
tially not permitted to take to the skies. Now, the
lack of that air force will surely come to the fore as
an excuse for why any U.S. "withdrawal" will have
to have caveats and qualifications— and why, if ours
proves to be a non-withdrawal withdrawal, it will be
Iraq's fault.

A history of devastation in Iraq: Until the United
States arrived in Baghdad, things seemed bad
enough. There was Saddam Hussein, the megalo-
manic dictator of the endless Disneyesque palaces,
with his secret prisons, torture chambers, and heli-
copter gunships. There were the international sanc-
tions strangling the country. There were the mass
graves in the north and the south. There was an oil
industry held together by duct tape and ingenuity. It
was a gruesome enough mess.

That was before the invasion to "liberate" the
country. Since then, Saddam Hussein's killing fields
have been dwarfed by a fierce set of destructive U.S.
military operations, as well as insurgencies-cum-
civil-wars-cum-terrorist-acts: major cities have
been largely or partially destroyed, or ethnically
cleansed; millions of Iraqis have been forced from
their homes, becoming internal refugees or going
into exile; untold numbers of Iraqis have been im-
prisoned, assassinated, tortured, or abused; and the
country's cultural heritage has been ransacked.
Basic services— electricity, water, food— were ter-
ribly impaired and the economy was simply
wrecked. Health services were crippled. Oil produc-
tion, upon which Iraq now depends for up to 90
percent of its government funds, has only relatively
recently barely surpassed the worst levels of the
pre-invasion era.

Iraq, in other words, has been devastated. The
U.S. invasion and the occupation that followed ac-
ted like whirlwinds of destruction, unraveling a land
already bursting with problems and potential
animosities.

In what once was the breadbasket of civilization,
Iraqi agriculture, ignored by the occupiers, is with-
ering and the country is desertifying at a frightening

pace under the pressure of a several-year-old
drought. Rivers are drying up, wells are disappear-
ing, and desperate Iraqi farmers are deserting the
land for the city (where unemployment rates remain
high). Everywhere dust gathers, awaiting the winds
that create the monstrous dust storms that carry the
precious soil of Iraq into the fragile lungs of urban
Iraqis. "Now," writes Liz Sly of the Los Angeles
Times, "the Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90
percent of [Iraq's] land is either desert or suffering
from severe desertification, and that the remaining
arable land is being eroded at the rate of 5 percent a
year." Expecting the worst harvest in a decade and
with the wheat crop at 40 percent of normal, the
government has been forced to buy enormous
amounts of grain abroad at a time when oil prices,
dropping precipitously from 2008 highs, left it with
far less money available. However overused the im-
age may be, the Bush administration created the
perfect storm in Iraq, a "mission accomplished" ver-
sion of hell on earth. And it's because Iraq is in such
desperate shape that, of course, we, as the protect-
ors of its fragile "stability," can't leave.

A history of justifications: When we invaded Iraq,
serial justifications were offered. There was the
grim dictator who threatened the world. There were

his killing fields. (Never again!) There was 9/11 and
his "support for terrorism." (Top Bush administra-
tion officials long claimed a link between Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda, despite convincing evidence
to the contrary.) There was liberation for the Shiites
and the ending of what Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz called "criminal treatment of the
Iraqi people." There was the reestablishment of an
American version of order in the region. There were
those heavily emphasized, if nonexistent, weapons
of mass destruction the dictator supposedly had
squirreled away, as well as his (also nonexistent)
program to get his hands on a nuclear weapon.

Later, when things began to take a turn for the
worse and another reason was needed, there was
the propagation of democracy (a great guiding prin-
ciple to which the Bush administration arrived
rather late in Iraq and only under pressure from
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani). Even later, when
things were going far worse, there was the idea that
it was far better to fight the terrorists over there
than here. And, as the president liked to confide to
foreign leaders, there was God himself commanding
him to strike Saddam Hussein and so thwart Gog
and Magog.

Among the cognoscenti, of course, there were
other expectations and justifications, caught best
perhaps in the neoconservative quip of 2003,
"Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want
to go to Tehran." After all, the neocons in and
around the Bush administration truly did believe
that a Middle Eastern Pax Americana was within
their shock-and-awe grasp. As for oil— or what Pres-
ident Bush referred to, on the rare occasions when
he mentioned it, as Iraq's "patrimony"— mum was
the word, even though that country had the world's
third-largest proven petroleum reserves and sat
strategically at the heart of the energy heartlands of
the planet.

Now, with almost 100,000 troops still there, not
to speak of the scads of rent-a-guns and private con-
tractors, with that overstuffed, overstaffed embassy
the size of the Vatican, with a series of major milit-
ary bases still well occupied, with significant num-
bers of Iraqis and small numbers of Americans dy-
ing each month, with millions of Iraqis still internal
or external refugees, with the land devastated and
basic services hardly restored, with ethnic tensions
still running high and a government quietly allied to
Iran in place in Baghdad backed by a 250,000-man
military, with the nature of an American withdrawal

still a matter of definition, no one even bothers to
offer the slightest justification for being in Iraq.
After all, why would explanations be necessary
when we're getting ready to leave?

If you go hunting for an official explanation
today, you'll be disappointed. Why are we in Iraq?
Because we're there. Because the Iraqis need us. Be-
cause something terrible would happen if we left
precipitously. So we still occupy Iraq and no one
even asks why.

A history of withdrawal from Iraq: There is
none.

How the Pentagon Counts Coups in
Washington

Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last
paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little
gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell
of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn't fit
comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can
be packed away in the place most of your readers
will never get near, where your editor is likely to
give you a free pass. So it was, undoubtedly, with

New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who
accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as
he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone,
two-day trip to Pakistan in January 2010. Gates
must have felt a little like a punching bag by the
time he boarded his plane for home, having, as Juan
Cole pointed out, managed to signal "that the U.S. is
now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it
in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is
isolated.. .and that Pakistani conspiracy theories
about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had
admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out."

In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of
Bumiller's parting January 23 piece on the trip:

Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis
that he regretted their country's "trust defi-
cit" with the United States and that Americ-
ans had made a grave mistake in abandoning
Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan,
promised the military officers that the United
States would do better.

His final message delivered, he relaxed on
the 14-hour trip home by watching "Seven
Days in May," the cold war-era film about an
attempted military coup in the United States.

Three major cautionary political films came out in
the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after
the Cuban missile crisis. All three concerned nucle-
ar politics, "oops" moments, and Washington. The
first, and best remembered, was Dr. Strangelove,
Stanley Kubrick's classic vision of the end of the
world, American-style. ("I'm not saying we wouldn't
get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten
to twenty million people killed, tops," General
"Buck" Turgidson notes in the film.) The second was
Fail-Safe, in which a computerized nuclear re-
sponse system too fast for human intervention mal-
functions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear at-
tack on Moscow, forcing a U.S. president to save the
world by nuking New York City. It was basically Dr.
Strangelove done straight. (It's worth pointing out
that Americans loved to stomp New York City in
their fantasies long before 9/11.) The third was the
secretary of defense's top pick, Seven Days in May,
which came with this tagline: "You are soon to be
shaken by the most awesome seven days in your
life!" In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to
an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out
a coup d'etat against a dovish president who has
just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the
Soviet Union. The plot is uncovered and defused by

a marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas. ("I'm sug-
gesting, Mr. President," says Colonel Martin "Jiggs"
Casey, "there's a military plot to take over the gov-
ernment. This may occur sometime this coming
Sunday.")

These were, of course, the liberal worries of a
long-gone time. Now, one of the films is iconic and
the other two half-forgotten. All three would make a
perfect film festival for a secretary of defense with
fourteen hours to spare. Just the sort of retro
fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a
couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you
were headed for a "homeland" where no one had a
bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you.
After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about
nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more local-
ized scale, and a military plot to take over the gov-
ernment is entertainingly outre exactly because, in
the Washington of today, such a thought is
ludicrous. After all, every week in Washington is
now the twenty-first-century equivalent of Seven
Days in May come true.

Think of the week after the secretary of defense
flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.

After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he
already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget,
including more than $128 billion in war funds, had
passed Congress in December and that his next
budget for fiscal year 2011 would likely cross the
$700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in
the upcoming State of the Union Address, President
Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze
on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011,
but leave national security expenditures of any sort
unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the
week after his return, news would come out about
the president's plans to ask Congress for $14.2 bil-
lion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively
bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doub-
ling the 2010 funds already approved by Congress
for that task.

Or consider that only days after his plane landed,
the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office re-
leased its latest "budget outlook" indicating that the
Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the Americ-
an taxpayer more than one trillion congressionally
approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the
non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the
Union Address caused next to no mainstream com-
ment, so there would be no significant media

response to these budget figures. And bear in mind
that these costs don't even include the massive pro-
jected societal price of the two wars, including fu-
ture care for wounded soldiers and the replacement
of worn-out or destroyed equipment, which will run
so much higher.

Each of these announcements could be con-
sidered another little coup for the Pentagon and the
U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon
blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a
national security establishment ascendant in a way
that the makers of Seven Days in May might have
found hard to grasp.

To put just the president's domestic cost-cutting
plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic
programs goes through Congress intact (an unlikely
possibility), it would still be chicken feed in the
cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president's team es-
timates savings of $250 billion over ten years. On
the other hand, the National Priorities Project has
done some sober figuring, based on projections
from the Office of Management and Budget, and
finds that, over the same decade, the total increase
in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion.
(And keep in mind that this figure doesn't include
possible increases in the budgets of the Department

of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence
agencies, or even any future war supplemental
funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion
in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the
guaranteed further rise of national security spend-
ing. American life, in other words, is being sacri-
ficed to the very infrastructure meant to provide
this country's citizens with "safety."

Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the
Afghan military and police. Forget, for a moment,
all obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to
400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and
evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into
shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan
will never be able to afford such a vast security ap-
paratus (which means it's ours to fund into the dis-
tant future), or even that many of those training
dollars may go to Xe/Blackwater or other mercen-
ary private contracting companies. Just think for a
minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the
Union Address offered not a hint that a single fur-
ther dollar would go to train an adult American, es-
pecially an out-of-work one, in anything
whatsoever.

Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to
those who admire the secretary of defense's movie

tastes: Do as he did and get the old Seven Days in
May from Netflix. Unlike Star Trek, the James
Bond films, Bewitched , and other sixties "classics,"
Seven Days isn't likely to come back, not even if
Matt Damon were available to play the marine col-
onel who saves the country from a military
takeover, because these days there's little left to
save— and every week is the Pentagon's week in
Washington.

SEVEN

Living in the Shadow of War

G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero

In my childhood, I played endlessly with toy sol-
diers—a crew of cowboys and bluecoats to defeat the
Indians and win the West, a bag or two of tiny olive-
green plastic marines to storm the beaches of Iwo
Jima. Alternately, I grabbed my toy six-guns, or
simply picked up a suitable stick in the park, and
with friends replayed scenes from the movies of
World War II, my father's war. It was second nature
to do so. No instruction was necessary. After all, a
script involving a heady version of American tri-
umphalism was already firmly in place, as it had
been long before my grandfather made it to this
land in steerage in the 1890s.

My sunny fantasies of war play were intimately
connected to the wars Americans had fought by an
elaborate mythology of American goodness and ulti-
mate victory. If my father tended to be silent about

the war he had taken part in, it made no difference.
I already knew what he had done. I had seen it at
the movies, in comic books, and sooner or later in
shows like Victory at Sea on that new entertain-
ment medium, television.

And when, in the 1960s, countless demonstrators
from my generation went into opposition to a brutal
American war in Vietnam, they did so still garbed in
cast-off "Good War" paraphernalia— secondhand
army jackets and bombardier coats— or they formed
themselves into "tribes" and turned goodness and
victory over to the former enemies in their child-
hood war stories. They transformed the "V for Vict-
ory" into a peace sign and made themselves into be-
ings recognizable from thousands of Westerns. They
wore the Pancho Villa mustache, sombrero, and
serape, or the Native American headband and moc-
casins. They painted their faces and grew long hair
in the manner of the formerly "savage" foe, and
smoked the peace (now, hash) pipe.

American mytho-history, even when turned up-
side down, was deeply embedded in their lives. How
could they have known that they would be its un-
dertakers, that their six-shooters would become
eBayable relics?

You can bet on one thing today: in those streets,
fields, parks, or rooms, children in significant num-
bers are not playing G.I. versus Sunni insurgent, or
special ops soldier versus Taliban fighter; and if
those kids are wielding toy guns, they're not replicas
from the current arsenal, but flashingly neon
weaponry from some fantasy future.

As it happens, G.I. Joe— then dubbed a "real
American hero"— proved to be my introduction to
this new world of child's war play. I had, of course,
grown up years too early for the original G.I. Joe (b.
1964), but one spring in the mid-1980s, during his
second heyday, I paid a journalistic visit to the Toy
Fair, a yearly industry bash for toy-store buyers
held in New York City. Hasbro, which produced the
popular G.I. Joe action figures, was one of the Big
Two in the toy business. Mattel, the maker of Joe's
original inspiration and big sister, Barbie, was the
other. Hasbro had its own building and, on arriving,
I soon found myself being led by a company minder
through a labyrinthine exhibit hall in the deeply
gender-segregated world of toys. Featured were
blond models dressed in white holding baby dolls
and fashion dolls of every imaginable sort, set
against an environment done up in nothing but pink
and robin's egg blue.

Here, the hum of the world seemed to lower to a
selling hush, a baby-doll whisper, but somewhere
off in the distance, you could faintly hear the high-
pitched whistle of an incoming mortar round amid
brief bursts of machine-gun fire. And then, sud-
denly, you stepped across a threshold and out of a
world of pastels into a kingdom of darkness, of net-
ting and camouflage, of blasting music and a
soundtrack of destruction, as well-muscled male
models in camo performed battle routines while
displaying the upcoming line of little G.I. Joe action
figures or their evil Cobra counterparts.

It was energizing. It was electric. If you were a toy
buyer, you wanted in. You wanted Joe, then the rage
in the boy's world of war play, as well as on chil-
dren's TV where an animated series of syndicated
half-hour shows was nothing but a toy commercial.
I was as riveted as any buyer, and yet the world I
had just been plunged into seemed alien. These fig-
ures bore no relation to my toy soldiers. On first
sight, it was hard even to tell the good guys from the
bad guys or to figure out who was fighting whom,
where, and for what reason. And that, it turned out,
was just the beginning.

In summer 2009, G.I. Joe returned, this time to
the big screen in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Nobody mentioned it then, but the most impressive
thing about the movie came during the eight
minutes or so of credits, which made it clear that to
produce a twenty-first-century shoot-'emup, you
needed to mobilize a veritable army of experts.
There may have been more "compositors" than act-
ors and more movie units (Prague Unit, Prague Se-
cond Unit, Paris Unit) than units of Joes. After the
last shot, those credits still scrolled inexorably on-
ward, like a beachhead in eternity, the very eternity
in American cultural life that G.I. Joe already seems
to inhabit. The credits did, of course, finally end,
and on a note of gratitude that, almost uniquely in
the film, evoked an actual history. "The producers
also wish to thank the following," and the list that
followed was headed by the Department of Defense,
which has been "advising" Hollywood on how to
make war movies, with generous loans of equip-
ment, troops, consultants, and weaponry in return
for script "supervision," since the silent era.

I caught G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra one sunny af-
ternoon in a multiplex theater empty of customers
except for a few clusters of teenage boys. So where
to start? How about with the Joes' futuristic military
base, all flashing screens, hi-tech weaponry, and
next-generation surveillance equipment, built under

the Egyptian desert. (How this most postmodern of
bases got under pharaonic sands or what kind of
Status of Forces Agreement the Joes have with the
government of Egypt are not questions this film
considers.) But here's the thing: well-protected as
the base is, spectacularly armed and trained as the
Joes are, it turns out to be a snap to break into— if
you happen to be a dame in the black catsuit of a
dominatrix and a ninja dressed in white. And then
there's that even spiffier ultra-evil base under the
Arctic ice (a location only slightly less busy than
Times Square in movies like this). It's the sort of
setup that would have made Captain Nemo salivate.
Oh, and don't forget the introductory scene about a
Scottish arms dealer in seventeenth-century France
condemned to having a molten mask fitted over his
face for selling weapons to all sides or his great-
great-great-something-or-other who's doing the
same thing in our world. Then there are those
weaponized exoskeletons lifted from Iron Man
(which also had its own two-faced arms dealer), the
X-wing-fighter-style space battle from Star Wars
but transposed under the ocean (a la James Bond in
Thunderball), not to speak of the Bond-like scene in
which the evildoer, having captured the hero,

introduces him to a fate so much worse than death
and so time-consuming it can't possibly work.

And then there is the requisite scene in which a
famous landmark (in this case, the Eiffel Tower) is
destroyed by the forces of evil, collapsing on pan-
icked crowds below, as in Independence Day or just
about any disaster movie you'd care to mention.
Throw in the sort of car chase introduced a zillion
years ago in Bullitt, but now pumped up beyond all
recognition, and, oh yes, there's someone who
wants to control the world and who will do any-
thing, including killing millions, to achieve his
purpose (ha-ha-ha!).

Movies like this are Hollywood's version of re-
combinant DNA. They can be written in the dark or,
as in the case of G.I. Joe, in a terrible hurry because
of an impending writers' strike. All that matters is
that they deliver the chases and explosions, the fake
blood and weird experiments, the wild weaponry
and futuristic sets, the madmen and heroes at such
a pace and decibel level that your nervous system is
brought fully to life jangling like a fire alarm. Their
sole justification is to deliver boys and young
men— and so the franchise— to studios like Para-
mount (and, in cases like G.I. Joe, to the Depart-
ment of Defense as well): the Batman franchise, the

Bond franchise, the Terminator franchise, the X-
Men franchise, the Bourne franchise, the Iron Man
franchise, the Transformers franchise. And now— if
it works— the G.I. Joe franchise.

After all, the first word that appears on screen
without explanation in this latest junior epic is, ap-
propriately enough, Hasbro. We're talking about the
toy company that is G.I. Joe and, in a synergistic
fury, was then releasing an endless range of toys, ac-
tion figures, video games, board games, Burger King
giveaways, and who knows what else as synergistic
accompaniments to this elaborate "advertainment."

Barbie's Little Brother

Hasbro first brought Joe to market in 1964. He
was then twelve inches tall and essentially a Barbie
for boys, a soldier doll you could dress in that "Ike"
jacket with the red scarf or a "beachhead assault fa-
tigue shirt," then undress, and take into that pup
tent with you for the night. Of course, nobody could
say such a thing. Officially, the doll was declared to
be a "poseable action figure for boys," and that
phrase, "action figure," for a new boy toy, like Joe
himself, never went away. He had no "backstory" (a

word still to be invented), and no name. G.I.— for
"Government Issue"— Joe was a generic term for an
American foot soldier, redolent of the last American
war in which total victory had been possible. Nor
did he have an enemy, in part because young boys
still knew a version of American history, of World
War II and the cold war. They still knew who the en-
emy was without a backstory or a guidebook.

Though born on the cusp of the Vietnam War, Joe
prospered for almost a decade until antiwar senti-
ment began to turn war toys into the personae non
gratae of the toy world, and, in 1973, the first oil
crunch hit, making the twelve-inch Joe far more ex-
pensive to produce. First, he shrank, and then, like
so many of his warring kin, he was (as Hasbro put
it) "furloughed." He left the scene, in part a casu-
alty, like much of war play then, of Vietnam distaste
and of an American victory that never came.

Despite being in his grave for a number of years,
as the undead of the toy world he would rise again.
In 1977, paving the way for his return, George Lucas
brought the war flick and war play back into the
child's world via the surprise hit Star Wars and its
accompanying three-and-three-quarter-inch-high
action figures that landed on Earth with an enorm-
ous commercial bang. Between them, they

introduced the child to a self-enclosed world of play
(in a galaxy "far, far away") shorn of Vietnam's
defeat.

In 1982, seeing an opening, Hasbro's planners
tagged Joe "a real American hero," and reintro-
duced him as part of a set of Star Wars-sized small
action figures, each with its own little backstory.
Hundreds of millions of these would subsequently
be sold. The Joe team now had an enemy as
well— another team, of course. In this case, though
the cold war was still going full blast in those early
years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, it wasn't the
Russians. As it happened, Hasbro's toymakers did a
better job of predicting the direction of the cold war
than the CIA or the rest of our government. They
sensed that the Russians wouldn't last and so chose
a vaguer, potentially more long-lasting enemy, a bo-
geyman called "terrorism" embodied in Cobra, an
organization of super-bad guys who lived not in Mo-
scow, but in— gasp— Springfield, U.SA. (Hasbro re-
searchers had discovered that a Springfield existed
in every state except Rhode Island, where the com-
pany was located.)

In story and style, the Joes and their enemies now
left history and the battlefields of this planet behind
for some alternate Earth. There, they disported

themselves with bulked-up weaponry and a look
that befitted not so much "real American heroes" as
a set of superheroes and supervillains in any futur-
istic space epic. And so, catching the Zeitgeist of
their moment, at a child's level, the crew at Hasbro
created the most successful boy's toy of that era by
divorcing war play from war American-style.

The Next War, On-Screen and Off

Twenty-seven years later, Joe, who lost his luster
a second time in the 1990s but never quite left the
toy scene, returned yet again with his new movie
and assorted products. Whether the latest iteration
proves to be another lucrative round for the fran-
chise depends not just on whether enough Americ-
an boys turn out to see him, but on whether his ver-
sion of explosive action, special effects, and futurist-
ic conflict is beloved by Saudis, Poles, Indians, and
Japanese. Today, for Hollywood, when it comes to
shoot-'em-ups, the international market means
everything.

Abroad, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened
smashingly in South Korea, and, in its first week, hit
number one in China and Russia, as well. It took in

nearly $100 million overseas in its first twelve days,
putting its U.S. take in the shade.

Whatever his fate, Joe, we know, can't die. On the
other hand, that once supreme ail-American tale of
battle triumph shows little sign of revival. Admit-
tedly, the new G.I. Joe movie does mention NATO
in passing, and one member of Joe's force is said,
also in passing, to have been stationed in Afgh-
anistan. In addition, the evil arms maker's company
produces its superweapons in the obscure but per-
fectly real former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan,
where the United States now rents out a base to
support its Afghan operations. Otherwise, the film's
only link with real-world battlefields comes from
the Pentagon-loaned Apache helicopters and Hum-
vees, and the fact that some of the military extras
lent by the Pentagon were unable to see the film
when it opened because they were then stationed in
Iraq or Afghanistan.

Soon after the film begins, a caption announces,
Star Wars-style, that we're "in the not too distant
future," and immediately you know that you're in
Hollywood's comfort zone, a recognizable battle
landscape that is no part of what once would have
been the war movie. Also recognizable is that loaned
Pentagon equipment and the fantasy weaponry

mixed so seamlessly in with it— "That's a Night
Raven!"— make the film an "advertainment" for the
techno-coolness of the U.S. military. The Pentagon,
you might say, is perfectly willing to make do with
post-historical battle space. It may be ever less ail-
American, but it's where the recruitable young are
heading.

For Hollywood, deserting actual American battle-
fields isn't the liberal thing to do, it's the business
thing to do. In fact, those planning out the film for
Hasbro and Paramount reportedly wanted to trans-
form the Joes into an international special ops force
based in Belgium, where NATO is headquartered.
However, fan grumbling at the early teasers Para-
mount released (and evidently a Pentagon reluct-
ance to help a less-than-American force) caused
them to pull back somewhat.

Still, one thing is certain: if the American car has
gone to hell, Hollywood's products still rule the
globe. And yet, in that international arena,
American-style war, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, is a
complete turnoff and real-world ail-American tri-
umph just doesn't fly anymore. That's certainly part
of what's happened to the American war film, but
far from all of it. After all, how long has it been since
all-American mythology and imagery— the

bluecoats' charge, the marines' advance— has
brought a mass audience to a movie screen. The last
such film, in 1998, was Saving Private Ryan, and it
was already an anomaly. Today, as close as it gets is
the parallel universe that passes for World War II in
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

It seems that American audiences are largely in
accord with the international crowd. They may not
want their Joe force stationed in Belgium, but they
don't want to see real war American-style on a re-
cognizable planet Earth either. They voted with
their feet most recently on a bevy of Iraq films.
Given the couple of hundred years that made tri-
umphalism a kind of American sacrament, it's noth-
ing short of remarkable that the young are no longer
willing to troop to movie theaters to see such films.
If you think of Hollywood as a kind of crude com-
mercial democracy, this can be seen as a popular
measure of imperial overstretch or the decline of the
globe's sole superpower.

Only recently has a mainstream discussion of U.S.
decline begun in Washington and among the pun-
dits. But at the movies it's been going on for a long,
long time. It's as if the grim reality of our seemingly
never-ending wars seeped into the pores of a nation
that no longer really believes victory is our due, or

that American soldiers will triumph forever and a
day. There may even be an unacknowledged ele-
ment of shame in all this. At least there is now a
consensus that we fight wars not fit for
entertainment.

As a result, war as entertainment has been sent
offshore— like imprisonment and punishment. Hol-
lywood has launched it into a nether-world of ali-
ens, superheroes, and robots. Something indelibly
American, close to a national religion, has gone
through the wormhole and is unlikely to return.

Joe lives. So does war, American-style, the brutal,
real thing in Afghanistan and Iraq, at Guantanamo
and Bagram, in the Predator- and Reaper-filled
skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands, among
the Blackwater (now Xe) mercenaries and the tens
of thousands of other private military contractors
who outnumber U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But the
two of them no longer have much to do with each
other.

If the Chinese, and South Koreans, and Saudis,
and enough American young men vote with their
feet and their wallets, there will be another G.I. Joe
film. And if Washington's national security man-
agers have anything to say about it, there will be

what's already regularly referred to as "the next
war." Film and war, however, are likely to share
little other than some snazzy weaponry, thanks to
the generosity of the Department of Defense, and
American kids who will pay good money to sit in the
dark and then perhaps join up to fight in the all-too-
real world. In this way, an entertainment era ends.
The curtain has come down and the children have
gone off elsewhere to play.

Meanwhile, behind that curtain, you can still
faintly hear the whistle of incoming mortars, the
rat-a-rat of machine guns, the sounds of actual war
that go on and on and on.

Why Military Dreams Fail— and Why
It Doesn't Matter

For drone freaks (and these days Washington
seems full of them), here's the good news: drones
are hot. Not long ago (2006 to be exact), the air
force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; in 2009, the
number was thirty-eight; by 2011, it will reputedly

be fifty, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky's
the limit.

Better yet, for the latest generation of armed sur-
veillance drones, whole new surveillance capabilit-
ies will soon be available. Their newest video sys-
tem, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed
"Gorgon Stare" after the creature in Greek mytho-
logy whose gaze turned its victims to stone. Accord-
ing to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gor-
gon Stare will offer a "pilot" back in the Langley,
Virginia, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to
"stare" via twelve video feeds (where only one now
exists) at a 1.5 square mile area, and then, with
Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any
part of that area into rubble. Within the year, that
viewing capacity is expected to double to three
square miles.

What we're talking about here is the gaze of the
gods, updated in corporate labs for the modern
American war-fighter— a gaze that can be focused
on whatever moves just about anywhere on the
planet, 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away.
And what's true of video capacity will be no less true
of the next generation of drone sensors— and, of
course, of drone weaponry like that "5-pound mis-
sile the size of a loaf of French bread" meant in

some near-robotic future to replace the present
100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger
or Predator C, the next generation drone under de-
velopment at General Atomics Aeronautical Sys-
tems. Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely
upgradeable, since we're still in the robotics equi-
valent of the age of the "horseless carriage," as Peter
Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us. The
first nanodrones will, according to Jane Mayer of
the New Yorker, be able to "fly after their prey like a
killer bee through an open window."

When it comes to drones, the air force and the
CIA are no longer the only games in town. The navy
wants in, too. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral
Gary Roughead, reports Jason Paur of Wired's
Danger Room blog, is looking for "a robotic attack
aircraft that can land and take off from a carrier."
According to Paur, the X-47B, which theoretically
should be able to do just that, could be checking out
those carrier decks by 2011 and be fully operational
by 2025.

Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for
the high seas where they are called unmanned sur-
face vehicles (USVs). In fact, Israel— which, along
with the United States, is leading the way on
drones— reportedly has already launched USVs off

the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The United
States can't be far behind, and it seems that, like
their airborne cousins, these ships, too, will be
weaponized.

Taking the Measure of a Slam-Dunk
Weapons System

Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In
his first nine months, President Obama authorized
more drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal border-
lands than the Bush administration did in its last
three years in office.

In Washington, drones are even considered the
"de-escalatory" option for the Afghan War by some
critics. Among the few people who don't adore them
are hard-core war-fighters who don't want an ar-
mada of robot planes standing in the way of sending
in more troops. Vice President Joe Biden, however,
is a drone-atic. He reportedly wanted to up their
missions, especially in Pakistan, rather than go the
full boots-on-the-ground route.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto
the drone band-wagon early. He has long been
pressing the air force to invest less in expensive

manned aircraft— he's called the F-35, still in devel-
opment, the last manned fighter aircraft— but more
in the robotic kind.

Coming back to earth for a moment, what drones
do is put wings on the Bush-era Guantanamo prin-
ciple that Washington has an inalienable right to act
as a global judge, jury, and executioner, and in do-
ing so remain beyond the reach of any court or law.
Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extraju-
dicial executions, has suggested that the U.S. drone
attacks might constitute war crimes under interna-
tional law: "[T]he CIA is running a program that is
killing significant numbers of people and there is
absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant
international laws." But that will matter little. When
it comes to drones, you don't have to be a prophet to
predict the future, since we've already experienced
it with previous wonder weapons.

Militarily speaking, in fact, we might as well be in
the film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray's
character is forced to live out the same twenty-four
hours again and again, with all the grimness of that
idea and none of the charm of that actor. We've re-
peatedly seen advanced weapons systems, like the
atomic bomb, or mind-boggling technologies of war
hailed for opening near-utopian paths to victory and

future peace. Take "the electronic battlefield" in Vi-
etnam, which was supposed to be an antidote to
brute and ineffective American airpower. That high-
tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to
bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and infilt-
rating enemy armies. No longer capable of going
anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to
hide.

In the 1980s, we had President Ronald Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed "Star
Wars" by its critics, a label that he accepted with
amusement. "If you will pardon my stealing a film
line— the Force is with us," he said in his usual geni-
al way. His dream, as he told the American people,
was to create an "impermeable" anti-missile shield
over the United States— "like a roof protects a family
from rain"— that would end the possibility of nucle-
ar attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace
in our time, or, if you were of a more critical turn of
mind, offer the possibility of a freebie nuclear as-
sault on the Soviets. In the Gulf War, "smart
bombs" and smart missiles were praised as the mil-
itary saviors of the moment. They were to give war
the kind of "precision" that would lower civilian
deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of
the Bush administration would claim in the next

decade, free the U.S. military to "decapitate" any re-
gime we loathed. All this would be possible without
so much as touching the civilian population, which
would, of course, then welcome us as liberators.
And later, there was "netcentric warfare," that
Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was
that advanced information-sharing technology
would create an uplinked force so savvy about chan-
ging battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere
demo or two would cow any "rogue" nation or in-
surgency into submission.

Of course, you know the results of this sort of ma-
gical thinking about wonder weapons (or technolo-
gies) and their properties just as well as I do. The
atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost
half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff, to
nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that,
someday, even terrorists might possess such
weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of
staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable
anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to
making it into our skies, and yet has continued to
fuel the global arms race. Those "smart bombs" of
the First Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while
the fifty "decapitation" strikes the Bush administra-
tion launched against Saddam Hussein's regime on

the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out
not a single Iraqi leader but killed "dozens" of civil-
ians. And the history of the netcentric military in
Iraq is well known. Its "success" sent Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy.

In the same way, robot drones as assassination
machines will prove to be just another weapons sys-
tem rather than a panacea for American warriors.
To date, in fact, there is at least as much evidence in
Pakistan and Afghanistan that the drones are help-
ing to spread war as that they are staunching it.

Yet, the above summary is, at best, only half the
story. None of these wonder weapons or technolo-
gies succeeded in their moment, or as advertised,
but that fact stopped none of them. From the atomic
bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that included
the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, produc-
tion plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an
enormous world-destroying arsenal (as well as pro-
liferating versions of the same, large and small,
across the planet). Nor did the electronic battlefield
go away. Quite the contrary, it came home and
entered our everyday world in the form of sensors,
cameras, surveillance equipment, and the like, now
implanted from our borders to our cities. While it's
true that Reagan's impermeable shield was the

purest of nuclear fantasies, it fueled a decades-long
binge of way-out research, space warfare plans and
commands, and boondoggles of all sorts, including
the staggeringly expensive, still not operational
anti-missile system that the Bush and now Obama
administrations have struggled to base somewhere
in Europe. Similarly, ever newer generations of
smart bombs and ever brighter missiles have been,
and are being, developed ad infinitum.

Rarely do wonder weapons or wonder technolo-
gies disappoint enough to disappear. Each of these
is, in fact, now surrounded by its own miniversion
of the military-industrial complex, with its own set
of corporate players, special lobbyists in Washing-
ton, specific interests, and congressional boosters.
Each has installed a typical revolving door that the
relevant Pentagon officials and officers can spin
through once their military careers are in order.
This is no less true for that wonder weapon of our
moment, the robot drone. In fact, you can already
see the military-industrial-drone-robotics complex
in formation.

As the Obama administration ups the ante on
drone use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it will be en-
suring not the end of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but
the long life of robot war within our ever more

militarized society. And by the time this set of ro-
botic dreams fails to pan out, it won't matter. Yet
another minisector of the military-industrial com-
plex will be etched into the American grain.

Whatever the short-term gains from introducing
drone warfare in these last years, we are now locked
into the 24/7 assassination trade, with our own set
of non-suicide bombers on the job into eternity.
This may pass for sanity in Washington, but it's
surely helping to pave the road to hell. If this is the
latest game in town, it won't remain mainly an
American one for long. Just wait until the first Ira-
nian drone takes out the first Baluchi guerrilla sup-
ported by American funds somewhere in Pakistan.
Then let's see what we think about the right of any
nation to summarily execute its enemies— and any-
one else in the vicinity— by drone.

The Afghan Speech Obama Should
(But Won't) Give

[Note: This was written in November 2009, more
than a month before President Obama addressed

the nation from the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point on the Afghan War.]

It's common knowledge that a president— but
above all a Democratic president— who tried to de-
escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afgh-
anistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw Amer-
ican troops, would be so much domestic political
dead meat. This everyday bit of engrained Washing-
ton wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evid-
ence in the historical record. We do know
something about what could happen to a president
who escalates a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon
Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited
war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled
the president who "lost" that country to the Com-
munists. And then there was Vice President Hubert
Humphrey, incapable of rejecting Johnson's war
policy, who lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon,
a candidate pushing a fraudulent "peace with hon-
or" formula for downsizing the war.

Still, we have no evidence about how American
voters would deal with a president who didn't take
the Johnson approach to a losing war. We do know
that there would be those on the right, and quite a
few warfightin' liberals as well, who would go nucle-
ar over any presidentially approved withdrawal

from Afghanistan. And we know that a media storm
would certainly follow. But when it comes to how
voters would react, especially at a moment when
unhappiness with the Afghan War (as well as the
president's handling of it) is on the rise, there is no
evidence.

While we don't know what exactly is going
through Obama's mind, or just when or in what
form he will address us, we do know something
about what his conclusions are likely to be; we do
know that he's not going to recommend a "minus
option." We have long been assured that any pro-
posals for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afgh-
anistan were never "on the table."

In any case, we— the rest of us— have had all the
disadvantages of essentially being in on the presid-
ent's councils these last months, and none of the ad-
vantages of offering our own advice. Personally, I
prefer not to leave the process to speechwriters and
advisers.

What follows, then, is my version of the presid-
ent's Afghan announcement. I've imagined it as a
challenging prime-time address to the American
people, doing what no American president has yet
done.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

A New Way Forward:
The President's Address to the Americ-
an People
on Afghan Strategy

Oval Office
For Immediate Release— December 2, 2009

8:01 P.M. EDT

My fellow Americans,

On March 28, I outlined what I called a "compre-
hensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and
Pakistan." It was ambitious. It was also an attempt
to fulfill a campaign promise that was heartfelt. I
believed— and still believe— that, in invading Iraq, a
war this administration is now ending, we took our
eye off Afghanistan. Our well-being and safety, as
well as that of the Afghan people, suffered for it.

I suggested then that the situation in Afghanistan
was already "perilous." I announced that we would
be sending seventeen thousand more American sol-
diers into that war zone, as well as four thousand
trainers and advisers whose job would be to in-
crease the size of the Afghan security forces so that
they could someday take the lead in securing their
own country. There could be no more serious de-
cision for an American president.

Eight months have passed since that day. This
evening, after a comprehensive policy review of our
options in that region that has involved command-
ers in the field, the joint chiefs of staff, National Se-
curity Adviser James Jones, Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
Vice President Joe Biden, top intelligence and State
Department officials and key ambassadors, Special
Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan
Richard Holbrooke, and experts from inside and
outside this administration, I have a very different
kind of announcement to make.

I plan to speak to you tonight with the frankness
Americans deserve from their president. I have re-
cently noted a number of pundits who suggest that
my task here should be to reassure you about Afgh-
anistan. I don't agree. What you need is the

unvarnished truth just as it's been given to me. We
all need to face a tough situation, as Americans have
done so many times in the past, with our eyes wide
open. It doesn't pay for a president or a people to
fake it or, for that matter, to kick the can of a diffi-
cult decision down the road, especially when the
lives of American troops are at stake.

During the presidential campaign I called Afgh-
anistan "the right war." Let me say this: with the full
information resources of the American presidency
at my fingertips, I no longer believe that to be the
case. I know a president isn't supposed to say such
things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to
change his mind. In fact, more than most people,
it's important that he do so based on the best in-
formation available. No false pride or political cal-
culation should keep him from that.

And the best information available to me on the
situation in Afghanistan is sobering. It doesn't mat-
ter whether you are listening to our war command-
er, General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press re-
ports have indicated, believes that with approxim-
ately eighty thousand more troops— which we es-
sentially don't have available— there would be a
reasonable chance of conducting a successful coun-
terinsurgency war against the Taliban, or our

ambassador to that country, Karl Eikenberry, a
former general with significant experience there,
who believes we shouldn't send another soldier at
present. All agree on the following seven points:

1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The con-
trol of the government of Afghan president
Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the em-
battled capital of Kabul. He himself has just
been returned to office in a presidential elec-
tion in which voting fraud on an almost un-
imaginably large scale was the order of the
day. His administration is believed to have
lost all credibility with the Afghan people.

2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption.
This includes President Karzai's administra-
tion up to its highest levels and also the war-
lords who control various areas and, like the
Taliban insurgency, are to some degree de-
pendent for their financing on opium, which
the country produces in staggering quantit-
ies. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-
state, but the leading narco-state on the
planet.

3. Despite billions of dollars of American
money poured into training the Afghan se-
curity forces, the army is notoriously

understrength and largely ineffective; the po-
lice forces are riddled with corruption and
held in contempt by most of the populace.

4. The Taliban insurgency is spreading and
gaining support largely because the Karzai
regime has been so thoroughly discredited,
the Afghan police and courts are so ineffect-
ive and corrupt, and reconstruction funds so
badly misspent. Under these circumstances,
American and NATO forces increasingly look
like an army of occupation, and more of them
are only likely to solidify this impression.

5. Al-Qaeda is no longer a significant factor in
Afghanistan. The best intelligence available
to me indicates— and again, whatever their
disagreements, all my advisers agree on
this— that there may be perhaps one hundred
al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and an-
other three hundred in neighboring Pakistan.
As I said in March, our goal has been to dis-
rupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on this we
have, especially recently, been successful.
Osama bin Laden, of course, remains at
large, and his terrorist organization is still a

danger to us, but not a $100 billion-plus
danger.

6. Our war in Afghanistan has become the mil-
itary equivalent of a massive bailout of a firm
determined to fail. Simply to send another
40,000 troops to Afghanistan would, my ad-
visers estimate, cost $40-$54 billion extra;
80,000 troops, more than $80 billion. Send-
ing more trainers and advisers in an effort to
double the size of the Afghan security forces,
as many have suggested, would cost another
estimated $10 billion a year. These figures
are over and above the present projected an-
nual costs of the war— $65 billion— and
would ensure that the American people will
be spending $100 billion a year or more on
this war, probably for years to come. Simply
put, this is not money we can afford to
squander on a failing war thousands of miles
from home.

7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now
shouldered the burden of our two wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were cap-
able of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops
to Afghanistan, they would without question
be servicepeople on their second, third,

fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military,
even the best in the world, wears down under
this sort of stress and pressure.

These seven points have been weighing on my
mind over the last weeks as we've deliberated on the
right course to take. Tonight, in response to the
realities of Afghanistan as I've just described them
to you, I've put aside all the subjects that ordinarily
obsess Washington, especially whether an American
president can reverse the direction of a war and still
have an electoral future. That's for the American
people, and them alone, to decide.

Given that, let me say as bluntly as I can that I
have decided to send no more troops to Afgh-
anistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national
interest of the American people that this war, like
the Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops
and resources will be brought home in an orderly
fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate
security for the men and women of our armed
forces. Ours will be an administration that will
stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position:
that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.

This will, of course, take time. But I have already
instructed Ambassador Eikenberry and Special

Representative Holbrooke to begin discussions,
however indirectly, with the Taliban insurgents for
a truce in place. Before year's end, I plan to call an
international conference of interested countries, in-
cluding key regional partners, to help work out a
way to settle this conflict. I will, in addition, soon
announce a schedule for the withdrawal of the first
American troops from Afghanistan.

For the counterinsurgency war that we now will
not fight, there is already a path laid out. We walked
down that well-mined path once in recent American
memory and we know where it leads. For ending the
war in another way, there is no precedent in our re-
cent history and so no path— only the unknown. But
there is hope. Let me try to explain.

Recently, comparisons between the Vietnam War
and our current conflict in Afghanistan have been
legion. Let me, however, suggest a major difference
between the two. When Presidents John F. Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnson faced their crises involving
sending more troops into Vietnam, they and their
advisers had little to rely on in the American record.
They, in a sense, faced the darkness of the unknown
as they made their choices. The same is not true of

In the White House, for instance, a number of us
have been reading a book on how the United States
got itself ever more disastrously involved in the Vi-
etnam War. We have history to guide us here. We
know what happens in counterinsurgency cam-
paigns. We have the experience of Vietnam as a
landmark on the trail behind us. And if that weren't
enough, of course, we have the path to defeat
already well cleared by the Russians in their Afghan
fiasco of the 1980s, when they had just as many
troops in the field as we would have if I had chosen
to send those extra forty thousand Americans. That
is the known.

On the other hand, peering down the path of de-
escalation, all we can see is darkness. Nothing like
this has been tried before in Washington. But I
firmly believe that this, too, is deeply in the Americ-
an grain. American immigrants, as well as slaves,
traveled to this country as if into the darkness of the
unknown. Americans have long braved the un-
known in all sorts of ways.

To present this more formulaically, if we sent the
troops and trainers to Afghanistan, if we increased
air strikes and tried to strengthen the Afghan Army,
we basically know how things are likely to work out:
not well. The war is likely to spread. The insurgents,

despite many losses, are likely to grow in strength.
Hatred of Americans is likely to increase. Pakistan
is likely to become more destabilized.

If, however, we don't take such steps and proceed
down that other path, we do not know how things
will work out in Afghanistan, or how well.

We do not know how things will work out in
Pakistan, or how well.

That is hardly surprising, since we do not know
what it means to end such a war now.

But we must not be scared. America will not— of
this, as your president, I am convinced— be a safer
nation if it spends many hundreds of billions of dol-
lars over many years, essentially bankrupting itself
and exhausting its military on what looks increas-
ingly like an unwinnable war. This is not the way to
safety, but to national penury— and I am unwilling
to preside over an America heading in that
direction.

Let me say again that the unknown path, the path
into the wilderness, couldn't be more American. We
have always been willing to strike out for ourselves
where others would not go. That, too, is in the best
American tradition.

It is, of course, a perilous thing to predict the fu-
ture, but in the Afghanistan/ Pakistan region, war
has visibly only spread war. The beginning of a ne-
gotiated peace may have a similarly powerful effect,
but in the opposite direction. It may actually take
the wind out of the sails of the insurgents on both
sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It may actually
encourage forces in both countries with which we
might be more comfortable to step to the fore.

Certainly, we will do our best to lead the way with
any aid or advice we can offer toward a future
peaceful Afghanistan and a future peaceful
Pakistan. In the meantime, I plan to ask Congress to
take some of the savings from our two wars winding
down and put them into a genuine jobs program for
the American people.

The way to safety in our world is, I believe, to se-
cure our borders against those who would harm us,
and to put Americans back to work. With this in
mind, next month I've called for a White House
Jobs Summit, which I plan to chair. And there I will
suggest that, as a start, and only as a start, we look
at two programs that were not only popular across
the political spectrum in the desperate years of the
Great Depression, but were remembered fondly
long after by those who took part in them— the

Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Pro-
gress Administration. These basic programs put
millions of Americans back to work on public pro-
jects that mattered to this nation and saved families,
lives, and souls.

We cannot afford a failing war in Afghanistan and
a 10.2 percent official unemployment rate at home.
We cannot live with two Americas, one for Wall
Street and one for everyone else. This is not the path
to American safety.

As president, I retain the right to strike at Al-
Qaeda or other terrorists who mean us imminent
harm, no matter where they may be, including
Afghanistan. I would never deny that there are
dangers in the approach I suggest today, but when
have Americans ever been averse to danger, or to a
challenge either? I cannot believe we will be now.

It's time for change. I know that not all Americ-
ans will agree with me and that some will be upset
by the approach I am now determined to follow. I
expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility
for whatever may result from this policy departure.
Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am convinced
that this is the way forward for our country in war
and peace, at home and abroad.

I thank you for your time and attention. Good-
night and God bless America. END 8:35 P.M. EDT

A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian
Authority

On December 1, 2009, from the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time pres-
idential address to the nation, speaking of his plans
for Afghanistan, Barack Obama surrendered. There
were no surrender documents. He wasn't on the
deck of the USS Missouri. He never bowed his head.
Still, from that moment on, think of him not as the
commander in chief, but as the commanded in
chief.

Give credit to the victors. Their campaign was
nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands
they were, they ambushed the president, held him
up with their threats, brought to bear key media
players and Republican honchos, and in the end
made off with the loot. The campaign began with a
strategic leak of Afghan War commander General
Stanley McChrystal's grim review of the situation in
that country, including demands for sizeable troop

escalations and a commitment to a counterinsur-
gency war. It came to include rumors of potential
retirements in protest if the president didn't deliver,
as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by
General McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive
citizen-mobilization of inside-the-Beltway former
neocon or fighting liberal think-tank experts, and a
helping hand from an admiring media. In the pro-
cess, the U.S. military succeeded in boxing in a pres-
ident who had already locked himself into a conflict
he had termed both "the right war" and a
"necessary" one. After more than two months of
painfully overreported deliberations, President
Obama ended up essentially where General
McChrystal began.

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was dusted
off from the moldy Vietnam archives and made
spanking new by General David Petraeus in 2006,
applied in Iraq (and Washington) in 2007, and first
put forward for Afghanistan in late 2008. It has now
been largely endorsed, and a major escalation of the
war— a new kind of military-led nation-building is
to be cranked up and set in motion. COIN is being
billed as a "population-centric," not "enemy-cent-
ric," approach in which U.S. troops are distinctly to
be "nation-builders as well a

The additional thirty thousand troops Obama
promised in his speech to surge into Afghanistan
are more than the United States had there as late as
summer 2008. In less than two years, in fact, U.S.
troop strength in that country will have more than
tripled to approximately one hundred thousand
troops. We're talking about near-Vietnam-level es-
calation rates. If you include the thirty-eight thou-
sand NATO forces also there (and a possible five
thousand more to come), total allied troop strength
will be significantly above what the Soviets deployed
during their devastating Afghan War of the 1980s in
which they fought some of the same insurgents now
arrayed against us.

Think of the West Point speech, then, as Barack
Obama's anti-MacArthur moment. In April 1951, in
the midst of the Korean War, President Harry Tru-
man relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of
U.S. forces. He did so because the general, a far
grander public figure than either McChrystal or
CentCom commander Petraeus (and with dreams of
his own about a possible presidential run), had pub-
licly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman's
plans to "limit" the war after the Chinese inter-
vened. Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss
in Rolling Stone calls a "generals' revolt"— amid

fears that his Republican opposition would line up
behind the insubordinate field commanders and
make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns.
Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who
might well have presidential ambitions, and who
has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever
did. After more than two months of what right-wing
critics termed "dithering" and supporters called
"thorough deliberations," Obama dealt with the
problem quite differently. He essentially agreed to
subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of
his field commanders. (Not that his Republican crit-
ics will give him much credit for doing so, of
course.) This is called "politics" in our country and,
for a Democratic president in our era, the end result
was remarkably predictable.

Monty Python in Afghanistan

There was surprisingly little discussion about the
president's decision to address the American people
on Afghanistan not from the Oval Office, but from
West Point. It was there, in 2002, that George W.
Bush gave a speech before the assembled cadets in
which he laid out his aggressive strategy of

preventive war, which would become the corner-
stone of the Bush Doctrine:

If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we
will have waited too long....

Our security will require transforming the
military you will lead— a military that must
be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any
dark corner of the world. And our security
will require all Americans to be forward-
looking and resolute, to be ready for pree-
mptive action when necessary to defend our
liberty and to defend our lives.
But keep in mind that this was still a graduation
speech and presidents have traditionally addressed
one of the military academies at graduation time.

Obama is not a man who appears in prop military
jackets with "commander in chief hand-stitched
across his heart before hoo-aahing crowds of sol-
diers, as our last president loved to do, and yet he
has increasingly appeared at military events and as-
sociated himself with things military. Has a presid-
ent ever, in fact, given a non-graduation speech, no
less a major address to the American people, at
West Point? Certainly, the choice of venue, and so
the decision to address a military audience first and

other Americans second, not only emphasized the
escalatory military path chosen, but represented a
kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

For his American audience, and undoubtedly his
skittish NATO allies as well, the president did put a
significant emphasis on an exit strategy from the
war. That off-ramp strategy was, however, placed in
the context of the training of the woeful Afghan se-
curity forces to take control of the struggle them-
selves and of the woeful government of Afghan
president Hamid Karzai turning over a new nation-
building leaf. Like the choice of West Point, this,
too, seemed to eerily echo George W. Bush's regu-
larly intoned mantra: "As Iraqis stand up, we will
stand down."

In his address, Obama offered July 2011 as the
date to begin withdrawing the first U.S. troops from
Afghanistan. ("After 18 months, our troops will be-
gin to come home.") However, according to the
Washington-insider "Nelson Report," a White
House on-background press briefing made it far
clearer that the president was talking about a "con-
ditions based withdrawal" that would depend "on
objective conditions on the ground," on whether the
Afghans had met the necessary "benchmarks."
When asked about "scaling back" the American war

effort, General McChrystal suggested a more con-
servative timeline— "sometime before 2013." Secret-
ary of Defense Robert Gates referred vaguely to the
"thinning out" of U.S. forces.

In fact, there's no reason to put faith in any of
these hazy deadlines. After all, this is the adminis-
tration that came into office announcing a firm one-
year closing date for the U.S. prison in Guantanamo
(officially missed), a firm sunshine policy for an
end-of-2009 release of millions of pages of historic-
al documents from the archives of the CIA and other
intelligence and military services (officially delayed,
possibly for years), and of course a firm date for the
withdrawal of U.S. combat troops, followed by all
U.S. forces from Iraq (possibly slipping).

Finish the job in Afghanistan? Based on the plans
of the field commanders to whom the president has
bowed, on the administration's record of escalation
in the war so far, and on the quiet reassurances to
the Pakistanis that we aren't leaving in any imagin-
able future, this war looks to be all job and no
finish.

If it weren't so grim, despite all the upbeat bench-
marks and encouraging words in the president's
speech, this would certainly qualify as Monty

Python in Afghanistan. After all, three cabinet min-
isters and twelve former ministers are under invest-
igation in Afghanistan on corruption charges. And
that barely scratches the surface of the problems in
a country that one Russian expert recently referred
to as an "international drug firm," where at least
one-third of the gross national product comes from
the drug trade. The Taliban now reportedly take a
cut of the billions of dollars in U.S. development aid
flowing into the country, much of which is other-
wise squandered, and of the American money that
goes into "protecting" the convoys that bring sup-
plies to U.S. troops throughout the country. One out
of every four Afghan soldiers has quit or deserted
the Afghan National Army, while the ill-paid, largely
illiterate, hapless Afghan police with their "well-de-
served reputation for stealing and extorting bribes,"
not to speak of a drug abuse rate estimated at 15
percent, are, as it's politely put, "years away from
functioning independently." Meanwhile, the insur-
gency is spreading to new areas of the country and
reviving in others.

Airless in Washington

Not that Washington, which obviously feels it has
much to impart to the Afghan people about good
governance and how to deal with corruption, has
particularly firm ground to stand on. After all, in
2008, the United States completed its first billion-
dollar presidential election in a $5 billion election
season, and two administrations just propped up
some of the worst financial scofflaws in the history
of the world and got nothing back in return. Mean-
while, the money flowing into Washington political
coffers from Wall Street, the military-industrial
complex, the pharmaceutical and health care indus-
tries, real estate, legal firms, and the like might be
thought of as a kind of drug in itself. At the same
time, according to USA Today, at least 158 retired
generals and admirals, many already pulling in mil-
itary pensions in the range of $100,000 to
$200,000, have been hired as "senior mentors" by
the Pentagon "to offer advice under an unusual ar-
rangement": they also work for companies seeking
Defense Department contracts.

In Congress, a rare Senate maneuver— needing a
sixty-vote super-majority to pass anything of signi-
ficance—has, almost without comment, become a

commonplace for the passage of just about any-
thing. This means Congress is eternally in a state of
gridlock. And that's just for starters when it comes
to ways in which the U.S. government, so ready to
surge its military and its civilian employees into
Afghanistan in the name of good governance, is in
need of repair, if not nation-building, itself.

It's nonetheless the wisdom of this Washington
and of this military that Obama has not found want-
ing, at least when it comes to Afghanistan. So why
did he listen to them? Stop for a moment and con-
sider the cast of characters who offered the presid-
ent the full range of advice available in Washington,
all of it, as far as we can tell, from Joe Biden's
"counterterrorism-plus" strategy to McChrystal's
COIN and beyond, escalatory in nature. Just a curs-
ory glance at the Obama team's collective record
should at least make you wonder:

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now said
to be the official with the best ties to Afghan
president Hamid Karzai, and therefore the
one in charge of "coaxing" him into a round
of reasonable nation-building, of making "a
new compact" with the Afghan people by
"improving governance and cracking down
on corruption." Yet, in the early 1990s, in her

single significant nation-building experience
at home, she botched the possibility of get-
ting a universal health-care bill through Con-
gress. She also had the "wisdom" to vote in
2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
• Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reputedly
deeply trusted by the president and in charge
of planning out our military future in Afgh-
anistan, was in the 1980s a supposed expert
on the Soviet Union, as well as deputy CIA
director and later deputy to National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Yet, in those years,
he couldn't bring himself to believe that the
Soviets were done for, even as that empire
was disappearing from the face of the earth.
In the words of former National Security
Council official Roger Morris, Gates "waged a
final battle against the Soviets, denying at
every turn that the old enemy was actually
dying." Former CIA official Melvin Goodman
writes: "Gates was wrong about every key in-
telligence question of the 1980s.... A Krem-
linologist by training, Gates was one of the
last American hardliners to comprehend the
changes taking place in the Soviet Union. He
was wrong about Mikhail Gorbachev, wrong

about the importance of reform, wrong about
Moscow's pursuit of arms control and
detente with the United States. He was
wrong about the Soviet withdrawal from
Afghanistan."

• Vice President Joe Biden, described by James

Traub in the New York Times as potentially
"the second-most powerful vice president in
history," as well as "the president's all-pur-
pose adviser and sage" on foreign policy, was
during the Bush years a believer in nation-
building in Afghanistan, voted to authorize
the invasion of Iraq, and later promoted the
idea— like Caesar with Gaul— of dividing that
country into three parts (without, of course,
bothering to ask the Iraqis), while leaving
25,000 to 30,000 American troops based
there in perpetuity.

• General Stanley McChrystal, our war com-
mander in Afghanistan and now the poster
boy for counterinsurgency warfare, had his
skills honed purely in the field of counterter-
rorism. The man who is now to "protect" the
Afghan people previously won his spurs as
the head of the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• General David Petraeus, who has practically
been deified in the U.S. media, is perhaps the
sawiest and most accomplished of this crew.
His greatest skill, however, has been in fos-
tering the career of David Petraeus. He is un-
doubtedly an adviser with an agenda and in
his wake come a whole crew of military and
think-tank experts, with almost unblemished
records of being wrong in the Bush years, but
to whom the surge in Iraq gave new
legitimacy.

• Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador to Kabul, in

his previous career in the U.S. military
served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and
as the commander of Combined Forces
Command-Afghanistan was the general re-
sponsible for building up the Afghan army
and "reforming" that country's police force.
We know how effective those attempts
proved.

• And then there are key figures with well-pad-

ded Washington CVs like Admiral Mike Mul-
len, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, or
James Jones, present national security ad-
viser and former commandant of the Marine
Corps, as well as the Supreme Allied

Commander, Europe, as well as a close friend
of Senator John McCain, and a former
revolving-door board member of Chevron
and Boeing. Remind me just what sticks in
your mind about their accomplishments?

So, when you think about Barack Obama's Afghan
decisions, remember first that the man considered
the smartest, most thoughtful president of our era
chose to surround himself with these people. He
chose, that is, not fresh air, or fresh thought in the
field of foreign and war policy, but the airless pre-
cincts where the combined wisdom of Washington
and the Pentagon now exists, and the remarkable
lack of accomplishment that goes with it. In short,
these are people whose credentials largely consist of
not having been right about much over the years.

Admittedly, this administration has called in
practically every Afghan expert in sight. Unfortu-
nately, the most essential problem isn't in Afgh-
anistan; it's in Washington where knowledge is
slim, egos large, and conventional national security
wisdom deeply imprinted on a system bleeding
money and breaking down. The president cam-
paigned on the slogan, "Change we can believe in."
He then chose as advisers— in the economic sphere
as well, where a similar record of gross error,

narrow and unimaginative thinking, and overidenti-
fication with the powerful could easily be com-
piled—a crew who had never seen a significant
change or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could
live with.

As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go
away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major
way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guanta-
namo remains open, black sites are still operating in
Afghanistan, the Pentagon's budget has grown yet
larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for
yet more money to pay for George W. Bush's wars
will, despite promises, continue.

Obama has ensured that Afghanistan, the first of
Bush's disastrous wars, is now truly his war, as well.

The Nine Surges of Obama's War

In his West Point speech, President Obama
offered Americans some specifics to back up his new
"way forward in Afghanistan." He spoke of the "ad-
ditional 30,000 U.S. troops" he was sending into
that country. He brought up the "roughly $30 bil-
lion" it would cost us to get them there and support

them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning
to bring them home by July 2011. Those were strik-
ing enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of
time, longer than many in the Democratic Party
would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don't
faintly cover just how fully the president has com-
mitted us to an expanding war and just how wide it
is likely to become.

Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it
gave little sense of just how big and expensive this
surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the
media as the "surge" is but a modest part of an on-
going expansion of the war effort in many areas.
Looked at another way, the media's focus on the
president's speech as the crucial moment of de-
cision, and on those thirty thousand new troops as
the crucial piece of information, has distorted
what's actually under way.

In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian
and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost
constant state of surge since the last days of the
Bush administration. Unfortunately, while informa-
tion on this is available, and often well reported, it's
scattered in innumerable news stories on specific
aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to
catch it all, no less put it together. What follows,

then, is my attempt to make sense of the nine fronts
on which the Unites States has been surging as part
of Obama's widening war.

1. The troop surge: Let's start with those
"30,000" new troops the president announced. First
of all, they represent phase two of Obama's surge.
As the president pointed out in his speech, there
were "just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afgh-
anistan" when he took office in January 2009. In
March 2009, Obama announced that he was order-
ing in 21,000 additional troops. By December 2009,
there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000
U.S. troops in Afghanistan. However, if you add the
32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 dis-
patched after the March announcement, you only
get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be ac-
counted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the
Washington Post, 11,000 of those were "authorized
in the waning days of the Bush administration and
deployed this year," bringing the figure to between
64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest
stage of the present Afghan "surge" was already un-
der way when Obama arrived. It also seems that at
least a few thousand more troops managed to slip
through the door without notice or comment. Simil-
arly, DeYoung reports that the president quietly

granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right
to "increase the [30,000] number by 10 percent, or
3,000 troops, without additional White House ap-
proval or announcement." That already potentially
brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000,
and an unnamed "senior military official" told
DeYoung that "the final number could go as high as
35,000 to allow for additional support personnel
such as engineers, medevac units and route-clear-
ance teams, which comb roads for bombs."

Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that
administration officials reportedly strong-armed
various European countries into offering. More than
1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and
simply not being withdrawn as previously an-
nounced. The cost of sending some of the others,
like the 900-plus troops Georgian president Mikhail
Saakashvili promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed
by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in
and, miraculously, you've surged up to, or beyond,
Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrys-
tal's basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pur-
sue a counterinsurgency war in that country.

2. The contractor surge: Given our heavily cor-
poratized and privatized military, it makes no sense
simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan.

You also need to know about the private contractors
who have taken over so many formerly military du-
ties, from KP and driving supply convoys to provid-
ing security on large bases.

There's no way of even knowing who is respons-
ible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded)
private contractors in Afghanistan. They certainly
went unmentioned in Obama's West Point speech.
Yet a modest-sized article by August Cole in the
Wall Street Journal the day after gave us the basics,
if you went looking for them. Headlined "U.S. Ad-
ding Contractors at Fast Pace," Cole's article repor-
ted: "The Defense Department's latest census shows
that the number of contractors increased about 40
percent between the end of June and the end of
September, for a total of 104,101. That compares
with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5 percent in the same
period.... Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are
locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total." In other
words, there are already more private contractors
on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S.
troops when the latest surge is complete.

Though many of these contractors are local
Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International
and Fluor Corporation, the website TPM Muckraker
to get a further breakdown of these figures

from the Pentagon and found that there were
16,400 "third country nationals" among the con-
tractors, and among those 9,300 Americans. This is
a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently
still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out
to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for in-
stance, writes of the contract that DynCorp and
Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan,
"which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to
each company in the coming years."

3. The militia surge: U.S. Special Forces are now
carrying out pilot programs for a minisurge in sup-
port of local Afghan militias that are, at least
theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to
create a movement along the lines of Iraq's Sunni
Awakening movement that, many believe, ensured
the "success" of George W. Bush's 2007 surge in
that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. sup-
port takes the form of offers of ammunition, food,
and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the fu-
ture we'll be ponying up more arms and, un-
doubtedly, significant amounts of cash.

This is, after all, to be a national program, the
Community Defense Initiative, which, according to
Jim Michaels of USA Today, will "funnel millions of
dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize

'neighborhood watch'-like programs to help with se-
curity." Think of this as a "bribe" surge. Such pro-
grams are bound to turn out to be essentially
money-based and designed to buy "friendship."

4. The civilian surge: The State Department now
claims to be "on track" to triple the U.S. civilian
component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in
January 2009 to 974 by early 2010. Of course, that
means another mini-surge in private contractors:
more security guards to protect civilian employees
of the U.S. government, including "diplomats and
experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of
law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction
teams across the country." A similar civilian surge is
evidently under way in neighboring Pakistan, just
the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan
for that humongous new, nearly billion-dollar em-
bassy compound to be built in Islamabad.

5. The CIA and special forces surge: Noah
Shachtman of Wired'?, Danger Room blog had it
right when he wrote: "The most important escala-
tion of the war might be the one the President didn't
mention at West Point," referring to the CIA's "cov-
ert" (but openly discussed) drone war in the
Pakistani tribal borderlands. In fact, the CIA's
drone attacks there have been escalating in

numbers since the Obama administration came into
office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge
in the Af-Pak theater of operations, there is to be a
CIA one as well. While little information on this is
available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the
New York Times report that the CIA has delivered a
plan to the White House "for widening the cam-
paign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft
in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and se-
curing a White House commitment to bulk up the
CIA's budget for operations inside the country." In
addition, Scott Shane of the Times reports, "The
White House has authorized an expansion of the
CIA's drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal
areas, officials said... to parallel the president's de-
cision... to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
American officials are talking with Pakistan about
the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first
time— a controversial move since it is outside the
tribal areas— because that is where Afghan Taliban
leaders are believed to hide."

The Pakistani southern border province of
Baluchistan is a complex tinderbox of a region with
its own sets of separatists and religious extremists,
as well as a (possibly U.S. -funded) rebel movement
aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The

Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to
drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated
provincial capital Quetta where, Washington insists,
the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If
such strikes do begin, they could prove the most
destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that
the present surge represents.

In addition, thanks to the Nation magazine's
Jeremy Scahill, we know that, from a secret base in
Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army's Joint Special
Operations Command, in conjunction with the
private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwa-
ter), operates "a secret program in which they plan
targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al
Qaeda operatives, 'snatch and grabs' of high-value
targets and other sensitive action inside and outside
Pakistan." Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan
involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget opera-
tions, we may only have the faintest outlines of what
the "surge" there means.

6. The base-building surge: Like the surge in con-
tractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base
building in Afghanistan significantly preceded
Obama's latest troop-surge announcement, but he
has continued it. A December 5, 2009, NBC Nightly
News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at

Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a "boom
town," shows just how ongoing this part of the over-
all surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq
from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into
bases, the largest of which— especially the old Soviet
site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million
in construction projects and upgrades under
way— are beginning to look like ever more perman-
ent fixtures on the landscape.

As Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported,
forward operating bases and smaller combat out-
posts have been sprouting all over southern Afgh-
anistan. "Forget for a moment the 'debates' in
Washington over Afghan War policy," he wrote,
"and, if you just focus on the construction activity
and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you
see is a war that, from the point of view of the
Pentagon, isn't going to end any time soon. In fact,
the U.S. military's building boom in that country
suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War,
the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not
near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no
matter what course Washington may decide upon."

7. The training surge: In some ways, the greatest
prospective surge may prove to be in the training of
the Afghan National Army and police. Despite years

of U.S. and NATO "mentoring," both are in notori-
ously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with
desertions, running at a rate of at least 25 percent of
those trained annually, and the Afghan police are
reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-ad-
dicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help
of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an
army whose numbers officially stand at approxim-
ately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd
thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained
troops by fall 2010 and 240,000 a year later. Simil-
arly, the Obama administration hopes to take the
police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.

8. The cost surge: This is a difficult subject to pin
down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-ac-
counting terms, one of the least transparent organ-
izations around. What can be said for certain is that
Obama's $30 billion figure won't faintly hold when
it comes to the real surge. There is no way that fig-
ure will cover anything like all the troops, bases,
contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train
an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000
in the coming years. We've already spent more than
$15 billion on the training of the Afghan army, and
another $7 billion has gone into police training,
figures for a far smaller combined force

with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive
bulking up of the country's security forces will actu-
ally cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom com-
mander General David Petraeus suggested a pos-
sible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a
program works, which seems unlikely, try to ima-
gine how one of the poorest countries on the planet
will support a 400,000-person force. Afghan pres-
ident Hamid Karzai has suggested that it will take at
least fifteen to twenty years before the country can
actually pay for such a force itself. In translation,
what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin
Powell's Pottery Barn rule ("You break it, you own
it"). In this case, you build it, you own it. If we cre-
ate such security forces, they will be, financially
speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. And this
is even without adding in those local militias we're
planning to invest "millions" in.

9. The endlessly receding horizon surge: By all
accounts, the president tried to put some kind of
limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting
"an open-ended commitment." With that in mind,
he evidently insisted on a plan in which some of the
surge troops would start to come home in July 2011.
This was presented in the media as a case of giving
something to everyone (the Republican opposition,

his field commanders, and his own antiwar Demo-
cratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders
and the Republican opposition a very real surge in
numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post head-
line said it all: "McChrystal's Afghanistan Plan Stays
Mainly Intact." On the other hand, what he gave his
base was only the vaguest of drawdown promises.
Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that
commitment was being watered down by the first
top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough,
as the right wing began to blaze away about the mis-
take of announcing a withdrawal date "to the en-
emy," there was little short of a stampede of high of-
ficials eager to make that promise ever less mean-
ingful. In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a
"flurry of coordinated television interviews," the top
civilian and military officials of the administration
marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows "in
lockstep" to reassure the Right (and they were reas-
sured) by playing "down the significance of the July
2011 target date." The United States was, Secretary
of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be
in the region in strength for years to come. ("July
2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a
lengthy process. That date, [national security

adviser] General [James] Jones said, is a 'ramp'
rather than a 'cliff.'")

When it came to the spreading Taliban insur-
gency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech
spoke of his surge goal this way: "We must reverse
the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to
overthrow the government." This seemed a modest
enough target, even if the means of reaching it are
proving immodest indeed. After all, we're talking
about a relatively lightly armed minority Pashtun
insurgency. Against them and a minuscule number
of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched
an unbelievably costly buildup of forces over vast
distances, along fragile, overextended supply lines,
and in a country poorer than almost any other on
the planet. The State Department has followed suit,
as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan. This is
the reality the president and his top officials didn't
bother to explain to the American people.

And yet, confoundingly, as the United States
bulks up, the war only grows fiercer both within the
country and in parts of Pakistan. As Andrew
Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, has writ-
ten, "Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars
in distant countries does more to inflame than to
extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent

anti-Western jihadism." Whatever the Obama ad-
ministration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
however, give it some credit: the ability to mount a
sustained operation of this size in one of the most
difficult places on the planet, when it can't even
mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains
a strange wonder of the world.

Pentagon Time: Tick... Tick... Tick...

Back in 2007, when General David Petraeus was
the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had
a penchant for clock imagery. In an interview in
April of that year, he typically said: "I'm conscious
of a couple of things. One is that the Washington
clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad
clock, so we're obviously trying to speed up the
Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress
on the ground that can perhaps give hope to those
in the coalition countries, in Washington, and per-
haps put a little more time on the Washington
clock." And he wasn't alone. Military spokespeople
and others in the Bush administration right up to
the president regularly seemed to hear one, two, or

sometimes as many as three clocks ticking away
ominously and out of sync.

Hearing some discordant ticking myself of late, I
decided to retrieve Petraeus's image from the dust-
bin of history. So imagine three ticking clocks, all
right here in the United States, one set to Washing-
ton time, a second to American time, and the third
to Pentagon time.

In Washington— with even the New York Times
agreeing that a "majority" of one hundred is sixty
(not fifty-one) and that the Senate's forty-first vote
settles everything— the clock seems to be ticking er-
ratically, if at all. On the other hand, that American
clock, if we're to believe the good citizens of Mas-
sachusetts, is ticking away like a bomb. Americans
are impatient, angry, and "in revolt" against Wash-
ington time. That's what the media continue to tell
us in the wake of the Senate upset in which Repub-
licans won the long-safe Democratic seat opened up
by the death of Edward Kennedy. Depending on
which account you read, they were outraged by a
nearly trillion-dollar health-care reform that was
also a giveaway to insurance companies, and an-
noyed by Democratic candidate Martha Coakley
calling Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling a
"Yankees fan." They were anxious about an official

Massachusetts unemployment rate of 9.4 percent
(and a higher real one), an economy that has re-
bounded for bankers but not for regular people,
soaring deficits, staggering foreclosure rates, mega-
banking bonuses, the Obama administration's bail-
out of those same bankers, and its coziness with
Wall Street. They were angry and impatient about a
lot of things, blind angry you might say, since they
were ready to vote back into office the party not in
office, even if behind that party's "new face" were
ideas that would take us back to the origins of the
present disaster.

It's worth noting, however, that they weren't
angry about everything— and that the Washington
clock, barely moving on a wide range of issues, is
still ticking away when it comes to one institution.
The good citizens of Massachusetts may be against
free rides and bailouts for many types, but not for
everybody. I'm speaking, of course, about the
Pentagon, for which Congress in 2010 passed a re-
cord budget of $626 billion. This happened without
real debate, much public notice, or even a touch of
anger in Washington or Massachusetts. And keep in
mind that the Pentagon's real budget is un-
doubtedly closer to a trillion dollars, without even

including the full panoply of support for our nation-
al security state.

The Tea Party crews don't rail against Pentagon
giveaways, nor do American voters. Unfettered
Pentagon budgets pass in the tick-tock of a Wash-
ington clock and no one seems fazed when the Wall
Street Journal reveals that military aides
accompanying globe-hopping parties of congres-
sional representatives regularly spend thousands of
taxpayer dollars on snacks, drinks, and other
"amenities" for them, even while, like some K Street
lobbying outfit, promoting their newest weaponry.
Think of it, in financial terms, as Pentagon peanuts
shelled out for actual peanuts, and no one gives a
damn.

It was hardly news— and certainly nothing to get
angry about— when the secretary of defense met
privately with the nation's top military-industrial
contractors, called for an even "closer partnership,"
and pledged to further their mutual interests by
working "with the White House to secure steady
growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time." Nor
did it cause a stir among the denizens of inside-the-
Beltway Washington or Americans generally when
the top ten defense contractors spent more than $27
million lobbying the federal government, as in the

last quarter of 2009, just as plans for the president's
Afghan surge were being prepared.

However, it's not just the angry citizens of Mas-
sachusetts, or those Tea Party organizers, or Repub-
lican stalwarts who see no link between our
military-industrial outlays, our perpetual wars, and
our economic woes. When, for instance, was the last
time you saw a bona fide liberal economist and
columnist like Paul Krugman include the Pentagon
and our wars in the litany of things potentially
bringing this country down?

Striking percentages of Americans attend the
church (temple, mosque) of their choice, but when
it comes to American politics and the economy, the
U.S. military is our church, "national security" our
bible, and nothing done in the name of either can be
wrong. It's as if the military, already the most
revered institution in the country, existed on the
other side of a Star-Trekkian financial wormhole.

Which brings us to Pentagon time. Yes, that third
clock is ticking, but at a very different tempo from
those in Washington or Massachusetts.

Americans are evidently increasingly impatient
for "change" of whatever sort, whether you can be-
lieve in it or not. The Pentagon, on the other hand,

is patient. It's opted for making counterinsurgency
the central strategy of its war in Central and South
Asia, the sort of strategy that, even if successful, ex-
perts claim could easily take a decade or two to pull
off. But no problem— not when the Pentagon's clock
is ticking on something like eternal time.

And here's the thing: because the mainstream
media are no less likely to give the Pentagon a blank
check than Americans generally, it's hard indeed to
grasp the extent to which that institution, and the
military services it represents, are planning and liv-
ing by their own clock. Though major papers have
Pentagon "beats," they generally tell us remarkably
little, except inadvertently and in passing, about
Pentagon time.

Take, for example, a January 6, 2010, story from
the inside pages of the New York Times. Reporter
Eric Schmitt began it this way: "The military's effort
to build a seasoned corps of expert officers for the
Afghan war, one of the highest priorities of top com-
manders, is off to a slow start, with too few volun-
teers and a high-level warning to the armed services
to steer better candidates into the program, accord-
ing to some senior officers and participants." At
stake was an initiative "championed" by Afghan
War commander General Stanley McChrystal to

create a "912-member corps of mostly officers and
enlisted service members who will work on Afgh-
anistan and Pakistan issues for up to five years."

As Schmitt saw it, a program in its infancy was
already faltering because it didn't conform to one of
the normal career paths followed in the U.S. milit-
ary. But what caught my eye was that phrase "up to
five years." Imagine what it means for the war com-
mander, backed by key figures in the Pentagon, to
plan to put more than nine hundred soldiers, in-
cluding top officers, on a career path that would
leave them totally wedded, for five years, to war in
the Af-Pak theater of operations. (After all, if that
war were to end, the State Department might well
take charge.) In other words, McChrystal was creat-
ing a potentially powerful interest group within the
military whose careers would be wedded to an on-
going war with a time line that extended into 2015,
and who would have something to lose if it ended
too quickly. What does it matter then that President
Obama was proclaiming his desire to begin drawing
down the war in July 2011?

Or consider the plan being proposed by special
forces major Jim Gant, and now getting a most re-
spectful hearing inside the military, according to
Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post. Gant

wants to establish small special forces teams that
would "go native," move into Afghan villages and
partner up with local tribal leaders, "One Tribe at a
Time," as an influential paper he wrote on the sub-
ject was entitled. "The U.S. military," reported
Tyson, "would have to grant the teams the leeway to
grow beards and wear local garb, and enough
autonomy in the chain of command to make rapid
decisions. Most important, to build relationships,
the military would have to commit one or two teams
to working with the same tribe for three to five
years, Gant said." She added that Gant has "won
praise at the highest levels for his effort to radically
deepen the U.S. military's involvement with Afghan
tribes— and is being sent back to Afghanistan to do
just that." Again, another "up to five year" commit-
ment in Afghanistan and a career path to go with it
on a clock that, in Gant's case, has yet to start
ticking.

Or just to run through a few more examples:

• In August 2009, the superb Walter Pincus of
the Washington Post quoted air force bri-
gadier general Walter Givhan, in charge of
training the Afghan National Army Air
Corps, as saying: "Our goal is by 2016 to have
an air corps that will be capable of doing

those operations and the things that it needs
to do to meet the security requirements of
this country." Of course, that six-year
timeline includes the American advisers
training that air force. (And note that
Givhan's 2016 date may actually represent
slippage. In January 2008, when air force
brigadier general Jay H. Lindell, who was
then commander of the Combined Air Power
Transition Force, discussed the subject, he
spoke of an "eight-year campaign plan"
through 2015 to build up the Afghan Air
Corps.)

• In a January 13, 2010, piece on Pentagon
budgeting plans, Anne Gearan and Anne Fla-
herty of the Associated Press reported: "The
Pentagon projects that war funding would
drop sharply in 2012, to $50 billion" from
the present at least $159 billion (mainly
thanks to a projected massive drawdown of
forces in Iraq), "and remain there through
2015." Whether the financial numbers are ac-
curate or not, the date is striking: again a
five-year window.

• Or take the "train and equip" program aimed

at bulking up the Afghan military and police,

which will be massively staffed with U.S. mil-
itary advisers (and private security contract-
ors) and is expected to cost at least $65 bil-
lion. It's officially slated to run from 2010 to
2014, by which time the combined Afghan
security forces are projected to reach four
hundred thousand.
• Or consider a couple of the long-term con-
tracts already being handed out for Afghan
War work like the $158 million the air force
has awarded to Evergreen Helicopters, Inc.,
for an "indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity
(IDIQ) contract for rotary wing aircraft, per-
sonnel, equipment, tools, material, mainten-
ance and supervision necessary to perform
passenger and cargo air transportation ser-
vices. Work will be performed in Afghanistan
and is expected to start Apr. 3, 2009, to be
completed by Nov. 30, 2013." Or the
Pentagon contract awarded to the private
contractor SOS International primarily for
translators, which has an estimated comple-
tion date of September 2014.

Of course, this just scratches the surface of long-
term Afghan War planning in the Pentagon and the
military, which rolls right along, seemingly barely

related to whatever war debates may be taking place
in Washington. Few in or out of that city find these
timelines strange, and indeed they are just sympto-
matic of an organization already planning for "the
next war" and the ones after that, not to speak of the
next generation bomber of 2018, the integrated U.S.
Army battlefield surveillance system of 2025, and
the drones of 2047.

This, in short, is Pentagon time, and it's we who
fund that clock that ticks toward eternity. If the
Pentagon gets in trouble, fighting a war or other-
wise, we bail it out without serious debate or any of
the anger we saw in the Massachusetts election. No
one marches in the streets, or demands that
Pentagon bailouts end, or votes 'em (or at least their
supporters) out of office.

In this way, no institution is more deeply embed-
ded in American life or less accountable for its acts.
Pentagon time exists enswathed in an almost reli-
gious glow of praise and veneration, what might
once have been known as "idolatry." Until the
Pentagon is forced into our financial universe, the
angry, impatient one where most Americans now
live, we're in trouble. Until candidates begin losing
because angry Americans reject our perpetual wars,
and the perpetual war planning that goes with

them, this sort of thinking will simply continue, no
matter who the "commander in chief is or what he
thinks he's commanding. Americans need to stop
saluting and end the Pentagon's free ride before our
wars kill us.

EPILOGUE
Premature Withdrawal

We've now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost
twenty years, and intermittently at war in Afgh-
anistan for thirty years. Think of it as nearly half a
century of experience, all bad. And what is it that
Washington seems to have concluded? In Afgh-
anistan, where one disaster after another has oc-
curred, that we Americans can finally do more of
the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so
much better. In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, de-
cided that enough was enough and we should
simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us
to stay are growing louder by the week.

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us. After
all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not
to do what they've done best in recent years: cut one
another's throats?

Modesty in Washington? Humility? The ability to
draw new lessons from long-term experience? None
of the above is evidently appropriate for "the indis-
pensable nation," as former Secretary of State

Madeleine Albright once called the United States,
and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to
"see further into the future." None of the above is
part of the American arsenal, not when Washing-
ton's weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the
scrap heap of history and repeatedly rescued, re-
mains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go
anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us,
even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly,
deeply, madly badly with us.

An expanding crew of Washington-based opiners
is now calling for the Obama administration to alter
its plans, negotiated in the last months of the Bush
administration, for the departure of all American
troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. They seem to
have taken Albright's belief in American
foresight— even prophesy— to heart and so are
basing their arguments on their ability to divine the
future.

The problem, it seems, is that, whatever may be
happening in the present, Iraq's future prospects
are terrifying, which makes leaving, if not incon-
ceivable, then as massively irresponsible (as former
Washington Post correspondent and bestselling au-
thor Tom Ricks wrote in a New York Times op-ed)
as invading in the first place. Without the U.S.

military on hand, we're told, the Iraqis will almost
certainly deep-six democracy, while devolving into
major civil violence and ethnic bloodletting, pos-
sibly of the sort that convulsed their country in
2005-06 when, by the way, the U.S. military was
present in force.

The various partial winners of Iraq's much
delayed March 7, 2010, election would, we were as-
sured beforehand, jockey for power for months try-
ing to cobble together a functioning national gov-
ernment. During that period, violence, it was said,
would surely escalate, potentially endangering the
marginal gains made thanks to the U.S. military
"surge" of 2007. The possibilities remain endless
and, according to these doomsayers, none of them
are encouraging: Shiite militias could use our with-
drawal to stage a violence-filled comeback. Iranian
interference in Iraqi affairs is likely to increase and
violently so, while al-Qaeda-in-Iraq could move into
any post-election power void with its own destruct-
ive agenda.

The Warrior- Pundits Occupy the
Future

Such predictions are now dribbling out of the
world of punditry and into the world of news report-
ing, where the future threatens to become fact long
before it makes it onto the scene. Already it's repor-
ted that the anxious U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen-
eral Ray Odierno, "citing the prospects for political
instability and increased violence," is talking about
"plan B's" to delay the agreed upon withdrawal of all
"combat troops" from the country this August. He
has, Ricks reported on Foreign Policy's website, of-
ficially requested that a combat brigade remain in
or near the troubled northern city of Kirkuk after
the deadline.

As 2009 ended, Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates was suggesting that new negotiations might
extend the U.S. position into the post-2011 years. ("I
wouldn't be a bit surprised to see agreements
between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a
train, equip, and advise role beyond the end of
2011.") Centcom commander General David
Petraeus agreed. More recently, Gates added that a
"pretty considerable deterioration" in the country's
security situation might lead to a delay in

withdrawal plans (and Iraqi prime minister Nouri
al-Maliki has agreed that this is a possibility). Vice
President Joe Biden is already talking about rela-
beling "combat troops" not sent home in August be-
cause, as he put it in an interview with Helene
Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times,
"we're not leaving behind cooks and quartermas-
ters." The bulk of the troops remaining, he insisted,
"will still be guys who can shoot straight and go get
bad guys."

And a chorus of the usual suspects, Washington's
warrior-pundits and "warrior journalists" (as Tom
Hayden calls them), have been singing ever-louder
versions of a song warning of that greatest of all
dangers: premature withdrawal. Ricks, for instance,
recommended in the Times that, having scuttled the
"grandiose original vision" of the Bush invasion, the
Obama administration should still "find a way" to
keep a "relatively small, tailored force" of thirty
thousand to fifty thousand troops in Iraq "for many
years to come." (Those numbers, oddly enough,
bring to mind the thirty-four thousand U.S. troops
that, according to Ricks in his 2006 best-seller
Fiasco, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
projected as the future U.S. garrison in Iraq in the
weeks before the invasion of 2003.)

Kenneth Pollack, a drumbeater for that invasion,
is now wary of removing "the cast"— his metaphor
for the U.S. military presence— on the "broken arm"
of Iraq too soon, since states that have "undergone a
major inter-communal civil war have a terrifying
rate of recidivism." For Kimberly and Frederick
Kagan, drumbeaters extraordinaire, writing for the
Wall Street Journal, the United States must start
discussing "a long-term military partnership with
Iraq beyond 2011," especially since that country will
not be able to defend itself by then.

Why, you might well ask, must we stay in Iraq,
given our abysmal record there? Well, say these ex-
perts, we are the only force all Iraqis now accept,
however grudgingly. We are, according to Pollack,
the "peacekeepers... the lev[ee] holding back viol-
ence... Iraq's security blanket, and the broker of
political deals. ..we enforce the rules." According to
Ricks, we are the only "honest brokers" around. Ac-
cording to the Kagans, we were the "guarantor" of
the recent elections, and have a kind of "continuing
leverage" not available to any other group in that
country, "should we choose to use it."

Today, Iraq is admittedly a mess. On our watch,
the country crashed and burned. No one claims that
we've put it back together. Multibillions of dollars in

reconstruction funds later, the United States has
been incapable of delivering the simplest things like
reliable electricity or potable water to significant
parts of the country. Now, the future sits empty and
threatening before us. So much time in which so
many things could happen, and all of them horrify-
ing, all calling out for us to remain because they just
can't be trusted, they just don't deliver.

The Sally Fields of American Foreign
Policy

Talk about blaming the victim. An uninvited
guest breaks into a lousy dinner party, sweeps the
already meager meal off the table, smashes the
patched-together silverware, busts up the rickety
furniture, and then insists on staying ad infinitum
because the place is such a mess that someone re-
sponsible has to oversee the cleanup process.

What's remained in all this, remarkably enough,
is our confidence in ourselves, our admiration for
us, our— well, why not say it?— narcissism. Nothing
we've done so far stops us from staring into that
pool and being struck by what a kindly, helpful face
stares back at us. Think of those gathering officials,

pundits, journalists, and military figures seemingly
eager to imagine the worst and so put the brakes on
a full-scale American withdrawal as the Sally Fields
of foreign policy. ("I can't deny the fact that you like
me, right now, you like me!")

When you have an administration that has made
backpedaling its modus operandi, this rising chorus
in Washington and perhaps among the military in
Iraq could prove formidable in an election year
(here, not there). What, of course, makes their argu-
ments particularly potent is the fact that they base
them almost entirely on things that have yet to hap-
pen, that may, in fact, never happen. After all, hu-
mans have such a lousy track record as predictors of
the future. History regularly surprises us, and yet
their dismal tune about that future turns out to be
an effective cudgel with which to beat those in favor
of getting all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011.

Few remember anymore, but we went through a
version of this forty years ago in Vietnam. There,
too, Americans were repeatedly told that the United
States couldn't withdraw because, if we left, the en-
emy would launch a "bloodbath" in South Vietnam.
This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared
in innumerable official speeches and accounts. It
became so real that sometimes it seemed to put the

actual, ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam in the shade,
and for years it provided a winning explanation for
why any departure would have to be interminably
and indefinitely delayed. The only problem was,
when the last American took that last helicopter out,
the bloodbath didn't happen.

In Iraq, only one thing is really known: After our
invasion and with U.S. and allied troops occupying
the country in significant numbers, the Iraqis did
descend into the charnel house of history, into a
monumental bloodbath. It happened in our pres-
ence, on our watch, and in significant part thanks to
us.

But why should the historical record— the only
thing we can, in part, rely on— be taken into account
when our pundits and strategists have such priv-
ileged access to an otherwise unknown future?
Based on what we're seeing now, such arguments
may intensify. Terrible prophesies about Iraq's fu-
ture without us may multiply. And make no mis-
take, terrible things could indeed happen in Iraq.
They could happen while we are there. They could
happen with us gone. But history delivers its sur-
prises more regularly than we imagine— even in
Iraq.

In the meantime, it's worth keeping in mind that
not even Americans can occupy the future. It be-
longs to no one.

Note on the Text

If, soon after 9/11, you had told me that I would, in
the coming years, write hundreds of thousands of
words on America's wars, the Pentagon, its garris-
oning of the planet, and the militarization of the
United States, I would, to say the least, have been
surprised. I surely would have thought you had no
knack for predicting the future. That this actually
happened still surprises me. My only explanation is
that I couldn't help myself, that this was the way the
world looked to me and I found myself continually
amazed that it didn't look similarly to hordes of re-
porters, pundits, and analysts.

Mind you, I was never in the military and I cer-
tainly think of myself as the most peaceable of guys.
Sometimes, however, it takes a complete outsider to
see that what's in front of us all is a forest, not a
random grouping of trees, or, in the case of this
book, an identifiable American way of war rather
than a set of disparate political and military acts full
of sound and fury but signifying little.

The twenty-nine pieces that make up this book
were written between March 2004 and the early
months of 2010. They span the tumultuous era in

which my website, TomDispatch.com , was born and
has lived its relatively short life. However, I thought
it important to acknowledge here that the essays
you have just read are not simply the ones I origin-
ally wrote. Most have been trimmed, and the tell-
tale signs of the immediate moment— the recentlys
and next weeks, along with examples that were grip-
ping at the time but are forgotten today— have been
removed; so have most of the thematic repetitions
that are bound to pop up in any set of weekly re-
sponses to ongoing events. In a few cases, the essays
have even been very modestly updated. Nothing ba-
sic about them has, however, been changed, includ-
ing my conclusions, which, on the whole, still hold
up well.

Generally speaking, the book moves chronologic-
ally from the moment before 9/11, through the dis-
astrous Bush years and year one of the Obama ad-
ministration, right up to late last night (thanks to
the ability of a small independent press these days
to put out a book with remarkable speed). For the
sake of whatever flow this book may have, I decided
not to include in the text the original date on which
each piece was posted. But for the record, and in
case readers should wish to check out any of the es-
says in their original form at TomDispatch.com ,

here is a list of them with their original titles and
the dates they were posted. In each case below, the
title of a piece in this book is followed by the origin-
al title and date, unless of course the title remained
the same:

The World Before September 11— Shark-bit World,
December 8, 2005

9/11 in a Movie-Made World— September 7, 2006
The Billion-Dollar Gravestone— May 16, 2006
Looking Forward, Looking Backward— Don't Turn
the Page on History, July 23, 2009
Twenty-First-Century Gunboat Diplomacy— March
30, 2004

Wonders of the Imperial World— The Colossus of
Baghdad, May 29, 2007

How to Garrison a Planet (and Not Even
Notice)— Going on an Imperial Bender, September
4, 2008

Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq— December 5,
2004

The Barbarism of War from the Air— Degrading Be-
havior, July 28, 2006

An Anatomy of Collateral Damage— The Value of
One, the Value of None, September 11, 2008

Launching the Drone Wars— Terminator Planet,
April 7, 2009

Which War Is This Anyway?— Are We in World War
IV? March 10, 2005

The Imperial Unconscious— March 1, 2009

Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afgh-
anistan—February 21, 2010

Ponzi Scheme Presidency— January 5, 2009

With Us or Against Us?-The $100 Barrel of Oil vs.
the Global War on Terror, January 8, 2008

Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a National
Emergency— February 14, 2010

How Safe Do You Want to Be?-Killing Civilians,
April 23, 2009

General "Manhunter"— Going for Broke, May 21,
2009

Obama and the Imperial Presidency— Obama
Looses the Manhunters, June 14, 2009

A War That No Longer Needs a Justification— Bik-
ing out of Iraq, August 13, 2009

How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washing-
ton—Seven Days in January, January 31, 2010

G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero— August 26, 2009

Why Military Dreams Fail— and Why It Doesn't
Matter— Drone Race to a Known Future, November
10, 2009

The Afghan Speech Obama Should (But Won't)
Give— November 19, 2009

A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority— Meet
the Commanded-in-Chief, December 3, 2009

The Nine Surges of Obama's War— December 10,

2009

Pentagon Time: Tick.. .Tick.. .Tick.. .—January 26,

2010

Premature Withdrawal— March 10, 2010

This book has no footnotes. The original posts at
TomDispatch.com were, however, heavily footnoted
in the style of the Internet— through links that led
readers to my sources and also sometimes offered
directions for further exploration. Linking is, in fact,
the first democratic form of foot-noting, making
itantly accessible to normal readers who,

unlike scholars, may not have quick access to a good
library. URLs in a book, however, are both cumber-
some and useless. So if you want to check my
sources, you'll need to go to the originals online at
TomDispatch.com . Fair warning, however: One of
the debits of linking is that links regularly die, so the
older the piece, the greater the chance that some of
the links won't work.

Acknowledgments

I've been a book editor for almost forty years now
and lived in a world of editors. I know good edit-
ing—a rare enough commodity— when I stumble
across it. Anthony Arnove, who works at Haymarket
Books, is a superb editor (as well as a jack-of-all-
trades, the fate of any independent book publisher).
If this collection is now really a book, it's thanks to
his ministrations. He made me work, which— having
been on the other side of the process— I consider
one of the best things you can say about an editor. A
special bow to him. Thanks go as well to Mikki
Smith, copyeditor extraordinaire, Dao Tran, eagle-
eyed proofer, and to the hardworking duo, Rachel
Cohen and Julie Fain, also of Haymarket.

TomDispatch.com has been the odyssey of my
later life and for its existence and ongoing health I
have a number of people to thank: Ham Fish of The
Nation Institute, who made it an institute project
and me a fellow; Taya Kitman, also of the institute,
who's been remarkably supportive through the
years; Joe Duax, who offers youth for my age and
savvy about an Internet and computer world I don't
faintly grasp; Chris Holmes, who wandered into my

life from Tokyo (as can only happen in the world of
the Web), and defined generosity for me even as he
stopped endless small mistakes and errors from en-
tering the world; and Tam Turse, whose eagle eye
has made such a difference. Another kind of gratit-
ude is reserved for Nick Turse, who has worked with
me all these years, lived through my endless phone
calls, and helped make TomDispatch such an ad-
venture for me.

I also want to thank all those authors (and
friends) who have written for TomDispatch. You
add spice to my day, and sometimes a sense of col-
lective joy as well. And let me offer a bow to those at
other websites and blogs I've run into online (and
sometimes in person). Dealing with, working with,
exchanging ideas with you has been dizzying and
wonderful. You include: David Swanson and Chip
Yost of After Downing Street, Tony Allison of Asia
Times, Jan Frel of AlterNet, Eric Garris of Anti-
war.com , Mark Karlin of Buzzflash, Jon Queally and
Andrea Germanos of Common-dreams, Rick Shenk-
man of History News Network, David Weiner and
Cara Parks of the Huffington Post, Juan Cole of In-
formed Comment, Mamoon Alabbasi of Middle East
Online, Sam Baldwin and Nikki Gloudeman of
Mother Jones magazine, Tony Karon of Rootless

Cosmopolitan, Victoria Harper of Truthout, and
Paul Woodward of the War in Context, among oth-
ers. You have helped keep a world of critical and op-
positional thinking alive through the worst of times.
My gratitude to all of you.

Finally, I want to offer thanks and love to my
wife, Nancy, who lived her own life unflappably and
wonderfully in the midst of my craziness.

Index

Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk

Aiken, George

airpower

airbases

Azizabad air strikes

civilian deaths and

drones

historical use of

newspeak and

proliferation of

space-based platforms and

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
Albright, Madeleine
al-Maliki, Nouri
al-Sadr, Moqtada/Sadrists
Alston, Philip
al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab
al-Zawihari, Ayman
American way of war, the

as conceptually unending

good governance

as Hollywood movie

militarization and

newspeak and

recent historical context/choice and

sovereignty and

victim discourse and
anthrax
Apple, R. W.
Arkin, William
Armitage, Richard
Ashcroft, John
Azizabad air strikes

Bacevich, Andrew J.
Bagram Air Base
Baker, Peter
Balad Air Base
barbarism

air wars and

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and
Barnard, Anne

Barnes, Julian

Barry, John

Barstow, David

Bayh, Evan

Bearak, Barry

Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc. (BDY)

Berke, Richard L.

Biddle, Stephen

Biden, Joseph

bin Laden, Osama

Blanchette, Richard

body counts

Bolton, John

Boyd, Robert S.

Boyer, Paul

Branigin, William

Bremer, L. Paul

Brokaw, Tom

Bumiller, Elisabeth

Burns, John

Bush, George W./Bush administration

9/11 and

armed diplomacy and

body counts

Bush Doctrine

homeland security and
presidential power and
Global War on Terror and

Cambodia

Carroll, James

Cheney, Richard (Dick)

Churchill, Winston

civilian deaths. See also collateral damage

Clarke, Richard

Clarke, Victoria

Clinton, Hillary

COIN (counterinsurgency) doctrine

Cole, August

Cole, Juan R.

Coll, Steve

collateral damage. See also civilian deaths

Conrad, Joseph

Conway, James

Cooper, Helene

Cordesman, Anthony

counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine

D

Dean, Howard

Declaration of Independence (1776)

defense contractors (private)

DeYoung, Karen

Dowd, Maureen

Drew, Christopher

Dreyfuss, Robert

drones. See also Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Eaton, Paul D.

Eikenberry, Karl

embassies

endless war discourse

Erlanger, Steven

Erulkar, Matthew D.

extraordinary rendition (kidnapping)

Fail-Safe (1964)
Feingold, Russell
Feith, Douglas
Filkins, Dexter
Flaherty, Anne
Fleischer, Ari
Franklin, H. Bruce
Franks, Tommy
Frantz, Douglas
Fratto, Tony
Freedland, Jonathan
Freedom Tower
Friedman, Tom

Gabler, Neal
Gall, Carlotta
Gant, Jim
Garlasco, Marc
Gates, Robert
Gearan, Anne

Gibbs, Robert

G.I. Joe

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

Givhan, Walter

Global War on Terror

Goodman, Melvin

"Gorgon Stare" video system

Gorman, Siobhan

Graham, Bradley

Graham, Robert (Bob)

Ground Zero

Grozny (Chechnya)

gunboat diplomacy

Hayden, Tom
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin
Hersh, Seymour
Hiroshima
Hirsh, Michael
Hitchens, Theresa
Holbrooke, Richard

Hollywood movie, war as. See also Dr. Strangelove

(1964); G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009); Pearl

Harbor (2001); Terminator movies

homeland security

Humphrey, Hubert

Hussein, Saddam

Hutton, James

Ignatius, David

imprisonment. See also torture
Israel

Jamail, Dahr
James, Caryn
Johnson, Chalmers
Johnson, Lyndon
Jones, James

Kagan, Frederick
Kagan, Kimberly
Kandahar Airfield
Karzai, Hamid
Khalilzad, Zalmay
Khan, Awal
Khan, Reza
Kilian, Michael
Kraft, Joseph
Krauthammer, Charles
Krugman, Paul
Kurtz, Howard

LaFraniere, Sharon
Landler, Mark
Laos
Lebanon
Lenahan, Patrick
Levin, Carl
Libby, Scooter

Lindqvist, Sven

MacArthur, Douglas
Massoud, Ahmed Shah
Mayer, Jane
Mazzetti, Mark
McCaffrey, Barry R.
McCain, John
McChrystal, Stanley
Mclnerney, Thomas G.
McKiernan, David D.
Meigs, Montgomery
Michaels, Jim
military bases

base-building and

embassy as

as enduring camps/occupation

financial costs of

global presence of

as gunboat diplomacy

private contractors and

secret bases

space-based platforms
Miller, Judy
Mitchell, Allison
Mitchell, Billy
Mohammed, Khalid Shaikh
monuments to war
Morgenstein, Jonathan
Mullen, Mike

N

Nadery, Ahmad Nader
Nagl, John
Neillands, Robin

airpower and

American imperialism and

civilian death and

collateral damage

covert war

extraordinary rendition (kidnapping)

good governance

media coverage and

terrorist/rebel/resistance and

torture

U.S. war culture and

See also Hollywood movie, war as
Next Generation Bomber
Nielson-Green, Rumi
Nixon, Richard/Nixon administration
North, Oliver

Obama, Barack/Obama administration

counterinsurgency and

drones and

endless war discourse

good governance discourse and

imagined address on Afghanistan

inherited legacy of

national security expenditures

war on terror and

war policies/war cabinet of

widening war efforts of

withdrawal plans
Odierno, Ray

O'Hanlon, Michael
Orwell, George
"Ozymandias" (Shelley)

Panetta, Leon

Patriot Act

Paur, Jason

Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Pentagon, the

Perkins, David G.

Petraeus, David

Pincus, Walter

Plame, Valerie

Pletka, Danielle

Pollack, Kenneth

Porter, Gareth

Powell, Colin

Project for the New American Century

R

Reagan, Ronald/Reagan administration

Reese, Timothy R.

Reflecting Absence memorial

Rich, Frank

Ricks, Thomas E.

Risen, James

Rosenberg, Matthew

Roughead, Gary

Rove, Karl

Rumsfeld, Donald

Rupert, James

Safire, William
Saletan, William
Sanger, David E.
Scahill, Jeremy
Scarborough, Rowan
Schake, Kori
Schell, Jonathan
Schloesser, Jeffrey J.

Schmitt, Eric
Searle, Thomas F.
sectarian struggles
September 11

as "36-Hour war,"

Bush administration and

Ground Zero and

as Hollywood movie

media coverage of

Pearl Harbor and

pre-9/11 shark attack stories and
Seven Days in May (1964)
Shachtman, Noah
Shadid, Anthony
Shane, Scott
Shanker, Thorn
shark attacks
Shelby, Richard
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Sherry, Michael
Singer, Peter
Slaughter, Anne-Marie
Sly, Liz
Spiegel, Peter
Spolar, Christine

Steele, Michael
Steinberg, Saul
Sterngold, James
surveillance. See also drones

Taliban, the
Tavernise, Sabrina
Teets, Peter B.
Tenet, George
Terminator movies
terrorism

domestic fear of

media discourse on

newspeak and

Obama administration and

pre-9/11 domestic terrorism

war on terror and
torture
Turse, Nick
Tyson, Ann Scott

u

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

W

weapons of mass destruction
Weart, Spencer
Weeki Wachee mermaids
Wells, H. G.

Westmoreland, William
Will, George
Williams, Daniel
withdrawal efforts
Wolfowitz, Paul
Woodward, Bob
Woolsey, R. James
Wright Brothers

Zahir, Haji

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About TomDispatch

Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch.com in
October 2001 as an e-mail publication offering com-
mentary and collected articles from the world press.
In December 2002, it gained its name, became a
project of The Nation Institute, and went online as
"a regular antidote to the mainstream media." The
site now features three articles a week, all original to
the site. These include Engelhardt's regular com-
mentaries, as well as the work of authors ranging
from Rebecca Solnit, Chalmers Johnson, Bill
McKibben, Andrew Bacevich, Barbara Ehrenreich,
and Mike Davis to Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild,
Noam Chomsky, Anand Gopal, and Karen J. Green-
berg. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is its
associate editor and research director.

TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to
voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when
the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect
some of the global dots regularly left unconnected
by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer
sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually
works.

About Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDis-
patch.com website, a project of The Nation Insti-
tute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of a
highly praised history of American triumphalism in
the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and of a
novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his
TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission
Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with
American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. He also ed-
ited The World According to TomDispatch: Amer-
ica in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces
from his site that functions as an alternative history
of the mad Bush years.

TomDispatch is the sideline that ate his life. Be-
fore that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Ser-
vice in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades,
as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years, he
was Senior Editor at Pantheon Books, where he ed-
ited and published award-winning works ranging
from Art Spiegelman's Maus and John Dower's
War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano's Memory
of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Met-
ropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coed-
itor of Metropolitan's the American Empire Project,

where he has published bestselling works by
Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, and Noam
Chomsky, among others. Many of the authors
whose books he has edited and published over the
years now write for TomDispatch.com . For a num-
ber of years, he was also a Teaching Fellow at the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University of
California, Berkeley. He is married to Nancy J. Gar-
rity, a therapist, and has two children, Maggie and
Will.

First published by Haymarket Books in 2010
© 2010 Tom Engelhardt

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This book was published with the generous support of
Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund.

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