Premature Withdrawal
Washington’s Cult of Narcissism and Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Hubris? We’re bigger than that!
We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years. Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad. And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded? In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better. In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided 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 indispensable 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 Washington’s weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrapheap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains 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 are 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, making leaving, if not inconceivable, then as massively irresponsible (as former Washington Post correspondent and bestselling author Tom Ricks wrote recently 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, possibly of the sort that convulsed their country in 2005-2006 when, by the way, the U.S. military was present in force.
The various partial winners of Iraq’s much delayed March 7th election will, we were assured beforehand, jockey for power for months trying to cobble together a functioning national government. During that period, violence, it's said, will 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 coulduse our withdrawal 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 destructive agenda.
[Note to TomDispatch readers: When you’re done with today’s surprising and, I think, revelatory post, you may want to check out Michelle Alexander’s recently published book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. As I’ve discovered, it’s worth considering her case in depth (and she happens to be a superb writer). Keep this in mind as well: every time you click on a book link or cover-image at this site, go to Amazon.com, and buy anything, book or otherwise, you make a painless contribution to TomDispatch -- we get a small cut -- without spending an extra penny. Tom]
California is, as the time-worn adage has it, our nation's bellwether, and nowhere is that truer than in the Golden State’s prison crisis. California’s inmate population is among the highest in the nation. Its complex of prisons spills over with tens of thousands of inmates housed in every available inch of space and sleep-stacked three-high. So overcrowded are California’s prisons that the state penal system has been successfully sued for violating the constitutional rights of inmates -- essentially by subjecting them to a public-health crisis. That its inmates consistently resort to violence in prison should come as no surprise.
The dire state of California’s prisons can, in part, be traced to its draconian “three-strikes law,” which throws three-time felons behind bars for a mandatory 25 years. Overflowing prison populations have, in turn, contributed to that state’s bleak economic future, helping consign California to a perpetual budget deficit, annual financial crises, and repeated deep cuts in education and social funding. The state currently spends a staggering 10% of its annual operating budget, or $10.8 billion, on its prison system and its nearly 170,000 prisoners -- more than it spends on the University of California system, once the jewel in the crown of American public higher education.
And which Americans have borne the brunt of California’s prison boom? Mostly minorities, African Americans especially. In 2005, the state was incarcerating, on average, 5,125 for every 100,000 male adult blacks in the population -- nearly four-and-a-half times more than for Latino men and six-and-a-half times more than for white men. California’s prisons are also notorious for separating their prisoners by skin color, a form of segregation that was, one lawyer remarked, “not tolerated in any other aspect of American life and hasn't been for fifty years. It's the shame of California.”
As Michelle Alexander, legal expert and author of a startling just-published book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, points out in her first TomDispatch post, California’s racially infused prison quagmire is only a snapshot of a growing racial divide, one which includes the formation of a new undercaste in America that loses its normal rights at the prison gates and often never recovers them. (To check out the latest TomCast, Timothy MacBain’s striking audio interview with Alexander in which she explains how she came to realize that this country was bringing Jim Crow into the Age of Obama, click here.) Andy
The New Jim Crow
How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
By Michelle AlexanderEver since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.
Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.
Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: While you’re sorting out your lists of potential Oscar winners in preparation for the 82nd annual Academy Awards this Sunday night, make sure you take a moment to check out the recent TD post, “Another Planet for James Cameron,” in which Michael Klare offers advice to the director of the global blockbuster Avatar on the planet now most in need of his advanced animation and 3-D techniques. Tom]
When it comes to cracks in America’s imperial edifice -- as measured by the ability of other countries to say “no” to Washington, or just look the other way when American officials insist on something -- Europe has been garnering all the headlines lately, and they’ve been wildly American-centric. “Gates: Nato, in crisis, must change its ways,” “Pull Your Weight, Europe,” “Gates: Europe’s demilitarization has gone too far,” “Dutch Retreat,” and so on. All this over one country -- Holland -- which will evidently pull out of Afghanistan thanks to intensifying public pressure about the war there, and other NATO countries whose officials are shuffling their feet and hemming and hawing about sending significant reinforcements Afghanistan-wards. One could, of course, imagine quite a different set of headlines (“Europeans react to overbearing, overmuscled Americans,” “Europeans turn backs on endless war”), but not in the mainstream news. You can certainly find some striking commentary on the subject by figures like Andrew Bacevich and Juan Cole, but it goes unheeded.
The truth is that Europe still seems a long way from being ready to offer any set of firm noes to Washington on much of anything, while in Asia, noes from key American clients of the past half-century have been even less in evidence. But sometimes from the smallest crack in a façade come the largest of changes. In this case, the most modest potential “no” from a new Japanese government in Tokyo, concerning U.S. basing posture in that country, seems to have caused near panic in Washington. In neither Europe nor Asia have we felt any political earthquakes -- yet. But just below the surface, the global political tectonic plates are rubbing together, and who knows when, as power on this planet slowly shifts, one of them will slip and suddenly, for better or worse, the whole landscape of power will look different.
John Feffer, the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus and a TomDispatch regular, already has written for this site on whether Afghanistan might prove NATO’s graveyard. Now, he turns east to explore whether, in a dispute over one insignificant base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, we might be feeling early rumblings on the Asian fault-line of American global power. Tom
Pacific Pushback
Has the U.S. Empire of Bases Reached Its High-Water Mark?
By John FefferFor a country with a pacifist constitution, Japan is bristling with weaponry. Indeed, that Asian land has long functioned as a huge aircraft carrier and naval base for U.S. military power. We couldn’t have fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars without the nearly 90 military bases scattered around the islands of our major Pacific ally. Even today, Japan remains the anchor of what’s left of America’s Cold War containment policy when it comes to China and North Korea. From the Yokota and Kadena air bases, the United States can dispatch troops and bombers across Asia, while the Yokosuka base near Tokyo is the largest American naval installation outside the United States.
[Note for TomDispatch readers and listeners: I’m the one on Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast (the audio interviews that accompany about a TD piece a week), discussing our permanent state of war, the subject which inspired -- if that’s the right word -- today’s post. You can find the interview by clicking here as usual, but -- and this is news for TD readers -- you can, for the first time, download these interviews for free as podcasts from the iTunes store by clicking here, or by going to that store and searching for “TomDispatch.” You can also subscribe there and make sure that you never miss any of them. And let me take this opportunity to recommend MacBain’s earlier interviews. He’s the first radio guy we’ve had working at this site and it shows. He's always at the top of his game. Check him out and, while I’m at it, many thanks to all of you who continue to contribute to this site and so help make our newest features -- and the human hands that go with them -- possible. Tom]
How to Fight a Better War (Next Time)
Three Fixes for the American Way of War
By Tom Engelhardt
Iraq remains a mess from which the U.S. military seems increasingly uninterested in withdrawing fully and Afghanistan a disaster area, but it’s never too soon to think about the next war. The subject is already on the minds of Pentagon planners. The question is: Are they focusing on how to manage future wars so that they won’t last longer than the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II combined?
There’s reason to worry, especially since the lessons of both Iraq and Afghanistan are clear: it takes years after a war has been launched for the U.S. military to develop tactics that lead to stasis. (“Victory” is a word that has gone out of fashion.)
Here, then, are three modest suggestions for recalibrating the American way of war. All are based on a simple principle -- “preventive war planning” -- and are focused on getting the next war right before it begins, not decades after it’s launched.
If there were a prize for worst headline of the week, even the month, it would surely go to a February 23rd piece in the New York Times headlined online: “Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace.” The bellicose “mood,” so undermining of global peace that our secretary of defense had to go after it, was (according to Brian Knowlton of the Times) the “public and political opposition to the military” spreading across Europe. Who wouldn’t react similarly in the face of such an unnerving phenomenon? After all, should it grow stronger, peace on Earth will surely prove a chimera.
European publics are now, it seems, so totally peaceable that, while the thousandth American died “in and around Afghanistan” in Operation Enduring Freedom last week to next to no notice here, they continued to exhibit extraordinary “weakness.” After all, this was also the week in which -- speak of the devil -- the Dutch coalition government collapsed over a dispute about the public’s desire to get Dutch troops out of Afghanistan. What an example of that anti-peace bogeyman run riot! No wonder Gates was warning that the perception of weakness could lead hostile powers (unnamed) to a “temptation to miscalculate and aggression.”
Fortunately, one country is still willing to sink its money (and lives) into the armed enhancement of peace globally: the United States. As Jo Comerford of the National Priorities Project points out, the latest federal budget opens the American public to yet more pain, while shielding the military and the rest of the national security establishment from the same. Fortunately, that “antiwar mood” seems not to have jumped the wide Atlantic, which means, for the time being, peace is safe in America. Tom
A Titanic Budget in an Ocean of Icebergs
Will the USS Budget Go Down?
By Jo ComerfordSend up a flare! The 2011 federal budget has sprung some leaks in the midst of a storm. Not sure there's enough money for life rafts! Forget women and children first!
Buffeted by economic hard times, the 2,585-page, $3.8 trillion document is already taking on water, though this won’t be obvious to you if you’re reading the mainstream media. Let’s start with the absolute basics: 59% of the budget’s spending is dedicated to mandatory programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and now Pell Grants; 34% is to be spent on “discretionary programs,” including education, transportation, housing, and the military; 7% will be used to service the national debt.
A serious look at this budget document reveals some “leaks” -- two in actual spending practices and two in the basic assumptions that undergird the budget itself. Ship-shape as it may look on the surface, this is a budget perilously close to an iceberg, and it’s not clear whether the captain of the ship will heed the obvious warning signs.
