[Note to TomDispatch readers: We’re back, well rested and ready to roll. As of today, the offer of a signed Chalmers Johnson book in return for a contribution to this site is over, but I wanted to thank those of you who contributed so generously. What a difference it makes to us! In addition, TomDispatch readers bought my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, Johnson’s just published Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, and Andrew Bacevich’s latest bestseller, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War -- catch the superb New York Times review of the book by clicking here -- off TD book links in striking numbers. As long as you arrive at Amazon via those links and buy anything, book or otherwise, we get a small percentage of your purchase, and this month it really added up. TomDispatch writers and other toilers at this website will benefit greatly and we thank you. Those of you who haven’t picked up my book or either of the others can still get all three packaged together at a good price by visiting any of their Amazon pages. And if you want to catch me discussing the new military/media landscape in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here. Tom]
Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?
The Military’s Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence
By Tom Engelhardt
The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan’s “The Transformer,” an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post “sometime in 2011.” The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates’s views, they read: “He favors substantial increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in America's global military presence.”
Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded name, might still call “foreign policy.” Remind me: When was the last time you heard anyone use that phrase -- part of a superannuated world in which “diplomats” and “diplomacy” were considered important -- in a meaningful way? These days “foreign policy” and “global policy” are increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least across what used to be called “the Greater Middle East,” where what’s at stake is neither war nor peace, but that "military presence."
As a result, Gates’s message couldn’t be clearer: despite two disastrous wars and a global war on terror now considered “multigenerational” by those in the know, trillions of lost dollars, and staggering numbers of deaths (if you happen to include Iraqi and Afghan ones), the U.S. military mustn’t in any way slack off. The option of reducing the global mission -- the one that’s never on the table when “all options are on the table” -- should remain nowhere in sight. That’s Gates’s bedrock conviction. And when he opposes any diminution of the global mission, it matters.
Slicing Up the World Like a Pie
As we know from a Peter Baker front-page New York Times profile of Barack Obama as commander-in-chief, the 49-year-old president “with no experience in uniform” has “bonded” with Gates, the 66-year-old former spymaster, all-around-apparatchik, and holdover from the last years of the Bush era. Baker describes Gates as the president’s “most important tutor,” and on matters military like the Afghan War, the president has reportedly “deferred to him repeatedly.”
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today, to end this site’s summer, we offer a stirring excerpt from Andrew Bacevich’s new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (Metropolitan Books). What follows below is the introduction to the book which stands on its own as a riveting political essay about a personal odyssey into recent history and the realities of our moment, but also offers a powerful sense of the book itself, which is simply a must-read (and also on the New York Times extended bestseller list). To catch Bacevich discussing his book in one of Timothy MacBain’s TomCast audio interviews, click here or, to download to an iPod, here.
With this post, TD hangs out the old “gone fishing” sign until September 7th, when we’ll return with renewed energy and new posts. In the meantime, my thanks to the amazing crew of TomDispatch readers who recently contributed $150 (or more) to this site in return for a personally autographed copy of Chalmers Johnson’s new book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope. Your dollars make TD’s life a far better one, believe me. In addition, for anyone who meant to, but didn’t take up the offer, it remains open until we return in September. You can click here to check out the original offer or here to make your $150 contribution and receive your signed book.
A further thanks to all of you who, in the last month, used one of the TomDispatch book (or book cover) links to travel to Amazon.com and buy a book (or anything else). As we get a cut of any purchase you make at Amazon once you’ve arrived via TD, you continue to provide us with a small but growing stream of revenue (at no cost to you). Your purchases of the Bacevich book, the Johnson book, and my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, have been prodigious -- and appreciated. While my own book won’t make any bestseller lists, it is in its second printing thanks, in part, to you. Those of you who haven’t bought the three books can do so in a single cut-rate package deal at the Amazon page for my book.
Finally, my thanks and a deep bow of appreciation to the whole TomDispatch crew -- Joe Duax, Nick Turse, Andy Kroll, Christopher Holmes, and Timothy MacBain -- whose hard work makes it all possible. Have a good end of August. See you after Labor Day. Tom]
The Unmaking of a Company Man
An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate
By Andrew BacevichWorldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.
[Book update for TomDispatch readers: As of now, you can read my latest work, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, on the Apple iPad by clicking here and downloading it. Alternately, you can download it to your Kindle by clicking here, or simply buy the superannuated Gutenberg version by clicking here. If you buy either the Kindle version or the ye-olde-paper book at Amazon.com via the links above, or any other TD book link, this website gets a small percentage of your purchase, which means you support us without paying an extra cent. In addition, don’t miss the most recent review of my book at Foreign Policy in Focus. (“Full of potency is [Engelhardt’s] combined cultural and political critique of the U.S. imperial war culture that has permeated our nation. People in the United States are blind, perhaps intentionally, to the empire their country has assembled. Such a reminder of its true nature and cost, both to people in the United States and to those affected by it around the world, is invaluable...”) Finally, if you want to catch me discussing the book and other war issues of our moment, check out the radio show Culture Shocks (one of many radio interviews I’ve been doing of late).]
For Star Trek fans, the news is grim. Some set of maniacs on planet Earth is ready to take all the pleasure out of that low-budget TV show and its ensuing set of big-budget movies. They are actually planning someday to manufacture phasers, ones large enough to vaporize incoming missiles and others small enough to be hand-held and, if not vaporize, then inflict terrible pain. Sooner or later, they expect to beam them down to this planet and set them to work.
Oh, sorry, those aren’t maniacs; they’re the weaponizers at defense giant Raytheon (in conjunction with the U.S. military). As the National, the English-language newspaper of the United Arab Emirates, reported recently, Raytheon is in an arms race with Boeing to produce such weaponry perhaps for the coming decade.
One of the strangest aspects of these last years when two administrations, the U.S. intelligence community, and the American media have focused on, obsessed about, speculated wildly about, and generally chewed over a single potential proliferation story -- Iran’s nuclear program -- is how little other weapons proliferation stories even qualify as news. I’m excepting, of course, the usual alarums over possible nuclear weapons developments in North Korea, Syria, and the like. And I’m certainly not referring here to the estimated 200 to 400 nuclear weapons in Israel’s undeclared arsenal that hardly rate a peep in our media.
I’m thinking about us. We are, after all, the numero uno weapons proliferator on the planet. I’m thinking about -- to pick a few weapons systems almost at random -- the U.S. Air Force’s next generation bomber, an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or the truly futuristic bomber, "a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere," on the drawing boards for 2035. I’m talking about the coming generations of ever more powerful, ever more independent pilot-less drones which the Air Force is now planning out until 2047.
As with the drones today, the story of those Raytheon “phasers,” large and small, if they ever come on line, will be reasonably predictable. Ever since the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, the world has been experiencing an arms race of one. A single great power, the United States, continues to develop new weapons technology, often for the distant future, that is staggeringly advanced and strikingly destructive (potentially reaching, in some cases, an almost nuclear level of local devastation). It continues to act, that is, as if it were still in an arms race with another threatening superpower. Once our latest wonder weapon is developed, whatever it may be, it is sooner or later sold to allies -- after all, we now control almost 70% of what’s still dubbed the “global arms trade” -- while other states rush to develop their own versions of the same. (Just last week, for instance, Iran proudly unveiled its first “drone bomber.”) Sooner or later, such weaponry will predictably drop down to the level of non-state groups. Just wait for the first "suicide" drone to hit something American, or the first terrorist to unsheathe a “phaser” on some airplane. Then, of course, a drone or phaser proliferation panic will set in, “rogue states” will be threatened for having the nerve to develop such weapons, and we will redouble our anti-drone or anti-phaser research, while our media discusses appropriately aggressive actions that need to be taken ASAP.
Hence, Iran’s present nuclear adventure (which, by the way, began in 1957, thanks to the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace program). As you read TomDispach regular Tony Karon’s deconstruction of the present “debate” over whether to bomb Iran back to the pre-nuclear age, take a second to wonder why there is no media debate over whether to bomb the U.S. After all, we are the planet’s foremost weapons proliferator; we have a reputation for using what we produce and parceling it out as well; and, as it happens, we’re still investing money in improvements to our vast nuclear arsenal. Tom
Two Minutes to Midnight?
Cutting Through the Media's Bogus Bomb-Iran Debate
By Tony KaronAmerica's march to a disastrous war in Iraq began in the media, where an unprovoked U.S. invasion of an Arab country was introduced as a legitimate policy option, then debated as a prudent and necessary one. Now, a similarly flawed media conversation on Iran is gaining momentum.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Atop the last post, I made an offer to TD readers and Chalmers Johnson enthusiasts -- a signed copy of Johnson's new book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, in return for a $150 contribution to the site. The response was little short of amazing and wonderful for our coffers. Thank you so much. Believe me, it will make a difference. Those of you who have already contributed, be patient. It will take a little while to get the books signed and off to you. Those of you who haven’t, don’t miss the opportunity. By the way, right now at the Dismantling the Empire “page” at Amazon.com, you can buy Johnson’s book, my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, and Andrew Bacevich’s just published Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War as a threesome for a strikingly cut-rate price. And as long as you’ve visited Amazon via a TomDispatch link, this site will receive a small percentage of the proceeds! (Keep your eye out late next week for a special Andrew Bacevich surprise post before I shut the site down until Labor Day.) Tom]
The 9/11 killers were mass assassins who gave up their own lives to murder thousands. It’s now clear that, in response, the U.S. went into the global assassination business. The first of its “targeted killings” in the Global War on Terror launched by the Bush administration and expanded by the Obama administration seems to have taken place in Yemen in 2002. That November, a Predator drone loosed a Hellfire missile at a car carrying six alleged al-Qaeda operatives. Ever since, an American campaign of assassination from the air via drones operated by “pilots” thousands of miles from those being killed (and so, in a sense, the very opposite of the 9/11 attackers) has only escalated, especially in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. There, the CIA is now running the planet’s first 24/7 Terminator war.
It’s increasingly clear that the ground-war version of the Global War on Terror has featured its own growing assassination wing. Striking numbers of special operations forces have by now been assigned to what can only be termed assassination missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We don’t yet know the full scope of these activities, but it was no mistake that our last Afghan war commander, General Stanley McChrystal, emerged from a world of counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency. He made his reputation in the shadows as a “manhunter,” overseeing the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command which, among other things, ran what journalist Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.
McChrystal received kudos in the U.S. media for the counterinsurgency strategy he implemented in Afghanistan and for restricting U.S. troops from calling in air and artillery support when civilians might be in the vicinity. However, he surrounded himself with former special operations officers, surged in thousands of special operations troops, and cranked up the activities of special ops assassination teams. Now, new war commander General David Petraeus, who has a reputation as the guru of counterinsurgency, is overseeing a further escalation of counter-terror operations in that country.
In other words, the U.S. military is now in the “man-hunting” business in a big way in Afghanistan and globally. Thanks to the massive recent release of secret U.S. military documents by the website Wikileaks, we know far more about what was largely a secret set of activities in Afghanistan (though Anand Gopal did a riveting report on special ops "night raids" for TomDispatch in January), and in particular about a previously unknown manhunting unit called Task Force 373. TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee, author of Halliburton's Army, who has spent much time reporting on the American war in Afghanistan, digs deep into what can now be known about this secretive task force, the doctrine it swears by, and the missions it carries out. Tom
The Secret Killers
Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373
By Pratap Chatterjee"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: I have a special offer to make today. Chalmers Johnson has regularly written for this site since 2003. He’s been a stalwart here. His remarkable new book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, is due out today. As a signal of his support for TomDispatch, he’s agreed to sign a book for any TD reader or enthusiast willing to contribute $150 to this site. (All contributions to TomDispatch.com are tax-deductible to the extent provided by law. For more information, click here.)
In the past, surprising numbers of you have dug into your pockets and contributed generously to this website, helping us expand modestly, offer a little extra help to young writers, develop our new TomCast audio interviews and podcasts, hire some part-time help to take the load off my aging brain, and simply stay afloat. Those of you willing to dig into your pockets, whether for the first time or again, and contribute $150 directly to TomDispatch (by clicking on the “support us” icon to the right of the main screen or simply going here), will get your own personalized, autographed copy of Johnson’s new book. Those of you among Johnson’s legions of admirers not able to offer such a sum, but still eager for his latest work (as well you should be!), keep in mind that, if you order it by clicking here, or via any other TomDispatch link to Amazon, TD will get a small cut of your purchase, a gesture of support that won’t cost you a cent! Tom]
In September 1998, I was handed a submission for a proposed book by Chalmers Johnson. I was then (as I am now) consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. 9/11 was three years away, the Bush administration still an unimaginable nightmare, and though the prospective book’s prospective title had “American Empire” in it, the American Empire Project I now co-run with my friend and TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser was still almost four years from crossing either of our minds.
I remembered Johnson, however. As a young man, I had read his book on peasant nationalism in north China where, during the 1930s, Japanese invaders were conducting “kill-all, burn-all, loot-all” operations. Its vision of how a revolution could gain strength from a foreign occupation stayed with me. I had undoubtedly also read some of Johnson’s well-respected work on contemporary Japan and I knew, even then, that in the Vietnam War era he had been a fierce opponent of the antiwar movement I took part in. If I didn’t already know it, the proposal made no bones about the fact that he had also, in that era, consulted for the CIA.
I certainly turned to his submission -- a prologue, a single chapter, and an outline of the rest of a book -- with a dubious eye, but was promptly blasted away by a passage in the prologue in which he referred to himself as having been a “spear-carrier for empire” and, some pages in, by this passage as well:
“I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export ‘people’s war’ to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times. It proved to be a disastrously wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework [on the history of communism in East Asia]… As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.”
I was little short of thunderstruck. I knew then -- and I think it still holds today -- that no one of prominence with Johnson’s position on the war and in his age range had ever written such a set of sentences. At that moment, knowing nothing else, I made the decision to publish his book. It was possibly the single most impulsive, even irrational, and thoroughly satisfying decision I’ve made in my 30-odd years as an editor in, or at the fringes of, mainstream publishing.
Though I didn’t have expectations for the book then, the rest is, quite literally, history. After all, its title would be Blowback, a term of CIA tradecraft that neither I nor just about any other American had ever heard of, and which, thanks to Johnson, has now become part of our language (along with the accompanying catch phrase “unintended consequences”). On its publication in 2000, the book was widely ignored. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, it seemed nothing short of prophetic, and so, in paperback, stormed those 9/11 tables at the front of bookstores, and soared to bestsellerdom.
That I ever edited Blowback or Johnson’s subsequent books was little short of a fluke, one of the luckiest of my life. It led as well to a relationship with a man of remarkable empathy and insight, who was then on a no less remarkable journey (on which I could tag along). Now, a new book of his, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, has arrived, focused on the many subjects -- from our empire of bases to the way the Pentagon budget, the weapons industries, and military Keynesianism may one day help send us into great power bankruptcy -- that have obsessed him in recent years. It’s not to be missed. (Be sure to catch Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Johnson discusses that empire of bases and his new book by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
The Guns of August
Lowering the Flag on the American Century
By Chalmers JohnsonIn 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war.
