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Pratap Chatterjee — Destabilizing Pakistan

posted February 07, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA’s “secret” battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — that is, pilot-less drones — shoot missiles (18 of them in a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and then the news comes in: a certain number of al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders or suspected Arab or Uzbek or Afghan “militants” have died. The numbers are often remarkably precise. Sometimes they are attributed to U.S. sources, sometimes to the Pakistanis; sometimes, it’s hard to tell where the information comes from. In the Pakistani press, on the other hand, the numbers that come back are usually of civilian dead. They, too, tend to be precise.

Don’t let that precision fool you. Here’s the reality: There are no reporters on the ground and none of these figures can be taken as accurate. Let’s just consider the CIA side of things. Any information that comes from American sources (i.e. the CIA) has to be looked at with great wariness. As a start, the CIA’s history is one of deception. There’s no reason to take anything its sources say at face value. They will report just what they think it’s in their interest to report — and the ongoing “success” of their drone strikes is distinctly in their interest.

Then, there’s history. In the present drone wars, as in the CIA’s bloody Phoenix Program in the Vietnam era, the Agency’s operatives, working in distinctly alien terrain, must rely on local sources (or possibly official Pakistani ones) for targeting intelligence. In Vietnam in the 1960s, the Agency’s Phoenix Program — reportedly responsible for the assassination of 20,000 Vietnamese — became, according to historian Marilyn Young, “an extortionist’s paradise, with payoffs as available for denunciation as for protection.” Once again, the CIA is reportedly passing out bags of money and anyone on the ground with a grudge, or the desire to eliminate an enemy, or simply the desire to make some of that money can undoubtedly feed information into the system, watch the drones do their damnedest, and then report back that more “terrorists” are dead. Just assume that at least some of those “militants” dying in Pakistan, and possibly many of them, aren’t who the CIA hopes they are.

Think of it as a foolproof situation, with an emphasis on the “fool.” And then keep in mind that, in December, the CIA’s local brain trust, undoubtedly the same people who were leaking precise news of “successes” in Pakistan, mistook a jihadist double agent from Jordan for an agent of theirs, gathered at an Agency base in Khost, Afghanistan, and let him wipe them out with a suicide bomb. Seven CIA operatives died, including the base chief. This should give us a grim clue as to the accuracy of the CIA’s insights into what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan, or into the real effects of their 24/7 robotic assassination program.

But there’s a deeper, more dangerous level of deception in Washington’s widening war in the region: self-deception. The CIA drone program, which the Agency’s Director Leon Panetta has called “the only game in town” when it comes to dismantling al-Qaeda, is just symptomatic of such self-deception. While the CIA and the U.S. military have been expending enormous effort studying the Afghan and Pakistani situations and consulting experts, and while the White House has conducted an extensive series of seminars-cum-policy-debates on both countries, you can count on one thing: none of them have spent significant time studying or thinking about us.

As a result, the seeming cleanliness and effectiveness of the drone-war solution undoubtedly only reinforces a sense in Washington that the world’s last great military power can still control this war — that it can organize, order, prod, wheedle, and bribe both the Afghans and Pakistanis into doing what’s best, and if that doesn’t work, simply continue raining down the missiles and bombs. Beware Washington’s deep-seated belief that it controls events; that it is, however precariously, in the saddle; that, as Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal recently put it, there is a “corner” to “turn” out there, even if we haven’t quite turned it yet.

In fact, Washington is not in the saddle and that corner, if there, if turned, will have its own unpleasant surprises. Washington is, in this sense, as oblivious as those CIA operatives were as they waited for “their” Jordanian agent to give them supposedly vital information on the al-Qaeda leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas. Like their drones, the Americans in charge of this war are desperately far from the ground, and they don’t even seem to know it. It’s this that makes the analogy drawn by TomDispatch regular and author of Halliburton’s Army, Pratap Chatterjee, so unnerving. It’s time for Washington to examine not what we know about them, but what we don’t know about ourselves.

— Tom Engelhardt

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Operation Breakfast Redux

Could Pakistan 2010 Go the Way of Cambodia 1969?

By Pratap Chatterjee

Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the "enemy" to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids. The secret computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office. They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy’s central headquarters whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting daily.

In remote villages where no reporters dared to go, far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: "The ball game is over."

The campaign was called "Operation Breakfast," and, while it may sound like the CIA’s present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn’t. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact. The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids. Later ones were named "Lunch", "Snack", and "Supper", and they went under the collective label "Menu". They were authorized by President Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) "Bamboo Pentagon", a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.

Like President Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."

Return to the Killing Fields

In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy,” comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that U.S. military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.

A more provocative — and perhaps more ominous — analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent. To briefly recapitulate that ancient history: In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a “neutralist” king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found “sanctuaries.”

Sihanouk, helpless to do anything, looked the other way. In the meantime, sheltered by local villagers in distant areas of rural Cambodia was a small insurgent group, little-known communist fundamentalists who called themselves the Khmer Rouge. (Think of them as the 1970s equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban who have settled into the wild borderlands of that country largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government.) They were then weak and incapable of challenging Sihanouk — until, that is, those secret bombing raids by American B-52s began. As these intensified in the summer of 1969, areas of the country began to destabilize (helped on in 1970 by a U.S.-encouraged military coup in the capital Phnom Penh), and the Khmer Rouge began to gain strength.

You know the grim end of that old story.

Forty years, almost to the day, after Operation Breakfast began, I traveled to the town of Snuol, close to where the American bombs once fell. It is a quiet town, no longer remote, as modern roads and Chinese-led timber companies have systematically cut down the jungle that once sheltered anti-government rebels. I went in search of anyone who remembered the bombing raids, only to discover that few there were old enough to have been alive at the time, largely because the Khmer Rouge executed as much as a quarter of the total Cambodian population after they took power in 1975.

Eventually, a 15-minute ride out of town, I found an old soldier living by himself in a simple one-room house adorned with pictures of the old king, Sihanouk. His name was Kong Kan and he had first moved to the nearby town of Memot in 1960. A little further away, I ran into three more old men, Choenung Klou, Keo Long, and Hoe Huy, who had gathered at a newly built temple to chat.

All of them remembered the massive 1969 B-52 raids vividly and the arrival of U.S. troops the following year. "We thought the Americans had come to help us," said Choenung Klou. "But then they left and the [South] Vietnamese soldiers who came with them destroyed the villages and raped the women."

He had no love for the North Vietnamese communists either. "They would stay at people's houses, take our hammocks and food. We didn't like them and we were afraid of them."

Caught between two Vietnamese armies and with American planes carpet-bombing the countryside, increasing numbers of Cambodians soon came to believe that the Khmer Rouge, who were their countrymen, might help them. Like the Taliban of today, many of the Khmer Rouge were, in fact, teenaged villagers who had responded, under the pressure of war and disruption, to the distant call of an inspirational ideology and joined the resistance in the jungles.

"If you ask me why I joined the Khmer Rouge, the main reason is because of the American invasion," Hun Sen, the current prime minister of Cambodia, has said. "If there was no invasion, by now, I would be a pilot or a professor."

Six years after the bombings of Cambodia began, shortly after the last helicopter lifted off the U.S. embassy in Saigon and the flow of military aid to the crumbling government of Cambodia stopped, a reign of terror took hold in the capital, Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge left the jungles and entered the capital where they began a systemic genocide against city dwellers and anyone who was educated. They vowed to restart history at Year Zero, a new era in which much of the past became irrelevant. Some two million people are believed to have died from executions, starvation, and forced labor in the camps established by the Angkar leadership of the Khmer Rouge commanded by Pol Pot.

Unraveling Pakistan

Could the same thing happen in Pakistan today? A new American president was ordering escalating drone attacks, in a country where no war has been declared, at the moment when I flew from Cambodia across South Asia to Afghanistan, so this question loomed large in my mind. Both there and just across the border, Operation Breakfast seems to be repeating itself.

In the Afghan capital, Kabul, I met earnest aid workers who drank late into the night in places like L'Atmosphere, a foreigner-only bar that could easily have doubled as a movie set for Saigon in the 1960s. Like modern-day equivalents of Graham Greene's "quiet American", these "consultants" describe a Third Way that is neither Western nor fundamentalist Islam.

At the very same time, CIA analysts in distant Virginia are using pilot-less drones and satellite technology to order strikes against supposed terrorist headquarters across the border in Pakistan. They are not so unlike the military men who watched radar screens in South Vietnam in the 1960s as the Cambodian air raids went on.

In 2009, on the orders of President Obama, the U.S. unloaded more missiles and bombs on Pakistan than President Bush did in the years of his secret drone war, and the strikes have been accelerating in number and intensity. By this January, there was a drone attack almost every other day. Even if, this time around, no one is using the code phrase, "the ball game is over," Washington continually hails success after success, terrorist leader after terrorist leader killed, implying that something approaching victory could be somewhere just over the horizon.

As in the 1960s in Cambodia, these strikes are, in actuality, having a devastating, destabilizing effect in Pakistan, not just on the targeted communities, but on public consciousness throughout the region. An article in the January 23rd New York Times indicated that the fury over these attacks has even spread into Pakistan's military establishment which, in a manner similar to Sihanouk in the 1960s, knows its limits in its tribal borderlands and is publicly uneasy about U.S. air strikes which undermine the country’s sovereignty. "Are you with us or against us?" the newspaper quoted a senior Pakistani military officer demanding of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when he spoke last month at Pakistan's National Defense University.

Even pro-American Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has spoken out publicly against drone strikes. Of one such attack, he recently told reporters, "We strongly condemn this attack and the government will raise this issue at [the] diplomatic level."

Despite the public displays of outrage, however, the American strikes have undoubtedly been tacitly approved at the highest levels of the Pakistani government because of that country’s inability to control militants in its tribal borderlands. Similarly, Sihanouk finally looked the other way after the U.S. provided secret papers, code-named Vesuvius, as proof that the Vietnamese were operating from his country.

While most Democratic and Republican hawks have praised the growing drone war in the skies over Pakistan, some experts in the U.S. are starting to express worries about them (even if they don’t have the Cambodian analogy in mind). For example, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who frequently advises the military, says that an expansion of the drone strikes "might even spark a social revolution in Pakistan."

Indeed, even General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, wrote in a secret assessment on May 27, 2009: "Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan… especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties." Quoting local polls, he wrote: "35 percent [of Pakistanis] say they do not support U.S. strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan Military ahead of time."

The Pakistani Army has, in fact, launched several significant operations against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and in South Waziristan, just as Sihanouk initially ordered the Cambodian military to attack the Khmer Rouge and suppress peasant rebellions in Battambang Province. Again like Sihanouk in the late 1960s, however, the Pakistanis have balked at more comprehensive assaults on the Taliban, and especially on the Afghan Taliban using the border areas as “sanctuaries.”

The New Jihadists

What happens next is the $64 million question. Most Pakistani experts dismiss any suggestion that the Taliban has widespread support in their country, but it must be remembered that the Khmer Rouge was a fringe group with no more than 4,000 fighters at the time that Operation Breakfast began.

And if Cambodia's history is any guide to the future, the drone strikes do not have to create a groundswell for revolution. They only have to begin to destabilize Pakistan as would, for instance, the threatened spread of such strikes into the already unsettled province of Baluchistan, or any future American ground incursions into the country. A few charismatic intellectuals like Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot always have the possibility of taking it from there, rallying angry and unemployed youth to create an infrastructure for disruptive change.

Despite often repeated claims by both the Bush and Obama administrations that the drone raids are smashing al-Qaeda's intellectual leadership, more and more educated and disenchanted young men from around the world seem to be rallying to the fundamentalist cause.

Some have struck directly at American targets like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, and Dr. Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian double agent and suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives at a military base in Khost, southern Afghanistan, five days later.

Some have even been U.S.-born, like Anwar al-Awlaki, the 38-year-old Islamic preacher from New Mexico who has moved to Yemen; Adam Pearlman, a 32-year-old Southern Californian and al-Qaeda spokesman now known as "Azzam the American", who reportedly lives somewhere in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions; and Omar Hammami, the 25-year-old Syrian-American from Alabama believed to be an al-Shabaab leader in Somalia.

Like the Khmer Rouge before them, these new jihadists display no remorse for killing innocent civilians. "One of the sad truths I have come to see is that for this kind of mass violence, you don't need monsters," says Craig Etcheson, author of After the Killing Fields and founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. "Ordinary people will do just fine. This thing lives in all of us."

Even King Sihanouk, who had once ordered raids against the Khmer Rouge, eventually agreed to support them after he had been overthrown in a coup and was living in exile in China. Could the same thing happen to Pakistani politicians if they fall from grace and U.S. backing?

What threw Sihanouk's fragile government into serious disarray — other than his own eccentricity and self-absorption — was the devastating spillover of Nixon's war in Vietnam into Cambodia’s border regions. It finally brought the Khmer Rouge to power.

Pakistan 2010, with its enormous modern military and industrialized base, is hardly impoverished Cambodia 1969. Nonetheless, in that now ancient history lies both a potential analogy and a cautionary tale. Beware secret air wars that promise success and yet wreak havoc in lands that are not even enemy nations.

When his war plans were questioned, Nixon pressed ahead, despite a growing public distaste for his war. A similar dynamic seems to be underway today. In 1970, after Operation Breakfast was revealed by the New York Times, Nixon told his top military and national security aides: "We cannot sit here and let the enemy believe that Cambodia is our last gasp."

Had he refrained first from launching Operation Breakfast and then from supping on the whole “menu,” some historians like Etcheson believe a genocide would have been averted. It would be a sad day if the drone strikes, along with the endless war that the Obama administration has inherited and that is now spilling over ever more devastatingly into Pakistan, were to create a new class of fundamentalists who actually had the capacity to seize power.

• Pratap Chatterjee is a freelance journalist and senior editor at CorpWatch who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has written two books about the war on terror, “Iraq, Inc.” (Seven Stories Press, 2004) and Halliburton's Army (Nation Books, 2009). For more information on Nixon’s secret campaign, he recommends “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia” by William Shawcross (Simon and Schuster, 1979).

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175203/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee%2C_destabilizing_pakistan

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Nick Turse — America's Shadowy Base World

posted February 09, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

Once is an anomaly; twice is the beginning of a pattern. Right now, we’re seeing the same sequence of events for the second time in less than a decade, and it looks like the signature American way of war in our time is coming into focus.

In 2003, when the Bush administration invaded Iraq, the Pentagon already had on its drawing boards plans for building a series of permanent mega-bases in that country. (They were charmingly called “enduring camps”.) Once Baghdad fell and it turned out that, Saddam Hussein or no, the U.S. was going to have to fight rather than settle in and let the good times roll, hundreds of micro-bases were added to the mega ones — 106 of them by 2005, more than 300 in all. Then, in 2005, Washington decided to trade in its embassy in one of Saddam’s old palaces for something a little spiffier. In its place, on a 104-acre plot by the Tigris River in the middle of Baghdad, for at least three-quarters of a billion dollars after cost overruns, it built the largest, most expensive embassy on the planet. It was planned for a staff of 1,000 “diplomats” with all the accoutrements of the good life and plenty of hired help. (Even now, despite much discussion about “ending” the American role in Iraq, further plans are reportedly being made for the embassy’s staff to double.) This was clearly to be U.S. mission control for the Greater Middle East.

Building of this expansive kind is, of course, a staggering imperial undertaking. It implies a global power with resources beyond measure, for which waste means nothing. The mega-bases and the embassy were, in that sense, American wonders of the world, our own ziggurat-equivalents in Mesopotamia, right down to the multiple PXs, familiar fast food outlets, and miniature golf. No empire had ever launched a base-building program quite like it (if, that is, you leave out the precursor to this whole experience, the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s).

The Iraqi base-building project alone had already absorbed several billion taxpayer dollars in just the first half-year of construction in 2003. But it did look like a one-of-a-kind architectural adventure — until, that is, the “forgotten war”, the one in Afghanistan, came back into view. Starting in 2008, base building ramped up there, went into overdrive in 2009, and hasn’t come out of it yet. The result: according to Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an even more staggering base-construction splurge, and with it, the announcement last year that another monster embassy would go up, this time in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, for another cool near-billion. (The already large U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, would also be further expanded to the tune of $175-200 million). And keep in mind that none of this even includes the huge ring of supporting bases for America’s Afghan and Iraq operations in the Persian Gulf, South and Central Asia, and even on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Does anyone see a pattern here? The American military must be the heaviest occupation force in history. According to reports, it now has 1.5 million pieces of equipment, micro to mega, to get out of Iraq as U.S. forces draw down. This is war and occupation of Guinness World Records proportions, a veritable Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of imperial military construction. The only thing that won’t make the record books, of course, is the results: in war-fighting terms, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the world’s mightiest military has been battled to at least a draw by rag-tag, lightly armed, minority insurgencies.

Who would believe any of this, if it weren’t happening? Given how our media reports on such things, who would even know about it if you didn’t read it first here at TomDispatch.com?

— Tom Engelhardt

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The 700 Military Bases of Afghanistan

Black Sites in the Empire of Bases

By Nick Turse

In the nineteenth century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the twentieth century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country.

Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces. Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns. Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year.

Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive. It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the U.S. will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.

400 Foreign Bases in Afghanistan

Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), tells TomDispatch that there are, at present, nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. In addition, there are at least 300 Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) bases, most of them built, maintained, or supported by the U.S. A small number of the coalition sites are mega-bases like Kandahar Airfield, which boasts one of the busiest runways in the world, and Bagram Air Base, a former Soviet facility that received a makeover, complete with Burger King and Popeyes outlets, and now serves more than 20,000 U.S. troops, in addition to thousands of coalition forces and civilian contractors.

In fact, Kandahar, which housed 9,000 coalition troops as recently as 2007, is expected to have a population of as many as 35,000 troops by the time President Obama's surge is complete, according to Colonel Kevin Wilson who oversees building efforts in the southern half of Afghanistan for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On the other hand, the Shinwar site, according to Sgt. Tracy J. Smith of the U.S. 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, will be a small forward operating base (FOB) that will host both Afghan troops and foreign forces.

Last fall, it was reported that more than $200 million in construction projects — from barracks to cargo storage facilities — were planned for or in-progress at Bagram. Substantial construction funds have also been set aside by the U.S. Air Force to upgrade its air power capacity at Kandahar. For example, $65 million has been allocated to build additional apron space (where aircraft can be parked, serviced, and loaded or unloaded) to accommodate more close-air support for soldiers in the field and a greater intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability. Another $61 million has also been earmarked for the construction of a cargo helicopter apron and a tactical airlift apron there.

Kandahar is just one of many sites currently being upgraded. Exact figures on the number of facilities being enlarged, improved, or hardened are unavailable but, according a spokesman for ISAF, the military plans to expand several more bases to accommodate the increase of troops as part of Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal’s surge strategy. In addition, at least 12 more bases are slated to be built to help handle the 30,000 extra American troops and thousands of NATO forces beginning to arrive in the country.

“Currently we have over $3 billion worth of work going on in Afghanistan,” says Colonel Wilson, “and probably by the summer, when the dust settles from all the uplift, we’ll have about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion worth of that [in the South].” By comparison, between 2002 and 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $4.5 billion on construction projects, most of it base-building, in Afghanistan.

At the site of the future FOB in Shinwar, more than 135 private construction contractors attended what was termed an “Afghan-Coalition contractors rodeo.” According to Lieutenant Fernando Roach, a contracting officer with the U.S. Army’s Task Force Mountain Warrior, the event was designed “to give potential contractors a walkthrough of the area so they'll have a solid overview of the scope of work.” The construction firms then bid on three separate projects: the renovation of the more than 30-year old Soviet facilities, the building of new living quarters for Afghan and coalition forces, and the construction of a two-kilometer wall for the base.

In the weeks since the “rodeo,” the U.S. Army has announced additional plans to upgrade facilities at other forward operating bases. At FOB Airborne, located near Kane-Ezzat in Wardak Province, for instance, the Army intends to put in reinforced concrete bunkers and blast protection barriers as well as lay concrete foundations for Re-Locatable Buildings (prefabricated, trailer-like structures used for living and working quarters). Similar work is also scheduled for FOB Altimur, an Army camp in Logar Province.

The Afghan Base Boom

Recently, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Afghanistan District-Kabul, announced that it would be seeking bids on “site assessments” for Afghan National Security Forces District Headquarters Facilities nationwide. The precise number of Afghan bases scattered throughout the country is unclear.

When asked by TomDispatch, Colonel Radmanish of the Afghan Ministry of Defense would state only that major bases were located in Kabul, Pakteya, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif, and that ANA units operate all across Afghanistan. Recent U.S. Army contracts for maintenance services provided to Afghan army and police bases, however, suggest that there are no fewer than 300 such facilities that are, according to an ISAF spokesman, not counted among the coalition base inventory.

As opposed to America’s fast-food-franchise-filled bases, Afghan ones are often decidedly more rustic affairs. The police headquarters in Khost Farang District, Baghlan Province, is a good example. According to a detailed site assessment conducted by a local contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers and the Afghan government, the district headquarters consists of mud and stone buildings surrounded by a mud wall. The site even lacks a deep well for water. A trench fed by a nearby spring is the only convenient water source.

The U.S. bases that most resemble austere Afghan facilities are combat outposts, also known as COPs. Environmental Specialist Michael Bell of the Army Corps of Engineers, Afghanistan Engineer District-South’s Real Estate Division, recently described the facilities and life on such a base as he and his co-worker, Realty Specialist Damian Salazar, saw it in late 2009:

“COP Sangar... is a compound surrounded by mud and straw walls. Tents with cots supplied the sleeping quarters… A medical, pharmacy and command post tent occupied the center of the COP, complete with a few computers with internet access and three primitive operating tables. Showers had just been installed with hot [water]... only available from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m...

“An MWR [Morale, Welfare and Recreation] tent was erected on Thanksgiving Day with an operating television; however, the tent was rarely used due to the cold. Most of the troops used a tent with gym equipment for recreation... A cook trailer provided a hot simple breakfast and supper. Lunch was MREs [meals ready to eat]. Nights were pitch black with no outside lighting from the base or the city.”

What Makes a Base?

According to an official site assessment, future construction at the Khost Farang District police headquarters will make use of sand, gravel, and stone, all available on the spot. Additionally, cement, steel, bricks, lime, and gypsum have been located for purchase in Pol-e Khomri City, about 85 miles away.

Constructing a base for American troops, however, is another matter. For the far less modest American needs of American troops, builders rely heavily on goods imported over extremely long, difficult to traverse, and sometimes embattled supply lines, all of which adds up to an extraordinarily costly affair. “Our business runs on materials,” Lieutenant General Robert Van Antwerp, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, told an audience at a town hall meeting in Afghanistan in December 2009. “You have to bring in the lumber, you have to bring in the steel, you have to bring in the containers and all that. Transport isn’t easy in this country — number one, the roads themselves, number two, coming through other countries to get here — there are just huge challenges in getting the materials here.”

To facilitate U.S. base construction projects, a new “virtual storefront” — an online shopping portal — has been launched by the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). The Maintenance, Repair and Operations Uzbekistan Virtual Storefront website and a defense contractor-owned and operated brick-and-mortar warehouse facility that supports it aim to provide regionally-produced construction materials to speed surge-accelerated building efforts.

From a facility located in Termez, Uzbekistan, cement, concrete, fencing, roofing, rope, sand, steel, gutters, pipe, and other construction material manufactured in countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan can be rushed to nearby Afghanistan to accelerate base-building efforts. “Having the products closer to the fight will make it easier for warfighters by reducing logistics response and delivery time," says Chet Evanitsky, the DLA’s construction and equipment supply chain division chief.

America’s Shadowy Base World

The Pentagon’s most recent inventory of bases lists a total of 716 overseas sites. These include facilities owned and leased all across the Middle East as well as a significant presence in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea. Perhaps even more notable than the Pentagon’s impressive public foreign property portfolio are the many sites left off the official inventory. While bases in the Persian Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are all listed, one conspicuously absent site is Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in nearby Qatar, where the U.S. Air Force secretly oversees its on-going unmanned drone wars.

The count also does not include any sites in Iraq where, as of August 2009, there were still nearly 300 American bases and outposts. Similarly, U.S. bases in Afghanistan — a significant percentage of the 400 foreign sites scattered across the country — are noticeably absent from the Pentagon inventory.

Counting the remaining bases in Iraq — as many as 50 are slated to be operating after President Barack Obama’s August 31, 2010, deadline to remove all U.S. “combat troops” from the country — and those in Afghanistan, as well as black sites like Al-Udeid, the total number of U.S. bases overseas now must significantly exceed 1,000. Just exactly how many U.S. military bases (and allied facilities used by U.S. forces) are scattered across the globe may never be publicly known. What we do know — from the experience of bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea — is that, once built, they have a tendency toward permanency that a cessation of hostilities, or even outright peace, has a way of not altering.

After nearly a decade of war, close to 700 U.S., allied, and Afghan military bases dot Afghanistan. Until now, however, they have existed as black sites known to few Americans outside the Pentagon. It remains to be seen, a decade into the future, how many of these sites will still be occupied by U.S. and allied troops and whose flag will be planted on the ever-shifting British-Soviet-U.S./Afghan site at Shinwar.

• Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175204/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_america%27s_shadowy_base_world

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Steve Fraser — A Tale of Two Presidents

posted February 11, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

Note for TomDispatch Readers: As some of you may remember, I’ve taken on Andy Kroll, who also writes for TomDispatch, as an associate editor and all-purpose, if very part-time, assistant. Today, he’s produced the introduction to Steve Fraser’s piece. He’s also slowly cleaning up the 1,300 or more TomDispatch posts that have accumulated since December 2002, many of which had their headlines and formatting thoroughly messed up when the latest iteration of this website was launched in November 2009. It’s a Sisyphean task, but it’s happening, which is a relief to me. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank those TD readers who have made contributions to this site via the “Resist empire, support TomDispatch” icon at the right of the main screen on the website, especially those of you who have become “recurring” supporters. It’s your contributions that have made it possible for me to hire Andy and ease these 65-year-old bones a little.

So a deep bow of appreciation to all of you. — Tom Englehardt

______________________________________

Not long after Scott Brown, a nude model turned U.S. Senator, and his Tea Party cohort rode the public’s growing disquiet and the candidate’s everyman truck into office, you could hear the shift in Barack Obama’s voice. Out went the cool, detached president, and in came a new populism and a leader who had lost his elitist “g”s and now talked about “leakin'” roofs and “buyin'” new curtains, who spent time walkin’ the shop floor and rollin’ up his shirtsleeves. In Elyria, Ohio, he exhorted a town-hall crowd with how hard he’s been fightin' — so hard, in fact, that he repeated the word 14 emphatic times.

Rhetorical fisticuffs aside, Obama the Populist had by now essentially sidelined health care and climate change for a far narrower focus in 2010: jobs. In his State of the Union Address, he held up the nearly $800 billion stimulus bill as evidence of his job-creating bona fides, and laid out a new $30 billion small-business initiative using repaid bailout cash to boost hiring and wages. “Jobs must be our number-one focus in 2010” was his mantra.

The president’s recent jobs “surge”, however, does little more than tilt feebly at fixin' the country’s dismal employment landscape. Sendin’ funds to community banks to provide credit and cuttin’ taxes for businesses, as Obama proposes, are at best indirect and modest routes to creatin' new jobs or savin' existing ones. No indirect program of this sort is going to quickly lower an official unemployment rate hovering near 10%, with underemployment at 17%, and record numbers of people jobless for 27 weeks or more.

Looking back on Obama’s first year, there’s little to suggest he’s up to the jobs task. The stimulus, for instance, reportedly paid for around 600,000 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2009, and around 1.2 million jobs since its creation — nothing to scoff at, but scant enough improvement in the face of 2.6 million jobs lost in 2008 and nearly 4 million in 2009. Compared to presidential forebear Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who galvanized the nation during the Great Depression with truly popular direct public-works programs that created millions of jobs, Obama’s record is paltry indeed, as Steve Fraser, TomDispatch regular and author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, so vividly makes clear. (To catch him in a TD audio interview discussing why Obama has ignored the jobs model Roosevelt pioneered, click here.)

— Andy Kroll

______________________________________

The New Deal in Reverse

How the Obama Administration Ended Up Where Franklin Roosevelt Began

By Steve Fraser

On March 04, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the “money changers” who “have fled from their high seats in the temples of our civilization [because...] they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision and where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Rhetoric, however, is only rhetoric. According to one skeptical congressional observer of FDR’s first inaugural address, “The President drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th — and they were all back on the 9th.”

That was essentially true. It was what happened after that, in the midst of the Great Depression, which set the New Deal on a course that is the mirror image of the direction in which the Obama administration seems headed.

Buoyed by great expectations when he assumed office, Barack Obama has so far revealed himself to be an unfolding disappointment. On arrival, expectations were far lower for FDR, who was not considered extraordinary at all — until he actually did something extraordinary.

The great expectations of 2009 are, only a year later, beginning to smell like a pile of dead fish with new rhetoric — including populist-style attacks on villainous bankers that sound fake (or cynically pandering) when uttered by Obama’s brainiacs — layered on top of the pile like deodorant. Meanwhile, the country is suffering through a recovery that isn’t a recovery unless you happen to be a banker, and the administration stands by, too politically or intellectually inhibited or incapacitated to do much of anything about it. A year into “change we can believe in” and the new regime, once so flush with power and the promise of big doings, seems exhausted, vulnerable, and afraid. A year into the New Deal — indeed a mere 100 days into Roosevelt’s era — change, whether you believed in it or not, clearly had the wind at its back.

A Tale of Two Presidencies

If, a few days after Roosevelt pronounced them ex-communicant, the “money-changers” were back inside the temple — “temple,” by the way, was how the Federal Reserve used to be known before its recent fall from grace — no one was too surprised. He, like Obama, was initially worried about alienating big business and high finance. He arrived in the Oval Office, in fact, still a prisoner of his own past and the country’s. He believed, for example, in the then-orthodox wisdom of balancing the budget and would never entirely abandon that faith.

Not long before he assumed office, his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, vetoed a bill calling for the accelerated payment of bonuses to World War I veterans. Many of them had only recently gathered in makeshift tents on Anacostia Flats in Washington D.C., an army of the destitute, to plead their case. Hoover, to his lasting dishonor, ordered Army Chief of Staff General Douglas McArthur to have their tents set on fire and drive them away at bayonet point. Not long after FDR took the oath of office, he vetoed the same bill. He shared, as well, in a broad cultural repugnance for what was then called “the dole,” and today is known as “welfare.”

The legendary first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration, memorable for a raft of reform and recovery legislation, also prominently featured an Economy Act designed to reduce government expenditures. Fearing the possibility of a break with the commercial elite, the president tried forging a partnership with them, much as Hoover had. As a matter of fact, the first two pieces of recovery legislation his administration submitted to Congress — the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act — were formulated and implemented in a way that would seem familiar today. They gave the country’s major corporations and largest agricultural interests the principal authority for re-starting the country’s stalled economic engines.

However, even as the administration tried to maintain its ties to powerful business interests and a traditional fiscal conservatism, it broke them — and it severed those connections in ways, and for reasons, that are instructive today.

• The Glass-Steagall Act: This emergency banking legislation passed during those extraordinary first 100 days separated commercial from investment banking. It was meant to prevent the misuse of commercial bank deposits (other people’s money like yours and mine) in dangerous forms of speculation, which many at the time believed had helped cause the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, prelude to the Great Depression. Today, ever more people wish Glass-Steagall had never been repealed (as it was in 1999), as its absence helped open the door to the financial misadventures that brought us the Great Crash of ’08.

The bill infuriated what was called, in those days, “the Money Trust,” especially the once omnipotent house of Morgan, the dominant member of an elite group of Wall Street firms that had run the financial system since the turn of the century when J.P. Morgan, America’s most famous banker, was revered and feared around the world. (Jack, the patriarch’s son, was so incensed by New Deal financial reform that he banned all pictures of the President from the bank’s premises.) Glass-Steagall, as well as the two Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 which created the Securities and Exchange Commission and left the doyens of the New York Stock Exchange apoplectic, represented real reform, and so were different in kind from TARP and all the other contraptions designed by the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments simply to bail out the financial sector.

• The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): Offspring also of those first 100 days, the TVA uplifted a vast, underdeveloped, and impoverished rural region of the country by bringing it electric power, irrigation, soil conservation, and flood control. It introduced the then-alien (and once again alien) idea of government-directed economic planning and development. It left the private utility industry irate at the prospect of having to compete with effective, publicly owned electrical-power-generating facilities. Fast-forward to today when, on the contrary, the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, conniving behind closed doors with Obama’s people, proved triumphant in a similar confrontation, leaving government competition in the dust.

• Jobs: And then there was, as there is again, the question of jobs and how to create them. In 1933, American politicians still took the notion of balancing the budget each year with deadly seriousness. In our present era, every president from Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and now, apparently, Barack Obama talks the talk without any intention of walking the walk. What made the Roosevelt moment remarkable was this: balanced-budget orthodoxy notwithstanding, the new administration soon forged ahead with a set of jobs programs that not only implied deficit spending but an even more radical departure from business as usual.

Initially, the Public Works Administration (PWA), created as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, relied on large-scale infrastructure projects farmed out to private enterprise. Undertaking such projects inevitably entailed government borrowing and deficits. Partly for that reason, the PWA proceeded at a glacial pace, put few to work right away, and — in the way it looked to the private sector to take the lead — resembled the latest thinking of the Obama administration whose newest tepid suggestions for creating jobs depend almost solely on funneling tax relief to business.

Simultaneously, however, the New Deal pursued a more daring alternative. FDR diverted a third of the PWA’s budget to the Civil Works Administration (CWA), out of which was born the legendary Civilian Conservation Corps, an agency that deployed hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men to restore the country’s forests and parklands. The CWA skipped the private sector entirely and simply put people to work: four million people in the summer and fall of 1933. (That would be the equivalent, today, of ten million Americans back on the job.)

During the first nine months of the Roosevelt administration manual laborers, clerks, architects, book-binders, teachers, actors, white and blue collar workers alike became Federal employees. They laid millions of feet of sewer pipe, improved hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and built thousands of schools, playgrounds, and airports. Harry Hopkins, who ran the CWA, was authorized to seize tools, equipment, and materials from Army warehouses to get the new system up and running. (The Works Progress Administration, a subsequent incarnation of the CWA, would later create eight million jobs on the same principle of public employment.)

This isn’t even within hailing distance of where the current Administration is now as it frets about the deficit and pledges to freeze domestic spending (and implies, without having the courage to say so, that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security had better watch out). Coming from a regnant Democratic Party this is change we can’t or don’t want to believe in.

Heading Backwards

Like Obama, Roosevelt was denounced by his enemies in the Republican Party and the business community as a closet socialist (not to mention a cripple, a Jew, and a homosexual). While the administration would sometimes trim its sails considerably to weather the right wing storm, its general reaction to Republican opposition was the opposite of Obama’s. Even during that first year, and at an accelerating pace afterwards, the momentum of the New Deal carried it irresistibly to the left.

This was true, in fact, of the whole Democratic Party. The Congress elected in the off-year of 1934 was not only more overwhelmingly Democratic, but the Democrats who won were considerably more progressive-minded. They were far readier to jettison the shibboleths of the old order and press a still cautious President in their direction. By 1936, the essentials of the social welfare and regulatory state were in place, an insurgent labor movement had won the elementary right to organize (while becoming the New Deal’s most muscular constituency), and the president was denouncing “economic royalists” and “tories of industry” whose “hatred” for him he “welcomed.”

Today the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are visibly moving in the opposite direction. They read the lesson of humiliating defeat in Massachusetts and the voluble hostility of the populist right as an advisory to move further to the right. Tacking rightward, tailoring policy to match the tastes of business and finance, cautioning Americans that they’ll need to tighten their belts (as if they hadn’t already been doing so), adopting the parsimonious sanctimony of the balanced budget, slimming down their great expectations until what little is left mocks the hopes of so many who elected them — all of this is seen as smart politics.

Smart like a chicken. This is the same cleverness that, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s triumph, turned the Democratic Party into Republican-lite. Shrewdness like this helps explain, in part, why Obama’s inner circle and Democratic leaders took the early, fateful steps that were bound to land them where they find themselves today.

Would the Republican right and its tea-party populists — marginal, mockable political freaks less than a year ago — have enjoyed their current growth spasm if the administration hadn’t been committed to bailing out the very institutions most people considered the villains responsible for running this country into a ditch? Would the Democratic Party have been in imminent danger of losing its faltering grip on Congress had it found the will to pursue serious health-care reform and environmental legislation, or wrestled the financial oligarchy to the mat as Roosevelt did? A long generation spent cowering in the shadows of the conservative ascendancy has left the newly empowered Democrats congenitally incapable of seizing their own historic moment.

After a year of feinting to the left without meaning it, how seriously is anyone going to take the administration’s latest call to tax the banks or break their addiction to reckless speculation? Even if Obama now means to push ahead with some sort of health-care reform or put some teeth into new financial regulations, he has spent so much political capital moving in the opposite direction and seeking partners where there never were any that his quest, even if genuine, may now be purely quixotic. As for the surge in Afghanistan and the endless war that goes with it, by election time 2010, it’s an even bet that it will have further undermined any hopes of a late-inning Democratic Party revival.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, off-year elections do not always favor the minority party. Indeed, 1934 may be the best example of the opposite effect. Exactly because the New Deal showed itself ever readier to junk the ancien régime, break with economic orthodoxy, and above all say goodbye to its erstwhile corporate friends, it was rewarded handsomely at the polls. None of that apparently will be repeated in 2010, given an administration that seems to be running a New Deal in reverse.

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• Steve Fraser is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order and author, most recently, of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He is Research Associate at the Joseph Murphy Center for Labor and Community Studies at the Graduate Center of the City of New York. (To catch him in an exclusive TomDispatch audio interview discussing why Obama has ignored the public-works job model Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered, click here.)

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175205/tomgram%3A_steve_fraser%2C_a_tale_of_two_presidents

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Fear Inc.

posted February 14, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

Hold Onto Your Underwear

This Is Not a National Emergency

By Tom Engelhardt

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of 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, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. 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, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 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 rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 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, despite 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 Connection 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 January 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 ensued. 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 International Airport. (No one was killed.)

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived. Had the inept Abdulmutallab actually succeeded, the death toll would not have equaled the 324 traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008; while the destruction of four Flight 253s from terrorism 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 23-year-old Nigerian set off his bomb, it would have been a nightmare for the people on board, and a tragedy for those who knew them. It would certainly have represented a safety and security issue that needed to be dealt with. But it would not have been a national emergency, nor a national-security crisis. It would have been nothing more than a single plane knocked out of the sky, something that happens from time to time without the intervention of terrorists.

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 machine (and the media universe that goes with it) ramped up on the subject of the Obama administration’s terror wimpiness; the global air transport system plunked down millions of dollars on new technology which 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 significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing your behavior over, or perhaps 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 U.S. — whether the 13 killed at Fort Hood or the soldier murdered outside an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas — were far outnumbered by the 32 dead in a 2007 mass killing at Virginia Tech University, not to speak of the relatively regular moments when workers or former workers “go postal”. Since September 11th, terror in the U.S. 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, foreclosure, 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, which had the look of the apocalyptic, brought the fear of terrorism into the American bedroom via the TV screen. That fear was used with remarkable effectiveness by the Bush administration, which color-coded terror for its own ends. A domestic version of shock-and-awe — Americans were indeed shocked and awed by 9/11 — helped drive the country into two disastrous wars and occupations, each still ongoing, and into George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror, a term now persona non grata in Washington, even if the “war” itself goes on and on.

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, of course, 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 institutionalized 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 language of the terror-mongers. “The homeland” is the place which 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” department, 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, associations, 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 insure that fear is the drug constantly shot into the American body politic. These would include:

• The imperial presidency: The Bush administration used fear not only to promote its wars and its Global War on Terror, but also to unchain the commander-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 imprisonment, and torture, turned out to be the royal road to the American unconscious and so to a presidency 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. Recently, for instance, we learned that, under the pressure of the Flight 253 incident, the Obama administration has adopted the Bush administration position that a president, under certain circumstances, has the authority 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 Abdulmutallab.) The Bush administration opened the door to this possibility and now, it seems, 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 20 news helicopters while 95 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 which 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, publishing to publicity, the Republicans had their own megaphone ready at hand. This is, by now, a machine chock-a-block full of politicians and ex-politicians, publishers, pundits, military “experts,” journalists, 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 until a subject — none more popular than terrorism and Democratic spinelessness in the face of it — is temporarily 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 tagalong 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 remind 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 apologized, 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. advisors 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 Republican 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 institutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of society.

9/11 Never Ends

Fear has a way of re-ordering human worlds. That only a relatively small number of determined fanatics with extraordinarily limited access to American soil keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvious. What the fear machine produces is the dark underside 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 planet 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? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pin-prick 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 Republicans 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 homeland security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust devil and say:

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

[Note: The figures on the 2010 Department of Homeland Security budget and “homeland security” spending in the 2010 budget were provided by the National Priorities Project.]

______________________________________

• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175206/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_fear_inc._/

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Frida Berrigan — Pimping Weapons to the World

posted February 16, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

As last week ended, the American and British military in Afghanistan finally launched a long awaited operation to occupy the city of Marja in Taliban-controlled Helmand Province. According to Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal, to win “hearts and minds,” the U.S. Army and Marines were arriving with “a government in a box” — Afghan governing and security structures evidently ready to be unpacked as part of the sort of nation-building operation that once would have staggered the American officer corps.

Not surprisingly, when it comes to the Afghan War, “hearts and minds” pieces are now a dime a dozen in the U.S. press. (Can McChrystal’s new counterinsurgency strategy of “protecting the people” work? Will the Afghans start to love us, love themselves, and reject the Taliban?) In one recent piece about Marines in a Taliban “stronghold” near the southern city of Kandahar, “Forces Strain to Hire Afghans”, Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov described the crisis a U.S. Army captain faced. He had more than a million dollars to spend on reconstruction projects meant to gain local loyalties, and few Afghan takers. The third paragraph of his piece went like this: “Yet, the only construction work here so far has been the hammering of U.S. Navy Seabees, or construction troops, erecting a vast American base overlooking Senjaray. The town's unemployed men prefer to stay home, for fear of Taliban retribution.”

This is fairly typical of U.S. press coverage of the Afghan War. That “vast American base,” just now under construction, is noticed and mentioned in passing by an American reporter, and then never comes up again. Yet it is one of approximately 400 bases built or being built in the country, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com recently discovered — a staggering Pentagon military construction splurge that is almost never reported on. It’s simply taken for granted.

As TomDispatch regular and weapons-export expert Frida Berrigan of the New American Foundation points out, the American position in what U.S. news reports always call “the global arms trade” is similarly taken for granted. If the Hollywood export Avatar sweeps the world, bringing in multi-billions, it's front-page news. If American arms exports sweep the world, bringing in multi-billions, you’re lucky to find out about it deep inside your ever-thinning daily newspaper (and such stories seldom even make it onto the TV news). If we sell weaponry repeatedly to the Indonesians or the Saudis or the Qataris or the Israelis, it’s a ho-hum matter. The norm. Like those bases in Afghanistan. It’s only if some country with clout screams bloody murder, as the Chinese recently did about a massive arms deal with Taiwan, that we have news; or if some other country sells weapons to whatever state is eager, as France recently agreed to do with the Russians, and the Americans responsible for distributing most of the advanced weaponry on the planet disapprove, is attention paid. Go figure.

— Tom Engelhardt

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America’s Global Weapons Monopoly

Don’t Call It “the Global Arms Trade”

By Frida Berrigan

On the relatively rare occasions when the media turns its attention to U.S. weapons sales abroad and shines its not-so-bright spotlight on the latest set of facts and figures, it invariably speaks of “the global arms trade.”

Let’s consider that label for a moment, word by word:

• It is “global”, since there are few places on the planet that lie beyond the reach of the weapons industry.

• “Arms” sounds so old-fashioned and anodyne when what we’re talking about is advanced technology designed to kill and maim.

• And “trade” suggests a give and take among many parties when, if we’re looking at the figures for that “trade” in a clear-eyed way, there is really just one seller and so many buyers.

How about updating it this way: “the global weapons monopoly.”

In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total “trade”. Some of these agreements were long-term ones and did not result in 2008 deliveries of weapons systems, but these latest figures are a good gauge of the global appetite for weapons. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to recognize that, when one nation accounts for nearly 70% of weapons sales, the term “global arms trade” doesn’t quite cut it.

Consider the “competition” and reality comes into focus. Take a guess on which country is the number two weapons exporter on the planet: China? Russia? No, Italy, with a relatively paltry $3.7 billion in agreements with other countries or just 9% of the U.S. market share. Russia, that former Cold War superpower in the “trade”, was close behind Italy, with only $3.5 billion in arms agreements.

U.S. weapons manufacturers have come a long way, baby, since those Cold War days when the United States really did have a major competitor. For instance, the Congressional Research Service’s data for 1990, the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence, shows global weapons sales totaling $32.7 billion, with the United States accounting for $12.1 billion of that or 37% of the market. For its part, the Soviet Union was responsible for a competitive $10.7 billion in deals inked that year. France, China, and the United Kingdom accounted for most of the rest.

Since then, the global appetite for weapons has only grown more voracious, while the number of purveyors has shrunk to the point where the Pentagon could hang out a sign: “We arm the world”. No kidding, it’s true.

Cambodia ($304,000), Comoros ($895,000), Colombia ($256 million), Guinea ($200,000), Greece ($225 million), Great Britain ($1.1 billion), the Philippines ($72.9 million), Poland ($79.8 million), and Peru ($16.4 million) all buy U.S. arms, as does almost every country not in that list. U.S. weapons, and only U.S. weapons, are coveted by presidents and prime ministers, generals and strongmen.

From the Pentagon’s own data (which differs from that in the CRS report), here are the top ten nations which made Foreign Military Sales agreements with the Pentagon, and so with U.S. weapons makers, in 2008:

• Saudi Arabia: $6.06 billion

• Iraq: $2.50 billion

• Morocco: $2.41 billion

• Egypt: $2.31 billion

• Israel: $1.32 billion

• Australia: $1.13 billion

• South Korea: $1.12 billion

• Great Britain: $1.10 billion

• India: $1 billion

• Japan: $840 million

That’s more than $17 billion in weapons right there. Some of these countries are consistently eager buyers, and some are not. Morocco, for example, is only in that top-ten list because it was green-lighted to buy 24 of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 fighter planes at $360 million (or so) for each aircraft, an expensive one-shot deal. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia (which inked $14.71 billion in weapons agreements between 2001 and 2008), Egypt ($13.25 billion) and Israel ($11.27 billion) are such regular customers that they should have the equivalent of one of those “buy 10, get the 11th free” punch cards doled out by your favorite coffee shop.

To sum up, the U.S. has a virtual global monopoly on exporting tools of force and destruction. Call it market saturation. Call it anything you like, just not the “global arms trade.”

Getting Even More Competitive?

It used to be that the United States exported goods, products, and machinery of all sorts in prodigious quantities: cars and trucks, steel and computers, and high-tech gizmos. But those days are largely over.

The Obama administration now wants to launch a green manufacturing revolution in the U.S., and in February, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a new “National Export Initiative” with the aim of doubling American exports, a move he said would support the creation of two million new jobs. The U.S. could, of course, lose the renewable-energy race to China and that new exports program may never get off the ground. In one area, however, the U.S. is manufacturing products that are distinctly wanted — things that go boom in the night — and there the Pentagon is working hard to increase market share.

Don’t for a second think that the American global monopoly on weapons sales is accidental or unintentional. The constant and lucrative growth of this market for U.S. weapons makers has been ensured by shrewd strategic planning. Washington is constantly thinking of new and inventive ways to flog its deadly wares throughout the world.

How do you improve on near perfection? In the interest of enhancing that “competitive” edge in weapons sales, the Obama administration is investigating the possibility of revising export laws to make it even easier to sell military technology abroad. As Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morell explained in January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to see “wholesale changes to the rules and regulations on government technology exports” in the name of “competitiveness.”

When he says “government technology exports”, Morell of course means weapons and other military technologies. “Tinkering with our antiquated, bureaucratic, overly cumbersome system is not enough to maintain our competitiveness in the global economy and also help our friends and allies buy the equipment they need to contribute to global security”, he continued, “[Gates] strongly supports the administration’s efforts to completely reform our export control regime, starting ideally with a blank sheet of paper”.

The laws that regulate U.S. weapons exports are a jumbled mess, but in essence they delineate what the United States can sell to whom and through what bureaucratic mechanisms. According to U.S. law, for example, there are actually a few countries that cannot receive U.S. weapons. Myanmar under the military junta and Venezuela while led by Hugo Chavez are two examples. There are also some weapons systems that are not intended for export. Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor jet fighter was — until the Pentagon recently stopped buying the plane — deemed too sophisticated or sensitive to sell abroad. And there are reporting requirements that give members of Congress a window of opportunity within which they can question or oppose proposed weapons exports.

Given what’s being sold, these export controls are remarkably minimal in nature and are constantly under assault by the weapons industry. Bans on weapons sales to particular countries are regularly lifted through aggressive lobbying. (Indonesia, for example, was offered $50 million in weapons from 2006 to 2008 after an almost decade long congressional arms embargo.) The industry also works to relax controls on new technology exports to allies. Japan and Australia have mounted campaigns to win the ability to buy F-22 Raptors, potential sales that Lockheed Martin is now especially happy to entertain. The reporting window to Congress remains an important export control, but the time frame is shrinking as more countries are being “fast tracked,” making it harder for distracted representatives to react when a controversial sale comes up.

In addition to revising these export controls, the administration is looking at the issue of “dual-use” technologies. These are not weapons. They do not shoot or explode. Included are high-speed computer processors, surveillance and detection networks, and a host of other complex and evolving technologies that could have military as well as civilian applications. This category might also include intangible items like cyber-entities or access to controlled web environments.

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other major weapons manufacturers have invested billions of dollars from the Pentagon’s research and development budgets in exploring and perfecting such technologies, and now they are eager to sell them to foreign buyers along with the usual fighter planes, combat ships, and guided missiles. But the rules as they stand make this something less than a slam dunk. So the weapons industry and the Pentagon are arguing for “updating” the rules. If you translate updating as “loosening” the rules, then the United States would indeed be more “competitive,” but who exactly are we trying to beat?

Weapons Sales are Red Hot

“What’s Hot?” is the title of Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieranga’s blog entry for January 04, 2010. Wieranga is the Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is charged with overseeing weapons exports, and such pillow talk is evidently more than acceptable — at least when it’s about weapons sales. In fact, Wieranga could barely restrain himself that day, adding: “Afghanistan is really HOT!” Admittedly, on that day the temperature in Kabul was just above freezing, but not at the Pentagon, where arms sales to Afghanistan evidently create a lot of heat.

As Wieranga went on to write, the Obama administration’s new 2010/2011 budget allocates $6 billion in weaponry for Afghan Security Forces. The Afghans will actually get those weapons for free, but U.S. weapons makers will make real money delivering them at taxpayers’ expense and, as the Vice Admiral pointed out, that “means there is a staggering amount of acquisition work to do.”

It’s not just Afghanistan that’s now in the torrid zone. Weapons sales all over the world will be smoking in 2010 and beyond.

The year began with a bang when Wieranga’s Agency announced that the Obama administration had decided to sell a nifty $6 billion in weapons to Taiwan. Even as the United States leans heavily on China for debt servicing, Washington is giving the Mainland a big raspberry by offering the island of 22 million off its coast (which Washington does not formally recognize as an independent nation), a lethal cocktail of weaponry that includes $3 billion in Black Hawk helicopters. This deal comes on top of more than $11 billion in U.S. weapons exports to Taiwan over the last decade, and is certain to set Chinese-U.S. relations back a step or two.

Other bonanzas on the horizon? Brazil wants new fighter planes and Boeing is battling a French company for the contract in a deal that could be worth a whopping $7 billion. India, once a major arms buyer from the Soviet Union, is now another big buy-American customer, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin vying to equip its air force with new fighter planes in deals that Boeing estimates may reach $11 billion.

Such deals are staggering. They contribute more bang and blast to a world already bristling with particularly lethal weaponry. They are a striking American success story in a time filled with failures. Put in the lurid but everyday terms of a nation weaned on reality television, the Pentagon is pimping for the U.S. weapons industry. The weapons industry, for its part, is a pusher for every kind of lethal technology. The two of them together are working to ensure that more of the same will flow out of the U.S. in ever easier and more lucrative ways.

Global arms trade? Send that one back to the Department of Euphemisms. Pimps and pushers with a lucrative global monopoly on a killing drug — maybe that’s the language we need. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to launch a “war on weapons.”

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• Frida Berrigan is a Senior Program Associate with the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative. “Weapons at War 2008”, a report she co-authored with William D. Hartung, goes into much more detail about the politics and pratfalls of weapons exports.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175207/tomgram%3A_frida_berrigan%2C_pimping_weapons_to_the_world

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

William Astore — The U.S. Military's German Fetish

posted February 18, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

Remember the 100 hours of combat that made up the first Gulf War, the mere weeks it took for Kabul to fall in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, or the “shock and awe” wave of air attacks that led off the 2003 invasion of Iraq, followed by the 20-day blitzkrieg-like campaign that left American troops occupying Baghdad? Those were the days when, as retired lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore reminds us, the civilians in the Bush Pentagon thought they were the masters of lightning war. Now, skip almost seven years, and in Afghanistan the U.S. military has just launched the largest campaign since the invasion of 2001. Fifteen thousand U.S., British, and Afghan troops have been dispatched to take Marja, a single, modest-sized, Taliban-controlled city of 80,000 in one of more than 700 districts in Afghanistan, many under some degree of Taliban control or influence. How the time frame for success has changed.

As the Americans went in, Marine Commander Brigadier General Larry Nicholson was already warning that it might take up to 30 days, longer than it took to capture Baghdad, just to clear Marja of hidden explosives and, despite overwhelming power arrayed against perhaps a few hundred Taliban guerrillas, the fighting in the town has gone on relatively steadily for days. What, in 1991, 2001, and 2003 was the swift claim of total victory is now a long-haul campaign, according to American military sources, to blunt Taliban success (or, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, to “degrade the capability of the Taliban”) and so, evidently, bring the enemy in a chastened state to the negotiating table before an American drawdown begins.

As for timelines, U.S. officials now talk about the combat portion of the Marja campaign being but the beginning of a full-scale, militarized version of nation-building on a local level. Think of it as city- or district-building, and the process includes (we’re told by the U.S. war commander with some pride) the unpacking of an imported “government in a box” — the governing and security forces of Hamid Karzai’s central government — and the launching of a well-funded, local reconstruction program to win “hearts and minds”. As a result, the test of success is now considered to be months down the line, and that’s if the Marja campaign doesn’t turn out to be a classic counterinsurgency quagmire.

The story of how Pentagon strategists and the U.S. military went from being the masters of war to a force of would-be long-haul city-builders in the backlands of Afghanistan is a strange one indeed, made stranger yet by the bizarre detour they took through modern German military lore. (To catch William Astore in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview discussing the U.S. military's fascination with the Wehrmacht, click here.)

— Tom Engelhardt

______________________________________

American Blitzkrieg

Loving the German War Machine to Death

By William J. Astore

“Why do people have a fixation with the German military when they haven’t won a war since 1871?”

— Tom Clancy

I’ve always been interested in the German military, especially the Wehrmacht of World War II. As a young boy, I recall building many models, not just German Panther and Tiger tanks, but famous Luftwaffe planes as well. True, I built American tanks and planes, Shermans and Thunderbolts and Mustangs, but the German models always seemed “cooler”, a little more exotic, a little more predatory. And the German military, to my adolescent imagination, seemed admirably tough and aggressive: hard-fighting, thoroughly professional, hanging on against long odds, especially against the same hordes of “godless communists” that I knew we Americans were then facing down in the Cold War.

Later, of course, a little knowledge about the nightmare of Nazism and the Holocaust went a long way toward destroying my admiration for the Wehrmacht, but — to be completely honest — a residue of grudging respect still survives: I no longer have my models, but I still have many of the Ballantine illustrated war books I bought as a young boy for a buck or two, and which often celebrated the achievements of the German military, with titles like Panzer Division, or Afrika Korps, or even Waffen SS.

As the Bible says, we are meant to put aside childish things as we grow to adulthood, and an uninformed fascination with the militaria and regalia of the Third Reich was certainly one of these. But when I entered Air Force ROTC in 1981, and later on active duty in 1985, I was surprised, even pleased, to discover that so many members of the U.S. military shared my interest in the German military. To cite just one example, as a cadet at Field Training in 1983 (and later at Squadron Officer School in 1992), I participated in what was known as “Project X”. As cadets, we came to know of it in whispers: Tomorrow we’re doing ‘Project X’: It’s really tough …”

A problem-solving leadership exercise, Project X consisted of several scenarios and associated tasks. Working in small groups, you were expected to solve these while working against the clock. What made the project exciting and more than busy-work, like the endless marching or shining of shoes or waxing of floors, was that it was based on German methods of developing and instilling small-unit leadership, teamwork, and adaptability. If it worked for the Germans, the “finest soldiers in the world” during World War II, it was good enough for us, or so most of us concluded (including me).

Project X was just one rather routine manifestation of the American military’s fascination with German methods and the German military mystique. As I began teaching military history to cadets at the Air Force Academy in 1990, I quickly became familiar with a flourishing “Cult of Clausewitz”. So ubiquitous was Carl von Clausewitz and his book On War that it seemed as if we Americans had never produced our own military theorists. I grew familiar with the way Auftragstaktik (the idea of maximizing flexibility and initiative at the lowest tactical levels) was regularly extolled. So prevalent did Clausewitz and Auftragstaktik become that, in the 1980s and 1990s, American military thinking seemed reducible to the idea that “war is a continuation of politics” and a belief that victory went to the side that empowered its “strategic corporals.”

War as a Creative Act

The American military’s fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking raises many questions. In retrospect, what disturbs me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on events.

In this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive. It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of “creative” warlords who demonstrated their mastery of it by cultivating such qualities as flexibility, adaptability, and quickness. One aimed to get inside the enemy’s “decision cycle”, the so-called OODA loop — the Air Force’s version of Auftragstaktik — while at the same time cultivating a “warrior ethos” within a tight-knit professional army that was to stand above, and also separate from, ordinary citizens.

This idolization of the German military was a telling manifestation of a growing militarism within an American society which remained remarkably oblivious to the slow strangulation of its citizen-soldier ideal. At the same time, the American military began to glorify a new generation of warrior-leaders by a selective reading of its past. Old “Blood and Guts” himself, the warrior-leader George S. Patton — the commander as artist-creator-genius — was celebrated; Omar N. Bradley — the bespectacled GI general and reluctant soldier-citizen — was neglected. Not coincidentally, a new vision of the battlefield emerged in which the U.S. military aimed, without the slightest sense of irony, for “total situational awareness” and “full spectrum dominance”, goals that, if attained, promised commanders the almost god-like ability to master the “storm of steel”, to calm the waves, to command the air.

In the process, any sense of war as thoroughly unpredictable and enormously wasteful was lost. In this infatuation with German military prowess, which the political scientist John Mearsheimer memorably described as “Wehrmacht penis envy,” we celebrated our ability to Blitzkrieg our enemies — which promised rapid, decisive victories that would be largely bloodless (at least for us). In 1991, a decisively quick victory in the Desert Storm campaign of the first Gulf War was the proof, or so it seemed then, that a successful “revolution in military affairs”, or RMA in military parlance, was underway.

Forgotten, however, was this: the German Blitzkrieg of World War II ended with Germany’s “third empire” thoroughly thrashed by opponents who continued to fight even when the odds seemed longest.

What a remarkable, not to say bizarre, turnabout! The army and country the U.S. had soundly beaten in two world wars (with a lot of help from allies, including, of course, those godless communists of the Soviet Union in the second one) had become a beacon for the U.S. military after Vietnam. To use a sports analogy, it was as if a Major League Baseball franchise, in seeking to win the World Series, decided to model itself not on the New York Yankees but rather on the Chicago Cubs.

The New Masters of Blitzkrieg

Busts of Clausewitz reside in places of honor today at both the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and the National War College in Washington, D.C. Clausewitz was a complex writer, and his vision of war was both dense and rich, defying easy simplification. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. military from simplifying him. Ask the average officer about Clausewitz, and he’ll mention “war as the continuation of politics” and maybe something about “the fog and friction of war” — and that’s about it. What’s really meant by this rendition of Clausewitz for Dummies is that, though warfare may seem extreme, it’s really a perfectly sensible form of violent political discourse between nation-states.

Such an officer may grudgingly admit that, thanks to fog and friction, “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. What he’s secretly thinking, however, is that it won’t matter at all, not given the U.S. military’s “mastery” of Auftragstaktik, achieved in part through next-generation weaponry that provides both “total situational awareness” and a decisive, war-winning edge.

No wonder that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were so eager to go to war in Iraq in 2003. They saw themselves as the new masters of Blitzkrieg, the new warlords (or “Vulcans” to use a term popular back then), the inheritors of the best methods of German military efficiency.

This belief, this faith, in German-style total victory through relentless military proficiency is best captured in Max Boot’s gushing tribute to the U.S. military, published soon after Bush’s self-congratulatory and self-adulatory “Mission Accomplished” speech in May 2003. For Boot, America’s victory in Iraq had to “rank as one of the signal achievements in military history.” In his words:

“Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German ‘blitzkrieg’ through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of ‘only’ 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison.”

How likely is it that future military historians will celebrate General Tommy Franks and elevate him above the “incompetent” Rommel and Guderian? Such praise, even then, was more than fatuous. It was absurd.

Throughout our history, many Americans, especially frontline combat veterans, have known the hell of real war. It’s one big reason why, historically speaking, we’ve traditionally been reluctant to keep a large standing military. But the Cold War, containment, and our own fetishizing of the German Wehrmacht changed everything. We began to see war not as a human-made disaster but as a creative science and art. We began to seek “force multipliers” and total victory achieved through an almost Prussian mania for military excellence.

Reeling from a seemingly inexplicable and unimaginable defeat in Vietnam, the officer corps used Clausewitz to crawl out of its collective fog. By reading him selectively and reaffirming our own faith in military professionalism and precision weaponry, we tricked ourselves into believing that we had attained mastery over warfare. We believed we had tamed the dogs of war; we believed we had conquered Bellona, that we could make the goddess of war do our bidding.

We forgot that Clausewitz compared war not only to politics but to a game of cards. Call it the ultimate high-stakes poker match. Even the player with the best cards, the highest stack of chips, doesn’t always win. Guile and endurance matter. So too does nerve, even luck. And having a home-table advantage doesn’t hurt either.

None of that seemed to matter to a U.S. military that aped the German military, while over-hyping its abilities and successes. The result? A so-called “new American way of war” that was simply a desiccated version of the old German one, which had produced nothing but catastrophic defeat for Germany in both 1918 and 1945 — and disaster for Europe as well.

Just Ask the Germans

Precisely because that disaster did not befall us, precisely because we emerged triumphant from two world wars, we became both too enamored with the decisiveness of war, and too dismissive of our own unique strength. For our strength was not military élan or cutting-edge weaponry or tactical finesse (these were German “strengths”), but rather the dedication, the generosity, even the occasional ineptitude, of our citizen-soldiers. Their spirit was unbreakable precisely because they — a truly democratic citizen army — were dedicated to defeating a repellently evil empire that reveled fanatically in its own combat vigor.

Looking back on my youthful infatuation with the German Wehrmacht, I recognize a boy’s misguided enthusiasm for military hardness and toughness. I recognize as well the seductiveness of reducing the chaos of war to “shock and awe” Blitzkrieg and warrior empowerment. What amazes me, however, is how this astonishingly selective and adolescent view of war — with its fetish for lightning results, achieved by elevating and empowering a new generation of warlords, warriors, and advanced weaponry — came to dominate mainstream American military thinking after the frustrations of Vietnam.

Unlike a devastated and demoralized Germany after its defeats, we decided not to devalue war as an instrument of policy after our defeat, but rather to embrace it. Clasping Clausewitz to our collective breasts, we marched forward seeking new decisive victories. Yet, like our role models the Germans of World War II, we found victory to be both elusive and illusive.

So, I have a message for my younger self: put aside those menacing models of German tanks and planes. Forget those glowing accounts of Rommel and his Afrika Korps. Dismiss Blitzkrieg from your childish mind. There is no lightning war, America. There never was. And if you won’t take my word for it, just ask the Germans.

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• William J. Astore ([e-mail]), a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. To catch him in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview discussing the U.S. military's fascination with the Wehrmacht, click here.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175208/tomgram%3A_william_astore%2C_the_u.s._military%27s_german_fetish

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

The Afghan Mask Slips

posted February 21, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

Explain Something to Me

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

By Tom Engelhardt

Explain something to me.

In recent months, unless you were insensate, 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 getting 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.

Only the other day, no less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, “Washington, right now, is broken." Indiana Senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced recently that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, “The system 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 hyperpartisanship” — dominate the news when the media describes that dysfunctionalism. Foreign observers have been 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 congressional “gridlock” and the “slash and burn politics” that have left the nation’s capital tied in knots.

And he has an obvious point since, when he had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, congressional Democrats and the White House still couldn’t get their act together and pass health-care reform, not even after a year of discussion, debate, and favors trading, not even as the train wreck of the Massachusetts election barreled toward them. These days the Democrats may not even be a party, which means their staggering Senate majority has really been a majority of next to nothing.

The Republicans, who ran us into this ditch in the Bush years, are now perfectly happy to be the party of “no” — and the polls seem to show that it’s 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 two weeks ago) in Taliban-controlled Helmand Province, Afghanistan, it’s placing a bet on its ability to “restore the credibility” of President Hamid Karzai’s government. In the process, it 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, have driven the Taliban out of town, he’s prepared to roll out an Afghan “government in a box”, including police, courts, and local services.

The U.S. military is intent, according to the Wall Street Journal, on “delivering a new administration 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 15 years in Germany, is, according to press reports, living on a U.S. Marine base in the province until, one day soon, the American military can install him in an “abandoned government building” or simple "a clump of ruins" in that city.

He is, we’re told, to arrive with four U.S. civilian advisors, two from the State Department and two from the U.S. Agency for International Development, described (in the typically patronizing language of American press reports) as his “mentors”. They are to help him govern, and especially dole out the millions of dollars that the U.S. military has available to “reconstruct” Marja. Road-building projects are to be launched, schools refurbished, and a new clinic built, all to win Pashtun “hearts and minds”. As soon as the fighting abates, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has suggested, the post-military emphasis will be on “economic development”, with an influx of “military and civilian workers” who will "show a better way of life" to the town's inhabitants.

So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it's becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What’s the military’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 convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation’s capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can’t do it in Washington or Sacramento?

Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world’s leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military 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 Matthew 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 corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered 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 outside 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 “togetherness” 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 decision to launch the operation, already long announced, General McChrystal “stepped into his armored 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-consciousness, about putting an “Afghan face” on the Marja campaign. The phrase is revelatory and oddly blunt. As an image, there's really only one way to understand it (not that the Americans involved would ever stop to do so). After all, what does it mean to "put a face" on something that assumedly 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, which is American.

National Security Adviser James Jones, for instance, spoke of the Marja 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 use the phrase, as in a recent Associated Press story: “Military officials say they are learning from past mistakes. The offensive is designed 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 deepest American contempt for putative “allies”? Why, for instance, can those same Wall Street Journal reporters write without blinking: “Western officials also are bringing Afghan cabinet members into strategy discussions, allowing them to select the officials 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 general 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 representatives 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?

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Note on further reading:[/b] The single best piece I’ve seen suggesting answers to some of the questions raised above is Andrew Bacevich’s “Government-in-a-box in Marja”, in last week’s Los Angeles Times. As ever, I recommend that, on war and peace subjects across the Middle East, Central, and South Asia, you check out Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog (never to be missed), Antiwar.com (an invaluable daily resource), and the War in Context website, which I’ve always relied on and which now exists in a new, more focused iteration. (It has been riveting lately as it follows the spreading scandal surrounding the assassination in Dubai of a senior Hamas military commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.)][/size]

• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175209/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_afghan_mask_slips

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Michael Klare — Another Planet for James Cameron

posted February 23, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

A planet with depleted resources is nothing new at the movies. Few who saw the 1973 film Soylent Green (set in 2022) are likely to forget the brief visit to what looks like a pawnbroker’s shop with grills and bars to get a single tomato or a humanity being fed itself by a rapacious corporation. A Boy and his Dog (1975), Mad Max (1979, and its sequels), Escape from New York (1981), Waterworld (1995), and most recently Children of Men (2006), among others, have all offered glimpses of this planet depleted in some fashion of its basic resources and winding down, a world where the phrase “struggle for survival” has a new, far grimmer meaning.

Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular, professor of peace and world security, and author most recently of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, has no track record whatsoever as a movie scriptwriter or a consultant to Hollywood. Nonetheless, he was among the earliest scholars to grasp that, when it came to energy, key industrial minerals, and water supplies, we were heading into a future that could well be filled with what, back in 2001, he prophetically called “resource wars” in his path-breaking book of the same name. “The inhabitants of planet Earth,” he wrote then, “have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials. But we are placing increased pressure on those supplies, and in some cases we face, in our lifetimes, or those of our children, the prospect of severe resource depletion.” How much clearer this possibility looks today as the prospects of a human-changed and possibly ravaged planet only grow stronger.

Like so many of us, Klare recently took a tour of distant Pandora and returned to Earth later that night with a clear sense of what the planet Jake Scully left behind for the Na’vi world must have been like deep into the twenty-second century. As he looks forward to the upcoming Oscars, he has a suggestion for James Cameron about what planet (and whose resources) that film director should next turn his new 3-D techniques on.

— Tom Engelhardt

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Avatar: The Prequel

Will Earth’s Last Stand Sweep the 2013 Oscars?

By Michael T. Klare

The anticipation may be building, but we’ll all have to wait for the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7th to find out just how many Oscars the global box-office smash Avatar will receive. That 3-D sci-fi spectacle, directed by James Cameron, has garnered nine nominations, including ones for Best Picture and Best Director, and it’s already overtaken Titanic, another Cameron global blockbuster, as the top money-maker in movie history. But there’s an even bigger question absorbing Avatar’s millions of fans: What will Cameron, who has already indicated that he’s planning to write a novel based on Avatar, do for a screen encore? As it happens, I have a suggestion: skip the sequels on faraway Pandora’s sister worlds, and do the prequel.

Admittedly, the movie I have in mind (set in a world that Avatar hints at) would lack the blue-skinned Na’vi people, but it would still feature Jake Scully, this time in his real body, on the most intriguing planet of all: Earth. And given a global audience that can’t get enough of Cameron’s work, how many wouldn’t pay big bucks for a chance to take a Pandora-style, sensory-expanding guided tour of our own planet? It would be part of a harrowing tale of environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and perennial conflict in the twilight years of humanity’s decline. Think of it as Avatar: Earth’s Last Stand.

Cameron offers many indications in Avatar that this is the logical direction for him to take. At a poignant moment before the climactic battle between the Na’vi and the remorseless humans begins, for instance, Scully, the renegade Marine turned native rebel, pleads for help from Eywa, the goddess who rules over Pandora: “See, the world we come from — there’s no green there — they killed their Mother.” At another point, Colonel Quaritch, the homicidal Marine commander played with gusto by Stephen Lang, refers to Scully’s previous service with the First Marine Reconnaissance unit on Earth, highlighting his three combat tours in Venezuela. “That was some mean bush,” he says. Then, speaking of his own combat record, Quaritch alludes to fierce fighting in Nigeria. For anyone familiar with the present competition for global energy resources, Venezuela and Nigeria stand out as major oil producers with a history of civil strife.

2144 in 3-D

Imagine them, then, on a future, energy-starved planet. In fact, I can easily picture such a future, so let me take one more step and offer myself to Cameron as a technical consultant on his prequel. Admittedly, I wouldn’t be the person to write the film’s plot or script — I know my limits — but when it comes to charting future resource wars, I think I could be useful. Drawing on Cameron’s clues in Avatar and my own books, including Resource Wars, Blood and Oil, and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, let me just sketch out the prequel scenario I envision:

It’s the torrid summer of 2144, just a decade before Avatar begins. (That movie takes place in summer 2154, after a flight from Earth that, we’re told, involves six continuous years of sleep, which helps us backdate Jake Scully’s Venezuelan combat tours.) As it has been for decades, the world is at war, with competing power blocs fighting bitterly over a diminishing pool of vital resources.

Three great power centers dominate the global resource struggle, all located in the northern latitudes where the climate still remains tolerable and the land still receives sufficient rainfall to support agriculture. The first of these, in whose legions both Scully and Quaritch fight, is the North American Federation, founded after the United States, facing desertification in its southern half, invaded and absorbed Canada. The second, Greater China, incorporating northern China, the Korean peninsula, and eastern Siberia (seized from Russia in a series of wars), dominates what’s left of Asia; the third, the North European Alliance, encompassing Germany, Russia (west of the Urals), and Scandinavia, relies heavily on Arctic resources. As in the world portrayed by George Orwell in 1984, these powers continually jockey for dominance in shifting alliances, while their armies face one another in the torrid, still relatively resource-rich parts of the planet. In this neo-Orwellian world, warfare and the constant pressure of resource competition are the only constants.

Thanks to global warming, the planet’s tropical and subtropical regions, including large parts of Africa, the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, as well as Mexico and the American Southwest, have become virtually uninhabitable. Many island nations and coastal areas, including much of Florida, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines, lie under water. Critical raw materials like oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, copper, and cobalt are perennially scarce. Starvation is a constant fear for those not affluent enough to pay for increasingly expensive genetically-modified crops and meat produced on corporate farms with multiple chemical inputs.

Large-scale industrial civilization still persists, but many once-industrialized areas have been abandoned, and what factories and transport systems remain are constantly constrained by limited energy supplies and the lack of steady flows of vital resources. Oil is particularly hard to come by, and so, in all three power blocs, its use is largely restricted to the military, security forces, emergency services, the largest of corporations, and the very rich. (If you want to get a sense of such a world, imagine Mel Gibson’s 1979 movie Road Warrior on steroids.) Other sources of energy, including natural gas and uranium, are also in increasingly scant supply. Renewable sources, including wind and solar power, help to make up some, but not enough, of the difference, while a shortage of critical minerals — copper, cobalt, tin, manganese, titanium — limits the scale of many industrial undertakings.

For ordinary people — and only somewhat less so for the elites of the planet’s heavily militarized states — survival is a constant struggle. Outside of the industrialized power centers, life involves a daily search for food, water, and energy of any sort, as well as whatever precious goods (gems, weapons, bits of technology) might be traded to get those basics. For the big corporations and their government sponsors, as they send the Scullys and Quadritches to the distant corners of the planet to enforce their will, the struggle is no less fierce for control of the world’s few remaining deposits of oil, natural gas, coal, copper, and uranium.

In 2144, only five areas of the world still possess any significant reserves of oil and natural gas: Russia (and contiguous areas of the former Soviet Union), the Persian Gulf, West Africa (including Nigeria), the Orinoco basin of Venezuela, and the now long ice-free Arctic. Even these areas have been substantially depleted, giving the remaining deposits staggering value to whichever country or company controls them. If these are not quite as valuable as “unobtanium,” the rare metal being plundered from Pandora and brought back to Earth, they are close enough to be thought of as “barely-obtanium.”

Life (and Death) on a Depleted Planet

For the record, I’m being an optimist here for the sake of Avatar: Earth’s Last Stand. Based on my own assessment of planetary energy resources, I doubt that any oil or natural gas worth drilling for will remain in 2144. But for narrative purposes, if such deposits are to be found anywhere almost a century and a half from now, the likely candidates are: the Persian Gulf area because it still possesses the world’s largest combined reserves of oil and natural gas, and so probably will be the last to run out; Russia, Africa, and the Orinoco basin because they have to date been spared intensive exploitation by the major Western firms, and so still retain substantial recoverable reserves; and the Arctic, which will only become fully accessible to oil producers when global warming has melted the ice cap.

Given the tripartite global power structure of 2144, Russian oil and gas reserves will have been divided between the North European Alliance, controlling western Siberia and the Caucasus, and Greater China, garrisoning eastern Siberia and Central Asia. The Arctic will be a constant source of conflict among all three blocs, with periodic fighting breaking out concerning overlapping territorial claims in the region. That leaves the Persian Gulf, West Africa, and Venezuela — the sites of constant warfare between the Na’vi of this planet and the various expeditionary forces sent out by the three big power blocs which, often in temporary alliances of convenience, will also be fighting each other.

Already, we can get a sense of what this might look like. Under its ultra-nationalist president Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has sought to distance itself from its traditional client, the United States, and bolstered its ties with Russia and China. As part of this effort, Venezuela has purchased billions of dollars worth of arms from Russia and forged a strategic energy alliance with China. Claiming evidence of a U.S. plan to invade his country, Chávez has also conducted sizeable self-defense maneuvers and strengthened the military’s control over ports and other infrastructure.

Looking into the future, one can imagine a time, some decades distant, when Venezuela is a satellite of Greater China and its deposits of heavy oil — the largest remaining on the planet — are reserved for China’s exclusive use. Under these circumstances, it is not hard to imagine a move by the North American Federation to oust the prevailing Venezuelan regime by launching an invasion on a remote stretch of coast and striking out for the capital, Caracas. The Venezuelans, backed up by Chinese expeditionary forces, might manage to halt the invasion, but fail to dislodge the North Americans, holed up in harsh patches of the countryside. Brutal fighting might follow — the “mean bush” mentioned by Quaritch in Avatar. Jake Scully, sent back into this gruesome contest for his third deployment, is gravely wounded and barely survives the trek back to safety.

If Venezuela is still a peaceful land today, Nigeria is already conflict-ridden and certainly destined to be a major battlefield in the unending resource wars of a future planet. Possessing the largest pool of untapped oil and natural gas in Africa, it is already the site of a fierce competitive economic struggle involving the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union, all of which seek to exploit the nation’s energy riches. Nigeria’s oil and gas reserves were first developed by Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum (now BP) — a legacy of the country’s past as a British colony — but now American, Chinese, and European firms have acquired drilling rights to valuable hydrocarbon deposits. Russia, too, has entered the scene, promising to help build a natural gas pipeline from the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast for eventual shipment to Europe.

Nigeria is also a battlefield today. Disgruntled inhabitants of the Niger Delta area, where most of the country’s oil is produced and few benefits are ever seen, have taken up arms in a struggle to receive a bigger share of the nation’s oil revenues. Both the United States and China are competing to provide the Nigerian government with military aid to defeat the insurgents, hoping to strengthen their respective positions in the country’s oil fields in the process.

Again, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine a scenario in which, 134 years from now (or a lot sooner), Nigeria has fallen under the sway of Greater China or the North American Federation and Colonel Quaritch and his cohort are carrying out combat operations in the Delta’s jungle regions, a setting not so unlike Pandora’s, with obvious Cameron-esque possibilities.

Where else might Scully, Quaritch, and their buddies be sent to fight? As a start, don’t assume that the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will simply end or that the United States will ever willingly withdraw its forces from a whole string of bases in the Persian Gulf area. As long as the United States obtains part of its oil from the region — and the North American Federation might still be fighting to do so in 2144 — U.S. forces are likely to remain. Given the historic enmities that divide the region and a widespread antipathy to the U.S. presence, don’t be surprised if North American Federation forces are still in battle there deep into the twenty-second century.

Finally, the warming Arctic, not currently on the global conflict map, could also experience warfare as it attracts major oil and gas drilling operations. The region also houses some of the world’s last remaining indigenous communities that still practice a traditional way of life, and which will undoubtedly face the sort of habitat-destroying invasions pictured in Avatar.

Still, as Cameron imagined, despite constant warfare, the North American Federation (like the other major power centers) will, by 2144, still find itself in desperate need of vital materials, no longer easily available on this planet. Economic conditions, even for privileged elites, will by then be deteriorating rapidly. It is in this context that the giant mining corporations might join in a fabulously expensive bid to use space travel to replenish the planet’s resources, voyaging to distant Pandora to extract its precious supply of unobtanium, a miraculous new source of energy.

It’s not that hard to imagine just such a future world if we continue on our present course toward ever greater resource consumption, increased carbon emissions, and the militarization of resource dependency. Can you doubt that the movie Cameron and I would make, Avatar: Earth’s Last Stand, would be both gripping and spectacular? It would be an amazing, if tension-producing place to visit in 3-D. Here’s the only catch: you wouldn’t want to live there.

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• Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author, most recently, of “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet”. A documentary movie version of his previous book, “Blood and Oil”, is available from the Media Education Foundation.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175210/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_another_planet_for_james_cameron

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Bill McKibben — Climate Change's O.J. Simpson Moment

posted February 25, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains. These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity's role in causing it, and in its import for the planet: a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).

What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face — from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet). What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely. If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth — and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves. It’s as if we’ve landed on Pandora without any of the charm. (By the way, don’t miss the latest TomCast, the site’s accompanying audio interview with Bill McKibben on what to make of climate-science scandals.)

— Tom Engelhardt

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The Attack on Climate-Change Science

Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century

By Bill McKibben

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning "a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome" on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made — that’s what Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”

If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington D.C. It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.

For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: "Al Gore’s New Home." These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.

Why We Don’t Want to Believe in Climate Change

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to Exxon Mobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few rightwing British tabloids which validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even the New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel”, which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount. He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

“...screen the entire population regularly and… quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic — and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main reason, for the success of the climate deniers, though. They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites. They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.

Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models… [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong — Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause — and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks. Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for the Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation — a world — to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen. There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: if you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.

Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be — and, in fact, should be — infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.

Why Data Isn’t Enough

I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun. One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty. That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research—we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.

But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn't pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress — cap-and-dividend, it’s called — that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80% of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right — and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.

Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miner’s kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed — just not at climate-change scientists.

But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.

There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”

There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through — a sunset, an hour in the garden — we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.

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• Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, including the forthcoming Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books, April 2010). He’s a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. Catch the latest TomCast, TomDispatch.com’s audio interview with Bill McKibben on what to make of the climate-science scandals.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175211/tomgram%3A_bill_mckibben%2C_climate_change%27s_o.j._simpson_moment

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Jo Comerford — A Budgetary SOS for 2011

posted February 28, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

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 Engelhardt

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A Titanic Budget in an Ocean of Icebergs

Will the USS Budget Go Down?

By Jo Comerford

Send 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.

Whose Security Is This Anyway?

In his State of the Union Address, given several days before the 2011 budget was released, President Obama announced a three-year freeze on “non-security discretionary spending”. This was meant as a gesture toward paying down the looming national debt, but it should also be considered an early warning sign for leak number one. After all, the president exempted all national-security-related spending from the cutting process. Practically speaking, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP), national security spending makes up about 67% of that discretionary 34% slice of the budget. In 2011, that will include an as-yet-untouchable $737 billion for the Pentagon alone.

Within the context of the total budget, then, so-called non-security discretionary spending represents a mere 11% of proposed 2011 spending. In other words, Obama’s present plans to chip away at the debt involve leaving 89% of the budget untouched. Only the $370 billion going to myriad domestic social programs will be on the chopping block.

What's in that $370 billion? Well, for starters, programs that focus on the environment, energy, and science. In the 2011 budget, these categories combined are projected to receive $79 billion or 6% of total domestic discretionary spending. Though each of these areas could actually use a significant boost in funds, that’s obviously not in the cards — and this will translate into less money at the state level. New York, for example, is projected to receive $247 million in home energy assistance for low-income folks, down more than $230 million from 2010. These funds mean an energy safety net for our communities, and also warmth and jobs in a cold winter, which looks like “security” to most of us, no matter what our captain says.

Asking for disproportionate cuts and efficiencies in programs in only 11% percent of the overall budget might perhaps be slightly easier to stomach if military spending wasn’t allowed relatively free rein in 2011 (and thereafter). The NPP estimates, in fact, that aggregated increases in military spending over the next decade will exceed $500 billion, drowning twice-over the projected $250 billion in non-security discretionary savings from the president’s cuts over the same time period. Consider this visible unwillingness to control military-related spending leak two in our budgetary Titanic.

By now, danger flags should be going up in profusion because the second leak is so familiar, so George W. Bush. With each new bit of information, in fact, it sounds more and more like the same old song, the last guy's tune. It’s clear that, as soon as the stimulus bump wears off later this year, we're in danger of falling back into exactly the same more-money-for-the-military, less-federal-aid-to-the-states rut we’ve been in for years, despite strong statements from both President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates decrying Pentagon waste.

And speaking of waste, the Department of Defense is currently carrying weapons-program cost overruns for 96 of its major weapons programs totaling $295 billion, which alone are guaranteed to wipe out any proposed savings from President Obama's non-security discretionary freeze, with $45 billion to spare. That's only to be expected, since neither the Pentagon nor any of the armed services have ever been able to pass a proper audit. Ever.

If they had, what would have become of the C-17, the Air Force's giant cargo plane? With a price tag now approaching $330 million per plane and a total program cost of well over $65 billion, the C-17, produced by weapons-maker Boeing, has miraculously evaded every attempt to squash it. In fact, Congress even included $2.5 billion in the 2010 budget for ten C-17s that the Pentagon hadn’t requested.

Keep in mind that $2.5 billion is a lot of money, especially when cuts to domestic spending are threatened. It could, for instance, provide an estimated 141,681 children and adults with health care for one year and pay the salaries of 6,138 public safety officers, 4,649 music and art teachers, and 4,568 elementary school teachers for that same year. Having done that, it could still fund 22,610 scholarships for university students, provide 46,130 students the maximum Pell Grant of $5,550 for the college of their choice, allow for the building of 1,877 affordable housing units, and provide 382,879 homes with renewable electricity — again for that same year — and enough money would be left over to carve out 29,630 free Head Start places for kids. That’s for ten giant transport planes that the military isn’t even asking for.

Domestic-spending freeze proponents demand that our $13 trillion national debt, accumulated over seven decades, be turned back starting now. Critics of Obama’s freeze remind us that, while the C-17 flourishes, cutting into that domestic 11% is like trying to get blood from a stone. They argue that what we need in recessionary times is an infusion of strategic domestic spending. They tend to cite Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, who has noted that, for every dollar in stimulus aid directed toward the states, $1.40 returns to the economy, while every dollar invested in infrastructure spending yields $1.60.

Freeze critics are acutely aware that, by December 31, 2010, most of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), that Obama stimulus package, will expire and states will face a remarkably bleak future. By then, they will also have spent the bulk of their education-relief funds, even as they grapple with a projected 48-state 2011 budget gap of $180 billion. Last year, despite the infusion of stimulus money, the same 48 states were already experiencing significant budget gaps and so cut a cumulative $194 billion or 28% of their total 2010 budgets.

Having already imposed deep program cuts, governors in almost every state will have to make even more excruciating choices before July 1st, the beginning of their next fiscal year. In Massachusetts, officials are considering eliminating funding for a program providing housing vouchers to homeless families. California is facing $1.5 billion in reductions to kindergarten through 12th grade education and community college funding, while New York State may have to reduce payments to health-care providers by $400 million.

On the eve of the annual gathering of governors in Washington D.C., Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, told a Washington Post columnist that he anticipates states needing to do far more than just institute program cuts, layoffs, and benefit cuts. Governors will have to permanently sell off assets like roads and office buildings, or implement a host of other previously “off-limits” changes.

Afloat in an Ever Harsher World

Having looked at two obvious leaks in the upper hull of our budgetary ship of state, it’s time to move deep underwater and examine the weak spots in two of the basic assumptions that undergird the new budget. The first deals with an issue on everyone's mind: unemployment.

The 2011 budget numbers are based on a crucial projection: just where the unemployment rate will be in 2012. Revenues available at the federal and state levels will depend, in part, on how many people go back to work and once again begin paying taxes on their wages. For the pending and projected federal budgets to have a shot at panning out, unemployment must decline, as the budget predicts it will, from the present official rate of 9.7% to 8.5% by 2012. That doesn’t sound like much of a drop, especially when Americans are in job pain. But there's a strong likelihood that even this goal is unattainable.

In reality, the U.S. needs to generate an estimated 1.5 million new jobs each year simply to keep pace with the arrival of newcomers on the job market. That’s before we talk about knocking down the present staggering unemployment rate. In this case, however, one set of budget projections (that three-year domestic spending freeze) might work against the other (that modest decline in unemployment). Fewer federal stimulus dollars will be available to offset onrushing shortfall disasters at the state budgetary level, which means a potential drop in jobs. And, thanks to that domestic freeze, more pain is in the offing, with fewer services available, for those out of work. Even if the new Senate jobs bill makes it to the president's desk, it’s unlikely to go far enough to make a real difference. All of this means that an 8.5% unemployment rate in two years is, at best, an optimistic projection.

Even if that figure were hit, however, Americans still wouldn’t be celebrating, in budgetary terms or otherwise. At 8.5%, we’re only back to an unemployment rate not seen in more than a quarter of a century, and keep in mind that a one-dimensional unemployment figure can’t begin to capture the complexity of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “alternate measures of labor underutilization”. In other words, it doesn’t count everyone who is underemployed, employed only part-time, or discouraged and so considered out of the job market. At 16.5% as of January 2010, this measure tells a very different story.

Nor does that 8.5% figure capture the disproportionately terrible employment situation faced by young people or people of color who are distinctly over-represented on the unemployment rolls. And if you happen to live in certain metropolitan areas, 50% of you can kiss your chances of a quick recovery goodbye. According to the projections of a U.S. Conference of Mayors study titled U.S. Metro Economics, Dayton, Ohio, is not expected to see a significant employment bounce until 2015; Hartford, Connecticut, not until 2018, and Detroit, Michigan, not until after 2039.

As Atlantic magazine Deputy Managing Editor Don Peck noted recently, it will be a long time before we dig ourselves out of this current job crisis. “We are living through a slow motion catastrophe,” he writes, “one that could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to come.”

That projected 8.5% figure and all the projected freezes and cuts that go with it, don’t begin to address this reality. Think of that as leak three.

Then, consider this little tidbit from the 2011 budget, hardly noted or discussed in the news, even though it has the potential to punch a hole in the budgetary hull: the document projects a zero percent cost of living adjustment (COLA) for Food Stamps through 2019.

To understand just what this means, it’s necessary to step back for a moment. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), food stamp usage is remarkably widespread and growing. Thirty-six million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on Food Stamps. An estimated monthly Food Stamp benefit for a family of four is $321 (approximately 89 cents per person per meal), which already falls significantly short of what the USDA considers a “thrifty” family's grocery receipts, estimated at roughly $513 per month.

If the COLA for food stamps is frozen over the next eight years, NPP analysts project a 19% erosion in the buying power of those stamps due to inflation. This means that, by the end of 2019, a similar family of four, eating at exactly the same level, would be paying $611 a month for its food, or $100 more, while still receiving that same $321.

In other words, if the 2011 budget and its projections proceed as planned, a great many Americans will be hungrier and still jobless in a harsher, meaner world, while what budgetary savings are achieved on the backs of the poorest Americans will be gobbled up by wars, weapons, and other “security” needs. Ordinary Americans will largely be left in a sink or swim world and the waters will be very, very cold.

Tell the radio operator. It’s none too soon. Start sending out the signals. SOS… SOS… SOS…

______________________________________

• Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175212/tomgram%3A__jo_comerford%2C_a_budgetary_sos_for_2011

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Planning for the Next War

posted March 02, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

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.

1. Make the Apologies in Advance

Who can doubt that the American way of war has undergone changes since, in December 2001, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers using precision-guided weapons essentially wiped out a village celebrating a wedding in Eastern Afghanistan? Of 112 Afghans in that wedding party, only two women survived. Similarly, in August 2008, in the village of Azizabad in Herat Province, at least 90 Afghans, including 60 children, were killed in a series of U.S. air strikes, while in May 2009, up to 140 Afghan civilians died in a U.S. bombing attack in Farah Province.

Understandably, such “incidents” have done little to endear the U.S. and its allies to Afghans. Until recently, the U.S. military would initially deny that civilians had even died; if the incident refused to go away, military spokespeople would then admit to small numbers of civilian deaths (often blamed on the Taliban), while launching an “investigation” and waiting for the hubbub to die away. Apologies or “regrets” came late and grudgingly, if at all (along with modest payments to the relatives of the dead). Back then, being American and at war in distant lands meant never having to say you were sorry.

More recently, Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal has changed the rules, curbing air strikes (though not drone strikes), warning his troops to prevent civilian deaths, and instituting an instant expression of “regrets” for such deaths. One thing, however, has changed only marginally: the civilian deaths themselves.

In mid-February, for instance, 12 civilians died when two U.S. rockets slammed into a compound near the city of Marja in Helmand Province. The following day, five Afghan civilians digging at the side of a road in Kandahar Province were killed in an air strike after being mistaken for insurgents planting a roadside bomb. Then, in Uruzgan Province, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including women and children.

After each of these incidents, regrets were quickly expressed, investigations launched. In the case of the mini-buses, McChrystal apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai personally and then went on Afghan television to make his apology public. (“I pledge to strengthen our efforts to regain your trust to build a brighter future for all Afghans. Most importantly, I express my deepest, heartfelt condolences to the victims and their families. We all share in their grief and will keep them in our thoughts and prayers.”)

Unfortunately, a policy of repeated apology is unlikely to prove much more successful than the previous stonewalling tactic as long as civilians die, which they will, given the American style of war. It may be too late to correct this in Afghanistan, but the next war is another story. My suggestion is simple: in the future, the U.S. military should issue a blanket apology before going to war, and the first waves of U.S. planes should not drop bombs but abjectly worded leaflets. These would take responsibility in advance for future civilian deaths and pre-apologize for them.

There is a partial precedent for this. In both the Korean and Vietnam wars, American planes regularly dropped leaflets warning peasant farmers that they were living in “free fire zones” and should beware or move out. In this case, the pamphlets would make clear that the United States is going after “the evil-doers” and admit that, despite our ever more precise weaponry, we will unfortunately kill a certain percentage of you in the process. (“The U.S. military expresses our deepest, heartfelt condolences to the future victims and their families. We will all share in their grief and, when they die, will keep them in our thoughts and prayers”.) We should also announce in advance at least a $1,500 solatium payment for any relative, spouse, or child who perishes, as well as carefully calibrated sums for the loss of limbs, eyes, and the like.

After this, whenever civilians die, the military would simply refer interested parties to the prewar statement. This should guarantee a cleaner, more effective way of war.

2. Pre-Build the Bases, Prisons, and Embassy Complexes

Thanks to nine years in Afghanistan and seven in Iraq, it’s easier to grasp how the American way of war actually works. A striking (if little discussed) aspect of it is the base-building that accompanies it. In the years of fighting, the Pentagon built several hundred bases in each country, ranging from tiny outposts to massive American “towns”. It also constructed multiple prisons and holding centers (some secret), and for each war, a nearly billion-dollar regional command center, which we still inaccurately call an “embassy”. The one in Islamabad, Pakistan, is only now under construction.

Much of this was done on the fly and in response to events. For the next war, it would be more logical to prepare in advance. Again, there is a partial precedent. In recent years, the U.S. has pre-positioned equipment at small bases and other locations around the world, so that, should a sudden desire to intervene arise, the means are relatively close at hand. This strategy should be significantly expanded. The Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community could agree on the four most likely places for future interventions. Say, Yemen, Colombia, Nigeria, and Kyrgyzstan, and start laying the groundwork now.

The usual private contractors — Fluor, DynCorp, and KBR — should be rounded up to build the necessary 1,400 bases and accompanying prisons under a global multi-billion dollar LOGCAP contract to be divided among them. At the same time, the State Department would put those future mega-embassies out for bid to U.S. architectural firms so that the now-typical fortress-like designs (with their near-billion-dollar price tags) would be ready to go.

With full-scale base-prison-embassy complexes ready in four strategically located regions, future invasions would have a reasonable shot at not dragging out for decades.

3. Pick the Right Natives

It’s noticeable that the U.S. military always seems to get stuck with the wrong natives. Take the current campaign in Marja:

Afghan National Army (ANA) troops are regularly described as unable to read maps, incapable of “planning a complicated patrol” or resupplying themselves, poor at small unit maneuvering, poorly trained, refusing to stand night guard duty and sometimes even to fight, high on drugs, riddled with corruption, unable to aim their weapons, “years away from functioning effectively on their own”, and as C.J. Chivers of the New York Times recently summed matters up, totally inadequate when it comes to “transporting troops, directing them in battle and coordinating fire support [or] arranging modern communications, logistics, aviation and medical support”. And keep in mind that the soldiers sent into Marja are reportedly the best the ANA has available. All this, despite multi-billions of dollars and years of effort invested in Afghan army training. (And the Afghan police, for multi-billions more, make the Afghan army look good.)

On the other hand, perhaps a few hundred Taliban fighters stayed in Marja and fought. Descriptions of them invariably reflect grudging admiration. They are considered capable of planning and executing complex small-unit maneuvers as well as “sustained and complex attacks”, of resupplying themselves, of “surprisingly accurate” sniper fire, and of not being corrupt. In Marja, it was repeatedly said that “outnumbered and outgunned” Taliban fighters were “mounting a tougher fight than expected” or engaging in “determined resistance”, that they represented, in the words of Centcom commander General David Petraeus, a “formidable” force.

For those old enough to remember the Vietnam War, you could replace such descriptions of “our” Afghans with “our” Vietnamese and “their” Afghans with “their” Vietnamese without breaking stride. One explanation for this is that indigenous people react differently when fighting a foreign occupying force rather than aiding it. However, as U.S. forces are incapable of occupying a country thanks to our exceptionally good intentions (of which we are well aware), another explanation makes better sense: In the kinds of countries we’re likely to invade, there are evidently two races (or the equivalent) of natives — think of them as like the Eloi and the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine — and we always pick the wrong one.

So before the next invasion, we should make use of small teams of anthropologists and social scientists from the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, already trained to help the military with local cultural problems. They should be inserted in the country or region in question to identify which natives are best suited for learning small-unit maneuvering and the other skills over which the enemy always seems to have such a monopoly.

Of course, a fourth planning possibility would involve not launching such wars in the first place. But that path would conflict with a basic American can-do spirit that this country prizes, so suggestions 1 through 3 are undoubtedly a more practical way to proceed.

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• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of “The End of Victory Culture”, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, “The Last Days of Publishing”. His latest book, “The American Way of War” (Haymarket Books), will be published in May. Catch the latest TomCast, TomDispatch.com’s audio interview with Tom Engelhardt on the American state of perpetual war, by clicking here, or download the podcast by clicking here.

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[Kiwithrottlejockey]

John Feffer — Can Japan Say No to Washington?

posted March 04, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

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 Engelhardt

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Pacific Pushback

Has the U.S. Empire of Bases Reached Its High-Water Mark?

By John Feffer

For 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.

You’d think that, with so many Japanese bases, the United States wouldn’t make a big fuss about closing one of them. Think again. The current battle over the Marine Corps air base at Futenma on Okinawa — an island prefecture almost 1,000 miles south of Tokyo that hosts about three dozen U.S. bases and 75% of American forces in Japan — is just revving up. In fact, Washington seems ready to stake its reputation and its relationship with a new Japanese government on the fate of that base alone, which reveals much about U.S. anxieties in the age of Obama.

What makes this so strange, on the surface, is that Futenma is an obsolete base. Under an agreement the Bush administration reached with the previous Japanese government, the U.S. was already planning to move most of the Marines now at Futenma to the island of Guam. Nonetheless, the Obama administration is insisting, over the protests of Okinawans and the objections of Tokyo, on completing that agreement by building a new partial replacement base in a less heavily populated part of Okinawa.

The current row between Tokyo and Washington is no mere “Pacific squall”, as Newsweek dismissively described it. After six decades of saying yes to everything the United States has demanded, Japan finally seems on the verge of saying no to something that matters greatly to Washington, and the relationship that Dwight D. Eisenhower once called an “indestructible alliance” is displaying ever more hairline fractures. Worse yet, from the Pentagon’s perspective, Japan’s resistance might prove infectious — one major reason why the United States is putting its alliance on the line over the closing of a single antiquated military base and the building of another of dubious strategic value.

During the Cold War, the Pentagon worried that countries would fall like dominoes before a relentless Communist advance. Today, the Pentagon worries about a different kind of domino effect. In Europe, NATO countries are refusing to throw their full support behind the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In Africa, no country has stepped forward to host the headquarters of the Pentagon’s new Africa Command. In Latin America, little Ecuador has kicked the U.S. out of its air base in Manta.

All of these are undoubtedly symptoms of the decline in respect for American power that the U.S. military is experiencing globally. But the current pushback in Japan is the surest sign yet that the American empire of overseas military bases has reached its high-water mark and will soon recede.

Toady No More?

Until recently, Japan was virtually a one-party state, and that suited Washington just fine. The long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had the coziest of bipartisan relations with that city’s policymakers and its “chrysanthemum club” of Japan-friendly pundits. A recent revelation that, in 1969, Japan buckled to President Richard Nixon’s demand that it secretly host U.S. ships carrying nuclear weapons — despite Tokyo’s supposedly firm anti-nuclear principles — has pulled back the curtain on only the tip of the toadyism.

During and after the Cold War, Japanese governments bent over backwards to give Washington whatever it wanted. When government restrictions on military exports got in the way of the alliance, Tokyo simply made an exception for the United States. When cooperation on missile defense contradicted Japan’s ban on militarizing space, Tokyo again waved a magic wand and made the restriction disappear.

Although Japan’s constitution renounces the “threat or the use of force as a means of settling international disputes”, Washington pushed Tokyo to offset the costs of the U.S. military adventure in the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991, and Tokyo did so. Then, from November 2001 until just recently, Washington persuaded the Japanese to provide refueling in the Indian Ocean for vessels and aircraft involved in the war in Afghanistan. In 2007, the Pentagon even tried to arm-twist Tokyo into raising its defense spending to pay for more of the costs of the alliance.

Of course, the LDP complied with such demands because they intersected so nicely with its own plans to bend that country’s peace constitution and beef up its military. Over the last two decades, in fact, Japan has acquired remarkably sophisticated hardware, including fighter jets, in-air refueling capability, and assault ships that can function like aircraft carriers. It also amended the 1954 Self-Defense Forces Law, which defines what the Japanese military can and cannot do, more than 50 times to give its forces the capacity to act with striking offensive strength. Despite its “peace constitution”, Japan now has one of the top militaries in the world.

Enter the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). In August 2009, that upstart political party dethroned the LDP, after more than a half-century in power, and swept into office with a broad mandate to shake things up. Given the country’s nose-diving economy, the party’s focus has been on domestic issues and cost-cutting. Not surprisingly, however, the quest to cut pork from the Japanese budget has led the party to scrutinize the alliance with the U.S. Unlike most other countries that host U.S. military bases, Japan shoulders most of the cost of maintaining them: more than $4 billion per year in direct or indirect support.

Under the circumstances, the new government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama proposed something modest indeed — putting the U.S.-Japan alliance on, in the phrase of the moment, a “more equal” footing. It inaugurated this new approach in a largely symbolic way by ending Japan’s resupply mission in the Indian Ocean (though Tokyo typically sweetened the pill by offering a five-year package of $5 billion in development assistance to the Afghan government).

More substantively, the Hatoyama government also signaled that it wanted to reduce its base-support payments. Japan’s proposed belt-tightening comes at an inopportune moment for the Obama administration, as it tries to pay for two wars, its “overseas contingency operations”, and a worldwide network of more than 700 military bases. The burdens of U.S. overseas operations are increasing, and fewer countries are proving willing to share the costs.

Of Dugongs and Democracy

The immediate source of tension in the U.S.-Japanese relationship has been Tokyo’s desire to renegotiate that 2006 agreement to close Futenma, transfer those 8,000 Marines to Guam, and build a new base in Nago, a less densely populated area of the island. It’s a deal that threatens to make an already strapped government pay big. Back in 2006, Tokyo promised to shell out more than $6 billion just to help relocate the Marines to Guam.

The political cost to the new government of going along with the LDP’s folly may be even higher. After all, the DPJ received a healthy chunk of voter support from Okinawans, dissatisfied with the 2006 agreement and eager to see the American occupation of their island end. Over the last several decades, with U.S. bases built cheek-by-jowl in the most heavily populated parts of the island, Okinawans have endured air, water, and noise pollution, accidents like a 2004 U.S. helicopter crash at Okinawa International University, and crimes that range from trivial speeding violations all the way up to the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three Marines in 1995. According to a June 2009 opinion poll, 68% of Okinawans opposed relocating Futenma within the prefecture, while only 18% favored the plan. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Party, a junior member of the ruling coalition, has threatened to pull out if Hatoyama backs away from his campaign pledge not to build a new base in Okinawa.

Then there’s the dugong, a sea mammal similar to the manatee that looks like a cross between a walrus and a dolphin and was the likely inspiration for the mermaid myth. Only 50 specimens of this endangered species are still living in the marine waters threatened by the proposed new base near less populated Nago. In a landmark case, Japanese lawyers and American environmentalists filed suit in U.S. federal court to block the base’s construction and save the dugong. Realistically speaking, even if the Pentagon were willing to appeal the case all the way up to the Supreme Court, lawyers and environmentalists could wrap the U.S. military in so much legal and bureaucratic red tape for so long that the new base might never leave the drawing board.

For environmental, political, and economic reasons, ditching the 2006 agreement is a no-brainer for Tokyo. Given Washington’s insistence on retaining a base of little strategic importance, however, the challenge for the DPJ has been to find a site other than Nago. The Japanese government floated the idea of merging the Futenma facility with existing facilities at Kadena, another U.S. base on the island. But that plan — as well as possible relocation to other parts of Japan — has met with stiff local resistance. A proposal to further expand facilities in Guam was nixed by the governor there.

The solution to all this is obvious: close down Futenma without opening another base. But so far, the United States is refusing to make it easy for the Japanese. In fact, Washington is doing all it can to box the new government in Tokyo into a corner.

Ratcheting Up the Pressure

The U.S. military presence in Okinawa is a residue of the Cold War and a U.S. commitment to containing the only military power on the horizon that could threaten American military supremacy. Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration’s solution to a rising China was to “integrate, but hedge”. The hedge — against the possibility of China developing a serious mean streak — centered around a strengthened U.S.-Japan alliance and a credible Japanese military deterrent.

What the Clinton administration and its successors didn’t anticipate was how effectively and peacefully China would disarm this hedging strategy with careful statesmanship and a vigorous trade policy. A number of Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia, succumbed early to China’s version of checkbook diplomacy. Then, in the last decade, South Korea, like the Japanese today, started to talk about establishing “more equal” relations with the United States in an effort to avoid being drawn into any future military scrape between Washington and Beijing.

Now, with its arch-conservatives gone from government, Japan is visibly warming to China’s charms. In 2007, China had already surpassed the United States as the country’s leading trade partner. On becoming prime minister, Hatoyama sensibly proposed the future establishment of an East Asian community patterned on the European Union. As he saw it, that would leverage Japan’s position between a rising China and a United States in decline. In December, while Washington and Tokyo were haggling bitterly over the Okinawa base issue, DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa sent a signal to Washington as well as Beijing by shepherding a 143-member delegation of his party’s legislators on a four-day trip to China.

Not surprisingly, China’s bedazzlement policy has set off warning bells in Washington, where the People’s Republic is still a focus of primary concern for a cadre of strategic planners inside the Pentagon. The Futenma base — and its potential replacement — would be well situated, should Washington ever decide to send rapid response units to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, or the Korean peninsula. Strategic planners in Washington like to speak of the “tyranny of distance”, of the difficulty of getting “boots on the ground” from Guam or Hawaii in case of an East Asian emergency.

Yet the actual strategic value of Futenma is, at best, questionable. The South Koreans are more than capable of dealing with any contingency on the peninsula. And the United States frankly has plenty of firepower by air (Kadena) and sea (Yokosuka) within hailing distance of China. A couple thousand Marines won’t make much of a difference (though the leathernecks strenuously disagree). However, in a political environment in which the Pentagon is finding itself making tough choices between funding counterinsurgency wars and old Cold War weapons systems, the “China threat” lobby doesn’t want to give an inch. Failure to relocate the Futenma base within Okinawa might be the first step down a slippery slope that could potentially put at risk billions of dollars in Cold War weapons still in the production line. It’s hard to justify buying all the fancy toys without a place to play with them.

And that’s one reason the Obama administration has gone to the mat to pressure Tokyo to adhere to the 2006 agreement. It even dispatched Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Japanese capital last October in advance of President Obama’s own Asian tour. Like an impatient father admonishing an obstreperous teenager, Gates lectured the Japanese “to move on” and abide by the agreement — to the irritation of both the new government and the public.

The punditocracy has predictably closed ranks behind a bipartisan Washington consensus that the new Japanese government should become as accustomed to its junior status as its predecessor and stop making a fuss. The Obama administration is frustrated with “Hatoyama's amateurish handling of the issue”, writes Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt. “What has resulted from Mr. Hatoyama's failure to enunciate a clear strategy or action plan is the biggest political vacuum in over 50 years”, adds Victor Cha, former director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council. Neither analyst acknowledges that Tokyo’s only “failure” or “amateurish” move was to stand up to Washington. “The dispute could undermine security in East Asia on the 50th anniversary of an alliance that has served the region well”, intoned The Economist more bluntly. “Tough as it is for Japan's new government, it needs to do most, though not all, of the caving in”.

The Hatoyama government is by no means radical, nor is it anti-American. It isn’t preparing to demand that all, or even many, U.S. bases close. It isn’t even preparing to close any of the other three dozen (or so) bases on Okinawa. Its modest pushback is confined to Futenma, where it finds itself between the rock of Japanese public opinion and the hard place of Pentagon pressure.

Those who prefer to achieve Washington’s objectives with Japan in a more roundabout fashion counsel patience. “If America undercuts the new Japanese government and creates resentment among the Japanese public, then a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic”, writes Joseph Nye, the architect of U.S. Asia policy during the Clinton years. Japan hands are urging the United States to wait until the summer, when the DPJ has a shot at picking up enough additional seats in the next parliamentary elections to jettison its coalition partners, if it deems such a move necessary.

Even if the Social Democratic Party is no longer in the government constantly raising the Okinawa base issue, the DPJ still must deal with democracy on the ground. The Okinawans are dead set against a new base. The residents of Nago, where that base would be built, just elected a mayor who campaigned on a no-base platform. It won’t look good for the party that has finally brought real democracy to Tokyo to squelch it in Okinawa.

Reverse Island Hop

Wherever the U.S. military puts down its foot overseas, movements have sprung up to protest the military, social, and environmental consequences of its military bases. This anti-base movement has notched some successes, such as the shut-down of a U.S. navy facility in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. In the Pacific, too, the movement has made its mark. On the heels of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, democracy activists in the Philippines successfully closed down the ash-covered Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station in 1991-1992. Later, South Korean activists managed to win closure of the huge Yongsan facility in downtown Seoul.

Of course, these were only partial victories. Washington subsequently negotiated a Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippines, whereby the U.S. military has redeployed troops and equipment to the island, and replaced Korea’s Yongsan base with a new one in nearby Pyeongtaek. But these not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) victories were significant enough to help edge the Pentagon toward the adoption of a military doctrine that emphasizes mobility over position. The U.S. military now relies on “strategic flexibility” and “rapid response” both to counter unexpected threats and to deal with allied fickleness.

The Hatoyama government may indeed learn to say no to Washington over the Okinawa bases. Evidently considering this a likelihood, former deputy secretary of state and former U.S. ambassador to Japan Richard Armitage has said (see YouTube video clip below) that the United States “had better have a plan B”. But the victory for the anti-base movement will still be only partial. U.S. forces will remain in Japan, and especially Okinawa, and Tokyo will undoubtedly continue to pay for their maintenance.


Buoyed by even this partial victory, however, NIMBY movements are likely to grow in Japan and across the region, focusing on other Okinawa bases, bases on the Japanese mainland, and elsewhere in the Pacific, including Guam. Indeed, protests are already building in Guam against the projected expansion of Andersen Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam to accommodate those Marines from Okinawa. And this strikes terror in the hearts of Pentagon planners.

In World War II, the United States employed an island-hopping strategy to move ever closer to the Japanese mainland. Okinawa was the last island and last major battle of that campaign, and more people died during the fighting there than in the subsequent atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined: 12,000 U.S. troops, more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians. This historical experience has stiffened the pacifist resolve of Okinawans.

The current battle over Okinawa again pits the United States against Japan, again with the Okinawans as victims. But there is a good chance that the Okinawans, like the Na’vi in that great NIMBY film Avatar, will win this time.

A victory in closing Futenma and preventing the construction of a new base might be the first step in a potential reverse island hop. NIMBY movements may someday finally push the U.S. military out of Japan and off Okinawa. It’s not likely to be a smooth process, nor is it likely to happen any time soon. But the kanji is on the wall. Even if the Yankees don’t know what the Japanese characters mean, they can at least tell in which direction the exit arrow is pointing.

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• John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website. For more information on the growing movement against the U.S. base in Okinawa, join the Facebook group I Oppose the Expansion of US Bases in Okinawa.

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