Lowering America’s War Ceiling? Imperial Psychosis on Display
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the
debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun
drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players,
aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten
LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before
an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline.
And yet, among the
dramatis personae we’ve been watching,
there are clearly missing actors. They happen to be out of town, part
of a traveling roadshow. When it comes to their production, however,
there has, of late, been little publicity, few reviewers, and only the
most modest media attention. Moreover, unlike the scenery-chewing divas
in Washington, these actors have simply been going about their
business as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.
On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the
Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a
debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the
Senate, America’s new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his
oath of office in distant Kabul.
According to the
New York Times,
he then gave a short speech “warning” that “Western powers needed to
‘proceed carefully’” and emphasized that when it came to the war, there
would “be no rush for the exits.”
If, in Washington, people were rushing for those exits, no chance of
that in Kabul almost a decade into America’s second Afghan War. There,
the air strikes, night raids,
assassinations,
roadside bombs, and
soldier and
civilian deaths, we are assured, will continue to
2014 and beyond. In a war in which every gallon of gas used by a fuel-guzzling U.S. military costs
$400 to
$800 to import, time is no object and -- despite the panic in Washington over debt payments -- neither evidently is cost.
In Iraq, meanwhile, in year eight of America’s armed involvement, U.S. officials are still wangling
to keep significant numbers of American troops stationed there beyond
an agreed end-of-2011 withdrawal date. And the State Department is preparing to hire
a small army of 5,000-odd armed mercenaries (with their own mini-air
force) to keep the American “mission” in that country humming along to
the tune of billions of dollars.
In Libya, the American/NATO war effort, once imagined as a brief
spasm of shock-‘n’-awe firepower that would oust autocrat Muammar
Gaddafi in a nanosecond, is now in its fifth month with neither an end nor a serious reassessment in sight, and no mention of costs there either. In Yemen and Somalia, the drones, CIA and military, are being sent in, and special operations forces built up, while in the region a new base is being constructed and older ones
expanded in the never-ending war against al-Qaeda, its affiliates,
wannabes, and any other nasties around. (At the same time, the Obama
administration is leaking information that the original al-Qaeda teeters at the edge of defeat, even as it intensifies the CIA’s drone war
in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.) And further expansion of the war
on terror -- watch out, al-Qaeda in North Africa! -- seems to be a given.
Meanwhile back in Washington -- not, mind you, the Washington of the
debt-ceiling crisis, but the war capital on the banks of the Potomac --
national security spending still seems to be on an upward trajectory.
At $526 billion (without the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars added
in), the 2011 Pentagon budget is, as Lawrence Korb, former assistant
secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, has written,
“in real or inflation adjusted dollars… higher than at any time since
World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the height of
the Reagan buildup.” The 2012 Pentagon budget is presently slated to go
even higher.
Senator John McCain recently raised
the question of Pentagon spending in tight times with General Martin
Dempsey, the newly nominated chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He
asked about a plan proposed by President Obama to cut $400 billion in
Pentagon funds over twelve years, as well as proposals kicking around
Congress for cutting up to $800 billion over the same period.
General Dempsey replied,
“I haven’t been asked to look at that number. But I have looked and we
are looking at $400 billion. Based on the difficulty of achieving the
$400 billion cut, I believe achieving $800 billion would be
extraordinarily difficult and very high risk.”
In little of the reporting on this was it apparent that Obama’s $400
billion in Pentagon “cuts” are not cuts at all -- not unless you
consider an obese person, who continues eating at the same level but
reduces his dreams of ever grander future repasts, to be on a diet. The
“cuts” in the White House proposal, that is, will only be from projected future Pentagon growth rates. Nor were the “savings” of up to one trillion dollars over a decade being projected
by Senator Harry Reid as part of his deficit-reduction plan cuts
either, not in the usual sense anyway. They are expected savings based
largely on the prospective winding down of America's wars and, like so much funny money,
could evaporate with the morning dew. (In his last minute deal with
John Boehner, President Obama's Pentagon "savings" have, in fact, been
reduced to a provisional $350 billion over 10 years.)
So
here’s a question at a moment when financial mania has Washington by
the throat: How would you define the state of mind of our war-makers,
who are carrying on as if trillion-dollar wars were an American birthright, as if the only sensible role for the United States was to eternally police the planet, and as if garrisoning U.S. troops, corporate mercenaries, and special operations forces in scores and scores of countries was the essence of life as it should be lived on this planet?
When I was kid, I used to be fascinated by a series of ads filled
with visual absurdities, in which, for instance, five-legged cows
floated through clouds. Each ad’s tagline went something like: What’s
wrong with this picture?
So imagine two worlds, both centered in Washington. In one, they’re heading for the exits, America’s credit rating is in danger of being downgraded, jobs are disappearing, infrastructure is eroding, homeownership levels are falling rapidly, foreclosures are sky-high, times are bad, and even the president admits that the political system designated to make things better is “dysfunctional”;
in the other, the exits are there, but there’s no rush to use them, not
with those global ramparts to be guarded, those wars to be fought, and a
massive national security complex -- larger than anything ever imagined
when the U.S. still faced a nuclear-armed superpower enemy -- to feed
and cultivate.
Now tell me: What’s wrong with this picture?
Two worlds, two productions, one over-the-top and raising fears of
bankruptcy, the other steady as she goes -- and (so it seems) never the
twain shall meet. And yet look again and those two worlds will fuse
before your eyes, those two Washingtons will meld into a single capital
city. Then it will be clearer that the actors at center stage and those
traveling in the provinces are putting on linked parts of a single
performance. The financial problems of one will turn out to be
inextricably linked to the other; the lack of an effective stimulus
package in the first connected to the endless series of stimulus packages -- all that failed “nation-building” in the imperium -- in the second.
Like some Roman god, it turns out that schizophrenic Washington has
two faces, each reflecting a different aspect of American decline. In
one, everybody can spot the madness. In the other, it’s less evident,
even though untold American treasure -- literally trillions of dollars
communities here desperately need -- has been poured into a series of
wars, conflicts, and war preparations without a victory, or even a
significant success on the horizon. (Greeted as if World War II had
been won, the killing of Osama bin Laden should have been a reminder
of the success of the Global War on Terror for a man with few “troops”
and relatively modest amounts of money who somehow managed to land
Washington in a financial and military quagmire.)
One American world, one Washington, is devouring the other. Think of
this as the half-hidden psychodrama of this American moment.
Put another way, for months Americans have been focused on raising
that debt ceiling, as onscreen countdown clocks ticked away to
disaster. In the process, few have asked the obvious question: Isn’t it
time to lower America’s war ceiling?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).
Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt
