My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years
of our forever wars, where are all the questions?
Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large
part of the planet and I’d like to know, for instance, who's been fired for
them? Who’s been impeached? Who’s even paying attention?
I mean, if another great
power had been so fruitlessly fighting a largely undeclared set of conflicts
under the label of “the war on terror” for so long, if it had wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars with
no end in sight and next to no one in that land was spending much time debating
or discussing the matter, what would you think? If nothing else, you’d have a
few questions about that, right?
Well, so many years later,
I do have a few that continue to haunt me, even if I see them asked practically
nowhere and, to my frustration, can’t really answer them myself, not to my
satisfaction anyway. In fact, since 2001 -- with the exception of the months
leading up to the invasion of Iraq when America’s streets suddenly filled with
hundreds of thousands of demonstrators asking a range of questions ("How
did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?" was a typical protest sign of that moment) --
our never-ending wars have seldom been questioned in this country. So think of
what follows not as my thoughts on the war in question but on the war in
questions.
The Age of Carnage
In October 2001, in
response to the 9/11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush
launched a bombing campaign not just against al-Qaeda, a relatively small group
partially holed up in Afghanistan, but the Taliban, an Islamist outfit that
controlled much of the country. It was a radical decision not just to target
the modest-sized organization whose 19 hijackers, most of them Saudis, had
taken out almost 3,000 Americans with a borrowed “air force” of commercial
jets, but in the phrase of the moment to “liberate” Afghanistan.
These days, who even remembers that, by then, Washington had already fought a
CIA-directed, Saudi-backed (and partially financed) war against the Soviet
Union in that country for a full decade (1979-1989). To take on the Red Army
then, Washington funded, armed, and supported extremist Islamist groups,
some of which would still be fighting in Afghanistan (against us) in the
twenty-first century.
In the
context of that all-American war, a rich young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, would,
of course, form al-Qaeda, or “the base.” In 1989, Washington watched as the mighty
Red Army limped out of Afghanistan, the “bleeding wound” as its leader then called it.
(Afghanistan wasn’t known as “the graveyard of empires”
for nothing.) In less than two years, that second great power of the Cold War
era would implode, an event that would be considered history’s
ultimate victory by many in Washington. President Jimmy Carter’s national
security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who first committed the U.S. to
its Afghan Wars, would, as last century ended, sum things up this way: “What is more important in world
history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated
Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Afghanistan itself would be
left in ruins as Washington turned its attention elsewhere, while various local
warlords fought it out and, in response, the extremist Taliban rose to power.
Now, let me jump ahead a
few years. In 2019, U.S. air
power expended more munitions(bombs and
missiles) on that country than at any time since figures began to be kept in
2006. Despite that, during the last months of 2019, the Taliban (and other
militant groups) launched more attacks on
U.S.-and-NATO-trained-and-financed Afghan security forces than at any time
since 2010 when (again) records began to be kept. And it tells you something
about our American world that, though you could have found both those stories
in the news if you were looking carefully, neither was considered worthy of
major coverage, front-page headlines, or real attention. All these years later,
it won’t surprise you to know that such ho-hum reporting is just par for the
course. And when it comes to either of those two on-the-record realities, you
certainly would be hard-pressed to find a serious editorial expression of
outrage or much of anything else about them in the media.
At 18-plus years or, if you
prefer to combine Washington’s two Afghan wars, 28-plus years, we’re talking
about the longest American war in history. The Civil War lasted four years. The American part of World War
II, another four. The Korean War less than four (though it never officially
ended). The Vietnam War, from the moment the first significant contingent of
U.S. advisors arrived, 14, and from the moment the first major U.S. troop
contingents arrived, perhaps a decade. In the Trump era, as those air strikes
rise, there has been a great deal of talk about possible “peace” and an American
withdrawal from that country. Peace, however, has now seemingly come to
be defined in Washington as a reduction of
American forces from approximately 12,000 to about 8,500 (and that’s without
counting either private military contractors or CIA personnel there).
Meanwhile, of course, the
war on terror that began in Afghanistan now stretches from the Philippines across
the Greater Middle East and deep into the heart of Africa.
Worse yet, it still threatens to expand into a war of some sort with Iran --
and that, mind you, is under the ministrations of an officially “antiwar”
president who has nonetheless upped American
military personnel in the Middle East to record levels in recent years.
Of course, this is a story
that you undoubtedly know fairly well. Who, in a sense, doesn’t? But it’s also
a story that, so many years and so much -- to use a word once-favored by our
president -- “carnage” later, should
raise an endless series of disturbing and unnerving questions here. And that it
doesn’t, should raise questions in itself, shouldn’t it?
Still, in a country where
opposition to endless war seems constantly to falter or fade out amid a media
universe in which Donald Trump’s latest tweet can top any war news, it seems
potentially useful to raise some of those questions -- at least the ones that
occur to me -- and perhaps for you to do the same. Isn’t it time, after all, for Americans
to ask a few questions about war, American-style, in what might be thought of
as the post-9/11 age of carnage?
In any case, here are
six of mine to which, as I said, I don’t really have the answers. Maybe you do.
Here goes:
1.
When
the Bush administration launched that invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in
2001 and followed it up with an invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, did
we, in some curious fashion, really invade and occupy ourselves? Of course, in these years, across the Greater Middle East
and Africa, the U.S. played a remarkable role in creating chaos in country
after country, leading to failed states, displaced people in staggering numbers,
economic disarray, and the spread of terror
groups. But the
question is: Did the self-proclaimed most exceptional and indispensable nation
on the planet do a version of the same thing to itself in the process?
After all, by 2016, the disarray in this country was striking enough and had
spread far enough, amid historic economic inequality, social division, partisan
divides, and growing anger, that Americans elected as president (if not quite
by a majority) a man who had run not on American greatness but on American decline. He
promised to make this country great again. (His declinist
credentials were not much noted at the time, except among the heartland
Americans who voted for him.) So, ask yourself: Would President Donald
Trump have been possible if
the Bush administration had simply gone after al-Qaeda on September 12, 2001,
and left it at that? Since January 2017, under the tutelage of that “very stable genius,” the
U.S. political (and possibly global economic) system has, of course, begun to
crack open. Is there any connection to those forever wars?
2.
Has there ever been a truly great power
in history, still at or near the height of its militarily prowess, that couldn’t
win a war? Sure,
great imperial powers from the Romans to the Chinese to the British sometimes
didn’t win specific wars despite their seeming military dominance, but not a
single one? Could that be historically unprecedented and, if so, what does it
tell us about our moment? How has the country proclaimed by its leaders to have
the finest fighting force the
world has ever known won nothing in more than 18 years of unceasing global
battle?
3.
How
and why did the “hearts and minds” factor move from the nationalist left in the
twentieth century to the Islamist right in the twenty-first? The anti-colonial struggles
against imperial powers that culminated in America’s first great losing war in
Vietnam (think of Korea as kind of a tie) were invariably fought by leftist and
communist groups. And whatever the military force arrayed against them, they
regularly captured -- in that classic Vietnam-era phrase -- “the hearts and
minds” of what were then called “Third World” peoples and repeatedly outlasted
far better armed powers, including, in the case of Vietnam, the United States.
In a word, they had the moxie in such conflicts and it didn’t matter that, by
the most obvious measures of military power, they were at a vast disadvantage.
In the twenty-first century, similar wars are still being fought in a
remarkably comparable fashion, Afghanistan being the most obvious. Again,
the weaponry, the money, everything that might seem to pass for the works has
been the property of Washington and yet that ability to win local “hearts and
minds” has remained in the hands of the rebels. But what I wonder about is how
exactly that moxie passed from the nationalist left to the extremist religious
right in this century and what exactly was our role, intended or not, in all
this?
4.
When
it comes to preparations for war, why can’t we ever stop? After all, when the Soviet Union
collapsed and the Cold War ended in 1991, the United States essentially had no
enemies left on the planet. Yet Washington continued essentially an arms race
of one with a finish line so distant -- the bomber of 2018, Earth-spanning
weapons systems, and weaponry for the heavens of perhaps 2050 -- as to imply
eternity. The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex surrounding it, including
mega-arms manufacturers, advanced weapons labs, university science centers, and
the official or semi-official think tanks that churned out strategies for
future military domination, went right on without an enemy in sight. In fact,
in late 2002, preparing for his coming invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush had to
cook up an “axis of evil” -- Iran,
Iraq, and North Korea, two of which were mortal enemies and the third unrelated
in any significant way to either of them -- as a justification for what was to
come, militarily speaking. Almost 20 years later, investing as much in its
military as the next seven countries combined,
updating and upgrading its nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion in
the coming decades (and having just deployed a new
"low-yield" nuclear weapon), and still investing staggering sums in
its planes, tanks, aircraft carriers, and the like, the U.S. military now seems
intent (without leaving its forever wars) on returning to the
era of the Cold War as well. Face-offs against
Russia and China are now the military order of the day in what seems like a
déjà-vu-all-over-again situation. I’m just curious, but isn’t it ever all over?
5.
How
can Washington's war system and the military-industrial complex across the country
continue to turn failure in war into success and endless dollars at home? Honestly,
the one thing in America that clearly works right
now is the U.S. military (putting aside those wars abroad). We may no longer invest
in domestic infrastructure, but in that military
and the giant corporate weapons makers that go with it? You bet! They are the
true success stories of the twenty-first century if you’re talking about
dollars invested, weaponry bought, and revolving doors greased.
On the face of it, failure is the new success and few in this country seem to
blink when it comes to any of that. How come?
6.
Why doesn't the reality of those wars
of ours ever really seem to sink in here? This, to my mind, is at least partially a question about
media coverage. Yes, every now and then (as with the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers last
December), America’s forever wars briefly break through and get some attention.
And yes, if you’re a war-coverage news jockey, you can find plenty of daily
reports on aspects of our wars in the media. But isn’t it surprising how much
of that coverage is essentially a kind of background hum, like Muzak in an
elevator? Unless the president personally decides to drone assassinate an
Iranian major general and prospective future leader of that country, our wars
simply drone on, barely attended to (unless, of course, you happen to be in the
U.S. military or a military spouse or
child). Eighteen years of failed wars and so many trillions of dollars later,
wouldn’t you have expected something else?
So those are my six questions, the most obvious things
that puzzle me about what may be the strangest aspect of this American world of
ours, those never-ending wars and the system that goes with them. To begin to
answer them, however, would mean beginning to think about ourselves and this
country in a different way.
Perhaps much of this would only make sense if we were to
start imagining ourselves or at least much of the leadership crew, that
infamous “Blob,” in Washington, as
so many war addicts. War -- the failing variety -- is evidently their drug of
choice and not even our “antiwar” president can get off it. Think of forever
war, then, as the opioid not of the masses but of the ruling classes.
Tom Engelhardt is a
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.
He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the
Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
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join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in
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Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Tom
Engelhardt
