Mark it on your calendar. It seems we’ve finally entered the Soviet era in America.
You remember the Soviet Union, now almost twenty years in its grave, but who gives it a second thought today? Even in its glory years, that “evil empire” was sometimes referred to as “the second superpower.” In 1991, after seven decades, it suddenly disintegrated and disappeared, leaving the United States—the “sole superpower” or even the “hyperpower,” on planet Earth—surprised but triumphant.
The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that official Washington had a clue. At the moment it happened, Soviet “experts” like Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, still expected the Cold War to go on and on. In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military, which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring, indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare payments were eating into what funds remained. Not even a vigorous reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could stanch the rot, especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell drastically.
Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military—and its military adventure in Afghanistan—when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation. They mistook military power for power on this planet. Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.
In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration, whose national security adviser was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a “Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a weak Communist government in Kabul. When resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.
Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t.
If you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the United States, you should.
In Washington, the Bush administration—G. H. W.’s, not G. W.’s—declared victory and then left the much ballyhooed “peace dividend” in the nearest ditch. Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington’s consensus policy makers drew no meaningful lessons from it, just as they had drawn few that mattered from their Vietnam defeat sixteen years earlier.
Quite the opposite: successive administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to global power was still the care and feeding of the U.S. military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet.
This urge, delusional in retrospect, seemed to reach its ultimate expression in the second Bush administration, whose infamous “unilateralism” rested on a belief that no country or even bloc of countries should ever again be allowed to come close to matching United States military power. (As its National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter—and it couldn’t have been blunter on the subject—the United States was to “build and maintain” its military power “beyond challenge.”) Bush’s military fundamentalists firmly believed that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force around, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of U.S. power, and friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel. After all, as the president said in front of a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”
In this way, far more than the Soviets, the top officials of the Bush administration mistook military power for power, a gargantuan misreading of the economic position of the United States in the world.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” clinched the deal. In the space the Soviet Union had deserted, which had been occupied for years by minor outlaw states like North Korea, there was now a new shape-shifting enemy, al-Qaeda (also known as Islamic extremism or the new “totalitarianism”), which could be just as big as you wanted to make it. Suddenly, we were in what the Bush administration dubbed “the Global War on Terror”—and this time there would be nothing “cold” about it.
Bush administration officials promptly suggested that they were prepared to use a newly agile American military to “drain the swamp” of global terrorism. (“While we’ll try to find every snake in the swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp,” insisted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz two weeks after 9/11.) They were prepared, they made clear, to undertake these draining operations against Islamic “terrorist networks” in no less than sixty countries around the planet.
Their military ambitions, in other words, knew no bounds; nor, it seemed, did the money and resources that began to flow into the Pentagon, the weapons industries, the country’s increasingly militarized intelligence services, mercenary companies like Blackwater and KBR that grew fat on a privatizing administration’s war plans and the multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts it was eager to proffer, the new Department of Homeland Security, and a ramped-up, ever more powerful national security state.
As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles, the numbers would prove staggering. By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under half the world’s total. Similarly, by 2008, the United States controlled almost 70 percent of the global arms market. It also had eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future enemy had more than one.
By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost three hundred military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive “American towns” holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors. They were in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region generally. This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet. As right-wing pundit Max Boot put it after a flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the United States possessed military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”
Depending on just what you counted, there were anywhere from seven hundred to twelve hundred or more of those bases, micro to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose budget grew by 50 percent.
Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight wars in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for instance, how to improve education). The Pentagon was also pioneering a new form of air power, drone warfare, in which “we” wouldn’t be anywhere near the battlefield, and the battlefield would no longer necessarily be in a country with which we were at war.
It was additionally embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar wars (and various global skirmishes), all this at top dollar at a time when next to no money was being invested in bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging American infrastructure. Except when it came to victory, the military stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even as the domestic economy was spinning out of control.
In other words, in a far wealthier country, another set of leaders, having watched the Soviet Union implode, decisively embarked on the Soviet path to disaster.
In fall 2008, the abyss opened under the U.S. economy, which the Bush administration had been blissfully ignoring, and millions of people fell into it. Giant institutions wobbled or crashed, foreclosures happened on a mind-boggling scale, infrastructure began to buckle, state budgets were caught in a death grip, teachers’ jobs, another kind of infrastructure, went down the tubes in startling numbers, and the federal deficit soared.
A new president also entered the Oval Office, someone (many voters believed) intent on winding down Bush’s wars and the delusions of military omnipotence and technological omniscience that went with them. If George W. Bush had pushed this country to the edge of disaster, at least his military policies, as many of his critics saw it, were as extreme and anomalous as the cult of executive power his top officials fostered.
But here was the strange thing. In the midst of the Great Recession, under a new president with supposedly far fewer illusions about American omnipotence and power, war policy continued to expand in just about every way. The Pentagon budget rose by Bushian increments, and while the Iraq War began to wind down, the new president doubled down in Afghanistan soon after entering office, and then again before the end of 2009. There, he “surged” in multiple ways. At best, the United States was only drawing down one war, in Iraq, to feed the flames of another.
As in the Soviet Union before its collapse, the exaltation of the military at the expense of the rest of society and the economy had by now become the new normal, so much so that hardly a serious word could be said—lest you not “support our troops”—when it came to ending the American way of war or downsizing the global mission. Even when, after years of astronomical growth, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began to talk about cost-cutting at the Pentagon, it was in the service of the reallocation of that money to war-fighting.
Here was how the New York Times summed up what reduction actually meant for our ultimate supersized institution in tough times: “Current budget plans project growth of only 1 percent in the Pentagon budget, after inflation, over the next five years.” Only 1 percent growth—at a time when state budgets, for instance, are being slashed to the bone. Like the Soviet military, the Pentagon is planning to remain obese whatever else goes down.
Meanwhile, the “antiwar” president has been overseeing the expansion of the new normal on many fronts, including the expanding size of the army itself. In fact, when it comes to the Global War on Terror—even with the name now in disuse—the profligacy can still take your breath away.
Consider, for instance, the $2.2 billion Host Nation Trucking contract the Pentagon uses to pay protection money to Afghan security companies which, in turn, slip some part of those payments to the Taliban to let American supplies travel safely on Afghan roads. Or consider the $683,000 the Pentagon spent, according to the Washington Post, to “renovate a café that sells ice cream and Starbucks coffee” at its base/prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Or the $773,000 used there “to remodel a cinder-block building to house a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant,” or the $7.3 million spent on baseball and football fields, or the $60,000 batting cage, or a promised $20,000 soccer cage, all part of the approximately $2 billion that have gone into the American base and prison complex that Barack Obama promised to close but hasn’t.
Or what about the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, that 104-acre, almost three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar, twenty-one-building homage to the American-mall-as-fortified-citadel? It costs more than $1.5 billion a year to run, and bears about as much relationship to an “embassy” as McDonald’s does to a neighborhood hamburger joint. According to a recent audit, millions of dollars in “federal property” assigned to what is essentially a vast command center for the region, including 159 of the embassy’s 1,168 vehicles, are missing or unaccounted for.
Or consider a particularly striking example of military expansion under President Obama, superbly reported by the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe in a piece headlined, “U.S. ‘Secret War’ Expands Globally as Special Operations Forces Take Larger Role.” As a story, it sank without a trace in a country evidently unfazed by the idea of having its forces garrisoned and potentially readying to fight everywhere on the planet. Here’s how the piece began: “Beneath its commitment to soft- spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in seventy-five countries, compared with about sixty at the beginning of last year.”
Now, without opening an atlas, just try to name any seventy-five countries on this planet. And yet U.S. special operatives are now engaging in war, or preparing for war, or training others to do so, or covertly collecting intelligence in that many countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Whatever it is or isn’t called, this remains Bush’s Global War on Terror on an expansionist trajectory. DeYoung and Jaffe quote an unnamed “senior military official” saying that the Obama administration has allowed “things that the previous administration did not,” and report that special operations commanders are now “a far more regular presence at the White House” than in the Bush years. Not surprisingly, those special operations forces have themselves expanded in the first year and a half of the Obama presidency and, for fiscal year 2011, the administration has requested a 5.7 percent hike in their budget to $6.3 billion.
Once upon a time, special operations forces got their name because they were small and “special.” Now, they are, in essence, being transformed into a covert military within the military and, as befits their growing size, reports Noah Shachtman of Wired’sDanger Room, the Army Special Forces alone are slated to get a new $100 million “headquarters” in northern Afghanistan. It will cover about 17 acres and will include a “communications building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance Facility . . . dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support working dogs. . . . Supporting facilities include roads, power production system and electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water production, water storage, water distribution, sanitary sewer collection system, communication manhole/duct system, curbs, walkways, drainage and parking.” This headquarters, adds Shachtman, will take a year to build, “at which point, the U.S. is allegedly supposed to begin drawing down its forces in Afghanistan.”
The first year and a half of the Obama administration has seen a continuation of what could be considered the monumental socialist-realist era of American war-making (including a decision to construct another huge, Baghdad-style “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan). This sort of creeping gigantism, with all its assorted cost overruns and private perks, would undoubtedly have seemed familiar to the Soviets. Certainly no less familiar will be the near decade the U.S. military has spent in the Afghan graveyard.
Drunk on war as Washington may be, the United States in 2011 is still not the Soviet Union in 1990—not yet. But it’s not the triumphant “sole superpower” anymore, either. Its global power is visibly waning, its ability to win wars distinctly in question, its economic viability open to doubt. Its airports are less shiny and more Third World–like every year. Unlike France or China, it has not a mile of high-speed rail. And when it comes to the future, especially the creation and support of innovative industries in alternative energy, it’s chasing the pack. It is increasingly a low-end service economy, losing good jobs that will never return. And if its armies come home in defeat, watch out.
In 1991, the Soviet Union suddenly evaporated. The Cold War was over. Like many wars, it seemed to have an obvious winner and an obvious loser. Nearly twenty years later, as the United States heads down the Soviet road to disaster—even if the world can’t imagine what a bankrupt America might mean—it’s far clearer that, in the titanic struggle of the two superpowers that we came to call the Cold War, there were actually two losers, and that, when the “second superpower” left the scene, the first was already heading for the exits, just ever so slowly and in a state of self-intoxicated self-congratulation. Nearly every decision in Washington since then, including Barack Obama’s to expand both the Afghan War and the war on terror, has only made what was, in 1991, one possible path seem like fate itself.
Call up the Politburo in Washington. We’re in trouble.
Just as 2010 ended, the U.S. military’s urge to surge resurfaced in a significant way. “Leaders” in the Obama administration and “senior American military commanders” in Afghanistan slipped information to New York Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins about secret planning to increase pressure on the Pakistani tribal borderlands via cross-border raids by U.S. Special Operations forces in the new year. In the front-page story those two reporters produced, you could practically slice with a dull knife American military frustration over a war going terribly wrong, over an enemy (shades of Vietnam) with “sanctuaries” for rest, recuperation, and rearming just over an ill-marked, only half-existent border.
You could practically taste the chagrin of the military that their war wasn’t proceeding exactly swimmingly. You could practically reach out and be seared by their anger at the Pakistanis for continuing to take American bucks by the billions while playing their own game, rather than an American one, in the region.
If you were of a certain age, you could practically feel (shades of Vietnam again!) that eerily hopeful sense that the next step in spreading the war, the next escalation, could be the decisive one—the familiar conviction that, when things are going badly, the answer is never less, always more.
From this single New York Times piece, you can sense just how addictive war is for the war planners. Once you begin down the path of invasion and occupation, turning back is as difficult as an addict going cold turkey. It’s easy to forget that war is a drug. When you’re high on it, your decisions undoubtedly look as rational, even practical, as the public language you tend to use to describe them. But don’t believe it for a second. Once you’ve shot up this drug, your thinking is impaired. Through its dream-haze, unpleasant history becomes bunk; what others couldn’t do, you fantasize that you can.
Forget the fact that crossing similar borders to get similar information and wipe out similar sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War years led to catastrophe for American planners and the peoples of the region. It only widened that war into what in Cambodia would become auto-genocide. Forget the fact that, no matter whom American raiders might capture, they have no hope of capturing the feeling of nationalism (or the tribal equivalent) that, in the face of foreign invaders or a foreign occupation, keeps the under-armed resilient against the mightiest of forces.
In what the Bush administration used to call “the Greater Middle East,” Washington is now in its third and grimmest surge iteration. The first took place in the 1980s during the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and proved the highest of highs. The second got rolling as the last century was ending and culminated in the first years of the twenty-first century amid what can only be described as delusions of grandeur or even imperial megalomania. It focused on a global Pax Americana and the wars that would extend it into the distant future.
The third started in 2006 in Iraq and is still playing itself out in Afghanistan in 2011. Three decades after the American urge to surge in Afghanistan helped destabilize one imperial superpower, the Soviet Union, the present plans seem to be destabilizing the other superpower of the Cold War era. And what our preeminent group of surgers welcomed as an “unprecedented strategic opportunity” as this century dawned may, in its later stages, be seen as an unprecedented act of strategic desperation.
That, of course, is what drugs, taken over decades, do to you: they give you delusions of grandeur and then leave you on the street, strung out and without much to call your own. Perhaps it’s fitting that Afghanistan, the country we helped turn into the planet’s leading narco-state, has given us a thirty-year high from hell.
If you have any doubts, then I suggest you spend some time looking at secret Soviet documents from the USSR’s Afghan debacle of the 1980s. It gives you chills to run across Communist Party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in October 1985, almost six years after Soviet troops first flooded into Afghanistan, reading letters aloud to his colleagues from embittered Soviet citizens. (“The Politburo had made a mistake and must correct it as soon as possible—every day precious lives are lost.”) Or, in November 1986, insisting to those same colleagues that the Afghan War must be ended in a year, “at maximum, two.”
Yet, with the gut-wrenching sureness history offers, you can’t help but know that, even two years later, even with a strong desire to leave (which has yet to surface among the Washington elite a decade into our own Afghan adventure), imperial pride and fear of loss of “credibility” would keep the Soviets fighting on to 1989. Or what about Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev offering that same Politburo meeting an assessment that any honest American military commander might offer a quarter century later about our own Afghan adventure: “There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels.”
Or General Boris Gromov, the commander of the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, boasting “on his last day in the country that ‘[n]o Soviet garrison or major outpost was ever overrun.’” Or Andrei Gromyko, chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, emphasizing in 1986 the strategic pleasure of their not-so-secret foe, that other great imperial power of the moment: “Concerning the Americans, they are not interested in the settlement of the situation in Afghanistan. On the contrary, it is to their advantage for the war to drag out.” The same might today be said of a far less impressive foe, al-Qaeda.
Or in 1988, with the war still dragging on, to read a “closed” letter the Communist Party distributed to its members explaining how the Afghan fiasco happened (again, the sort of thing that any honest American leader could say of our Afghan War): “In addition, [we] completely disregarded the most important national and historical factors, above all the fact that the appearance of armed foreigners in Afghanistan was always met with arms in the hands [of the population]. . . . One should not disregard the economic factor either. If the enemy in Afghanistan received weapons and ammunition for hundreds of millions and later even billions of dollars, the Soviet-Afghan side also had to shoulder adequate expenditures. The war in Afghanistan costs us 5 billion rubles a year.”
Or finally the pathetic letter the Soviet Military Command delivered to the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan on February 14, 1989, arguing (just as the American military high command would do of our war effort) that it was “not only unfair but even absurd to draw . . . parallels” between the Soviet Afghan disaster and the American war in Vietnam. That was, of course, the day the last of one hundred thousand Soviet soldiers—just about the number of American soldiers there in mid-2011—left Afghan soil heading home to a sclerotic country bled dry by war, its infrastructure aging, its economy crumbling. Riddled by drugs and thoroughly demoralized, the Red Army limped home to a society led by a Communist Party significantly delegitimized by its disastrous Afghan adventure, and with its Islamic territories from Chechnya to Central Asia in increasing turmoil. In November of that same year, the Berlin Wall would be torn down, and not long after, the Soviet Union would disappear.
Reading those documents, you can almost imagine CIA director William Webster and “his euphoric ‘Afghan Team’” toasting the success of the agency’s ten-year effort, its largest paramilitary operation since the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration’s surge in Pakistan and Afghanistan had been profligate, involving billions of dollars and a massive propaganda campaign, as well as alliances with the Saudis and a Pakistani dictator and his intelligence service to fund and arm the most extreme of the anti-Soviet jihadists of that moment—“freedom fighters” as they were then commonly called in Washington.
It’s easy to imagine the triumphalist mood of celebration among those who had intended to give the Soviet Union a full blast of the Vietnam effect. They had used the “war” part of the Cold War to purposely bleed the less powerful and less wealthy of the two superpowers dry. As President Reagan would write in his memoirs: “The great dynamic of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever.”
By 1990, the urge to surge seemed a success beyond imagining. Forget that it had left more than a million Afghans dead (and more dying), that one-third of that impoverished country’s population had been turned into refugees, or that the most extreme of the jihadists, including a group calling itself al-Qaeda, had been brought together, funded, and empowered through the Afghan War. More important, the urge to surge in the region was now in the American bloodstream. And who could ever imagine that, in a new century, “our” freedom fighters would become our sworn enemies, or that the Afghans, that backward people in a poor land, could ever be the sort of impediment to American power that they had been to the Soviets?
The Cold War was over. The surge had it. We were supreme. And what better high could there be than that?
Of course, with the Soviet Union gone, there was no military on the planet that could come close to challenging the American one, nor was there a nascent rival on the horizon. Still, a question remained: After centuries of great power rivalry, what did it mean to have a sole superpower on planet Earth, and what path should that triumphant power head down? It took a few years, including passing talk about a possible “peace dividend”—that is, the investment of monies that would have gone into the Pentagon and the military in infrastructural and other domestic projects—for this question to be settled, but settled it was, definitively, on September 12, 2001.
And for all the unknown paths that might have been taken in this unique situation, the one chosen was familiar. It was, of course, the very one that had helped lead the Soviet Union to implosion, the investment of vast national treasure in military power above all else. However, to those high on the urge to surge and now eager to surge globally, when it came to an American future, the fate of the Soviet Union seemed no more relevant than what the Afghans had done to the Red Army. In those glory years, analogies between the greatest power the planet had ever seen and a defeated foe seemed absurd to those who believed themselves the smartest, clearest-headed guys in the room.
Previously, the Cold War arms race, like any race, had involved at least two, and sometimes more, great powers. Now, it seemed, there would be something new under the sun, an arms race of one, as the United States prepared itself for utter dominance into a distant, highly militarized future. The military-industrial complex would, in these years, be further embedded in the warp and woof of American life, the military expanded and privatized (which meant being firmly embraced by crony corporations and hire-a-gun outfits of every sort), and the U.S. “global presence”—from military bases to aircraft-carrier task forces—ballooned until, however briefly, the United States became a military presence unique in the annals of history.
Thanks to the destructive acts of nineteen jihadists, the urge to surge would with finality overwhelm all other urges in the fall of 2001, and there would be a group ready for just such a moment, for (as the newspaper headlines screamed) a “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.” To take full stock of that group, however, we would first have to return to June 3, 1997, the day a confident crew of Washington think-tank, academic, and political types calling themselves the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) posted a fin de siècle “statement of principles.” In it, they called for “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.” Crucially, they were demanding that the Clinton administration, or assumedly some future administration with a better sense of American priorities, “increase defense spending significantly.”
The twenty-three men and two women who signed the initial PNAC statement urging the United States to go for the military option in the twenty-first century would, however, prove something more than your typical crew of think-tank types. After all, not so many years later, after a disputed presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, Dick Cheney would be vice president; I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby would be his right-hand man; Donald Rumsfeld would be secretary of defense, and Paul Wolfowitz would be deputy secretary of defense; Zalmay Khalilzad, head of the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Department of Defense and then the first post-invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, as well as ambassador to Iraq and the UN; Elliott Abrams, special assistant to the president with a post on the National Security Council; Paula Dobriansky, under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs; Aaron Friedberg, deputy assistant for national security affairs and director of policy planning in the office of the vice president; and Jeb Bush, governor of Florida. (Others like John Bolton, who signed on to PNAC later, would be no less well employed.)
This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it’s the only example so far of a government-in-waiting masquerading as think tank. In either case, more than thirteen years later, the success of that group can still take your breath away, as can both the narrowness—and scope—of their thinking, and of their seminal document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” published in September 2000, two months before George W. Bush took the presidency. This crew of surgers extraordinaires was considering a global situation that, as they saw it, offered Americans an “unprecedented strategic opportunity.” Facing a new century, their ambitions were caught by James Peck in his book Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights, in this way: “In the [Reagan] era, Washington organized half the planet; in the [Bush era] it sought to organize the whole.”
“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” if remembered at all today, is recalled mainly for a throwaway sentence that looked ominous indeed in retrospect: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” It remains, however, a remarkable document for other reasons. In many ways canny about the direction war would take in the near future, ranging from the role of drones in air war to the onrushing possibility that cyberwar (or “Net-War,” as they called it) would be the style of future conflict, it was a clarion call to ensure this country’s “unchallenged supremacy” into the distant future by military means alone.
In 1983, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” It wanted, as he saw it, what all dark empires (and every evildoer in any James Bond film) desires: unchallenged dominion over the planet—and it pursued that dominion in the name of a glorious “world revolution.” Now, in the name of American safety and the glories of global democracy, we were—so the PNAC people both pleaded and demanded—to do what only evil empires did and achieve global dominion beyond compare over planet Earth.
We could, they insisted, enforce an American peace, a Pax Americana, for decades to come, if only we poured our resources, untold billions (they refused to estimate what the real price might be) into war preparations and, if necessary, war itself, from the seven seas to the heavens, from manifold new “forward operating bases on land” to space and cyberspace. Pushing “the American security perimeter” ever farther into the distant reaches of the planet (and “patrolling” it via “constabulary missions”) was, they claimed, the only way that “U.S. military supremacy” could be translated into “American geopolitical preeminence.” It was also the only way that the “homeland”—yes, unlike 99.9 percent of Americans before 9/11, they were already using that term—could be effectively “defended.”
In making their pitch, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge that the United States was already a military giant among midgets, but they were also eager to suggest that our military situation was “deteriorating” fast, that we were “increasingly ill-prepared” or even in “retreat” on a planet without obvious enemies. They couldn’t have thought more globally. (They were, after all, visionaries, as druggies tend to be.) Nor could they have thought longer term. And on military matters, they couldn’t have been more up to date.
Yet on the most crucial issues, they—and their documents—couldn’t have been dumber or more misguided. They were fundamentalists when it came to the use of force and idolaters on the subject of the U.S. military. They believed it capable of doing just about anything. As a result, they made a massive miscalculation, mistaking military destructiveness for global might. Nor could they have been less interested in the sinews of global economic power (though they did imagine our future enemy to be China). Nor were they capable of imagining that the greatest military power on the planet might be stopped in its tracks—in the Greater Middle East, no less—by a ragtag crew of Iraqis and Afghans. To read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” today is to see the rabbit hole down which, as if in a fever dream, we would soon disappear.
It was a genuine tragedy that they came to power and proceeded to put their military-first policies in place; that, on September 12 of the year that “changed everything,” the PNAC people seized the reins of defense and foreign policy, mobilized for war, began channeling American treasure into the military solution they had long desired, and surged. That urge to surge was infamously caught in notes based on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comments taken on September 11, 2001.
“[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon. . . . Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq,” even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack. (“‘Go massive,’ the notes quote him as saying. ‘Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’”) And so they did. They swept up everything and then watched as their dreams and geopolitical calculations were themselves swept into the dustbin of history. And yet the urge to surge, twisted and desperate, did not abate.
To one degree or another, we have been on the Soviet path for years and yet, ever more desperately, we continue to plan additional surges. Our military, like the Soviet one, has not lost a battle and has occupied whatever ground it chose to take. Yet, in the process, it has won less than nothing at all. Our country, still far wealthier than the Soviet Union ever was, has nonetheless entered its Soviet phase. At home, in the increasing emphasis on surveillance of every sort, there is even a hint of what made “soviet” and “totalitarian” synonymous.
The U.S. economy looks increasingly sclerotic as state and city governments are laying off teachers, police, even firefighters, Americans are unemployed in near record numbers, global oil prices are ominously on the rise, and yet taxpayer money continues to pour into the military and into its foreign wars. It has recently been estimated, for instance, that after spending $11.6 billion in 2011 on the training, supply, and support of the Afghan army and police, the U.S. government will continue to spend an average of $6.2 billion a year at least through 2015—and that’s but one expense in the estimated $120 billion a year being spent at present on the Afghan War, what can only be described as part of our war stimulus package abroad.
Sooner than later, Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military will have to enter rehab. They desperately need a twelve-step program for recovery. Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end.
Back in the 1960s, Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for dealing with the Vietnam War: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it’s a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now more than a decade old.
Osama bin Laden has, of course, been eliminated. Literally. By Navy SEALS. Or as one of a crowd of revelers who appeared in front of the White House the night his killing was announced put it on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: “Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead.” And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home,” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were V-J day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.
Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it’s an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it’s we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labeled the Global War on Terror.
Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust even before he took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely nonviolent protests that shook the region and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of the world, his death was, as Tony Karon of Time magazine wrote, “little more than a historical footnote,” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.
Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos, and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighborhood.
If analogies to The Wizard of Oz were in order, bin Laden might better be compared to that film’s wizard rather than the wicked witch. After all, he was, in a sense, a small man behind a vast screen on which his frail frame took on, in the United States, the hulking proportions of a supervillain, if not a rival superpower. In actuality, al-Qaeda, his organization, was, at best, a ragtag crew that, even before it was embattled and on the run, had the most limited of operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount spectacularly murderous actions, but only one of them every year or two.
Bin Laden was never “Hitler,” nor were his henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Stalin and his minions. The nearest thing al-Qaeda had to a state was the impoverished, ravaged, Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some of its camps were once sheltered. Even the money available to bin Laden, while significant, wasn’t much to brag about. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $400,000 to $500,000, which in superpower terms is pure chump change.
Despite the apocalyptic look of the destruction bin Laden’s followers caused in New York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of killers represented a relatively modest, distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the United States. And had the Bush administration focused the same energies on hunting him down that it put into invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq, can there be any question that almost ten years wouldn’t have passed before he was killed or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?
It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice, but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet down for decades to come. After all, while bin Laden only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington—with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons, and troops at its command—was capable of launching operations every day.
In a sense, after 9/11, bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires and turning them to his own ends, the way a bot takes over a computer. It was he who ensured that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be put into motion. It was he who also ensured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be launched. It was he who brought America’s Afghan War to Pakistan, and American aircraft, bombs, and missiles to Somalia and Yemen to fight that Global War on Terror. And for the last near-decade, he did all this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not his own minimal strength but our massive destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in which he undoubtedly imagined that an organization like his could thrive.
Don’t be surprised, then, that prior to his death, bin Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled compound in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practicing the Tao of Terrorism. And the less he did, the fewer operations he was capable of launching, the more the American military did for him in creating what collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call “chaos under heaven.”
As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others). In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years thereafter. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be bin Laden’s monument, and our imperial graveyard.
Now that the celebrations and partying over his death have long faded, we are once again left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it’s easier to see just how paltry a thing this “victory” of his killing was. For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the hosannas lavished on American Special Ops forces, the president, his planners, and various intelligence outfits, this was hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves, and what, in the course of so doing, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others.
Those chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” on the announcement of his death were but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, when President George W. Bush picked up a bullhorn and promised “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” That would be the beginning of a brief few years of soaring American hubris and fantasies of domination wilder than those of any caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, and soon enough they would leave us high and dry in our present world.
Unless we set aside the special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a chance, unless we’re willing to follow the example of all those nonviolent demonstrators across the Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy withdrawal from the Af-Pak theater of operations, Osama bin Laden will never die.
On September 17, 2001, President Bush was asked whether he wanted bin Laden dead. He replied: “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said ‘wanted dead or alive.’” Dead or alive. Now, it turns out that there was a third option. Dead and alive.
The chance exists to put a stake through the heart of Osama bin Laden’s legacy. After all, the man who officially started it all is gone. We could declare victory, Toto, and head for home. But why do I think that, on this score, the malign wizard is likely to win?
As we watched the dramatic events of the Arab Spring of 2011 in the Middle East, you would hardly have known that we had a thing to do with them. Oh, yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments that were under siege. When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our “interests” and our “values” were in conflict, about how far the United States should back off its support for the regime of Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak, and about what a “tightrope” the Obama administration was walking. While the president and his officials flailed, the mildest of questions were raised about how much we should chide our erstwhile allies, or encourage the massed protestors, and about whether we should “take sides” (as though we hadn’t done so decisively in the previous decades).
With popular cries for “democracy” and “freedom” sweeping the Middle East, it’s curious to note that the Bush-era’s now-infamous “democracy agenda” has been nowhere in sight. In its brief and disastrous life, it was used as a battering ram for regimes Washington loathed and offered as a soft pillow of future possibility to those it loved.
Still, there’s a story in a Washington stunned and “blindsided,” in an administration visibly toothless and in disarray as well as dismayed over the loss of its Egyptian ally, “the keystone of its Middle Eastern policy,” that’s so big it should knock your socks off: Almost twenty years after the lesser superpower of the Cold War left the world stage, the “victor” is now lurching down the declinist slope. So don’t mark the end of the Cold War in 1991 as our conventional histories do. Mark it in the early days of 2011, which served as a symbolic goodbye-to-all-that for the planet’s “sole superpower.”
The proximate cause of Washington’s defeat is a collapse of its imperial position in a region that, ever since President Jimmy Carter proclaimed his Carter Doctrine in 1980, has been considered the crucible of global power. Today, “people power” has shaken the pillars of that American position in the Middle East, while—despite the staggering levels of military might the Pentagon still has embedded in the area—the Obama administration has found itself standing by helplessly and in grim confusion.
As a spectacle of imperial power on the decline, we haven’t seen anything like it since 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Then, too, people power stunned the world. It swept like lightning across the satellite states of Eastern Europe, those “pillars” of the old Soviet Empire, most of which had (like the Middle East) seemed quiescent for years. It was an invigorating time. After all, such moments often don’t come once in a life, no less twice in twenty years. If you don’t happen to live in Washington, the Arab Spring is proving no less remarkable, unpredictable, and earthshaking than its predecessor.
What we’re dealing with is, in a sense, the story of two “abroads.” In 1990, in the wake of a disastrous war in Afghanistan, in the midst of a people’s revolt, the Russians lost what they came to call their “near abroad,” the lands from Eastern Europe to Central Asia that had made up the Soviet Empire. The United States had something the Soviets never possessed. Call it a “far abroad.” Now, in the midst of another draining, disastrous Afghan War, in the face of another people’s revolt, a critical part of its far abroad is being shaken to its core.
In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia—along, of course, with obdurate Israel and little Jordan. In previous eras, the chosen bulwarks of “stability” and “moderation,” terms much favored in Washington, had been the shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s (and you remember his fate), and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and you remember his, too). In the larger region the Bush administration liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or “the arc of instability,” another key pillar has been Pakistan, a country now in destabilization mode under the pressure of a disastrous American war in Afghanistan.
The question is: How did this happen? And the answer, in part, is: blame it on the way the Cold War officially ended, the mood of unparalleled hubris in which the United States emerged from it, and the unilateralist path its leaders chose in its wake.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, Washington was stunned—the collapse was unexpected despite all the signs that something monumental was afoot—and then thrilled. The Cold War was over and we had won. It didn’t take long for the talk to begin about how our power and glory would outshine even the Roman and British Empires. The conclusion that this victory—as in World War II—would have its benefits, that the world was now our oyster, led to two waves of American “unilateralism” or go-it-alone-ism that essentially drove the car of state directly toward the nearest cliff and helped prepare the way for the sudden eruption of people power in the Middle East.
The second of those waves began with the fateful post-9/11 decision of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and company to “drain the global swamp.” They would, that is, pursue al-Qaeda (and whomever else they decided to label an enemy) by full military means. That included the invasion of Afghanistan and the issuing of a with-us-or-against-us diktat to Pakistan, which reportedly included the threat to bomb that country “back to the Stone Age.” It also involved a full-scale militarization, Pentagonization, and privatization of American foreign policy, and above all else, the crushing of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the occupation of his country. All that and more came to be associated with the term “unilateralism,” with the idea that U.S. military power was so overwhelming Washington could simply go it alone in the world with any “coalition of the billing” it might muster and still get exactly what it wanted.
That second wave of unilateralism, now largely relegated to the memory hole of history by the mainstream media, helped pave the way for the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, and possibly elsewhere. As a start, from Pakistan to North Africa, the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, along with its support for thuggish rule in the name of fighting al-Qaeda, helped radicalize the region. Remember, for instance, that while Washington was pouring billions of dollars into the American-equipped Egyptian Army and the American-trained Egyptian officer corps, Bush administration officials were delighted to enlist the Mubarak regime as War on Terror warriors and use Egypt’s jails as places to torture terror suspects rendered off streets anywhere on Earth.
In the process, by sweeping an area from North Africa to the Chinese border that it dubbed the Greater Middle East into that War on Terror, the Bush administration undoubtedly gave the region a newfound sense of unity, a feeling that the fate of its disparate parts was somehow bound together. In addition, Bush’s top officials, fundamentalists all when it came to U.S. military might, had immense power at their command. They gave that power the snappy label “shock and awe,” and then used it to blow a hole in the heart of the Middle East by invading Iraq. In the process, they put that land, already on the ropes, on life support.
It’s never really come off. In the wars, civil and guerrilla, set off by the American invasion and occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis undoubtedly died and millions more were sent into exile abroad or in their own land. Today, Iraq remains a barely breathing carcass of a nation, unable to deliver something as simple as electricity to its restive people or pump enough oil to pay for the disaster.
At the same time, the Bush administration sat on its hands while Israel had its way, taking Palestinian lands via its settlement policies and blowing its own hole in southern Lebanon with American backing (and weaponry) in the summer of 2006, and a smaller hole of utter devastation through Gaza in 2009. In other words, from Lebanon to Pakistan, the Greater Middle East was destabilized and radicalized. The acts of Bush’s officials couldn’t have been rasher, or more destructive. They managed, for instance, to turn Afghanistan into the globe’s foremost narco-state, even as they gave new life to the Taliban—no small miracle for a movement that, in 2001, had lost its last vestige of popularity. Most crucial of all, they, and the Obama administration after them, spread the war irrevocably to populous, nuclear-armed Pakistan.
To their mad plans and projects you can trace, at least in part, the rise to power of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip (the only significant result of Bush’s “democracy agenda,” since Iraq’s elections arrived, despite Bush administration opposition, due to the prestige of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani). You can credit them with an Iran-allied Shiite government in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as with the growth of a version of Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands. You can also credit them with the disorganization and impoverishment of the region. In summary, when the Bush unilateralists took control of the car of state, they souped it up, armed it to the teeth, and sent it careering off to catastrophe.
How hollow the neocon quip of 2003 now rings: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” But remember too that, however much the Bush administration accomplished (in a manner of speaking), there was a wave of unilateralism, no less significant, that preceded it.
Though we all know this first wave well, we don’t usually think of it as “unilateralist,” or in terms of the Middle East at all, or speak about it in the same breath with the Bush administration and its neocon supporters. I’m talking about the globalists, sometimes called the neoliberals, who were let loose to do their damnedest in the good times of the post–Cold War Clinton years. They, too, were dreamy about organizing the planet and about another kind of American power that was never going to end: economic power. (And, of course, they would be called back to power in Washington in the Obama years to run the U.S. economy into the ground yet again.) They believed deeply that we were the economic superpower of the ages, and they were eager to create their own version of a Pax Americana. Intent on homogenizing the world by bringing American economic power to bear on it, their version of shock-and-awe tactics involved calling in institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to discipline developing countries into a profitable kind of poverty and misery.
In the end, as they gleefully sliced and diced subprime mortgages, they drove a different kind of hole through the world. They were financial jihadists with their own style of shock-and-awe tactics and they, too, proved deeply destructive, even if in a different way. The irony was that, in the economic meltdown of 2008, they finally took down the global economy they had helped “unify.” And that occurred just as the second wave of unilateralists were facing the endgame of their dreams of global domination. In the process, for instance, Egypt, the most populous of Arab countries, was economically neoliberalized and, except for a small elite who made out like the bandits, they were impoverished.
Talk about “creative destruction.” The two waves of American unilateralists nearly took down the planet. They let loose demons of every sort, even as they ensured that the world’s first experience of a sole superpower would prove short indeed. Heap onto the rubble they left behind the global disaster of rising prices for the basics—food and fuel—and you have a situation so combustible that no one should have been surprised when a Tunisian match lit it aflame.
Nobody today remembers how, in September 2004, Amr Musa, the head of the Arab League, described the post-invasion Iraqi situation. “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.” This was not the sort of language we were used to hearing in the United States, no matter what you felt about the war. It read like an over-the-top metaphor, but it could as easily be taken as a realistic depiction of what happened not just in Iraq, but in the Greater Middle East and, to some extent, in the world.
Our unilateralists twice drove blithely through those gates, imagining that they were the gates to paradise. The results are now clear for all to see. And the gates of hell remain open.