In my 1950s childhood, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: “If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and ever.” Or if you were young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine’s parody, “Ripup’s Believe It or Don’t!”
With our Afghan and Iraq Wars on my mind, I’ve been wondering whether Ripley’s moment hasn’t returned. Here, for instance, are some figures offered in a March 30, 2010, Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the “drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq”: “There are . . . more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq.” Admittedly, that list lacks the “believe it or not” tagline, but otherwise Ripley’s couldn’t have put it more staggeringly. And here’s Pillsbury’s Ripley-esque kicker: the American drawdown will be the “equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York.”
When it comes to that slo-mo drawdown, all the numbers turn out to be staggering. They are also a reminder of just how the Pentagon has been fighting its wars in these last years—like a compulsive shopper without a twelve-step recovery program in sight. Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million (all numbers cited in one media account or another), whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which are still operating with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them) or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.
Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses.
In Ripley’s terms, if you were to put all the vehicles, equipment, and other materiel we managed to transport to Iraq and Afghanistan “four abreast,” they, too, might stretch on close to forever. And wouldn’t that be an illustration worthy of the old Ripley’s cartoon—all those coffeemakers and porta-potties and Internet cafés, even imported sand that, if more widely known about, might change the phrase “taking coals to Newcastle“ to “bringing sand to Iraq”?
You see, for all the sand Iraq did have, from the point of view of the U.S. military it didn’t have the perfect type for making the miles of protective “blast walls” that became a common feature of the post-invasion landscape. So, according to Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, U.S. taxpayer dollars shipped in boatloads of sand from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to create those 15-ton blast walls at $3,500 a pop. U.S. planners are now evidently wondering whether to ship some of the leftover walls thousands of miles by staggeringly roundabout routes to Afghanistan at a transportation cost of $15,000 each.
When it comes to the U.S. drawdown in Iraq and the buildup in Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of unbelievable.
• Believe it or not, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making “friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies.” It’s all socked away in the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account that, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.
• Believe it or not (small change department), the Pentagon is planning to spend an initial $50 million from a “$350 million Pentagon program designed to improve the counterterrorism operations of U.S. allies” on Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of whom, in the latest version of the Coalition of the Billing, just happen to have small numbers of troops deployed in Afghanistan.
• Believe it or not, the Defense Logistics Agency shipped 1.1 million hamburger patties to Afghanistan in the month of March 2010 (nearly doubling the March 2009 figure).
• Believe it or not, the State Department has paid private contractors Triple Canopy $438 million since mid-2005 simply to guard the massive U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. That’s more than half the price tag to build the embassy. Triple Canopy now has 1,800 employees dedicated to embassy protection in the Iraqi capital, mainly Ugandan and Peruvian security guards. At $736 million to build, the embassy itself is a numbers wonder, and has even had its sizeable playing field astroturfed—“the first artificial turf sports field in Iraq”—also assumedly at taxpayer expense.
• Believe it or not, according to Nick Turse, nearly four hundred bases for U.S. troops, CIA operatives, special operations forces, NATO allies, and civilian contractors have already been constructed in Afghanistan, topping the base-building figures for Iraq by about one hundred in a situation where almost every bit of material has to be transported into the country. The base-building spree has yet to end.
• Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan—and his company has no trucks. (He hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises little oversight.
• Believe it or not, the staggering logistics effort involved in transporting part of the American way of war from Iraq to Afghanistan is now being compared by those involved to Hannibal (not Lecter) crossing the Alps with his cohort of battle elephants, or to that ancient conqueror of conquerors, Alexander the Great (“the largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar”).
If war were really a Believe It or Not matter, or victory lay in the number of hamburgers transported, the U.S. military would have been the winner long ago. After all, it may be the most product-profligate military with the heaviest “footprint” in history. Though it’s seldom thought strange and rarely commented upon in the United States, the Pentagon practices war as a form of mass consumption and so, not surprisingly, bears a striking resemblance to the society from which it comes. Like the Taliban, it carries its way of life to war on its back.
It’s striking, of course, that all this is happening at a moment when, domestically, small businesses can’t get loans and close to 10 percent of the population is officially out of work, while state governments are desperately scrabbling for every available dollar even as they cut what would once have been considered basic services. In contrast, the Pentagon is fighting its distant wars as if American pockets had no bottoms, the national treasury had no limits, and there was no tomorrow.
And there’s one more small contrast to be made when it comes to the finest military in the history of the world: for all the private security guards, mountains of burgers, lakes of gasoline, miles of blast walls, and satchels of cash to pass out to the locals, it’s been remarkably unsuccessful in its pacification campaigns against some of the motliest forces of our time. The U.S. military has been fought to something like a draw by relatively modest-sized, relatively lightly armed minority insurgencies that don’t even pass muster when it comes to shooting straight.
Vast piles of money and vast quantities of materiel have been squandered; equipment by the boatload has been used up; lives have been wasted in profusion; and yet the winners of our wars might turn out to be Iran and China. The American way of war, unfortunately, has the numbers to die for, just not to live by.
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to two hundred thousand troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.
Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a drawdown operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter.
There’s also the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable—at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan—would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: ours. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost.
It’s accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear.
It’s common wisdom in the United States that, before we pull our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation process” that will last years and only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the battlefield.
The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us—whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other’s throats or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country—the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here would say such a thing.
Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there—by proxy and directly—on and off for thirty years and with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that an Afghan “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.
The annals of history are well stocked with countries that invaded and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But they did it.
It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space, barrels of money were burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands, and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.
Keep in mind that then, too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously—including rolling Communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of “credibility” for the American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards. Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land that maintains friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no other “dominos” fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it could have been different—and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been. But even when local skies darken, the world doesn’t end.
And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The sky won’t fall, even if the United States gets out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country. We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are, undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use to them, but either way we could go.
Of course, there’s a small problem here. All evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw—not really, not from either region. It has no interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil lands.
And then there’s another factor to consider: habit. Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The United States has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, sixty-five years later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice more than fifty years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison South Korea.
Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its 7-mile perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I, the United States either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent that we do, is not quite as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking. It’s not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque.
A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of “people power” (and a local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide truck bombing of a marine barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease. (“We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami—an Ecuadorian base,” he said slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.
Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come “cut and run” charges and blame for “losing” Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration. Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere.
Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and trillion-dollar-plus annual national security budget, there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fighting two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.
Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s too late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day. Better sooner.
There’s a history still to be written about how our highest military commanders came to never shut up. There should be, but no longer is, something startling about all this. Generals and admirals now mouth off regularly on a wide range of policy issues, appealing to the American public both directly and via deferential (sometimes fawning) reporters, pundits, and commentators. They and their underlings clearly leak news repeatedly for tactical advantage in policymaking situations. They organize what are essentially political-style barnstorming campaigns for what once would have been “foreign policy” positions. Increasingly this is just the way the game is played.
Certainly, in 1990, as Gulf War I was approaching, Americans experienced the first full flowering of a new form of militarized “journalism” in which, among other things, retired high-ranking military officers, like so many play-by-play analysts on Monday Night Football, became regular TV news consultants. They were called upon to narrate and analyze the upcoming battle (“showdown in the Gulf”), the brief offensive that followed, and the aftermath in something close to real time. Amid nifty logos, dazzling Star Wars–style graphics, theme music, and instant-replay nose-cone snuff films of “precision” weapons wiping out the enemy, they offered a running commentary on the progress of battle as well as on the work of commanders in the field, some of whom they might once have served with.
And that was just the beginning of the way, after years of post–Vietnam War planning, the Pentagon took control of the media battlefield and so the popular portrayal of American-style war. In the past, the reporting of war had often been successfully controlled by governments, while generals had polished their images with the press or—like Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur—even employed public-relations staffs to do it for them. But never had generals and war planners gone before the public as actors, supported by all the means a studio could muster on their behalf and determined to produce a program that would fill the day across the dial for the duration of a war. The military even had a version of a network standards and practices department with its guidelines for on-air acceptability. Military handlers made decisions—like refusing to clear for publication the fact that Stealth pilots viewed X-rated movies before missions—reminiscent of network show-vetting practices.
When it came time for Gulf War II, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military had added the practice of putting reporters through weeklong prewar “boot camps” and then “embedding” them with the troops (a Stockholm Syndrome–type experience that many American reporters grew to love). It also built itself a quarter-million-dollar stage set for nonstop war briefings at Centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar. All of this was still remarkably new in the history of relations between the Pentagon and the media, but it meant that the military could address the public more or less directly both through those embedded reporters and over the shoulders of that assembled gaggle of media types in Doha.
As long as war took its traditional form, this approach worked well, but once it turned into a protracted and inchoate guerrilla struggle, and “war” and “wartime” became the endless (often dismal) norm, something new was needed. In the Bush years, the Pentagon responded to endless war in part by sending out an endless stream of well-coached, well-choreographed retired military “experts” to fill the gaping maw of cable news. In the meantime, something quite new had developed.
You no longer needed to be a retired military officer to offer play-by-play commentary on and analysis of our wars. Now, at certain moments, the main narrators of those wars turned out to be none other than the generals running, or overseeing, them. They regularly got major airtime to explain to the American public how their wars were going, as well as to expound on their views on more general issues. This was something new. Among the American commanders of World War II and the Korean War, only Douglas MacArthur did anything faintly like this, which made him an outlier (or perhaps an omen) and in a sense that’s why President Harry Truman fired him. Generals Eisenhower, Patton, Ridgeway, and others, did not think to go on media tours touting their own political lines while in uniform.
Admittedly, Vietnam War commander general William Westmoreland was an early pioneer of the form. He had, however, been pushed onto the stage to put a public face on the American war effort by President Lyndon Johnson, who was desperate to buck up public opinion. Westmoreland returned from Vietnam in 1968 just before the disastrous Tet Offensive for a “whirlwind tour” of the country and uplifting testimony before Congress. In a speech at the National Press Club, he spoke of reaching “an important point where the end begins to come into view,” and later in a televised press conference, even more infamously used the phrase “the light at the end of tunnel.” Events would soon discredit his optimism.
Still, we’ve reached quite a different level of military/media confluence today. Take the two generals fighting our Afghan and Iraq Wars in mid-August 2010: General Petraeus and General Ray Odierno.
Having spent six weeks assessing the Afghan situation and convinced that he needed to buy more time for his war from the American public, Petraeus launched a full-blown, well-organized media tour from his headquarters in Kabul. In it, he touted “progress” in Afghanistan, offered comments subtly but visibly at odds with the president’s original July 2011 drawdown date, and generally evangelized for his war. He began with an hour-long interview with Dexter Filkins of the New York Times and another with Rajiv Chandrasekaran, national editor of the Washington Post.
These were timed to be released on August 15, the morning he appeared on NBC’s Sunday political show Meet the Press. (Moderator David Gregory traveled to the Afghan capital to toss softball questions at Washington’s greatest general and watch him do push-ups in a “special edition” of the show.) Petraeus then followed up with a Katie Couric interview on CBS Evening News, as part of an all-fronts “media blitz” that would include Fox News, AP, Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, and in a bow to the allies, the BBC and even NATO TV, among others.
At almost the same moment, General Odierno was ending his tour of duty as Iraq War commander by launching a goodbye media blitz of his own from Baghdad, which included interviews with Christiane Amanpour of ABC’s This Week, Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, CNN’s State of the Union, PBSNewshour, and the New York Times, among others. He, too, had a policy line to promote and he, too, expressed himself in ways subtly but visibly at odds with an official Obama position, emphasizing the possibility that some number of U.S. troops might need to stay in Iraq beyond the 2011 departure deadline.
As he said to Schieffer, “If [the Iraqis] ask us that they might want us to stay longer, we certainly would consider that.” Offering another scenario as well, he also suggested that, as Reuters put it, “U.S. troops . . . could move back to a combat role if there was ‘a complete failure of the security forces’ or if political divisions split Iraqi security forces.” (He then covered his flanks by adding, “but we don’t see that happening.”)
In February 2009, less than a month after Obama took office, Odierno was already broadcasting his desire to have up to 35,000 troops remain in Iraq after 2011, and at the end of 2009, Secretary of Defense Gates was already suggesting that a new round of negotiations with a future Iraqi government might extend our stay for years. All this, of course, could qualify as part of a more general campaign to maintain the Pentagon’s 800-pound status, the military’s clout, and a global military presence.
Pentagon foreign policy is regularly seconded by a growing cadre of what might be called military intellectuals at think tanks scattered around Washington. Such figures, many of them qualifying as “warrior pundits” and “warrior journalists,” include: Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and Petraeus adviser; former U.S. Army officer Andrew Exum, fellow at the Center for a New American Security, founder of the Abu Muqawama website, and a McChrystal adviser; former Australian infantry officer and Petraeus adviser David Kilcullen, non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post, author of the bestselling Iraq War books Fiasco and The Gamble, Petraeus admirer, and senior fellow at the same center; Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the man Gates credited with turning around his thinking on Afghanistan and a Petraeus hiree in Afghanistan; Kimberley Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, an adviser to both Petraeus and McChrystal; Kenneth Pollack, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution; and Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and another Petraeus as well as McChrystal adviser.
These figures, and numerous others like them, have repeatedly been invited to U.S. war zones by the military, flattered, toured, given face time with commanders, sometimes hired by them, and sometimes even given the sense that they are the ones planning our wars. They then return to Washington to offer sophisticated, “objective” versions of the military line.
Toss into this mix the former neocons who caused so much of the damage in the early Bush years and who regularly return at key moments as esteemed media “experts” (not the fools and knaves they were), including former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) L. Paul Bremer III, and former senior adviser to the CPA Noah Feldman, among others. For them, being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry. And, of course, they and their thoughts are dealt with remarkably respectfully, while those who were against the Iraq War from the beginning remain the rarest of commodities on op-ed pages, as sources in news articles, and on the national radio and TV news.
This combined crew of former warriors, war-zone bureaucrats, and warrior pundits have been, like Odierno, stumping for a sizeable residual U.S. military force to stay in Iraq until hell freezes over. They regularly compare Iraq to postwar South Korea, where U.S. troops are still garrisoned nearly sixty years after the Korean War and which, after decades of U.S.-supported dictators, now has a flourishing democracy.
Combine the military intellectuals, the former neocons, the war commanders, the retired military-officer-commentators, the secretary of defense, and other Pentagon civilians, and you have an impressive array of firepower of a sort that no Eisenhower, Ridgeway, or even MacArthur could have imagined. They may disagree fiercely with each other on tactical matters when it comes to pursuing American-style war, and they certainly don’t represent the views of a monolithic military. There are undoubtedly generals who have quite a different view of what the defense of the United States entails. As a group, though, civilian and military, in and out of uniform, in the Pentagon or in a war zone, they agree forcefully on the need to maintain an American global military presence over the long term.
Other than Robert Gates, the key figure of the moment has clearly been David Petraeus, who might be thought of as our Teflon general. He could represent a genuine challenge to the fading tradition of civilian control of the military. Treated as a demigod and genius of battle on both sides of the aisle in Washington, he would have been hard for any president, especially this one, to remove from command. (Obama, of course, finally “removed” him in 2011 by appointing him CIA director.) As a four-star who would have to throw a punch at Michelle Obama on national television to get fired, he had significant latitude to pursue the war policies of his choice in Afghanistan. He also has—should he care to exercise it someday—the potential and the opening to pursue much more. It’s not completely farfetched to imagine him as the first mini-Caesar-in-waiting of our American times.
As yet, he and other top figures may plan their individual media blitzes, but they are not consciously planning a media strategy for a coherent Pentagon foreign policy. The result is all the more chilling for not being fully coordinated, and for being so little noticed or attended to by the media that play such a role in promoting it. What’s at stake here goes well beyond the specific issue of military insubordination that usually comes up when military-civilian relations are discussed. After all, we could be seeing, in however inchoate form, the beginning of a genuine Pentagon/military production in support of Pentagon timing, our global military presence, and the global mission that goes with it.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon version of an American foreign policy straining to be born. In the end, of course, it could be stillborn, but it could also become an all-enveloping system offering Americans a strange, skewed vision of a world constantly at war and of the importance of planning for more of the same. To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of figures who have been deeply immersed in the imperial mayhem that our wars created, have left us armed to the teeth and flailing at ghosts and demons, and are still enmeshed in the process by which American money has been squandered to worse than no purpose in distant lands.
Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say. Yet nothing in the record indicates that Washington won’t be all ears and the media won’t remain an enthusiastic conduit for whatever they say we must do, no matter how steep the price.
In 2011, we were treated to a “debate” in Washington in which only one question was on the table: how much of the federal budget do we cut?
The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives originally picked $40 billion as its target figure for cuts to the as-yet-not-enacted 2011 budget. That was the gauntlet it threw down to the Obama administration, only to find its own proposal slashed to bits by the freshman class of that body’s conservative majority. The upstarts insisted on adhering to a Republican Pledge to America vow to cut $100 billion from the budget. With that figure on the table, pundits were predicting widespread pain in the land, including the possible loss of at least seventy thousand jobs “as government aid to cops, teachers, and research is slashed.”
In the meantime, the Obama administration offered its own entry in the cut-and-burn sweepstakes. Its plan called for ending or trimming more than two hundred federal programs in 2012. It also reportedly offered cuts adding up to $1.1 trillion over a decade and put in place a “five-year freeze on domestic programs [that] would reduce spending in that category to the lowest level, measured against the economy, since President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961.”
It all sounded daunting, and the muttering was only beginning about “entitlement” programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—that had yet to be touched.
Which reminds me: Didn’t I mention Afghanistan?
If so, how fortunate, because there’s a perfectly obvious path toward that Republican goal of $100 billion. If we were to embark on it, there would be even more cuts to follow and—believe it or not—they wouldn’t be all that painful, provided we did one small thing: change our thinking about making war.
After all, according to the Pentagon, the cost of the Afghan War in 2012 will be almost $300 million a day or, for all 365 of them, $107.3 billion. Like anything having to do with American war-fighting, however, such figures regularly turn out to be undercounts. Other estimates for our yearly war costs there go as high as $120 to $160 billion.
And let’s face it, it’s a war worth ending fast. Almost a decade after the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. military is still fruitlessly engaged in possibly the stupidest frontier war in our history. It’s just the sort of conflict that has historically tended to drive declining imperial powers around the bend.
There’s genuine money to be slashed simply by bringing the troops home, but okay, I hear you. You live in Washington and you can’t bear to give up that war, lock, stock, and barrel. I understand. Really, I do. So let’s just pretend that we’re part of that “moderate” and beleaguered House leadership and really only want to go after $40 billion in the federal budget.
In that case, here’s an idea, We’ve been training the Afghan military and police forces for almost a decade now, dumping an estimated $29 billion plus into the endeavor, only to find that, unlike the Taliban, our Afghans generally prefer not to fight and love to desert. What if the Obama administration were simply to stop the training program? What if we weren’t to spend the $11.6 billion slated for 2011, or the up to $12.8 billion being discussed for next year, or the $6 billion or more annually thereafter to create a security force of nearly four hundred thousand Afghans that we’ll have to pay for into eternity, since the Afghan government is essentially broke?
What if, instead, we went cold turkey on our obsession with training Afghans? For one thing, you’d promptly wipe out more than a quarter of that $40 billion the House leadership wants cut and many more billions for years to come. (And that doesn’t even take into account all the savable American dollars going down the tubes in Afghanistan—a recent report from the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction suggested it adds up to $12 billion for the Afghan army alone—in graft, corruption, and pure incompetence.)
Are we actually safer if we get rid of police, firefighters, and teachers here in the United States, while essentially hiring hordes of police and military personnel to secure Afghanistan? I suspect you know how most Americans would answer that question.
Here’s another way to approach both those $40 billion and $100 billion targets. Start with the budget for the labyrinthine U.S. Intelligence Community, which is officially $80.1 billion. That, of course, is sure to prove an undercount. So, just for the heck of it, let’s take a wild guess and assume that the real figure probably edges closer to $100 billion. I know, the Republican House majority will never agree to get rid of all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies, and neither will the Democrats. They’ll claim that Washington would be blinded by such an act—although it’s no less reasonable to argue that, without the blinders of what we call “intelligence,” which is largely a morass of dead thinking about our world, our leaders might finally be able to see again.
Nonetheless, in the spirit of compromise with a crew that hates the “federal bureaucracy” (until the words “national security” come up), how about cutting back from seventeen intelligence outfits to maybe three? Let’s say, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. I’ll bet you’re talking an easy $40 to $50 billion dollars in savings right there, and the cost of the job-retraining programs for the out-of-work intelligence analysts and operatives would be minimal by comparison.
According to a Washington Post series, “Top Secret America,” here are just a few of the things that taxpayers have helped our intelligence bureaucracy do: Produce fifty thousand intelligence reports annually, create the redundancy of “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, [to] track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks,” and, in the category of the monumental (as well as monumentally useless), construct “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work . . . since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.”
Take just one example: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which has sixteen thousand employees and a “black budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year.” Until now, you may not have known that such an outfit was protecting your security, but you’re paying through the nose for its construction spree anyway. Believe it or not, as Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out, it now has a gleaming new, nearly Pentagon-sized headquarters complex rising in Virginia at the cost of $1.8 billion—almost as expensive, that is, as the Freedom Tower now going up at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
Or let’s check out some smaller, distinctly chopable potatoes. Officially, America’s Iraq War is ending (even if in a Shiite-dominated state allied with Iran). All American military personnel are, at least theoretically, to leave the country by year’s end. Whether that happens or not, the Obama administration evidently remains convinced that it’s in our interest to prolong our effort to control that country. As a result, the planned “civilian” presence left behind to staff the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar citadel of an “embassy” the United States built in downtown Baghdad as well as various consular outposts will look uncomfortably like a mini-army.
As Wired’s Danger Room blog put it, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq “will become a de facto general of a huge, for-hire army.” We’re talking about 5,100 mercenaries paid to guard the 12,000 “civilians,” representing various U.S. government agencies and the State Department there. To guard the Baghdad embassy alone—really a regional command headquarters—there will be 3,650 hired guns under contract for almost $1 billion. The full complement of heavily armed mercenaries will operate out of “15 different sites . . . including 3 air hubs, 3 police training centers . . . and 5 Office of Security Cooperation sites.”
In 2010, USA Today estimated that the cost of operating just the monstrous Baghdad embassy was more than $1.5 billion a year. God knows what it is now.
What if the cost-cutters in Washington were to conclude that it was a fruitless task to try to manage the unmanageable (i.e., Iraq) and that, instead of militarizing the State Department, the United States should return to the business of diplomacy with a modest embassy and a consulate or two to negotiate deals, discuss matters of common interest, and hand out the odd visa. That would represent a cost-cutting extravaganza on a small scale. The same could be said for the near billion-dollar “embassy” being built in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the $790 million going into another such embassy and consulates in Afghanistan.
It’s important to note that none of the potential cost-cutting measures I’ve mentioned touch the big palooka. I’m talking about the Pentagon budget, a very distinctive “entitlement” program on the American landscape. Given the news reports on “Pentagon cuts” lately, you might think that the Obama administration is taking a hatchet to the Defense Department’s funds, but no such luck. Defense analyst Miriam Pemberton has written, “The Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious increases, paring them back, and calling this a cut.” In fact, the proposed Pentagon budget for 2012 actually represents an increase over the already stunningly bloated 2011 version of the same.
Keep in mind that U.S. military spending equals that of the next fifteen countries combined (most of them allies) and represents 47 percent of total global military spending. If Washington’s mindset were different, it wouldn’t be hard to find that $100 billion the Republican House freshmen are looking for in the Pentagon budget alone—quite aside from cuts in supplemental war-fighting funds—and still be the most heavily armed nation on the planet.
And here’s my question to you: Don’t you find it odd that cuts of this potential size are so obviously available and yet, with all the raging and groaning about deficits and budget-cutting, no one who matters seems to focus on such possibilities at all? To head down this path, Washington would need to make only the smallest of changes: it would have to begin thinking outside the war box for about a minute and thirty seconds.
Our leaders would have to conclude the obvious: that, in these last years, war hasn’t proved the best way to advance American interests. We would have to decide that real security does not involve fighting permanently in distant lands, pursuing a “war on terror” in seventy-five countries, or enlarging the Pentagon (and the weapons-makers that go with it) year after year.
Americans would have to begin to think anew. That’s all. The minute we did, our financial situation would look different and for all we know, something like non-war, if not peace, might begin to break out.
Forty years ago, Americans regularly spoke about a war 7,500 miles away in Vietnam as a “quagmire.” We were, as one protest song of that era went, “waist deep in the Big Muddy.” Today, Afghanistan, too, looks like a quagmire, but don’t be fooled. The real quagmire isn’t there; it’s right here in Washington, D.C., that capital mythically built on a swamp.