The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  Little did I know. Today, it seems, our country is triumphant in producing only things that go boom in the night: we have a near monopoly on the global weapons market and on the global movie market, where in the dark we’re experts on explosions of every sort. When I wrote in 1989 that the process was “so far gone,” I had no idea how far we still had to go. I had no idea, for instance, how far a single administration could push us when it came to war. Still, one thing that does remain reasonably constant about America’s now perpetual state of war is how little we—the 99 percent of us who don’t belong to the military or fight—actually see of it, even though it is, in a sense, all around us.

  Warscapes

  From a remarkable array of possibilities, here are just a few warscapes—think of them as landscapes, only deadlier—that might help make more visible an American world of, and way of, war that we normally spend little time discussing, debating, or doing anything about.

  As a start, let me try to conjure up a map of what “defense,” as imagined by the Pentagon and the U.S. military, actually looks like. For a second just imagine a world map laid flat before you. Now divide it, the whole globe, like so many ill-shaped pieces of cobbler, into six servings—you can be as messy as you want, it’s not an exact science—and label them the U.S. European Command or Eucom (for Europe and Russia), the U.S. Pacific Command or Pacom (Asia), Centcom (the Greater Middle East and a touch of North Africa), Northcom (North America), Southcom (South America and most of the Caribbean), and Africom (almost all of Africa). Those are the “areas of responsibility” of the six U.S. military commands.

  In case you hadn’t noticed, that takes care of just about every inch of the planet, but—I hasten to add—not every bit of imaginable space. For that, if you were a clever cartographer, you would somehow need to include Stratcom, the U.S. Strategic Command charged with, among other things, ensuring that we dominate the heavens, and the newest of all the “geographic” commands, Cybercom, which oversees “1,000 elite military hackers and spies under one four-star general,” all prepared to engage in preemptive war in cyberspace.

  Some of these commands have crept up on us over the years. Centcom, which now oversees our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was formed in 1983, a result of the Carter Doctrine—that is, of President Jimmy Carter’s decision to make the protection of Persian Gulf oil a military necessity, while both Northcom (2002) and Africom (2007) were creations of the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

  From a mapping perspective, however, the salient point is simple enough: at the moment, there is no imaginable space on or off the planet that is not an “area of responsibility” for the U.S. military. That, not the protection of our shores and borders, is what is now meant by the word “defense” in the Department of Defense. And if you were to stare at that map for a while, I can’t help but think it would come to strike you as abidingly strange. No place at all of no military interest to us? What does that say about our country—and us?

  In case you think the map I’ve just described is cartographic hyperbole, consider this: we now have what is, in essence, a secret military inside the U.S. military. I’m talking about our special operations forces. These elite and largely covert forces were rapidly expanded in the Bush years as part of the Global War on Terror, but also thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s urge to bring covert activities that were once the province of the CIA under the Pentagon’s wing.

  By the end of George W. Bush’s second term in office, special operations forces were fighting in, training in, or stationed in approximately sixty countries under the aegis of the Global War on Terror. Less than two years later, according to the Washington Post, thirteen thousand special operations troops were deployed abroad in approximately seventy-five countries as part of an expanding Global War on Terror (even if the Obama administration had ditched that name); in other words, special ops troops alone are now operating in close to 40 percent of the 192 countries that make up the United Nations.

  And talking about what the Pentagon has taken under its wing, I’m reminded of a low-budget sci-fi film of my childhood, The Blob. In it, a gelatinous alien grows ever more humongous by eating every living thing in its path, with the exception of Steve McQueen in his debut screen role. By analogy, take what’s officially called the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), which Rumsfeld was so eager to militarize. It’s made up of seventeen major agencies and outfits, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Created in 2004 in response to the intelligence dysfunction of 9/11, ODNI is already its own small bureaucracy, with 1,500 employees and next to no power to do the only thing it was ever really meant to do: coordinate the generally dysfunctional labyrinth of the IC itself.

  You might wonder what kind of “intelligence” a country could possibly get from seventeen competing, bickering outfits—and that’s not even the half of it. According to a Washington Post series “Top Secret America” by Dana Priest and William Arkin:

  In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. . . . Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. . . . In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built 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.

  And keep in mind that more than two-thirds of the IC’s intelligence programs are controlled by the Pentagon, which also means control over a major chunk of the combined intelligence budget, announced at $80 billion (“2 1⁄2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001,” according to Priest and Arkin), but undoubtedly far larger.

  And when it comes to the Pentagon, that’s just a start. Massive expansion in all directions has been its modus operandi since 9/11. Its soaring budget hit about $700 billion for fiscal year 2010 (when you include a war-fighting supplemental bill of $33 billion)—an increase of only 4.7 percent in budget-slashing times—and is projected to hit $726 billion in fiscal year 2011. Chris Hellman of the National Priorities Project crunched the numbers in 2010, however, and found that the full U.S. national security budget was actually more than $1.2 trillion.

  Not surprisingly, the Pentagon has taken over a spectrum of previously State Department–controlled civilian activities, ranging from humanitarian relief and development (also known as “nation building”) to actual diplomacy. And don’t forget its growing roles as a domestic-disaster manager and a global arms dealer. You could certainly think of the Pentagon as the blob on the American horizon, and yet, looking around, you might hardly be aware of the ways in which your country continues to be militarized.

  With that in mind, let’s examine another warscape, particularly appropriate at a moment when numerous commentators are pointing out how the United States is morphing from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, when the headlines are filled with exploding gas lines and grim reports on the country’s aging infrastructure. Still, don’t think that the old can-do American spirit of my childhood is dead. Quite the contrary, we still have our great building projects, our equivalents of pyramids and ziggurats—and in some cases we even build them near the ruins of actual ziggurats and pyramids. I’m talking about our military bases, especially those being constructed in our war zones.

  No sooner had U.S. troops taken Baghdad in April 2003 than the Pentagon and the crony corporations it now can’t go to war without began to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into the construction of well-fortified American towns in Iraq that included multiple bus routes, PXs, fast-food joints, massage parlors, Internet cafés, power plants, water-treatment plants, fire stations, sewage plants, you name it.

  Hundreds of military bases, micro to mega, were built in Iraq alone, including the ill-named but enormous Victory Base Complex at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, wi
th at least nine significant sub-bases nestled inside it, and Balad Air Base, which—sooner than you could say “Saddam Hussein’s in captivity”—was handling air traffic on the scale of O’Hare International in Chicago, and bedding down forty thousand inhabitants, including hire-a-gun African cops, civilian defense employees, special ops forces, employees of private contractors, and tons of troops.

  And all of this was nothing compared to the feat the Pentagon accomplished in Afghanistan, where the U.S. military now claims to have built four hundred bases of every sort from the smallest combat outposts to monster installations like Bagram Air Base. In a country without normal resources, adequate fuel, or much of anything else, just about all construction materials for those bases and the fuel to go with them had to be delivered over treacherous supply lines thousands of miles long—so treacherous and difficult, in fact, that, by the time a gallon of fuel reaches Afghanistan to keep our Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles rolling along, it’s estimated to cost at least $400.

  Of course, whatever skills we may lack when it comes to predicting the future, all things must end, including the American war state and our strange state of war. The question is: Can our over-armed global mission be radically downsized before it downsizes us? It will happen anyway and it won’t take forever either, not the way things are going, but it will happen in a less harmful way, if you’re involved, in whatever fashion you choose, in making it so. Had I had a birthday cake with candles on it for that ninth birthday of mine and blew them out, that, I think, would have been my wish.

  How the Movies Saved My Life

  Every childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called me a “quince” (a fruit sour enough, they insisted, to make your face pucker, as mine did when challenged by any food out of the ordinary). I was neither a daredevil nor a chance-taker, and by my teens scorned myself for being so boringly on the straight and narrow. I never raced a car, or mocked a cop, or lit out for the territories.

  Still, by the luck of the draw, as a child of the 1950s, I was plunged into a landscape more exotic than most American kids could then have imagined. It was still devastated by war, populated to a startling extent by present and former enemies, and most amazingly, the Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Russians (not to speak of the French and English) I encountered there were thrillingly alive in a way everything in my life told me we Americans weren’t.

  Let me explain, geographically speaking and as personally as I can. I grew up at 40 East 58th Street, just off Madison Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan, two blocks from the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise got her hair cut. Apartment 6D—“as in David,” we always said. My parents moved there in 1946, just after World War II. It was two doors down from the Plaza movie theater, and getting to 6D was an exotic affair. You exited a small, gated elevator into a modest-sized corridor, apartments on either side, only to find yourself on a catwalk in the open air looking down on what might have been the low roofs of Paris. A stroll along that catwalk and a right turn into another corridor got you to our rent-controlled duplex with its living-room skylight under which my mother—“New York’s girl caricaturist,” as she was known in the gossip columns of the war years—regularly set up her easel. My room was upstairs.

  The fifties are now recalled as a golden age when Americans, white ones anyway, burst into the suburbs, while all the consumerist gratifications deferred by the Great Depression and World War II were sated. It was the age of the television set (“Bigger screen . . . Brighter picture . . . Better reception”) and pop-up toasters, of Frigidaires and freezers big enough “for the whole family” (“holds 525 pounds!”) of “extension” phones, wonder of wonders, (“I just couldn’t get along without my kitchen telephone”), and cigarettes so “soothing to the nerves” that doctors and baseball players alike were proud to endorse them.

  With good jobs and rising wages in a still war-battered world, the United States stood so much taller than the rest of the planet, manufacturing the large items of the peaceable life (cars, above all) and the advanced weaponry of war, often in the same dominant corporations. It was a world in which Bell Telephone, that purveyor of extension phones, could also run upbeat ads aimed at boys extolling its weapons work. (As one began: “Chip Martin, college reporter, sees a ‘talking brain’ for guided missiles. . . . ‘Glad to see you, Chip. Understand you want to find out how our Air Force can guide a warhead a quarter of the way around the world. Well, look here . . . ’”)

  Inexpensive gas, cheap well-marbled steaks, and reliable warheads that might end life as we knew it—that seems like a reasonable summary of the obvious in American life in those years. And if you were a kid and wanted more, Hollywood was there to deliver: it was a time when, on screen, the marines always advanced before the movie ended, and the sound of a bugle meant the bluecoats were coming to save the day. It was the moment when, for the first time in history, teenagers had money in their pockets and could begin to spend it on clothes, records, and other entertainment, propelling the country into a new age in which the Mad Men of that era would begin advertising directly to them.

  I knew that world, of course, even if our little “icebox,” which iced over easily, was no Frigidaire. Living in the middle of Manhattan, I could catch the all-American-ness of life by taking a three-block walk to the RKO 58th Street movie theater at the corner of Third Avenue where, popcorn in hand, I’d settle in for a double-feature version of the world as it was supposed to be. There, too, I could regularly see my father’s war. Like so many of those we now call “the greatest generation,” he was silent on the subject of his war experience (except for rare rants about “war profiteers” and “the Japs”), but that mattered little. After all, what did he have to say when the movies taught me everything I needed to know about what he had done in his war?

  Because the then-liberal rag the New York Post assigned my mother to draw the Army-McCarthy hearings (being broadcast live on ABC); we got a TV for the first time in April 1954. Of course, the sitcoms I was allowed to watch, like Hollywood’s war films, Westerns, and comedies, had a remarkable tendency to end tidily and on an upbeat note. Unlike movies about my father’s war, however, I had something to compare those sitcoms to and, much as I loved Father Knows Best, it bore not the slightest resemblance to anything my hard-pressed mother, angry father, and I were living out. In it, I could find no hint of the messy psychic geography of my own childhood.

  For my nuclear family in those first years of the nuclear age, it was bad times all the way. In the middle years of the decade, my father, a salesman, was out of work and drinking heavily; my mother brought home “the bacon” (really, that’s the way they spoke about it then), which—I have her account book from those years—was excessively lean. They were struggling to keep up the appearance of a middle-class life while falling ever more deeply into debt. The fights about “Tommy’s doctor bill” or “Tommy’s school bill” began as soon as they thought I was asleep.

  Among my most vivid memories was creeping out into the light of the hall, propping myself up by the stairs and listening, mesmerized, as my parents went at it below with startling verbal violence. Think of that as my first perch as a future writer.

  Like most kids in most places, I assumed then that my life, including such eternally angry nights, was the way it was for everyone. My problems, as I saw it, didn’t actually begin until I stepped out onto 58th Street, where, as far as I could tell, a landscape strangely empty of interest stretched as far as the eye could see. If America then sat atop the world, triumphant and alone, the blandness that aloneness bred, a kind of unnaturally fearful uniformity of everything, is difficult today to conjure up or even describe. At the time, though, I hardly understood why the world I was being promised struck me as so dull. I thought it was me. And above all, I didn’t have a clue when or how this would end and life, whatever that was, would begin.

>   Fortunately for me, geography came to my rescue. My street, was—no hyperbole here—unique at that moment. You could have traveled a fair distance in 1950s America, hundreds or possibly thousands of miles, without stumbling upon a movie house dedicated to “foreign films,” and yet between Sixth Avenue and Lexington Avenue, in fewer than three and a half city blocks, I had three of them—the Paris just west of Fifth Avenue, the Plaza by my house, and between Park and Lexington, the Fine Arts.

  You would no more have wondered about why they were clustered there than why your parents duked it out each night. And yet how strange that was in a still remarkably white bread and parochial American world. Immigration, remember, had largely been shut down by act of Congress in 1924 (see, for example, the Asian Exclusion Act) and America’s doors didn’t begin to open again until the early 1950s. In a time when you can get bagels in El Paso and Thai, Japanese, or Mexican food in Anytown, USA, it’s hard to remember just how rare the “foreign” in “foreign films” once was. In that earlier era of American fear and hysteria, that word and the dreaded phrase “Communist influence” were linked.

  And so, to enter the darkness of one of those theaters and be suddenly transported elsewhere on Earth, to consort with the enemy and immerse yourself in lives that couldn’t have seemed more alien (or attractive), under more empathetic circumstances—well, that was not a common experience. Think of those movie houses not simply as one confused and unhappy teenage boy’s escape hatch from the world, but as Star Trekian–style wormholes into previously unsuspected parallel universes that happened to exist on planet Earth.