The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  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.

  Second-Wave Unilateralism

  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.

  Our Financial Jihadists

  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 “cr
eative 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.

  Chapter 3

  Their Dead and Ours

  The View from Mount Olympus

  The Greeks had it right. When you live on Mount Olympus, your view of humanity is qualitatively different. The Greek gods, after all, lied to, stole from, lusted for, and punished humanity without mercy while taking the planet for a spin. And it didn’t bother them a bit. They felt—so Greek mythology tells us—remarkably free to intervene from the heights in the affairs of whichever mortals caught their attention and, in the process, to do whatever took their fancy without thinking much about the nature of human lives. If they sometimes felt sympathy for the mortals whose lives they repeatedly threw into havoc, they were incapable of real empathy. Such is the nature of the world when your view is the Olympian one and what you see from the heights are so many barely distinguishable mammals scurrying about.

  In early April 2010, a modern example of what it means to act from the heights was available for all to see when the website WikiLeaks released a decrypted July 2007 video of two U.S. Apache helicopters attacking Iraqis on a street in Baghdad. At least twelve Iraqis, including two employees of the Reuters news agency, a photographer and his driver, were killed in the incident, and two children in the vehicle of a good Samaritan who stopped to pick up casualties and died in the process were also wounded.

  Without a doubt, that video is a remarkable seventeen-minute demonstration of how to efficiently slaughter tiny beings from on high. There is no way American helicopter crews could know just who was walking down there—Sunni or Shiite, insurgent or shopper, Baghdadis with intent to harm Americans or Baghdadis paying little attention to two of the helicopters then so regularly buzzing the city. Were they killers, guards, bank clerks, unemployed idlers, Baathist Party members, religious fanatics, café owners? Who could tell from such a height? But the details mattered little.

  The Reuters cameraman crouches behind a building looking, camera first, around a corner, and you hear an American in an Apache yell, “He’s got an RPG!”—mistaking his camera with its long-range lens for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The pilot, of course, doesn’t know that it’s a Reuters photographer down there. Only we do. (And when his death did become known, the military carefully buried the video.) Along with that video comes a soundtrack in which you hear the Americans check out the rules of engagement, request permission to fire, and banter about the results. (“Hahaha. I hit ’em”; “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards . . .”; and of the two wounded children, “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids into a battle.”) Such callous chitchat is explained away in media articles here by the need of those whose job it is to kill for “psychological distance,” but in truth that’s undoubtedly the way you talk when you, and only you, have godlike access to the skies and can hover over the rest of humanity making preparations to wipe out lesser beings.

  Another example of our Olympian detachment came in predawn darkness on February 12, 2010, in Paktia Province, eastern Afghanistan, when a U.S. Special Operations team dropped from the skies into a village near Gardez. There, in a world that couldn’t be more distant from their lives, possibly based on an informant’s bad tip, American snipers on rooftops killed an Afghan police officer (“head of intelligence in one of Paktia’s most volatile districts”), his brother, and three women—a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager. They then evidently dug the bullets out of the women’s bodies, bound and gagged them, and filed a report claiming that the dead men were Taliban militants who had murdered the women—“honor killings”—before they arrived.

  That was how the American press, generally reliant on military handouts, initially reported the story. Fortunately, in the face of some good on-the-spot journalism by an unembedded British reporter, this cover-up story ingloriously disintegrated, while U.S. military spokespeople retreated step by step in a series of partial admissions of error, leading to an in-person apology, including the sacrifice of a sheep and $30,000 in compensation payments.

  Ceremonial Evisceration

  Both incidents elicited shock and anger from critics of American war policies. And both incidents are shocking. Probably the most shocking aspect of them, however, is just how humdrum they actually were. Start with one detail in those Afghan murders, reported in most accounts but little emphasized: what the Americans descended on was a traditional family ceremony. More than twenty-five guests had gathered for the naming of a newborn child.

  In fact, over the past decade, Afghan and Iraqi ceremonies of all sorts have regularly been blasted away. Keeping a partial tally of wedding parties eradicated by American air power at TomDispatch.com, I had counted five such “incidents” between December 2001 and July 2008. A sixth in July 2002 in which possibly forty Afghan wedding celebrants died and many more were wounded has since come to my attention, as has a seventh that took place in August 2008. Other kinds of rites where significant numbers of Afghans gather have not been immune from attack, including funerals, and now, naming ceremonies. And keep in mind that these are only the reported incidents in a rural land where much undoubtedly goes unreported.

  Even General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, expressed surprise at a tally of at least thirty Afghans killed and eighty wounded at checkpoints when U.S. soldiers opened fire on cars. He said: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

  Take thirty-six-year-old Mohammed Yonus, a popular imam of a mosque on the outskirts of Kabul, who was killed in his car by fire from a passing NATO convoy, which considered his vehicle “threatening.” His seven-year-old son was in the back seat. Or while on the subject of Reuters employees, recall reporter Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian producer for the al-Arabiya satellite network of Dubai, who was killed on Haifa Street in central Baghdad in September 2004 in a U.S. helicopter attack. He was on camera at the time and his blood spattered the lens. Seif Fouad, a Reuters cameraman, was wounded in the same incident, while a number of bystanders, including a girl, were killed.

  Or remember the seventeen Iraqi civilians infamously murdered when Blackwater employees in a convoy began firing in Nissour Square in Baghdad on September 16, 2007. Or the missiles regularly shot from U.S. helicopters and unmanned aerial drones into the heavily populated Shiite slum of Sadr City back in 2007 and 2008. Or the Iraqis regularly killed at checkpoints in the years since the invasion of 2003. Or, for that matter, the first moments of that invasion on March 20, 2003, when, according to Human Rights Watch, “dozens” of ordinary Iraqi civilians were killed in the fifty aerial “decapitation strikes” the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Iraqi leadership, missing every one of them.

  This is the indiscriminate nature of killing, no matter how “precise” and “surgical” the weaponry, when war is made by those who command the heavens and descend, as if from Mars, into alien worlds, convinced that they have
the power to sort out the good from the bad, even if they can’t tell villagers from insurgents. Under these circumstances, death comes in a multitude of disguises—from a great distance via cruise missiles or Predator drones to close up at checkpoints where armored American troops, fingers on triggers, have no way of telling a suicide bomber from a confused or panicked local with a couple of kids in the backseat.

  It comes repetitively when U.S. Special Operations forces helicopter into villages after dark looking for terror suspects based on tips from unreliable informants who may be settling local scores of which the soldiers are dismally ignorant. It comes repeatedly to Afghan police or army troops mistaken for the enemy.

  It came not just to a police officer and his brother and family in Paktia Province, but to a “wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport” who, along with up to seventy-six members of his extended family, was slaughtered in such a raid on the village of Azizabad in Herat Province in August 2008. It came to the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander (away in another province) whose “schoolteacher wife, a seventeen-year-old daughter named Nadia, a fifteen-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department” were killed in April 2009 in a U.S.-led raid in Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan. (Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan’s cousin was shot five times in the abdomen.)