The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  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.

  Dumb Intelligence Runs Rampant

  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.

  Deep in the Big Muddy

  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.

  Chapter 6

  Living with War

  Ballot Box Blues

  Voting in the 2010 election was the single most reflexive political act of my life, in the single most dispiriting election I can remember. As I haven’t missed a midterm or presidential election since my first vote in 1968, that says something. Certainly, my version of election politics started long before I could vote. I remember collecting campaign buttons in the 1950s and also—for the 1956 presidential campaign in which Dwight Eisenhower (and his vice president, Richard Nixon) faced off against Democratic Party candidate Adlai Stevenson—singing this ditty:

  Whistle while you work

  Nixon is a jerk

  Eisenhower has no power

  Stevenson will work!

  Even in the world of kids, even then, politics could be gloves-off stuff. Little good my singing did, though: Stevenson was trounced, thus beginning my political education. My father and mother were dyed-in-the-wool Depression Democrats, and my mother was a political caricaturist for the then-liberal (now Murdoch-owned) tabloid the New York Post. I still remember the fierce drawings she penned for that paper’s front page of red-baiting senator Joe McCarthy. She also came away from those years filled with political fears, reflected in her admonition to me throughout the 1960s: “It’s the whale that spouts that gets caught.”

  Still, I was sold on the American system. It was a sign of the times that I simply couldn’t wait to vote. The first election rally I ever attended, in 1962, was for John F. Kennedy, already president. I remember his face, a postage-stamp-sized blur of pink, glimpsed through a sea of heads and shoulders. Even today, I can feel a remnant of the excitement and hope of that moment. In those years before our government had become “the bureaucracy” in young minds, I was imbued with a powerful sense of civic duty that, I suspect, was commonplace. I daydreamed relentlessly about becoming an American diplomat and so representing my country to the world.

  The first presidential campaign I followed with a passion was in 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination. In memory, I feel as if I voted in it, though I couldn’t have since the voting age was then twenty-one, and I was only twenty. Nonetheless, I all but put my X beside the “peace candidate” of that moment, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had, in such an untimely manner, inherited the Oval Office and a war in Vietnam. What other vote was there, since he was running against a Republican extremist and warmonger, an Arizona senator named Barry Goldwater?

  Not long after his inauguration, however, Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam. It had been planned before the election, but was kept suitably under wraps while Goldwater was being portrayed as a man intent on getting American boys killed in Asia and maybe nuking the planet as well.

  Four years later, with half a million U.S. troops in South Vietnam and the war reaching conflagration status, I was “mad as hell and not going to take this anymore”—and that was years before Paddy Chayefsky penned those words for the film Network. I was at least as mad as any present-day Tea Partier and a heck of a lot younger. By 1968, I had been betrayed by my not-quite-vote for Johnson and learned my lesson—they were all warmongers—and so, deeply involved in antiwar activities, I rejected both Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had barely peeped about the war, and his opponent Richard Nixon (that “jerk” of my 1956 ditty), who was promising “peace with honor,” but as I understood quite well, preparing to blast any Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian within reach. I voted instead, with some pride, for Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.

  Nor was it exactly thrilling in 1972 when “tricky Dick,” running for reelection, swamped Senator George McGovern, who actually wanted to bring American troops home and end the war, just before the Watergate scandal fully broke. And don’t forget the 1980 election in which Jimmy Carter was hung out to dry by the Iran hostage crisis. As I remember it, I voted late and Democratic that Tuesday in November, came home, made a bowl of popcorn, and sat down in front of the TV just in time to watch Carter concede to Ronald Reagan. Don’t think I didn’t find that dispiriting.

  And none of this could, of course, compare to campaign 2000 with its “elected by the Supreme Court” tag or election night 2004, when early exit polls seemed to indicate that Senator John Kerry, himself an admittedly dispiriting figure, might be headed for the White House. My wife and I threw a party that night, which started in the highest of spirits, only to end, after a long, dismal night, in the reelection of George W. Bush. On the morning of November 3, I wrote at TomDispatch.com that I had “the election hangover of a lifetime,” as I contemplated the way American voters had re-upped for “the rashest presidency in our history (short perhaps of that of Jefferson Davis).”

  “They have,” I added, “signed on to a disastrous crime of a war in Iraq, and a losing war at that, which will only get worse; they have signed on to whatever dangerous schemes these schemers can come up with. They have signed on to their own impoverishment. This is the political version of the volunteer army. Now they have to live with it. Unfortunately, so do we.”

  Hermetic Systems and Mad Elephants

  Years later, we are indeed poorer in all the obvious ways, and some not so obvious ones as well. How, then, could the 2010 midterms have been the most dispiriting elections of my life, especially when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News assured us, in the days leading up to the event, that it would have “the power to reshape our nation’s politics.” Okay, you and I know that’s BS, part of the endless, breathless handicapping of the midterms that went on nonstop for weeks on the TV news.

  Still, the most dispiriting? After all, I’m the guy who penned a piece eight days after the 2008 election entitled “Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart.” In what was, for most people I knew, a decidedly upbeat moment, I then wrote, for instance: “So, after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush’s di
sastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British Empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success.”

  And take my word for it, when I say dispiriting I’m not even referring to just how dismal my actual voting experience was for the 2010 election in New York City. I mean, two senators and a governor I don’t give a whit about and not a breath of fresh air anywhere—not unless you count the Republican gubernatorial and “Tea Party” candidate, a beyond-mad-as-hell businessman who made a fortune partially thanks to state government favors and breaks of every sort and then couldn’t wait to take out that government. (And when Carl Paladino talks about taking something out, you instinctively know that he’s not a man of metaphor.) Okay, that is dispiriting, just not in a lifetime award kind of way.

  No, it’s the whole airless shebang we call elections that’s gotten to me, the bizarrely hermetic, self-financing, self-praising, self-promoting system we still manage to think of as “democratic.” That includes, of course, the media echo chamber that ginned up a nationally nondescript political season into an epochal life-changer via a powerfully mad—as in mad elephant—populace ready to run amok.

  What Goes Up . . .