The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  The president’s recent Afghan remarks were, in this sense, par for the course. As he plugged his plan to bring America’s “long wars” to what he called “a responsible end,” he insisted that “[l]ike generations before, we must embrace America’s singular role in the course of human events.” He then painted this flattering word portrait of us: “We’re a nation that brings our enemies to justice while adhering to the rule of law, and respecting the rights of all our citizens. We protect our own freedom and prosperity by extending it to others. We stand not for empire, but for self-determination . . . and when our union is strong no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach . . . we are bound together by the creed that is written into our founding documents, and a conviction that the United States of America is a country that can achieve whatever it sets out to accomplish.”

  I know, I know. You’re wondering whether you just mainlined into a Sarah Palin speech and your eyes are glazing over. But hang in there, because that’s just a start. For example, in an Obama speech of any sort, what America’s soldiers never lack is the extra adjective. They aren’t just soldiers, but “our extraordinary men and women in uniform.” They aren’t just Americans, but “patriotic Americans.” (Since when did an American president have to describe American soldiers as, of all things, “patriotic”?) And in case you missed the point that, in their extraordinariness and their outsized patriotism they are better than other Americans, he made sure to acknowledge them as the ones we “draw inspiration from.”

  In a country that now “supports the troops” with bumper-sticker fervor but pays next to no attention to the wars they fight, perhaps Obama is simply striving to be the premier American of the twenty-first century. Still, you have to wonder what such presidential fawning, omnipresent enough to be boilerplate, really represents. The strange thing is we hear this sort of thing all the time. And yet no one comments on it.And let’s not forget that no significant White House moment ends these days without the president bestowing God’s blessing on the globe’s most extraordinary nation and its extraordinary fighters, or as he put it in his Afghan remarks: “May God bless our troops. And may God bless the United States of America.”

  The day after he revealed his drawdown plan to the nation, the president traveled to Fort Drum in New York State to thank soldiers from the army’s 10th Mountain Division for their multiple deployments to Afghanistan. Before those extraordinary and patriotic Americans, he quite naturally doubled down.

  Summoning another tic of this presidential moment (and of the Bush one before it), he told them that they were part of “the finest fighting force in the world.” Even that evidently seemed inadequate, so he upped the hyperbole. “I have no greater job,” he told them, “nothing gives me more honor than serving as your commander in chief. To all of you who are potentially going to be redeployed, just know that your commander in chief has your back. . . . God bless you, God bless the United States of America, climb to glory.”

  As ever, all of this was overlooked. Nowhere did a single commentator wonder, for instance, whether an American president was really supposed to feel that being commander in chief offered greater “honor” than being president of a nation of citizens. In another age, such a statement would have registered as, at best, bizarre. These days, no one even blinks.

  And yet who living in this riven, confused, semi-paralyzed country of ours truly believes that, in 2011, Americans can achieve whatever we set out to accomplish? Who thinks that, not having won a war in memory, the U.S. military is incontestably the finest fighting force now or ever, or that this country is at present specially blessed by God, or that ours is a mission of selfless kindheartedness on planet Earth?

  Obama’s remarks have no wings these days because they are ever more divorced from reality. Perhaps because this president in fawning mode is such an uncomfortable sight, and because Americans generally feel so ill-at-ease about their relationship to our wars, however, such remarks are neither attacked nor defended, discussed nor debated, but as if by some unspoken agreement simply ignored.

  Here, in any case, is what they aren’t: effective rallying cries for a nation in need of unity. Here’s what they may be: strange, defensive artifacts of an imperial power in visible decline, part of what might be imagined as the Great American Unraveling. But hold that thought a moment. After all, the topic of the president’s remarks was Afghanistan.

  The Unreal War

  If Obama framed his Afghan remarks in a rhetoric of militarized supernational surrealism, then what he had to say about the future of the war itself was deceptive in the extreme—not lies perhaps, but full falsehoods half told. Consider just the two most important items: that his “surge” consisted only of 33,000 American troops and that “by next summer,” Americans are going to be on the road to leaving Afghanistan.

  Unfortunately, it just ain’t so. First of all, the real Obama surge was minimally almost 55,000 and possibly 66,000 troops, depending on how you count them. When he came into office in January 2009, there were about 32,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Another 11,000 had been designated to go in the last days of the Bush administration, but only departed in the first Obama months. In March 2009, the president announced his own “new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan“ and dispatched 21,700 more troops. Then, in December 2009 in a televised speech to the nation from West Point, he announced that another 30,000 would be going. (With “support troops,” it turned out to be 33,000.)

  In other words, in September 2012, if indeed he withdraws those 33,000 troops, only about half the actual troop surge of the Obama years will have left Afghanistan. In addition, though seldom discussed, the Obama “surge” was hardly restricted to troops. There was a much ballyhooed “civilian surge“ of State Department and aid types that more than tripled the “civilian” effort in Afghanistan. Their drawdown was addressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the wake of the president’s remarks, but only in the vaguest of terms.

  Then there was a major surge of CIA personnel (along with U.S. Special Operations forces), and there’s no indication whatsoever that anyone in Washington intends reductions there, or in the drone surge that went with it. As a troop drawdown begins, CIA agents, those special ops forces, and the drones are clearly slated to remain at or beyond a surge peak.

  Finally, there was a surge in private contractors—hired foreign guns and hired Afghans—tens of thousands of them. It goes unmentioned, as does the surge in base building, which has yet to end.

  All of this makes mincemeat of the idea that we are in the process of ending the Afghan War. The president did say, “Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.” And that was a foggy enough formulation that you might be forgiven for imagining more or less everything will be over “by 2014”—which, by the way, means not January 1, but December 31 of that year.

  If what we know of U.S. plans in Afghanistan plays out, however, December 31, 2014, will be the date for the departure of the last of the full Obama surge of 64,000 troops, at best. In other words, almost five years after Obama entered office, more than thirteen years after the Bush administration launched its invasion, we could find ourselves back to or just below something close to Bush-era troop levels. Tens of thousands of U.S. forces would still be in Afghanistan, some of them “combat troops” officially relabeled (as in Iraq) for less warlike activity. All would be part of an American “support” mission that would include huge numbers of “trainers” for the Afghan security forces and also U.S. Special Forces operatives and CIA types engaged in “counterterror” activities in the country and region.

  The U.S. general in charge of training the Afghan military has suggested that his mission wouldn’t be done until 2017 (and no one who knows anything about the country believes that an effective Afghan army will be in place then either). In addition, although the president didn’t directly mention this in his
speech, the Obama administration has been involved in quiet talks with the government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai to nail down a “strategic partnership” agreement that would allow American troops, spies, and air power to hunker down as “tenants” on some of the giant bases we’ve built. There they would evidently remain for years, if not decades (as some reports have it).

  In other words, on December 31, 2014, if all goes as planned, the United States will be girding for years more of wildly expensive war, even if in a slimmed-down form. This is the reality, as American planners imagine it, behind the president’s speech.

  Overstretched Empire

  Of course, it’s not for nothing that we regularly speak of best-laid plans going awry, something that applies doubly, as in Afghanistan, to the worst-laid plans. It’s increasingly apparent that our disastrous wars are, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry admitted, “unsustainable.” After all, just the cost of providing air conditioning to U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan—$20 billion a year—is more than NASA’s entire budget.

  Yes, despite Washington’s long-lost dreams of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, some of its wars there are still being planned as if for a near-eternity, while others are being intensified. Those wars are still fueled by overblown fears of terrorism, encouraged by a remarkably well-funded National Security Complex in an atmosphere of permanent armed crisis, and run by a military that, after a decade of not-so-creative destruction, can’t stop doing what it knows how to do best (which isn’t winning a war).

  Although Obama claims that the United States is no empire, all of this gives modern meaning to the term “overstretched empire.” And it’s not really much of a mystery what happens to overextended imperial powers that find themselves fighting “little” wars they can’t win, while their treasuries head south.

  The growing unease in Washington about America’s wars reflects a dawning sense of genuine crisis, a sneaking suspicion even among hawkish Republicans that they preside ineffectually over a great power in precipitous decline.

  If you want to take the temperature of the present crisis, you can do it through Obama’s words. The less they ring true, the more discordant they seem in the face of reality, the more he fawns and repeats his various mantras, the more uncomfortable he makes you feel, the more you have the urge to look away, the deeper the crisis.

  What will he say when the Great American Unraveling truly begins?

  Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark

  This can’t end well.

  But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.

  Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re a part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast.

  I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish Empire, or the twilight of the Qing Dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this—truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

  The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states. Our military continues to garrison much of the planet. And we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?

  A Country in Need of Prozac

  Have you noticed how repetitiously our president, various presidential candidates, and others now insist that we are “the greatest nation on Earth” (as they speak of the U.S. military being “the finest fighting force in the history of the world”)? And yet, doesn’t that phrase leave ash in your mouth? Look at this country and its frustrations today and tell me: Does anyone honestly believe that anymore?

  It wasn’t a mistake that the fantasy avenger figure of Rambo became immensely popular in the wake of defeat in Vietnam or that, unlike American heroes of earlier decades, he had such a visibly, almost risibly overblown musculature. As eye-candy, it was pure overcompensation for the obvious. Similarly, when the United States was actually “the greatest” on this planet, no one needed to say it over and over again.

  Can there be any question that something big is happening here, even if we don’t quite know what it is because, unlike the peoples of past empires, we never took pride in or were even able to think of ourselves as imperial? And if you were indeed in denial that you lived in the belly of a great imperial power, if like most Americans you managed to ignore the fact that we were pouring our treasure into the military or setting up bases in countries that few could have found on a map, then you would naturally experience the empire going down as if through a glass darkly.

  Nonetheless, the feelings that should accompany the experience of an imperial power running off the rails aren’t likely to disappear just because analysis is lacking. Disillusionment, depression, and dismay flow ever more strongly through the American bloodstream. Just look at any polling data on whether this country, once the quintessential land of optimists, is heading in “the right direction” or on “the wrong track,” and you’ll find that the “wrong track” numbers are staggering, and growing by the month. On the rare occasions when Americans have been asked by pollsters whether they think the country is “in decline,” the figures have been similarly over the top.

  It’s not hard to see why. A loss of faith in the American political system is palpable. For many Americans, it’s no longer “our government” but “the bureaucracy.” Washington is visibly incapable of doing much of significance, while state governments, facing the “steepest decline in state tax receipts on record,” are, along with local governments, staggering under massive deficits and cutting back in areas—education, policing, firefighting—that are crucial to daily life.

  Years ago, in the George W. Bush era, I wanted to put a new word in our domestic political vocabulary: “Republican’ts.” It was my way of expressing the feeling that something basic to this country—a “can do” spirit—was seeping away. I failed, of course, and since then that “can’t do” spirit has visibly spread far beyond the Republican Party. Simply put, we’re a country in need of Prozac.

  Facing the challenges of a world on edge—from Japan to the Greater Middle East, from a shaky global economic system to weather that has become anything but entertainment—the United States looks increasingly incapable of coping. It no longer invests in its young, or plans effectively for the future, or sets off on new paths. It literally can’t do. And this is not just a domestic crisis, but part of imperial decline.

  We just don’t treat it as such, tending instead to deal with the foreign and domestic as essentially separate spheres, when the connections between them are so obvious. If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station and fill up the tank. Of course, who doesn’t know that this country, once such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it’s hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for planning how to get off that drug), or that it’s living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history? And who doesn’t know that a crew of financial fabu
lists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?

  And if you don’t think any of this has anything to do with imperial power in decline, ask yourself why the options for our country so often seem to have shrunk to what our military is capable of; or why the only significant part of the government whose budget is still on the rise is the Pentagon; or why, when something is needed, this administration, like its predecessor, regularly turns to that same military.

  Once upon a time, helping other nations in terrible times would have been an obvious duty of the civil sector of the U.S. government. Today, from Haiti to Japan, in such moments it’s the U.S. military that acts. In response to the Japanese triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, for instance, the Pentagon mounted a large-scale recovery effort, involving eighteen thousand people, twenty U.S. Navy ships, and even fuel barges bringing fresh water for reactor-cooling efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. The effort was given a military code name, Operation Tomodachi (Japanese for “friend”), and is, among other things, an obvious propaganda campaign meant to promote the usefulness of America’s archipelago of bases in that country.

  Similarly, when the administration needs something done in the Middle East, these days it’s as likely to send the secretary of defense as the secretary of state to visit. And of course, as is typical, when a grim situation in Libya worsened and something “humanitarian” was called for, the Obama administration (along with NATO) threw air power at it.

  Predictably, as in Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands, air power failed to bring about speedy success. What’s most striking is not that Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi didn’t instantly fall, or that the Libyan military didn’t collapse when significant parts of its tank and artillery forces were taken out, or that the swift strikes meant to turn the tide soon stretched into months of no-fly-zone NATO squabbling and military stalemate (as the no-fly-zone version of war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq stretched to twelve years without ultimate success).