American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  As a start, remind me: What didn’t we do? Let’s review for a moment.

  In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques—known to the previous administration and most of the media as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at “black sites” offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its Global War on Terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the “cleansing” of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our special forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out—and still carry out—assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined “torture” out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).

  And don’t think that that’s anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It’s only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

  Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what’s missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It’s a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.

  Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately, is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared “war,” made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.

  Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don’t believe it. History matters.

  Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don’t face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson—the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson—of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam—and Laos and Cambodia—because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H. W. Bush, “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” It still haunts us.

  However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country—and they remain monstrously large—we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of…well, of us and our “safety.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.

  Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?

  TWO

  How to Garrison a Planet

  Twenty-First-Century Gunboat Diplomacy

  The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons, the gunboat, the battleship, and finally the “airship”—historically, these proved the difference between global victory and staying at home, between empire and nothing much at all. In the first couple of centuries of Europe’s burst onto the world stage, the weaponry of European armies and their foes was not generally so disparate. It was those cannons on ships that decisively tipped the balance. And they continued to do so for a long, long time. Traditionally, in fact, the modern arms race is considered to have taken off at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rush of European powers to build ever larger, ever more powerful, “all-big-gun” battleships—the “dreadnoughts” (scared of nothings).

  In “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a remarkable travel book that takes you into the heart of European darkness (via an actual trip through Africa), the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist offers the following comments on that sixteenth-century seaborne moment when Europe was still a barbaric outcropping of Euro-Asian civilization:Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. Our most important export was force. All over the rest of the world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols and the Tatars. They reigned supreme from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.

  Our cannons met little resistance among the peoples who were more advanced than we were. The Moguls in India had no ships able to withstand artillery fire or carry heavy guns…. Thus the backward and poorly resourced Europe of the sixteenth century acquired a monopoly on ocean-going ships with guns capable of spreading death and destruction across huge distances. Europeans became the gods of cannons that killed long before the weapons of their opponents could reach them.

  For a while, Europeans ruled the coasts where nothing could stand up to their shipborne cannons, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa, as well as on the Asian mainland, they moved inland, taking their cannons upriver with them. For those centuries, the ship was, in modern terms, a floating military base filled with the latest in high-tech equipment. And yet ships had their limits, as indicated by a well-known passage about a French warship off the African coast from Joseph Conrad’s novel about the Congo, Heart of Darkness:In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart a
nd vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight.

  Well, maybe it wasn’t quite so droll if you happened to be on land, but the point remains. Of course, sooner or later the Europeans did make it inland with the musket, the rifle, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, artillery, and finally, by the twentieth century, the airplane filled with bombs or even, as in Iraq, poison gas. Backing up the process was often the naval vessel—as at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, when somewhere between nine thousand and eleven thousand soldiers in the Mahdi’s army were killed (with a British loss of forty-eight troops), thanks to mass rifle fire, Maxim machine guns, and the batteries of gunboats floating on the Nile.

  Winston Churchill was a reporter with the British expeditionary force at the time. Here’s part of his description of the slaughter (also from Lindqvist):The white flags [of the Mahdi’s army] were nearly over the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realize what would come to meet them? They were in a dense mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery…. About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid the ranks…. It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply.

  And—presto!—before you knew it, three-quarters of the world was a colony of Europe, the United States, or Japan. Not bad, all in all, for a few floating centuries. In the latter part of this period, the phrase “gunboat diplomacy” came into existence, an oxymoron that nonetheless expressed itself all too eloquently.

  Our Little “Diplomats”

  Today, “gunboat diplomacy” seems like a phrase from some antiquated imperial past, despite our many aircraft carrier task forces that travel the world making “friendly” house calls from time to time. But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats and try to imagine how we carry out “armed diplomacy”—and under the Bush administration the Pentagon took over much that might once have been labeled “diplomacy”—then you can begin to conjure up our own twenty-first-century version of gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider exactly what the “platforms” are upon which we “export force,” upon which we mount our “cannons.”

  What should immediately come to mind are our military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more “mobile” versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to the “arc of instability,” a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia well into northern Africa, and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartlands of the planet. The Pentagon’s so-called lily pads strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions—the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the “flies” as they go.

  Thought about a certain way, the military base, particularly as reconceived in recent years, whether in Uzbekistan, Kosovo, or Qatar, is our “gunboat,” a “platform” that has been ridden ever deeper into the land-locked parts of the globe—into regions like the Middle East, where our access once had some limits, or like the former Yugoslavia and the -stans of Central Asia, where the lesser superpower of the cold war era once blocked access entirely. Our new military bases are essentially the twenty-first-century version of those old European warships, the difference being that, once built, the base remains in place, while its parts—the modern equivalents of those sixteenth-century cannons—are capable of moving over land or water almost anywhere.

  As Chalmers Johnson has calculated in his book The Sorrows of Empire , our global baseworld consists of at least seven hundred military and intelligence bases, possibly—depending on how you count them up—many more. This is our true “imperial fleet” (though, of course, we have an actual imperial fleet, our aircraft carriers alone being like small, massively armed towns). In the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we’ve left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of some giant beast marking the scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several Central Asian states after the Afghan War of 2001; and into Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

  The process speeded up under the Bush administration, but you would have had almost no way of knowing this. Basing is generally considered either a topic not worth writing about or an arcane policy matter best left to the inside pages of the newspaper for the policy wonks and news junkies. This is in part because we Americans—and by extension our journalists—don’t imagine us as garrisoning or occupying the world, and certainly not as having anything faintly approaching a military empire. Generally speaking, those more than seven hundred bases, our little “diplomats” (and the rights of extraterritoriality that go with them via Status of Forces Agreements) don’t even register on our media’s mental map of our globe.

  Enduring Camps

  In Iraq, our permanent bases are endearingly referred to by the military as “enduring camps.” Such bases were almost certainly planned before the 2003 invasion. After all, we were also planning to withdraw most of our troops from Saudi Arabia—Osama bin Laden had complained bitterly about the occupation of Islam’s holy sites—and they weren’t simply going to be shipped back to the United States.

  The numbers of those potential enduring camps in Iraq are startling indeed. As one rare Chicago Tribune article on the topic noted, early on in the occupation of Iraq, “From the ashes of abandoned Iraqi army bases, U.S. military engineers are overseeing the building of an enhanced system of American bases designed to last for years.” Some of these bases are already comparable in size and elaborateness to the ones we built in Vietnam four decades ago. Christine Spolar, who wrote the article, continues:As the U.S. scales back its military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq provides an option for an administration eager to maintain a robust military presence in the Middle East and intent on a muscular approach to seeding democracy in the region.…

  “Is this a swap for the Saudi bases?” asked Army Brig. Gen. Robert Pollman, chief engineer for base construction in Iraq. “I don’t know.… When we talk about enduring bases here, we’re talking about the present operation, not in terms of America’s global strategic base. But this makes sense. It makes a lot of logical sense.”

  And keep in mind as well that all of this construction is being done to the tune of billions of dollars under contracts controlled by the Pentagon and, as Spolar writes, quite “separate from the State Department and its Embassy in Baghdad” (which is slated to be the largest embassy in the world).

  As the Pentagon planned it, and as we knew via leaks to the press soon after the invasion began, newly “liberated” Iraq, once “sovereignty” had been restored, was to have only a lightly armed military force of some forty thousand troops and no air force. The other part of this equation, the given (if unspoken) part, was that some sort of significant long-term U.S. military protection of the country would have to be put in place. And we proceeded accordingly, emplacing our “little diplomats” right at a future hub of the global energy superhighway.

  But we’ve made sure to cover the other on- and off-ramps as well. As James Sterngold of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in a rundown of some of ou
r post-9/11 basing policies:[T]he administration has instituted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history.

  The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls “lily pads.” They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries—the traditional Cold War role of such installations—but as jumping-off points for future “preventive wars” and military missions.

  In fact, our particular version of military empire is perhaps unique: all “gunboats,” no colonies. The combination of bases we set down in any given country is referred to in the Pentagon as our “footprint” in that country. It’s a term that may once have come from the idea of “boots on the ground,” but now has congealed, imagistically speaking, into a single (and assumedly singular) boot print—as if, as it strode across the planet, the globe’s only hyperpower was so vast that it could place but a single boot in any given country at any time, an eerie echo perhaps of that British sun which was never to set on their vast empire (until, of course, it did).

  Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was the main Pentagon architect of a plan to “realign” our bases so as to “forward deploy” U.S. forces into the “arc of instability.” In a December 2003 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he offered a Pentagon version of sensitivity in discussing his forward deployment plans: “Realigning the U.S. posture will also help strengthen our alliances by tailoring the physical U.S. ‘footprint’ to suit local conditions. The goal is to reduce friction with host nations, the kind that results from accidents and other problems relating to local sensitivities.” In the meantime, to ensure that there will be no consequences if the giant foot, however enclosed, happens to stamp its print in a tad clumsily, causing the odd bit of collateral damage, he added:For this deployability concept to work, U.S. forces must be able to move smoothly into, through, and out of host nations, which puts a premium on establishing legal and support arrangements with many friendly countries. We are negotiating or planning to negotiate with many countries legal protections for U.S. personnel, through Status of Forces Agreements and agreements (known as Article 98 agreements) limiting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court with respect to our forces’ activities.