This was why, in choosing to take on Saddam Hussein’s shattered military in 2003—the administration expected a “cakewalk” campaign that would “shock and awe” enemies throughout the Middle East—they officially chose not to release any counts of enemy dead. General Tommy Franks, commander of the administration’s Afghan operation in 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, put the party line succinctly: “We don’t do body counts.” As the president finally admitted in some frustration to a group of conservative columnists in October 2006, his administration had “made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team.” Not intending to repeat the 1960s experience, he and his advisers had planned out an opposites war on the home front (anything done in Vietnam would not be done this time around), and that meant not offering official counts of the dead that might stoke an antiwar movement—until, that is, frustration truly set in, as in Korea and Vietnam.
When the taking of Baghdad in April 2003 proved no more a cap-stone on American victory than the taking of Kabul in November 2001, when everything began to go disastrously wrong and the carefully enumerated count of the U.S. military dead in Iraq rose precipitously, when “victory” (a word that the president still invoked fifteen times in a single speech in November 2005) adamantly refused to make an appearance, the moment for the body count had arrived. Despite all the planning, they just couldn’t stop themselves. A frustrated President Bush expressed it this way: “We don’t get to say that—a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It’s happening. You just don’t know it.”
Soon enough the Pentagon was regularly releasing such figures in reports on its operations, and, in December 2006, the president, too, first slipped such a tally into a press briefing: “Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.”
It wasn’t, of course, that no one had been counting. The president, as we know from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, kept “his own personal scorecard for the [global] war [on terror]”—photographs with “brief biographies and personality sketches” of the “Most Wanted Terrorists” ready to be crossed off when U.S. forces took them out. The military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it did represent a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration that never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.
That implicit admission, however, took years to arrive, and, in the meantime, Iraqis and Afghans—civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police, and military men—were dying in prodigious numbers.
The Charnel House of History
As it happened, others were also counting. Among the earliest of them, Iraq Body Count carefully added up Iraqi civilian deaths as documented in reputable media outlets. (Their estimate has over the years reached about 100,000—and, circumscribed by those words “documented” and “civilian,” doesn’t begin to get at the full scope of Iraqi deaths.) Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took up the task, using sophisticated sampling techniques, including door-to-door interviews under exceedingly dangerous conditions, to arrive at reasonable approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have come up with figures ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to a million or more in a country with a prewar population of perhaps twenty-six million. UN representatives have similarly attempted, under difficult circumstances, to keep a count of Iraqis fleeing into exile—exile being, after a fashion, a form of living death—and have estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, were “internally displaced.”
Similar attempts have been made for Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance, done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes in that country. But, of course, the real body count in either country will never be known. One thing is certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should routinely be portrayed as a success, thanks to the Bush administration’s “surge” policy in 2007-08. Only a country—or a punditry or a military—incapable of facing the depths of destruction let loose could reach such a conclusion.
If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush administration have led to destruction, and remarkably regularly to piles of dead or tortured bodies, counted or not. In fact, it’s reasonable to say that every Bush administration foreign policy dream, including its first-term fantasy about a pacified “Greater Middle East” and its late second-term vision of a facilitated “peace process” between the Israelis and Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies and in failure. The Bush administration’s Global War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of one trillion taxpayer dollars (but sure to be in the multitrillions when all is said and done), Bush’s mad “global war” simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a street-corner hustler. Madoff, by his own accounting, squandered perhaps $50 billion of other people’s money. The Bush administration took a trillion dollars of ours and handed it out to its crony corporate buddies and to the Pentagon as down payments on disaster. The laid off, the pensionless, the foreclosed, the suicides—imagine what that trillion dollars might have meant to them. And the price tag continues to soar.
Bernie Madoff ended up behind bars, but Bush administration officials will face no such accountability. Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of massive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt. All this was brought to us by a president who said the following in his first inaugural address: “I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility…to call for responsibility and try to live it as well.”
Bush ruled, we know, by quite a different code. Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a Caesar—of destruction.
Veni, vidi, vastavi…I came, I saw, I devastated.
With Us or Against Us?
On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack address to the nation, George W. Bush was already using the phrase “the war on terror.” On September 13, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced that the administration was planning to do a lot more than just take out those who had attacked the United States. It was going to go about “removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism.” We were, Bush said that day, in a state of “war.” In fact, we were already in “the first war of the twenty-first century.” As R. W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times reported, “[T]he Bush administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism…or face the certain prospect of death and destruction.” Stand with us against terrorism—or else. That would be the measure by which everything was assessed in the years to come. That very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that the United States would “rip [the bin Laden] network up” and “when we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault on terrorism.”
A global assault on terrorism. How quickly the president’s Global War on Terror was on the scene. And no nation was immune. On September 14, the news was leaked that “a senior State Department official” had met with “15 Arab representatives” and delivered a stiff “with us or against us” message: Join “an international coalition against terrorism” or pay the price. There would be no safe havens. The choice—as Deputy Secretary of State Ri
chard Armitage would reportedly inform Pakistan’s intelligence director after the 9/11 attacks—was simple: Join the fight against al-Qaeda or “be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.”
From that day to this, the Global War on Terror would be the organizing principle for the Bush administration as it shook off “the constraints,” loosed the CIA, and sent the U.S. military into action—as it went, in short, for the Stone Age jugular. The phrase “Global War on Terror,” while never quite catching on with the public, would become so familiar in the corridors of Washington that it would soon morph into one of the least elegant acronyms around (GWOT), sometimes known among neocons as “World War IV”—they considered the cold war as World War III—or by military men and administration officials, after Iraq devolved from fantasy blitzkrieg into disaster, as “the Long War.”
In the administration’s eyes, the GWOT was to be the key to the magic kingdom, the lever with which the planet could be pried open for American dominion. It gave us an interest everywhere. After all, as Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke would say in January 2002, “The estimates are anywhere from 50 or 60 to 70 countries that have al Qaeda cells in them. The scope extends far beyond Afghanistan.” Administration officials, in other words, were already talking about a significant portion of existing states as potential targets. This was not surprising, since the GWOT was meant to create planetary free-fire zones. These al-Qaeda targets or breeding grounds, after all, had to be emptied. We were, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials were saying almost immediately after 9/11, going to “drain” the global “swamp” of terrorists. And any countries that got in the way had better watch out.
With us or against us, that was the sum of it, and terror was its measure. If any connection could be made—even, as in the case of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, a thoroughly bogus one—it immediately offered a compelling home-front explanation for possible intervention. The safety and security of Americans was, after all, at stake in every single place where those terrorist mosquitoes might be breeding. If you had the oil lands of the planet on your mind (as was true with Dick Cheney’s infamous Energy Task Force), then the threat of terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism, was a safe bet. If you wanted to fortify your position in new oil lands, then the ticket was to have the Pentagon move in, as in Africa, to help weak, possibly even failing, states prepare themselves against the forces of terror.
At home, too, you were for us or against us. Those few who opposed the Patriot Act, for instance, were obviously not patriots. The minority who claimed that you couldn’t be at “war” with “terror,” that what was needed in response to 9/11 was firm, ramped-up police action were simply laughed out of the room. In the kindliest light, they were wusses; in the worst light, essentially traitors. They lacked not only American redbloodedness, but a willingness to be bloody-minded. End of story.
In the wake of those endlessly replayed, apocalyptic-looking scenes of huge towers crumbling and near-mushroom-clouds of ash billowing upwards, a chill of end-time fear swept through the nation. War, whatever name you gave it, was quickly accepted as the obvious, commensurate answer. In a nation in the grips of the politics of fear, it seemed reasonable enough that a restoration of “security”—American security—should be the be-all and end-all globally. Everything, then, was to be calibrated against the successes of the GWOT.
From Seattle to Tampa, Toledo to Dallas, fear of terrorism became a ruling passion, as well as a pure moneymaker for the mini homeland-industrial complex that grew up around the new Department of Homeland Security. A thriving industry of private security firms, surveillance outfits, and terror consultants proliferated. With their help, the United States would be locked down in an unprecedented way—and to do that, we would also have to lock down the planet by any means necessary. We would fight “them” everywhere else, as the president would say again and again, so as not to fight them here.
A Nation of Cowards?
Most of the things that needed to be done to make us safer after 9/11 undoubtedly could have been done without much fuss, without a new, more bureaucratic, less efficient Department of Homeland Security, without a new, larger U.S. “intelligence community,” without pumping ever more money into the Pentagon, and certainly without invading and occupying Iraq. Most societies that have dealt with terror, often far worse campaigns than what we have experienced, despite 9/11, have faced the dangers involved without becoming obsessive over their safety and security, without locking down their countries, and then attempting to do the same with the planet, as the Bush administration did. In the process, we may have turned ourselves into the functional equivalent of a nation of cowards, ready to sacrifice so much of value on the altar of the god of “security.”
Think of it: Nineteen fanatics with hijacked planes, backed and funded by a relatively small movement based in one of the most impoverished places on the planet, did all this. Or, put more accurately, faced with the look of the apocalypse and the dominating urges of the Bush administration, we did what al-Qaeda’s crew never could have done. Blinding ourselves via the GWOT, we released American hubris and fear upon the world, in the process making almost every situation we touched progressively worse for this country.
The fact is that those who run empires can sometimes turn the right levers in societies far away. Historically, they have sometimes been quite capable of seeing the world and actual power relations as they are, clearly enough to conquer, occupy, and pacify other lands. Sometimes, they were quite capable of dividing and ruling local peoples for long periods, or hiring native troops to do their dirty work. But here’s the dirty miracle of the Bush administration: thinking GWOT all the way, its every move seemed to do more damage than the last, not just to the world, but to the fabric of the country they claimed they were protecting.
Opinion polls indicate that terrorism is no longer at the top of the American agenda of worries. Nonetheless, don’t for a second think that the subject isn’t lodged deep in national consciousness. When asked “How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism,” a striking 39 percent of Americans were either “very worried” or “somewhat worried,” and another 33 percent registered as “not too worried,” according to the pollsters of CNN/Opinion Research Corporation.
The obsession with terrorism has also been built into our institutions, from Guantánamo to the Department of Homeland Security. It’s had the time to sink its roots into fertile soil. It now has its own industries, lobbying groups, profit centers. Unbuilding it will be a formidable task indeed. It is a Bush legacy that no president is likely to reverse soon, if at all.
Ask yourself honestly: Can you imagine a future America without a Department of Homeland Security? Can you imagine a new administration ending the global lockdown that has become synonymous with Americanism?
Yet here’s the irony. Essential power relations in the world turn out to have next to nothing to do with the War on Terror (which may someday be seen as the last great ideological gasp of American globalism). In this sense, terrorism, no matter how frightening, is an ephemeral phenomenon. The fact is, non-state groups wielding terror as their weapon of choice can cause terrible pain, harm, and localized mayhem, but they simply don’t take down societies like ours. To think that possible is to misunderstand power on this planet. In that sense, the Global War on Terror’s greatest achievement—for American rulers and ruled alike—may simply have been to block out the world as it was, to block out, that is, reality.
Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a National Emergency
Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.
In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the United States and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the
swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from riptides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.
As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February, killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006. And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was killed.)
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