Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

In the method, there is madness; in the comedy, nightmare; in the tragedy, farce.

And despite everything, there’s still good news when it comes to what Americans can [...]]]> How Not to Make Friends in the Greater Middle East
Washington’s Singular Accomplishment
By Tom Engelhardt

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

In the method, there is madness; in the comedy, nightmare; in the tragedy, farce.

And despite everything, there’s still good news when it comes to what Americans can accomplish in the face of the impossible!  No, not a debt-ceiling deal in Washington.  So much better than that.

According to Thom Shanker of the New York Times, the U.S. military has gathered biometric data — “digital scans of eyes, photographs of the face, and fingerprints” — on 2.2 million Iraqis and 1.5 million Afghans, with an emphasis on men of an age to become insurgents, and has saved all of it in the Automated Biometric Information System, a vast computerized database.  Imagine: we’re talking about one of every 14 Iraqis and one of every 20 Afghans.  Who says America’s a can’t-do nation?

The Pentagon is pouring an estimated $3.5 billion into its biometric programs (2007 through 2015).  And though it’s been a couple of rough weeks when it comes to money in Washington, at least no one can claim that taxpayer dollars have been ill-spent on this project.  Give the Pentagon just another five to 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and the biometric endeavor of a lifetime should be complete.  Then Washington will be able to identify any Iraqi or Afghan on the planet by eye-scan alone.

Be proud, America!

And consider that feat a bright spot of American accomplishment (and not the only one either) in a couple of weeks of can’t-do news from the Greater Middle East.  After all, despite those biometric scans, an assassin managed to gun down Our Man in Kandahar (OMK), Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s half-brother, in his own residence.  He was the warlord the U.S. militarybuddied up with as U.S. troops were surging south in 2009 and who helped bring American-style “progress” to the Taliban heartland.

Of course, before he was OMK and our great ally in southern Afghanistan, he was OEK (Our Enemy in Kandahar), the down-and-dirty, election-fixing, drug-running evil dude whom one American military official more or less threatened to take out. (“The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone” was the way that Major General Michael Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in the country, put it at the time.)  And before he was OEK, he was CMK (theCIA’s Man in Kandahar), right up there on the Agency’s payroll; and even before that, speaking of Chicago, he was a restaurateur in that city who… but I’m losing track of my point, as Americans have a knack for doing in Afghanistan.

Anyway, as I think I was saying, OMK-OEK-CMK was assassinated by Sardar Mohammad, a man he trusted and saw six days a week, a local “police commander” who, according to theWashington Post’s Joshua Partlow, “spent years as an ally of the United States in the war against the Taliban.”  He was also reputedly a “trusted CIA contact” who had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces.  He had, so associates believe, either been turned by the Taliban in the last few months or was a long-time sleeper agent.

And then when security couldn’t have been tighter, at a service in a Kandahar mosque where hundreds (including top government officials from the region) had gathered to pay their respects to the dead capo, a suicide bomber wearing a turban-bomb somehow slipped inside and blew himself up, killing among others the chief of the Kandahar Province religious council.

In other words, even though the U.S. military tried to flood the zone in southern Afghanistan, itsclaims of progress and improved security are already giving way to a nowhere-to-hide Taliban world.  These events could certainly be considered the insurgency’s symbolic goodbye to General David Petraeus, the U.S. surge commander there, who was just handing over command and readying himself to return to Washington to become CIA director.  In a further sign of deteriorating security, an advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai was assassinated (along with a member of parliament) in heavily guarded Kabul when a squad of Taliban gunmen stormed his walled compound.

To look on the bright side, though, that turban bomb may prove useful indeed to the Homeland Security lobby and the Transportation Security Administration back in the U.S.  After all, it’s one more thing to strip off in airports along with the usual assortment of wallets, belts, baseball caps, and footwear; and it’s a surefire Homeland Security Department fear-stoker, hence fundraiser, to add tosuppository bombs and possibly mythical but well-publicized surgically implanted bombs.  (And bad news for any Sikhs with air travel in mind.)

Franchising a No-Friends Policy

Biometrics aside, there were some other startling numbers out of the Greater Middle East recently. As it happened, some non-military types were also looking into eyes, not for retinal patterns, but patterns of thought.  Pollsters from IBOPE Zogby International checked out 4,000 sets of eyes in six Middle Eastern countries — Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco — at least five of which qualify as U.S. allies, and in none of which has the U.S. bombed, invaded, or carried out a night raid in recent memory.

And still, favorable opinion about the United States had plunged dismally since the early, heady days of the Obama presidency.  In many cases, the numbers are now below those registered in the last year of the Bush era (and you can imagine what they were).  Only 5% of post-Arab-Spring Egyptians, for instance, claimed to have a “favorable view” of the United States, and across the six countries, only 10% of respondents “described themselves as having a favorable view of Obama.”

This spring, Pew pollsters found similarly plunging favorability ratings in the Greater Middle East.  More recently, they asked Pakistanis about the CIA drone strikes in that country’s tribal borderlands and came up with a polling near-impossibility: 97% of Pakistanis looked upon them negatively!

Consider that another remarkable American accomplishment of the Obama era — creating such unity of opinion in an otherwise fractious land!

Once upon a time, of course, American accomplishments involved the building of vast highway systems or massive steel mills or even the winning of a World War, but in tougher times you take your accomplishments where you find them.  And these polls emphasize one thing: that what Washington continues to do in the Greater Middle East with relentless brilliance and on an almost unimaginable scale is to make no friends.

Nor is it just in popularity terms that Washington has been racking up mind-boggling numbers in the no-friends business.  In a study it just released, the “Costs of War” project at Brown University found that Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will, in the end, eat $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion in taxpayer money — and that’s without adding in the air war in Libya (perhaps a chump-change billion dollars), the Global War on Terror (in places like Yemen and Somalia where, as Jeremy Scahillreports in the Nation magazine, the CIA is running quite a covert operation from a walled compound in the confines of Mogadishu’s international airport), our continuing frenzy of base building and ally supporting in the Persian Gulf area, military aid to the region, and so on.

In other words, not making friends in the Greater Middle East turns out to be a spectacularly budget-busting undertaking — and so an accomplishment in its own right.  And rest assured, Washington isn’t likely to settle for 10% or 5% on those favorability figures either, not when absolute perfection in unpopularity is within reach.  Just in the last weeks, in a clear effort to lower those numbers, Washington has launched air attacks in Somalia (at least two wounded), Yemen (50 dead), Pakistan (at least 48 dead), Libya (no count), and Afghanistan (at least 40, includingchildren).  Despite what Washington officials imagine, drones are, in practice, neither precise nor effective weapons.  But they are radicalizing instruments in an American war that, again in practice, is not just on but for terror.

In the same period, ex-CIA director and now Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta landed in Iraq and promptly launched a volley of threats at the Iranians, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Iraqi government.  Meanwhile, just to make sure Washington doesn’t lose its unique unpopularity franchise in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the State Department issued a “stern warning” to andthreatened prosecution of those Americans who boarded boats in the blockade-busting Gaza flotilla, almost none of which ever made it out of Greek harbors.

If those favorability numbers haven’t gone lower in the brief period since the Zogby pollsters finished their latest round of polling, one thing can be said: it wasn’t for lack of trying.

A Modern Gordian Knot

Nor should we leave the subject of no-friends franchises without making special mention of the remarkable American one in Pakistan.  Not so long ago, an elite SEAL team set off “SEAL-mania” in the U.S. by launching a strike on Osama bin Laden’s hideout-in-plain-sight in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the al-Qaeda leader without a warning to the Pakistani government or military.  The response there seems to have been a new round of America-phobia — thus undoubtedly fulfilling bin Laden’s fondest dream: that even in death he would sink Washington deeper into the quagmire of the Greater Middle East.)

A farcical ballet followed between the Pakistani military, its intelligence services, its civilian government and the Obama administration.  The Pakistanis promptly ordered 120 U.S. special operations forces training the paramilitary Frontier Corps in those tribal areas out of the country.  Itrefused to issue visas for U.S. “equipment technicians” and arrested five men who had aided the CIA in tracking down bin Laden.  Washington responded with the usual “stern warnings,” accusedthe Pakistanis of tipping off al-Qaeda bomb-makers in those borderlands before they could be caught, and held back equipment meant for the Frontier Corps. Congress began to balk on the Pakistani aid package.

The Pakistanis, in turn, threatened to halt CIA drone flights from the biggest of the three airbases the Agency borrows in that country.  The Obama administration responded that, with or without those bases, its air campaign would go on, and then sent in the drones repeatedly to hammer the point home.  It also held back $800 million in military aid — not enough to truly matter, but just enough to further tick off the Pakistanis.  Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar jabbed back by threatening to withdraw his country’s troops from the Afghan border areas.  “We cannot afford to keep our military out in the mountains for such a long period of time,” he said in a TV interview.  Meanwhile, envoys ferried back and forth with the usual grab bag of threats, bribes, pleas, and meaningless statements of unity between allies.  And so it went.

Think of the Washington-Islamabad relationship, wrapped in the disaster of the Afghan War, as a classic can’t-live-with-‘em-or-without-‘em marriage made in hell.  Or, if you prefer, think of it, now so many decades and two Afghan wars old, as a kind of Gordian knot.

In 333 BC, with a single swift stroke of his sword, Alexander the Great famously solved the problem of a knot on an ox cart in Gordium (in modern Turkey) that no one could untie.  He sliced it open, so the story goes, in what has always been considered an ingenious response to an otherwise insoluble problem.

America’s Gordian knot in Pakistan, as in Afghanistan and the Greater Middle East, is beyond untying. Hold back that $800 million, send in the drones, cajole, plead, threaten, issue stern warnings, train, equip, bribe, kill.  None of it does the trick.  None of it will.  Alexander would have known what to do.  Washington is clueless.

Thought about a certain way, this might be the ultimate American accomplishment of the present moment.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

At periodic intervals, the American body politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers.  Whenever an especially acute attack occurs, a sort of delirium ensues, manifesting itself in delusions of grandeur and demented [...]]]> On the Mend?
America Comes to Its Senses
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

At periodic intervals, the American body politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers.  Whenever an especially acute attack occurs, a sort of delirium ensues, manifesting itself in delusions of grandeur and demented behavior.

By the time the condition passes and a semblance of health is restored, recollection of what occurred during the illness tends to be hazy.  What happened?  How’d we get here?  Most Americans prefer not to know.  No sense dwelling on what’s behind us.  Feeling much better now!  Thanks!

Gripped by such a fever in 1898, Americans evinced an irrepressible impulse to liberate oppressed Cubans.  By the time they’d returned to their senses, having acquired various parcels of real estate between Puerto Rico and the Philippines, no one could quite explain what had happened or why.  (The Cubans meanwhile had merely exchanged one set of overseers for another.)

In 1917, the fever suddenly returned.  Amid wild ravings about waging a war to end war, Americans lurched off to France.  This time the affliction passed quickly, although the course of treatment proved painful: confinement to the charnel house of the Western Front, followed by bitter medicine administered at Versailles.

The 1960s brought another bout (and so yet more disappointment).  An overwhelming urge to pay any price, bear any burden landed Americans in Vietnam.  The fall of Saigon in 1975 seemed, for a brief interval, to inoculate the body politic against any further recurrence.  Yet the salutary effects of this “Vietnam syndrome” proved fleeting.  By the time the Cold War ended, Americans were running another temperature, their self-regard reaching impressive new heights.  Out of Washington came all sorts of embarrassing gibberish about permanent global supremacy and history’s purpose finding fulfillment in the American way of life.

Give Me Fever

Then came 9/11 and the fever simply soared off the charts.  The messiah-nation was really pissed and was going to fix things once and for all.

Nearly 10 years have passed since Washington set out to redeem the Greater Middle East.  The crusades have not gone especially well.  In fact, in the pursuit of its saving mission, the American messiah has pretty much worn itself out.

Today, the post-9/11 fever finally shows signs of abating.  The evidence is partial and preliminary.  The sickness has by no means passed.  Oddly, it lingers most strongly in the Obama White House, of all places, where a keenness to express American ideals by dropping bombs seems strangely undiminished.

Yet despite the urges of some in the Obama administration, after nearly a decade of self-destructive flailing about, American recovery has become a distinct possibility.  Here’s some of the evidence:

In Washington, it’s no longer considered a sin to question American omnipotence.  Take the case of Robert Gates.  The outgoing secretary of defense may well be the one senior U.S. official of the past decade to leave office with his reputation not only intact, but actually enhanced.  (Note to President Obama: think about naming an aircraft carrier after the guy).  Yet along with restoring a modicum of competence and accountability to the Pentagon, the Gates legacy is likely to be found in his willingness — however belated — to acknowledge the limits of American power.

That the United States should avoid wars except when absolutely necessary no longer connotes incipient isolationism.  It is once again a sign of common sense, with Gates a leading promoter.  Modesty is becoming respectable.

The Gates Doctrine

No one can charge Gates with being an isolationist or a national security wimp.  Neither is he a “declinist.”  So when he says anyone proposing another major land war in the Greater Middle East should “have his head examined” – citing the authority of Douglas MacArthur, no less — people take notice.  Or more recently there was this:  “I’ve got a military that’s exhausted,” Gates remarked, in one of those statements of the obvious too seldom heard from on high.  ”Let’s just finish the wars we’re in and keep focused on that instead of signing up for other wars of choice.”  Someone should etch that into the outer walls of the Pentagon’s E-ring.

A half-dozen years ago, “wars of choice” were all the rage in Washington.  No more.  Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Or consider the officer corps.  There is no “military mind,” but there are plenty of minds in the military and some numbers of them are changing.

Evidence suggests that the officer corps itself is rethinking the role of military power.  Consider, for example, “Mr. Y,” author of A National Strategic Narrative, published this spring to considerable acclaim by the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.  The actual authors of this report are two military professionals, one a navy captain, the other a Marine colonel.

What you won’t find in this document are jingoism, braggadocio, chest-thumping, and calls for a bigger military budget.  If there’s an overarching theme, it’s pragmatism.  Rather than the United States imposing its will on the world, the authors want more attention paid to the investment needed to rebuild at home.

The world is too big and complicated for any one nation to call the shots, they insist.  The effort to do so is self-defeating. “As Americans,” Mr. Y writes, “we needn’t seek the world’s friendship or proselytize the virtues of our society.  Neither do we seek to bully, intimidate, cajole, or persuade others to accept our unique values or to share our national objectives.  Rather, we will let others draw their own conclusions based upon our actions… We will pursue our national interests and let others pursue theirs…”

You might dismiss this as the idiosyncratic musing of two officers who have spent too much time having their brains baked in the Iraqi or Afghan sun.  I don’t.  What convinces me otherwise is the positive email traffic that my own musings about the misuse and abuse of American power elicit weekly from serving officers.  It’s no scientific sample, but the captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels I hear from broadly agree with Mr. Y.  They’ve had a bellyful of twenty-first-century American war and are open to a real debate over how to overhaul the nation’s basic approach to national security.

Intelligence Where You Least Expect It

And finally, by gum, there is the United States Congress.  Just when that body appeared to have entered a permanent vegetative state, a flickering of intelligent life has made its reappearance.  Perhaps more remarkably still, the signs are evident onboth sides of the aisle as Democrats and Republicans alike — albeit for different reasons — are raising serious questions about the nation’s propensity for multiple, open-ended wars.

Some members cite concerns for the Constitution and the abuse of executive power.  Others worry about the price tag.  With Osama bin Laden out of the picture, still others insist that it’s time to rethink strategic priorities.  No doubt partisan calculation or personal ambition figures alongside matters of principle.  They are, after all, politicians.

Given what polls indicate is a growing public unhappiness over the Afghan War, speaking out against that war these days doesn’t exactly require political courage.  Still, the possibility of our legislators reasserting a role in deciding whether or not a war actually serves the national interest — rather than simply rubberstamping appropriations and slinking away — now presents itself.  God bless the United States Congress.

Granted, the case presented here falls well short of being conclusive.  To judge by his announcement of a barely-more-than-symbolic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Obama himself seems uncertain of where he stands.  And clogging the corridors of power or the think tanks and lobbying arenas that surround them are plenty of folks still hankering to have a go at Syria or Iran.

At the first signs of self-restraint, you can always count on the likes of Senator John McCain or the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal to decry (in McCain’s words) an “isolationist-withdrawal-lack-of-knowledge-of-history attitude” hell-bent on pulling up the drawbridge and having Americans turn their backs on the world.  In such quarters, fever is a permanent condition and it’s always 104 and rising.  Yet it is a measure of just how quickly things are changing that McCain himself, once deemed a source of straight talk, now comes across as a mere crank.

In this way, nearly a decade after our most recent descent into madness, does the possibility of recovery finally beckon.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses voices of dissent within the military, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Andrew J. Bacevich

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

I have a fairy tale for you.  Once upon a time, a representative democracy was established with a constitution that distilled the wisdom of the ages.  Its [...]]]> Siamese Twins Sharing the Same Brain
How the Military and the Civilian Are Blurring in Washington
By William J. Astore

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

I have a fairy tale for you.  Once upon a time, a representative democracy was established with a constitution that distilled the wisdom of the ages.  Its foundational principles included civilian control of the military and a system of checks and balances that encouraged vigorous public debate as a basis for effective policy-making.

In this fabled land, the role of civilian leaders was, in part, to serve as a check on military ambition and endless wars.  They were to prove cautious, too, in committing their citizen-soldiers to battle, and when they did, they would issue Congressional declarations of war so that everyone could grasp the nature of the national emergency at hand and the necessity of military action.  In waging war, they would rely on shared sacrifice and even raise taxes.  When necessary, it was their job to rein in or even remove military leaders who acted like Caesar (read: General Douglas MacArthur) rather thanCincinnatus (read: General George Washington).

Yes, you’ve guessed it: it’s not a fairy tale, or at least not completely.  It’s the United States — an older America that, despite a decidedly checkered and often imperial past, was nevertheless proud of its reluctance to fight, but steadfast in its commitment to win once it decided that battle was the course of action.  Even then, this America remained resolute in its reluctance to embrace a military ethos or bow down before military gods, committed as it was to civilian primacy and the avoidance of a large standing army.

Paradoxically, the last vestiges of this America could still be seen some 50 years ago under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a retired five-star general, who tried with varying degrees of success to limit defense spending, and who famously warned in his farewell address in 1961 of the dangers of a surging “military-industrial complex.”

And leaping forward almost four decades, here’s another paradox for you: prior to September 11, 2001, what many leading pundits and commentators fretted most about was an alleged widening gap between American civilians and their now all-volunteer military.  In 1997, Wall Street Journal Pentagon correspondent Tom Ricks typically worried about an all-volunteer military that saw civilians as privileged and flabby, increasingly considered itself a breed apart, and held the public it served in contempt.

Concerned as well was Richard Kohn, former chief historian of the U.S. Air Force.  In a special lecture to Air Force Academy cadets in 1999 on “the erosion of civilian control of the military in the United States today,” Kohn worried about a military that openly disrespected President Bill Clinton, its commander-in-chief, even as it meddled in areas like policy-making for which it was not suited and from which it had been excluded by the Constitution.

How times have changed.  In the post-9/11 world, a far more insidious problem confronts us.  That gap, if it ever existed, is no more.  Instead, at the highest levels, what’s civilian and what’s military are increasingly difficult to tell apart as the two spheres blur and blend.  Today, civilian control of the military is largely a principle without a meaning, while inside Washington’s Beltway, even with a scorecard it’s hard to tell the players apart.

In the process, the military has gained a kind of unspoken and distinctly un-American primacy.  Put another way, after a decade-long budgetary feeding frenzy, the Pentagon has soared, while an eclipsed Department of State, all those civilian diplomats, has been left to eke out a living onbudgetary scraps or, as in Iraq today, arm and militarize itself. State, in other words, has become a remora clinging to the predatory shark that is the Department of Defense.

Large and small, symbolic or otherwise, signs of this civil-military blending (with the military significantly running the show) can be found almost anywhere you look.  Civilian presidents regularly appear in military flight gear or jackets, as George W. Bush famously did before his “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in 2003 and as President Obama did on a visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010.  Military leaders are now regularly put in charge of previously civilian intelligence agencies, as in the case of General David Petraeus, nownominated to leave the Afghan battlefield and become director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Civilian agencies now militarize themselves and wage war (as the CIA has done or is doing in various drone wars in the Greater Middle East, often in conjunction with the military).  America’s part-time citizen-soldiers havemorphed into full-time warriors and warfighters, if not the equivalent offoreign legionnaires.  America’s civilian embassies continue to morph into so many militarized fortresses protected by armed mercenaries.  And above all, among policy arguments in Washington, whether you’re a civilian official or a military one, the choices are increasingly between militarized alternatives — say, counterinsurgency versus counterterror — with that most civilian of all options, peace, not even on that “table” where officials eternally claim that all options are placed.

At the same time, a new civic religion at whose heart is military-worship implores us to “support our troops” (without any concomitant call to uphold our laws and our Constitution).  And even as ordinary Americans express serious doubts about the wisdom and cost of an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan — 64% of Americans don’t believe the Afghan war is worth fighting, and 73% would prefer sizable withdrawals of U.S. troops this summer, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll — the Pentagon continues to prepare for a future of “two, three, many Afghanistans,” as Michael Klare, defense correspondent for the Nationmagazine, noted in April 2010.

Clearly, if we’re not careful, the civilian and military will become the Washington equivalent of Siamese twins, co-joined at the head and, however bitter their internecine arguments, sharing the same underlying militarized thought processes.

Militarism Run Rampant

To separate such twins is a dicey thing, medically speaking, and no less so politically when the lines between civilian and military authority are being so rapidly erased.  Make no mistake, as President Obama is wont to say, the impact of this erasure has been devastating.

It’s both sensible and logical to argue that our president and elected representatives must serve as a check on the military establishment, rather than issuing blank checks to them.  It’s both sensible and logical to argue that all wars, as required by the Constitution, must have a Congressional declaration before American troops and treasure are committed.  It’s both sensible and logical to argue that, as good as our military is, it ultimately can’t win someone else’s civil war (Iraq) or nation-build in a place where the concept of “nation” is little more than notional (Afghanistan).

Sensible and logical, yes, but such arguments have been made — and roundly ignored.  They aren’t given the time of day among serious policy types in Washington, where to question the efficacy and legitimacy of the forces and tactics being used is simply not acceptable.  Sharing one brain and one ethos means being incapable of grasping one’s own militarized rigidity or truly recognizing the perils that have been unleashed on this nation.

There’s a word for this disease, even if after all these years it remains remarkably foreign to American ears: militarism.  When Americans think of that word, they tend to conjure up images of fanatical jackbooted Nazis or suicidal Japanese kamikazes, and so the concept seems eminently dismissible.  But militarism also describes a situation in which a country’s civil society and political culture are permeated to the point of dominance by military attitudes and values — an undeniable fact of life, I would argue, in America today.

Militarists see war as productive, as offering solutions rather than posing problems.  They see it as heroic.  (President Bush famously waxed poeticabout the “exciting” and “romantic” nature of fighting in Afghanistan.)  When wars are romanticized as action-packed tests of a nation’s warriors, cuts to war spending are naturally seen as perfidiously unpatriotic — as kneecapping those same heroes.  Hence our ever-growing “defense” budgets, even as a sledgehammer of a national debt hobbles America’s economic vitality and social security.

The end result of this militaristic mindset is a garrison state, constantly girding itself for national security crises, real or perceived, as in the last decade’sopen-ended and frantic “war on terror.”

A singular danger of such a mindset, as pointed out by Laurence Radway in a telling article on “militarism” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, is that militarists, unable to select means appropriate to true defense needs, end up jeopardizing the very national security they say they’re seeking to safeguard.  By exaggerating threats, defining all responses to those threats in military terms, dismissing dissenters as weak and deluded (even when they prove right), and being incapable of questioning their principles, they repeat the same mistakes again and again.

Until Americans turn away from militarism and learn again how to “support our Constitution” more than our troops (and don’t worry: those troops swear an oath to that very Constitution), until we return to a broader vision of national security that deemphasizes a garrison mentality, we will continue to wound, perhaps mortally, a once great republic.

And that’s no fairy tale, it’s a fact.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), professor of history, and TomDispatch regular.  He welcomes reader comments atwjastore@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 William J. Astore

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

The killing of Osama bin Laden, “a testament to the greatness of our country” according to President Obama, should not be allowed to obscure a central [...]]]> The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes
Washington Court Culture and Its Endless Wars
By William J. Astore

The killing of Osama bin Laden, “a testament to the greatness of our country” according to President Obama, should not be allowed to obscure a central reality of our post-9/11 world.  Our conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya remain instances of undeclared war, a fact that contributes to their remoteness from our American world.  They are remote geographically, but also remote from our day-to-day interests and, unless you are in the military or have a loved one who serves, remote from our collective consciousness (not to speak of our consciences).

And this remoteness is no accident.  Our wars and their impact are kept in remarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little knowledge and even less say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged.

In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the whim of what we might now call a unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite.

Cynics might say it has always been thus in the United States.  After all, the War of 1812 was known to critics as “Mr. Madison’s War” and the Mexican-American War of the 1840s was “Mr. Polk’s War.”  The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a naked war of expansion vigorously denounced by American anti-imperialists.  Yet in those conflicts there was at least genuine national debate, as well as formal declarations of war by Congress.

Today’s ruling class in Washington no longer bothers to make a pretense of following the letter of our Constitution — and they sidestep its spirit as well, invoking hollow claims of executive privilege or higher callings of humanitarian service (as in Libya) or of exporting democracy (as in Afghanistan).  But Libya is still torn by civil war, and Afghanistan has yet to morph into Oregon.

“Enlightened” War, Then and Now

History does not simply repeat itself, yet realities of power, privilege, and pride ensure certain continuities from the past.  Consider how today’s remote wars and the ways they reinforce existing power relations for a privileged and prideful elite echo a style of European warfare more than three centuries old.

Surveying the wreckage of the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), fought feverishly across Germanic territories by most of Europe, monarchs like Louis XIV of France began to seek to fight “limited” wars.  These they considered more consistent with the spirit of a rational and “enlightened” age.  In their hands, such wars became the sport of kings, the real-life equivalents of elaborate chess matches in which foot soldiers drawn from the lower orders served as expendable pawns, while the second or lesser sons of the nobility, fulfilling their duty as officers, proved hardly less expendable knights, bishops, and rooks.

As much as possible, the monarch and his retinue tried to keep war-making and its disruptions at a distance from thriving economic and manufacturing concerns.  In many cases, in the centuries to follow, this would essentially mean exporting war to faraway, “barbaric” realms or colonies.  In the process, death and destruction were outsourced to places and peoples remote from European metropoles.

In fact, this was precisely what enraged our founders: that the colonies in America had become a never-ending battleground for French and British imperial ambitions from which the colonists themselves reaped the whirlwind of war while gaining few of its benefits.  A close reading of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, reveals a proto-republic’s contempt for wars fought at a king’s whim and guaranteed to reduce the colonists to so much cannon fodder.

Refusing to surrender the hard-fought right as British men to have a say in how they were taxed, how their families and lands were defended, and especially for what purposes they themselves fought and died, the founders forged a new nation.  Given this history, it’s not surprising that they granted to Congress, and not to the President, the power to declare and fund war.

In this way, a noble experiment was born, and it worked, however imperfectly, until the devastation of a new thirty years’ war in Europe (better known as World Wars I and II) propelled the United States to superpower status with all its accompanying ambitions stoked by existential fears, whether of yesterday’s godless communists or today’s god-crazed terrorists.

Inside the Washington Beltway: The New Court of Versailles

In the eighteenth century, France was the superpower of Europe with a military that dwarfed those of its neighbors.  And who dictated France’s decisions to go to war?  The answer: the king, his generals, and his courtiers at the Court of Versailles.  In the twenty-first-century, the U.S. celebrates its status as the world’s “sole superpower” with a military second to none.  And who dictates its decisions to go to war?  Considering the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, the answer is no less obvious: the president, his generals, and his courtiers within the vast edifice of Washington’s national security state.

France’s “enlightened” wars were fought by professional armies and mercenaries, directed by a unitary executive who did as he pleased, and endured by the lower orders who had no say (even though they provided the brawn and blood).  Similarly, our twenty-first century masters plunge us into their version of enlightened wars and play their version of global chess matches.

The analogy can be pushed further.  In pre-revolutionary France, the First and Second Estates (the clergy and the nobility) constituted less than 2% of the population but controlled nearly all of France’s wealth and power.  Their unholy alliance kept the Third Estate (everyone who wasn’t a churchman or a noble) under their collective thumb.

Now, consider the United States today.  Our equivalent to the First Estate would be the clergy of finance and banking (the religion of the almighty dollar).  Look for them in their houses of worship on Wall Street.  Our Second Estate equivalent would be the movers and shakers inside Washington’s Beltway.  Look for them in the White House, the Pentagon, Congress, and on K Street where the lobbyists for the First Estate tend to congregate.  The unholy alliance of these two estates leaves the American Third Estate — you and me — with the deck stacked against us.

When it comes to war, the American ruling class has relegated the members of its Third Estate alternately to the role of “foreign legionnaires” in overseas service, or silent spectators passively watching moves on the big board.  These, in turn, are continually interpreted for us by retired members of the Second Estate: generals and admirals in mufti, hired by the corporate media to provide color commentary on Washington’s wars.

Small wonder that today’s Beltway elite is as imperious and detached as yesterday’s Court of Louis XIV.  A colleague of mine recently endured a short audience with some members of our Second Estate near Dupont Circle in Washington.  In his words: “They were at once condescending and puzzled by ‘tea party types,’ as they referred to them, which was to say that they inadvertently admitted to being out of touch and were pretty okay with that.  ‘Look,’ I finally said, ‘you cannot continue to pick someone’s pocket while hectoring him about how stupid and uninformed he is and then be surprised that he gets angry.’”

Whether it be unwashed “tea party types,” “retarded” (according to ex-courtier Rahm Emanuel) progressives, or other members of a disgruntled American Third Estate, the Washington elites who wage war in our name simply couldn’t care less what we think, just as Louis XIV and his court couldn’t have cared less about their subjects’ desires.

Endless “limited” wars fought for the interests of the ruling class, massive deficit spending on those wars, a refusal to recognize (or even understand) the people’s growing disgruntlement, a “let them eat cake” mentality: all of this is familiar to a historian.  And like those old French masters of limited war, our new masters of war are hemorrhaging legitimacy.

The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes

In isolating the American Third Estate from war — indeed, in disengaging it from any meaningful public debate about this nation’s perpetual war-making — our rulers have conspired to advance their own interests.  Yet in deciding everything of importance out of view, they have unwisely eliminated any check on their folly.

Consider again the example of pre-revolutionary Versailles.  A top-heavy, remarkably dissolute, and openly parasitic bureaucracy plundered the commonweal of France in its pursuit of power and privilege.  Can we not say the same of Washington today?  In its kleptocratic tendency to enrich itself and its accountability-free deployment of military power globally, the American ruling class bears a certain resemblance to French kings and their courts which, in the end, drove their country to economic ruin and violent revolution.

Fed up with its prodigal and prideful rulers, France saw the tumbrels roll and the guillotine blades drop.  How many more undeclared “enlightened” wars, how many more trillions of dollars in war-driven debt, how many more dead and wounded will it take for the American people to reclaim their power over war?  Or are we content to remain deferential to our ruling class and court — and to their less-than-liberty-loving overseas creditors — until such a time as their prideful wars and prodigal trillion-dollar-plus “defense” budgets bring our great democratic experiment crashing down?

William J. Astore is a TomDispatch regular, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), and a professor of history.  He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 William J. Astore

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible [...]]]> Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?
The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors
By Adam Hochschild

What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?

I found myself thinking about this recently while visiting the narrow strip of northern France and Belgium that has the densest concentration of young men’s graves in the world. This is the old Western Front of the First World War. Today, it is the final resting place for several million soldiers. Nearly half their bodies, blown into unrecognizable fragments by some 700 million artillery and mortar shells fired here between 1914 and 1918, lie in unmarked graves; the remainder are in hundreds upon hundreds of military cemeteries, still carefully groomed and weeded, the orderly rows of headstones or crosses covering hillsides and meadows.

Stand on a hilltop in one of the sites of greatest slaughter — Ypres, the Somme, Verdun — and you can see up to half-a-dozen cemeteries, large and small, surrounding you. In just one, Tyn Cot in Belgium, there are nearly 12,000 British, Canadian, South African, Australian, New Zealander, and West Indian graves.

Every year, millions of people visit the Western Front’s cemeteries and memorials, leaving behind flowers and photographs of long-dead relatives. The plaques and monuments are often subdued and remarkably unmartial.  At least two of those memorials celebrate soldiers from both sides who emerged from the trenches and, without the permission of their top commanders, took part in the famous informal Christmas Truce of 1914, marked by soccer games in no-man’s-land.

In a curious way, the death toll of that war almost a century gone, in which more than 100,000 Americans died, has become so much more visible than the deaths in our wars today. Is that why the First World War is almost always seen, unlike our present wars, not just as tragic, but as a murderous folly that swept away part of a generation and in every way remade the world for the worse?

To Paris — or Baghdad

For the last half-dozen years, I’ve been mentally living in that 1914-1918 world, writing a book about the war that killed some 20 million people, military and civilian, and left large parts of Europe in smoldering ruins. I’ve haunted battlefields and graveyards, asked a Belgian farmer if I could step inside a wartime concrete bunker that now houses his goats, and walked through reconstructed trenches and an underground tunnel which protected Canadian troops moving their ammunition to the front line.

In government archives, I’ve looked at laconic reports by officers who survived battles in which most of their troops died; I’ve listened to recordings of veterans and talked to a man whose labor-activist grandfather was court-martialed because he wrote a letter to the Daily Mail complaining that every British officer was assigned a private servant. In a heartbreakingly beautiful tree-shaded cemetery full of British soldiers mowed down with their commanding officer (as he had predicted they would be) by a single German machine gun on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, I found a comment in the visitors’ book: “Never Again.”

I can’t help but wonder: Where are the public places for mourning the mounting toll of today’s wars?  Where is that feeling of never again?

The eerie thing about studying the First World War is the way you can’t help but be reminded of today’s headlines. Consider, for example, how it started. High officials of the rickety Austro-Hungarian Empire, frightened by ethnic nationalism among Serbs within its borders, wanted to dismember neighboring Serbia, whose very existence as an independent state they regarded as a threat. Austro-Hungarian military commanders had even drawn up invasion plans.

When a 20-year-old ethnic Serb fired two fatal shots at Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo in the summer of 1914, those commanders had the perfect excuse to put their plans into action — even though the killer was an Austro-Hungarian citizen and there was no evidence Serbia’s cabinet knew of his plot. Although the war quickly drew in many other countries, its first shots were fired by Austro-Hungarian gunboats on the Danube shelling Serbia.

The more I learned about the war’s opening, the more I thought about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush and his key advisors had long hungered to dislodge Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Like the archduke’s assassination, the attacks of September 11, 2001, gave them the excuse they had been waiting for — even though there was no connection whatsoever between the hijackers, mainly Saudis, and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Other parallels between World War I and today’s wars abound. You can see photographs from 1914 of German soldiers climbing into railway cars with “To Paris” jauntily chalked on their sides, and French soldiers boarding similar cars labeled “To Berlin.”

“You will be home,” Kaiser Wilhelm II confidently told his troops that August, “before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Doesn’t that bring to mind Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in 2003 to declare, in front of a White House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”? A trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives later, whatever mission there may have been remains anything but accomplished. Similarly, in Afghanistan, where Washington expected (and thought it had achieved) the most rapid and decisive of victories, the U.S. military remains mired in one of the longest wars in American history.

The Flowery Words of War

As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious. In 1914, for instance, no country planned for the other side’s machine guns, a weapon which Europe’s colonial powers had used for decades mainly as a tool for suppressing uppity natives.

Both sides sent huge forces of cavalry to the Western Front — the Germans eight divisions with 40,000 horses. But the machine gun and barbed wire were destined to end the days of glorious cavalry charges forever. As for plans like the famous German one to defeat the French in exactly 42 days, they were full of holes. Internal combustion engines were in their infancy, and in the opening weeks of the war, 60% of the invading German army’s trucks broke down. This meant supplies had to be pulled by horse and wagon.  For those horses, not to mention all the useless cavalry chargers, the French countryside simply could not supply enough feed. Eating unripe green corn, they sickened and died by the tens of thousands, slowing the advance yet more.

Similarly, Bush and his top officials were so sure of success and of Iraqis welcoming their “liberation” that they gave remarkably little thought to what they should do once in Baghdad.  They took over a country with an enormous army, which they promptly and thoughtlessly dissolved with disastrous results. In the same way, despite a long, painfully instructive history to guide them, administration officials somehow never managed to consider that, however much most Afghans loathed the Taliban, they might come to despise foreign invaders who didn’t go home even more.

As World War I reminds us, however understandable the motives of those who enter the fight, the definition of war is “unplanned consequences.” It’s hard to fault a young Frenchman who marched off to battle in August 1914. After all, Germany had just sent millions of troops to invade France and Belgium, where they rapidly proved to be quite brutal occupiers. Wasn’t that worth resisting? Yet by the time the Germans were finally forced to surrender and withdraw four and a half years later, half of all French men aged 20 to 32 in 1914 had been killed. There were similarly horrific casualties among the other combatant nations.  The war also left 21 million wounded, many of them missing hands, arms, legs, eyes, genitals.

Was it worth it?  Of course not.  Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.

The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day — and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.

If you need a final resemblance between the First World War and ours of the present moment, consider the soaring rhetoric. The cataclysm of 1914-1918 is sometimes called the first modern war which, among other things, meant that gone forever was the era when “manifest destiny” or “the white man’s burden” would be satisfactory justifications for going into battle. In an age of conscription and increasing democracy, war could only be waged — officially — for higher, less self-interested motives.

As a result, once the conflict broke out, lofty ideals filled the air: a “holy war of civilization against barbarity,” as one leading French newspaper put it; a war to stop Russia from crushing “the culture of all of Western Europe,” claimed a German paper; a war to resist “the Germanic yoke,” insisted a manifesto by Russian writers, including leftists. Kaiser Wilhelm II avowed that he was fighting for “Right, Freedom, Honor, Morality” (and in those days, they were capitalized) and against a British victory which would enthrone “the worship of gold.” For English Prime Minster Herbert Asquith, Britain was fighting not for “the advancement of its own interests, but for principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilized world.” And so it went.

So it still goes.  Today’s high-flown war rhetoric naturally cites only the most noble of goals: stopping terrorists for humanity’s sake, finding weapons of mass destruction (remember them?), spreading a “democracy agenda,” protecting women from the Taliban. But beneath the flowery words, national self-interest is as powerful as it was almost a hundred years ago.

From 1914 to 1918, nowhere was this more naked than in competition for protectorates and colonies. In Africa, for instance, Germany dreamed of establishing Mittelafrika, a grand, unbroken belt of territory stretching across the continent. And the British cabinet set up the Territorial Desiderata Committee, charged with choosing the most lucrative of the other side’s possessions to acquire in the postwar division of spoils. Near the top of the list of desiderata: the oil-rich provinces of Ottoman Turkey that, after the war, would be fatefully cobbled together into the British protectorate of Iraq.

When it comes to that territory, does anyone think that Washington would have gotten quite so righteously worked up in 2003 if, instead of massive amounts of oil, its principal export was turnips?

Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium — and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others’ lives.  But here’s the question that haunts me: What will it take to bring us to that point?

Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of seven books, including King Leopold’s Ghost.  His new book To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Hochschild discusses the folly of war, his latest book, and why no one attends to the lessons of history, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Adam Hochschild

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

In recent weeks, Yemeni protesters calling for an immediate end to the 32-year reign of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh have been met with increasing violence at the hands of state [...]]]> Hueys Over Yemen
Is U.S. Aid Suppressing Another Mideast Freedom Struggle?
By Nick Turse

In recent weeks, Yemeni protesters calling for an immediate end to the 32-year reign of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh have been met with increasing violence at the hands of state security forces.  A recent pledge by Saleh to step down, one of many that haven’t met demonstrators’ demands, has yet to halt the protests or violence by the troops backing his regime.  During a demonstration earlier this month in the city of Taiz, protesters marching down a central street were confronted by security forces and Saleh supporters, while government helicopters flew overhead.  “The thugs and the security forces fired on us with live gunfire,” Mahmud al-Shaobi, one of the protesters told the New York Times. “Many people were shot.”

In the days since, more demonstrators have been attacked by government forces — with the death toll now estimated to exceed 130. Witnesses have also been reporting the increased use of military helicopters in the crackdown.  Some of those aircraft may be recent additions to Saleh’s arsenal, provided courtesy of the Obama administration as part of an $83-million military aviation aid package.

Since the beginning of 2011, under a program run by the U.S. Department of Defense, the United States has overseen the delivery of several new Bell UH-1Hs, or “Huey II” helicopters, current models of the iconic Huey that served as America’s primary gunship and troop transport during the Vietnam War.  Although these helicopters are only the latest additions to a sizeable arsenal that the Pentagon has provided to Yemen in recent years, they call attention to how U.S. weapons and assistance support regimes actively suppressing democratic uprisings across the Middle East.

How to Arm a Dictator

Last December, 26-year-old Tunisian fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of a local municipal office, touching off popular protests that continue to sweep across the Middle East and North Africa.  By the end of January 2011, the country’s U.S.-backed dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled and demonstrations, which would eventually also topple corrupt autocrat and long-time U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, had broken out in Egypt.  In Yemen, as is the case elsewhere in the region, anger at government corruption, rampant poverty (40% of all Yemenis live on less than $2 a day), high unemployment (also running at 40%), and decades of harsh rule by an authoritarian strongman brought tens of thousands into the streets.

In January, as freedom struggles were spreading across the region, President Barack Obama publicly avowed support for “certain core values that we believe in as Americans[,] that we believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, people being able to use social networking or any other mechanisms to communicate with each other and express their concerns.”  Just days earlier, however, his government had transferred military equipment to the security forces of Yemen’s so-called president for life.

Under the terms of a $27 million contract between the Pentagon and Bell Helicopter, Yemen received four Huey IIs.  Prior to this, 12 Yemeni Air Force pilots and 20 maintenance personnel were trained to fly and service the aircraft at Bell’s flight instruction facility in Alliance, Texas.  “The swift execution of the Yemen Huey II program demonstrates that the military departments  – in this case the U.S. Army — can quickly deliver defense articles and services to U.S. partners with the cooperation of U.S. industry,” said Brandon Denecke of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the branch of the Pentagon that coordinates sales and transfers of military equipment to allies.

The recent helicopter deal is just the latest example of Pentagon support for the forces of the Yemeni dictator through its so-called “1206 program,” a Congressionally-authorized arrangement that “allows the executive branch to rapidly provide foreign partners with military equipment and training…”  Named for section 1206 of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act, the program allows the Pentagon to enhance the capabilities of foreign military forces for “counterterrorism and stability operations.”

Since 2006, more than $1.3 billion worth of equipment has been allocated under the 1206 program and Yemen has been the largest recipient worldwide, benefitting from about one-fifth of the funding or approximately $253 million through 2010.  This assistance, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, has provided Yemeni security forces with light airplanes, helicopters, small arms, ammunition, light tactical vehicles, trucks, radios, surveillance cameras, computers, body armor, patrol boats, and helicopter parts, among other materiel.

Since 2000, the Pentagon has also transferred weapons and equipment directly from U.S. stockpiles to Yemen’s security forces.  These items include armored personnel carriers, M-60 machine guns, 2.5-ton military trucks, radios, and motorboats, according to an analysis of Defense Department documents by TomDispatch.  The Defense Security Cooperation Agency did not respond to repeated requests for further information.

All told, over the past five years, the U.S. has provided more than $300 million in aid to Yemen’s security forces, with the dollars escalating precipitously under the Obama administration.  In 2008, under President George W. Bush, Yemen received $17.2 million in baseline military assistance (which does not include counterterrorism or humanitarian funding).  In 2010, that number had risen to $72.3 million while, overall, Yemen received $155.3 million in U.S. aid that year, including a “$34.5 million special operations force counterterrorism enhancement package.”  These funds have provided Yemen’s security forces with helicopters, Humvees, weapons, ammunition, radio systems, and night-vision goggles.

Additionally, U.S. special operations troops (along with British and Saudi military personnel) have been supporting, advising, and conducting training missions with some of Yemen’s elite forces — including the Republican Guard, Special Operations Forces, and the National Security Bureau — which are commanded and staffed by Saleh’s sons and other close relatives.

As his part of the bargain, Saleh allowed the U.S. to launch missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda camps in Yemen while instructing his government to take credit for the attacks (for fear that if their American origins were made clear, there might be an anti-American backlash in Yemen and the larger Arab world), according to classified State Department documents released last year by the whistleblower group Wikileaks.  “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told then-CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus following strikes in December 2009.

The Yemeni government also came up with a cover story for, and even excused, the deaths of civilians in those strikes.  Rashad al-Alimi, a deputy prime minister, claimed that the Yemeni citizens killed in an attack were “acting in collusion with the terrorists and benefiting financially” when, in reality, they were likely Bedouin families involved in little more than peddling food.

Not So Tough Talk

As Yemen’s security forces have escalated their violence against demonstrators this spring, the Obama administration has offered mixed signals regarding Saleh, but has yet to issue an outright condemnation of the dictator, no less sever ties with a leader seen as crucial to the fight against al-Qaeda.  “We have had a good working relationship with President Saleh.  He’s been an important ally in the counterterrorism arena,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on March 23rd.  “But clearly, there’s a lot of unhappiness inside Yemen.  And I think we will basically just continue to watch the situation.  We haven’t done any post-Saleh planning, if you will.”

On April 5th, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney came out more forcefully.  “The United States strongly condemns the use of violence by Yemeni government forces against demonstrators in Sanaa, Taiz, and Hodeida in the past several days,” he said.  “The Yemeni people have a right to demonstrate peacefully, and we remind President Ali Abdullah Saleh of his responsibility to ensure the safety and security of Yemenis who are exercising their universal right to engage in political expression. “

That same day, however, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was more equivocal, justifying enduring U.S. support for Yemen’s strongman as a “prudent course of action,” while including the protestors as the equals of the security forces in his condemnation of the use of force: “The protests, the demonstrations need to be nonviolent. Obviously, the government needs to respond to them in a nonviolent manner.  So we are — we condemn the violence all around.”

Morrell also sought to distance the Pentagon’s aid for the country’s security forces from the violence being meted out in Yemen’s streets.  He told reporters, “To suggest that the aid to Yemen has somehow been used against protesters I think is a leap of faith for which there is no evidence to support.”  Recent reports, however, suggest that Yemen’s elite U.S.-trained counterterrorism troops have now been deployed in the capital, Sanaa, to deal with the massive ongoing protests.

Late last year, the Pentagon floated a new proposal to pump up to $1.2 billion more into Yemen’s security forces over the next five years.  However, with protesters in the streets week after week in vast numbers and significant elements of the military defecting from the regime, the Obama administration failed to write Saleh a check and began quietly urging him, through back-channel communications, to hand over power — assumedly to a successor likely to favor U.S. interests.

Finally, on April 23rd, after Saleh seemingly agreed to an arrangement brokered by Arab mediators that would grant immunity from prosecution to his family and him, and eventually shift power to his deputy for an interim period, the Obama administration threw its support behind the plan.  A spokesman characterized it as “responsive to the aspirations of the Yemeni people.”  Not only have many opposition protesters rejected the deal, while Saleh’s troops continue to attack them, but the dictator has slowly backed away from it as well.

And yet, despite weeks of violence that have left hundreds dead or wounded, President Obama has yet to publicly and unequivocally call for Saleh to step down as he did, albeit belatedly, with former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and, more recently, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Sending a Message

Earlier this month, Tawakul Karman, a Yemeni human rights activist and antigovernment protest leader, told the New York Times of her anger at Obama for his failure to issue such a call.  ”We feel that we have been betrayed,” she said.  Hamza Alkamaly, another prominent youth leader, echoed the same sentiments: ”We students lost our trust in the United States.”

After watching two allied autocrats fall in Tunisia and Egypt, the United States has focused on its periodic enemy, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, in Libya and has done little of substance to advocate for, let alone facilitate, demands for democracy and social change by protesters in allied states that are more integral to its military plans in the region, including Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.  Instead, Washington has continued to support repressive governments to which it has provided training, weapons, and other military equipment that has already been used or could be used to suppress grassroots democratic movements.

In the case of Bahrain, the U.S. has provided millions of rounds of live ammunition, helicopters, and tanks.  For Saudi Arabia, it was a weapons deal worth tens of billions of dollars that will have Saudi pilots training in the U.S. In Iraq, the U.S. is aiding the very units of the security forces implicated in crackdowns on the free press.  And these are only a few examples of recent U.S. efforts in the Middle East.

A survey of Yemeni adults conducted in January and February by the U.S.-based polling firm Glevum Associates found exceptional hostility to the United States.  Ninety-nine percent of those surveyed viewed the U.S. government’s relations with the Islamic world unfavorably, 82% considered U.S. military influence in the world “somewhat bad” or “bad,” 66% believed that the U.S. hardly ever or never took into account the interests of countries like Yemen, and just 4% “somewhat” or “strongly approved” of President Saleh’s cooperation with the United States.

The numbers could hardly get more dismal, but anger and resentment can deepen and become even more entrenched.  When protesters look to the skies over Sanaa in the days and weeks ahead, they may notice new American-made, U.S. taxpayer-financed helicopters hovering above them.  Unless the Hueys are seen ferrying the dictator away in a scene reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, Yemenis — more than two-thirds under the age of 24 — are likely to remember for a very long time which side the United States took in their freedom struggle.

Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, investigative journalist, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books).  You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook.  His website is NickTurse.com. This piece is part of Turse’s ongoing coverage on U.S. military impacts on the Arab Spring and the second in his TomDispatch series on the subject.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Nick Turse

The Missing Story from the Middle East
By Shahin Cole and Juan Cole

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

The “Arab Spring” has received copious attention in the American media, but one of its crucial elements has been largely overlooked: the striking role of [...]]]> An Arab Spring for Women

The Missing Story from the Middle East
By Shahin Cole and Juan Cole

The “Arab Spring” has received copious attention in the American media, but one of its crucial elements has been largely overlooked: the striking role of women in the protests sweeping the Arab world. Despite inadequate media coverage of their role, women have been and often remain at the forefront of those protests.

As a start, women had a significant place in the Tunisian demonstrations that kicked off the Arab Spring, often marching up Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, the capital, with their husbands and children in tow. Then, the spark for the Egyptian uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak out of office was a January 25th demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square called by an impassioned young woman via a video posted on Facebook. In Yemen, columns of veiled women have come out in Sanaa and Taiz to force that country’s autocrat from office, while in Syria, facing armed secret police, women have blockaded roads to demonstrate for the release of their husbands and sons from prison.

But with such bold gestures go fears.  As women look to the future, they worry that on the road to new, democratic parliamentary regimes, their rights will be discarded in favor of male constituencies, whether patriarchal liberals or Muslim fundamentalists.  The collective memory of how women were in the forefront of the Algerian revolution for independence from France from 1954 to 1962, only to be relegated to the margins of politics thereafter, still weighs heavily.

Historians will undoubtedly debate the causes of the Arab Spring for decades.  Among them certainly are high rates of unemployment for the educated classes, neoliberal policies of privatization and union-busting, corruption in high places, soaring food and energy prices, economic hardship caused by the shrinking of employment opportunities in the Gulf oil states and Europe (thanks to the 2008 global financial meltdown), and decades of frustration with petty, authoritarian styles of governing.  In their roles as workers and professionals as well as family caregivers, women have suffered directly from all these discontents and more, while watching their children and husbands suffer, too.

In late January, freelance journalist Megan Kearns pointed out the relative inattention American television and most print and Internet media gave to women and, by and large, the absence of images of women protesting in Tunisia and Egypt. Yet women couldn’t have been more visible in the big demonstrations of early to mid-January in the streets of Tunis, whether accompanying their husbands and children or forming distinct protest lines of their own — and given Western ideas of oppressed Arab women, this should in itself have been news.

Women Take to the Streets from Tunisia to Syria

To start with Tunisia, women there have, in fact, been in the vanguard of protest movements and social change since the drive to gain independence from France of the late 1940s. Tunisian women have a relatively high literacy rate (71%), represent more than one-fifth of the country’s wage earners, and make up 43% of the nearly half-million members of 18 local unions.  Most of these unionized women work in the education, textile, health, city services, and tourism industries.  The General Union of Tunisian Workers (French acronym: UGTT) had increasingly come into conflict with the country’s strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and so its rank and file enthusiastically joined the street protests.  Today, the UGTT continues to pressure the government formed after Ben Ali fled to move forward with genuine reforms.

In all of this, women opinion-leaders played an important part.  To take one example, although like most prominent Tunisians movie star Hend Sabry had been coerced into supporting Ben Ali and his mafia-like in-laws, when the anti-government rallies began she broke with the autocrat, warning him in a Facebook post against ordering his security forces to fire on the protesters.  Later, she admitted to being terrified at making such a public gesture, lest her relatives in Tunis be harmed or she be permanently exiled from her homeland.

In Egypt, the passionate video blog or “vlog” of Asmaa Mahfouz that called on Egyptians to turn out massively on January 25th in Tahrir Square went viral, playing a significant role in the success of that event.  Mahfouz appealed to Egyptians to honor four young men who, following the example of Mohammed Bouazizi (in an act which sparked the Tunisian uprisings), set themselves afire to protest the Mubarak regime.

Although the secret police had already dismissed them as “psychopaths,” she insisted otherwise, demanding a country where people could live in dignity, not “like animals.”  According to estimates, at least 20% of the crowds that thronged Tahrir Square that first week were made up of women, who also turned out in large numbers for protests in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria. Leil-Zahra Mortada’s celebrated Facebook album of women’s participation in the Egyptian revolution gives a sense of just how varied and powerful that turnout was.

As in Tunisia, Egyptian women make up a little more than one-fifth of wage-earning workers — and labor has long been a powerful force for change in that country. Before they began to mobilize around the Tahrir Square protests, Egyptian workers had staged over 3,000 strikes since 2004, with women sometimes taking the lead.  During the height of the protests against the rule of long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak, unionized workers even formed a new, nationwide umbrella trade union.

In Libya, women’s protests proved central to the movement of entire cities out of the control of Col. Muammar Gaddafi, as with Dirna in the western part of the country in February.  What makes the prominence of women demonstrators there so remarkable is that city’s reputation as a stronghold of Muslim fundamentalism.  The abuse of women, a central issue in countries like Libya, even burst into consciousness when a recent law-school graduate from a middle-class family in Tobruk, Iman al-Obeidi, broke into a government press conference in Tripoli to charge that Gaddafi’s troops had detained her at a checkpoint and then raped her.  Her plight provoked women’s demonstrations against the regime in the rebel-held cities of Benghazi and Tobruk.

On April 15th, Yemeni president for life Ali Abdullah Saleh scolded women for “inappropriately” mixing in public with men at the huge demonstrations then being staged in the capital, Sanaa, as well as in the cities of Taiz and Aden. In this way, the issue of women’s place in the mass protests against decades of autocracy was, for the first time, explicitly broached by a high political figure — and the response from women couldn’t have been clearer.  They came out in unprecedented numbers throughout the country, and even in the countryside, day after day, accusing the president of “besmirching their honor” by implying that they were behaving brazenly.  (It is a longstanding value in the Arab world to avoid impugning the honor of a chaste woman.)  In other words, they turned his attempt to invoke Arab mores about women’s seclusion from the public sphere into a rallying cry against him.

Women of a certain age who lived in the southern part of the country found the president’s taunt particularly painful, given that they had grown up in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), ruled by a communist regime that promoted women’s rights.  They were not subjected to more conservative norms until Saleh united the PDRY with northern Yemen in 1990.  Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, only about a quarter of Yemeni women can read and write, only 17% have finished high school, and only 5% are wage earners, though most work hard all their lives, many on farms.  Still, in urban areas such as Aden, Taiz or Sanaa, middle and upper middle class women have an important place in the professions and business, or as schoolteachers, and more than a quarter of college students are women.

Faced with the power of outraged women, Saleh quickly backed off, maintaining that, as a secular Arab nationalist, he believed they should be full participants in the political affairs of the nation.  He had simply been wondering aloud, he claimed, how members of the opposition Islah Party, a fundamentalist Muslim organization, were so willing to allow women to march in the streets against him when they favored women’s seclusion on all other occasions.

In Syria as well, on several occasions, women have shown their strength and bravery, turning out in forceful demonstrations — sometimes without men, but with their children in tow. Near the town of Bayda, for instance, thousands of women shouting “We will not be humiliated!” cut off a coastal road to protest a heavy-handed government policy in which the secret police of President Bashar al-Assad had arrested their demonstrating male relatives. On other occasions, Syrian women have staged all-female marches to demand democracy and changes in regime policy.

Protecting Women’s Gains

Despite the centrality of women activists to the Arab Spring, they have seldom been recognized as of real significance by most of the male politicians who will undoubtedly benefit from what they have accomplished.  It was, for example, striking that women were without representation on the commission appointed to revise the Egyptian constitution in preparation for September elections, and that only one woman (a Mubarak holdover at that) was appointed to the 29-person interim cabinet.

In addition, patriarchal forces such as Muslim fundamentalist groups and clergy are determined that women’s rights should not be expanded in the wake of these political upheavals.  As an omen in the wind, when a modest-sized group of 200 women showed up at Tahrir Square on March 8th to commemorate International Women’s Day, they found themselves attacked by militant religious young men who shouted that they should go home and do the laundry.

Women’s groups and progressive movements are understandably apprehensive about the possibility that, in Tunisia and Egypt, Muslim fundamentalist movements will become more influential in parliament and push through laws to the disadvantage of both women and secularists.  Yet they have been remarkably unwilling to let such considerations deter them from embracing democracy, something secular-leaning dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak had warned them against.

The likelihood of an actual Muslim fundamentalist takeover in either country remains minimal for the foreseeable future.  In Egypt, the military government has so far retained a Mubarak-era ban on the Muslim Brotherhood putting up candidates under its own banner.  As a result, its candidates will run as the representatives of other small parties.  In addition, the organization has pledged to contest parliamentary seats in only a limited number of electoral districts, so as to allay middle-class fears that their goal is an Iran-style fundamentalist takeover of the country.  Admittedly, Muslim conservatism will likely burgeon as a political current more generally in Egypt, whatever the shape of the next parliament, posing a challenge to women’s rights.

For instance, some Brotherhood officials have let slip that they will indeed be working for the implementation of a medieval form of Islamic law, which would include the segregation of women and men in the workplace, while the mufti or chief adviser on Islamic law to the government in Egypt has called for a “review” of secular personal status laws that favor women, and which had been supported by Suzanne Mubarak, the fashionable wife of the deposed dictator.

In Tunisia, the long years of repression under Ben Ali left the leading fundamentalist group, al-Nahda or the Renaissance Party, weakened.  In any case its leader Rashid Ghannouchi has been speaking of institutionalizing a “Turkish model” and says that, unlike the Egyptian Brotherhood, he supports the right of a woman to become the country’s president.

In this, he is looking to former Turkish fundamentalists like Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul who, tired of being imprisoned by and butting heads with the secular Turkish establishment, founded the Justice and Development Party.  Since coming to power in 2002, they have fought for a pluralistic system as a way of making a place for more traditional Muslims in society and politics without pushing for the implementation of medieval Muslim legal codes.

Still, as backlash reactions like the attack on the International Women’s Day protest have set in, activists on women’s issues and progressives are wondering how to ensure that women’s gains this spring not be rolled back.  In Egypt, prominent newscaster and critic of the Mubarak regime Buthaina Kamel has her own idea about how to gain women’s rights in a new, more democratic environment.  She is running for president, something inconceivable in the Mubarak era.

Even if her run gets little traction, her candidacy is nevertheless deeply symbolic and historic — and another strikingly brave act by a woman in this new era in the Arab world.  (Her decision is, of course, opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood.) Other Egyptian women are hoping that the constitution can be rewritten to strengthen women’s rights, and that the 64 seats set aside for women in the previous parliament will be retained.

Politicians in the transitional government of Tunisia, for decades the most progressive Arab country with regard to women’s rights, are determined to protect the public role of women by making sure they are well represented in the new legislature. Elections are now planned for July 24th, and a high commission was appointed to set electoral rules. That body has already announced that party lists will have to maintain parity between male and female candidates.

In such a list system, you don’t vote for an individual but a party, which has published an ordered list of its candidates.  If the list gets 10% of the vote nationally, it is awarded 10 percent of the seats in parliament, and can go down its ordered list until it fills all those seats.  Parity for women means that every other candidate on the ordered list should be a woman, ensuring them high representation in the legislature.  This procedure is sometimes called a “zipper” gender quota.  Quotas for female legislators are common in Scandinavia and in the global South.

Although the Tunisian requirement for gender parity remains controversial in some quarters, Ghannouchi’s al-Nahda Party recently came out in support of it.  In contrast, Abdelwaheb El Hani, leader of the newly founded right-of-center party al-Majd, complained that the rule was “a violation of freedom of electoral choice,” and insisted that he doubted it would be effective in promoting women’s representation.  In contrast, the leftist al-Tajdid (Renewal) Party praised the move as “historic” and pledged to make women’s equality an “irreversible accomplishment and an effective reality in Tunisian political life.”  Indeed, al-Tajdid wants an explicit equal rights amendment put into the constitution.

Giving Women a Fighting Chance

The Arab Spring has proven an epochal period of activism and change for women, recalling the role of early feminists in the 1919 Egyptian movement for independence from Britain, or the important place of women in the Algerian Revolution.  The sheer numbers of politically active women in this series of uprisings, however, dwarf their predecessors.  That this female element in the Arab Spring has drawn so little comment in the West suggests that our own narratives of, and preoccupations with, the Arab world — religion, fundamentalism, oil and Israel — have blinded us to the big social forces that are altering the lives of 300 million people.

Women have been aided by this generation’s advances in education and the professions, by the prominence of articulate women anchors on satellite television networks like Aljazeera, and by the rise of the Internet and social media.  Women can assert leadership roles in cyberspace that young men’s dominance of the public sphere might have hampered in city squares.

Their prominence in the labor movements and at the public rallies in Tunisia and Egypt, moreover, underlines how much more of a public role they now have than is usually acknowledged.  Even the trend toward wearing a headscarf among women in Egypt during the past two decades has been seen by some social scientists as a step forward.  It has been a way for women to enter the public sphere and work outside the home in greater numbers than ever before while maintaining a claim on conservative ideals of chastity and piety.

Women activists of the Arab Spring have come from all social classes, since it has been a mass movement.  Middle and upper class women often focus their political energies on issues of political representation and on laws affecting women’s equality.  Seeking constitutional guarantees of electoral parity is one possible way of responding to any patriarchal political backlash.

Working class women are particularly concerned with wages and workers’ rights.  Stronger unions would improve women’s prospects for greater rights.  Women’s health, literacy, and material wellbeing are concerns of all women.  During the age of the dictators, the nation’s wealth was often usurped by a narrow elite of politically connected families.  A democratization of politics could potentially lead to more state resources being devoted to women and the poor.

Keep in mind that women such as Buthaina Kamel knew the risks when they called for Mubarak to step down.  Whatever their patronizing appeals to feminist themes, authoritarian regimes like Mubarak’s and Ben Ali’s politically oppressed and stole from everyone in society, including women, and they had proved increasingly unable to deliver the social services and employment on which women and their families fundamentally depend for a better life.  Before, women could be marginalized at will by the dictators whenever they made demands on the regime.  Now, at least, they have a fighting chance.

Shahin Cole holds an LL.B. from Punjab University Law School in Pakistan and has lived in Egypt and Yemen.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Shahin and Juan Cole

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for [...]]]> Washington on the Rocks
An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to Totter
By Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.

Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal “subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.

Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer — and thanks to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring,” this is now so much clearer — is that both were Washington’s chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.

Why, half a century later, would Washington betray its stated democratic principles by backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to replace him, at least initially with his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a man best known for running Cairo’s torture chambers (and lending them out to Washington)? The answer again: because both were reliable subordinates who had long served Washington’s interests well in this key Arab state.

Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, democratic protests are threatening to sweep away subordinate elites crucial to the wielding of American power. Of course, all modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control — and for most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and set their own agendas was also the moment when it became clear that imperial collapse was in the cards.

If the “velvet revolutions” that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the Soviet empire, then the “jasmine revolutions” now spreading across the Middle East may well mark the beginning of the end for American global power.

Putting the Military in Charge

To understand the importance of local elites, look back to the Cold War’s early days when a desperate White House was searching for something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In December 1954, the National Security Council (NSC) met in the White House to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces of change then sweeping the globe.

Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European empires that had guaranteed global order for more than a century were giving way to 100 new nations, many — as Washington saw it — susceptible to “communist subversion.” In Latin America, there were stirrings of leftist opposition to the region’s growing urban poverty and rural landlessness.

After a review of the “threats” facing the U.S. in Latin America, influential Treasury Secretary George Humphrey informed his NSC colleagues that they should “stop talking so much about democracy” and instead “support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American.” At that moment with a flash of strategic insight, Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe that Humphrey was, in effect, saying, “They’re OK if they’re our s.o.b.’s.”

It was a moment to remember, for the President of the United States had just articulated with crystalline clarity the system of global dominion that Washington would implement for the next 50 years — setting aside democratic principles for a tough realpolitik policy of backing any reliable leader willing to support the U.S., thereby building a worldwide network of national (and often nationalist) leaders who would, in a pinch, put Washington’s needs above local ones.

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would favor military autocrats in Latin America, aristocrats across the Middle East, and a mixture of democrats and dictators in Asia. In 1958, military coups in Thailand and Iraq suddenly put the spotlight on Third World militaries as forces to be reckoned with.  It was then that the Eisenhower administration decided to bring foreign military leaders to the U.S. for further “training” to facilitate “the ‘management’ of the forces of change released by the development” of these emerging nations. Henceforth, Washington would pour military aid into the cultivation of the armed forces of allies and potential allies worldwide, while “training missions” would be used to create crucial ties between the U.S. military and the officer corps in country after country — or where subordinate elites did not seem subordinate enough, help identify alternative leaders.

When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, the Central Intelligence Agency went to work, promoting coups that would install reliable military successors –replacing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who tried to nationalize his country’s oil, with General Fazlollah Zahedi (and then the young Shah) in 1953; President Sukarno with General Suharto in Indonesia during the next decade; and of course President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, to name just three such moments.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Washington’s trust in the militaries of its client states would only grow.  The U.S. was, for example, lavishing $1.3 billion in aid on Egypt’s military annually, but investing only $250 million a year in the country’s economic development. As a result, when demonstrations rocked the regime in Cairo last January, as the New York Times reported, “a 30-year investment paid off as American generals… and intelligence officers quietly called… friends they had trained with,” successfully urging the army’s support for a “peaceful transition” to, yes indeed, military rule.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s, followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances, U.S. weapons systems, CIA support for local security, a safe American haven for their capital, and special favors for their elites, including access to educational institutions in the U.S. or Department of Defense overseas schools for their children.

In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summed up this record thusly:  “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

How It Used to Work

America is by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves (as America would later rule the skies), but when it came to the ground, like empires past it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could a small island nation of just 40 million with an army of only 99,000 men rule a global empire of some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all humanity?

From 1850 to 1950, Britain controlled its formal colonies through an extraordinary array of local allies — from Fiji island chiefs and Malay sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. Simultaneously, through subordinate elites Britain reigned over an even larger “informal empire” that encompassed emperors (from Beijing to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok to Cairo), and presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At its peak in 1880, Britain’s informal empire in Latin America, the Middle East, and China was larger, in population, than its formal colonial holdings in India and Africa. Its entire global empire, encompassing nearly half of humanity, rested on these slender ties of cooperation to loyal local elites.

Following four centuries of relentless imperial expansion, however, Europe’s five major overseas empires were suddenly erased from the globe in a quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 and 1974, the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires faded fast from Asia and Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more than half of today’s sovereign states. In searching for an explanation for this sudden, sweeping change, most scholars agree with British imperial historian Ronald Robinson who famously argued that “when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators,” their power began to fade.

During the Cold War that coincided with this era of rapid decolonization, the world’s two superpowers turned to the same methods regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of newly independent states.  The Soviet Union’s KGB and its surrogates like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania enforced political conformity among the 14 Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe and challenged the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third World.  Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of presidents, autocrats, and dictators on four continents, employing coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control and, when necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.

In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of local elites proved a complex matter indeed.  Many of them were driven by conflicting loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, which meant that they had to be monitored closely.  So critical were these subordinate elites, and so troublesome were their insubordinate iterations, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.

Given the rise of its system of global control in a post-World War II age of independence, Washington had little choice but to work not simply with surrogates or puppets, but with allies who — admittedly from weaker positions — still sought to maximize what they saw as their nations’ interests (as well as their own). Even at the height of American global power in the 1950s, when its dominance was relatively unquestioned, Washington was forced into hard bargaining with the likes of the Philippines’ Raymond Magsaysay, South Korean autocrat Syngman Rhee, and South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.

In South Korea during the 1960s, for instance, General Park Chung Hee, then president, bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of U.S. development dollars, which helped spark the country’s economic “miracle.” In the process, Washington paid up, but got what it most wanted: 50,000 of those tough Korean troops as guns-for-hire helpers in its unpopular war in Vietnam.

Post-Cold War World

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending the Cold War, Moscow quickly lost its satellite states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as once-loyal Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of empire. For Washington, the “victor” and soon to be the “sole superpower” on planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far slower pace.

Over the next two decades, globalization fostered a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency of developing economies on any single state, however imperial.  With its capacity for controlling elites receding, Washington has faced ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising tide of economic nationalism in Latin America.

As U.S. power and influence declined, Washington’s attempts to control its subordinate elites began to fail, often spectacularly — including its efforts to topple bête noire Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in a badly bungled 2002 coup, to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia from Russia’s orbit in 2008, and to oust nemesis Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian elections. Where a CIA coup or covert cash once sufficed to defeat an antagonist, the Bush administration needed a massive invasion to topple just one troublesome dictator, Saddam Hussein.  Even then, it found its plans for subsequent regime change in Syria and Iran blocked when these states instead aided a devastating insurgency against U.S. forces inside Iraq.

Similarly, despite the infusions of billions of dollars in foreign aid, Washington has found it nearly impossible to control the Afghan president it installed in power, Hamid Karzai, who memorably summed up his fractious relationship with Washington to American envoys this way: “If you’re looking for a stooge and calling a stooge a partner, no. If you’re looking for a partner, yes.”

Then, late in 2010, WikiLeaks began distributing those thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables that offer uncensored insights into Washington’s weakening control over the system of surrogate power that it had built up for 50 years. In reading these documents, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn of Haaretz could see “the fall of the American empire, the decline of a superpower that ruled the world by the dint of its military and economic supremacy.” No longer, he added, are “American ambassadors… received in world capitals as ‘high commissioners’… [instead they are] tired bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening wearily to their hosts’ talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state.”

Indeed, what the WikiLeaks documents show is a State Department struggling to manage an unruly global system of increasingly insubordinate elites by any means possible — via intrigue to collect needed information and intelligence, friendly acts meant to coax compliance, threats to coerce cooperation, and billions of dollars in misspent aid to court influence. In early 2009, for instance, the State Department instructed its embassies worldwide to play imperial police by collecting comprehensive data on local leaders, including “email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans.” Showing its need, like some colonial governor, for incriminating information on the locals, the State Department also pressed its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging in an Islamic society, about the kingdom’s crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?”

With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, U.S. diplomats seemed to empower themselves for dominance by dismissing “the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East and Balkans,” or by knowing the weaknesses of their subordinate elites, notably Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s “voluptuous blonde” nurse, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud’s $52 million in stolen funds.

As its influence declines, however, Washington is finding many of its chosen local allies either increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant, particularly in the strategic Middle East. In mid-2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia reported that “President Ben Ali… and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people,” relying “on the police for control,” while “corruption in the inner circle is growing” and “the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.” Even so, the U.S. envoy could only recommend that Washington “dial back the public criticism” and instead rely only on “frequent high-level private candor” — a policy that failed to produce any reforms before demonstrations toppled the regime just 18 months later.

Similarly, in late 2008 the American Embassy in Cairo feared that “Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts… are being suffocated.” However, as the embassy admitted, “we would not like to contemplate complications for U.S. regional interests should the U.S.-Egyptian bond be seriously weakened.” When Mubarak visited Washington a few months later, the Embassy urged the White House “to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership.” And so in June 2009, just 18 months before the Egyptian president’s downfall, President Obama hailed this useful dictator as “a stalwart ally… a force for stability and good in the region.”

As the crisis in Cairo’s Tahrir Square unfolded, respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that Washington was pushing “the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.” After 40 years of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he said, “a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.”

Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping away an empire, the decline of a great power is often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In addition to the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down to something not so far short of defeat, the nation’s capital is now writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm is losing its creditworthiness, and longtime allies are forging economic and even military ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now add the possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.

For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. That system once facilitated the extension of American influence worldwide with a surprising efficiency and (relatively speaking) an economy of force. Now, however, those loyal allies increasingly look like an empire of failed or insubordinate states. Make no mistake: the degradation of, or ending of, half a century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the rocks.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a TomDispatch regular, and author most recently of the award-winning book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. He has also convened the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, and the findings from their latest conference, at Barcelona last June, will appear next year as Endless Empires: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, and America’s Decline. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which McCoy discusses why Washington is likely to cling disastrously to empire in the midst of decline, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Brett Reilly is a graduate student in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying U.S. foreign policy in Asia.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

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, [...]]]> Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks
By Tom Engelhardt

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 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?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth’s “sole superpower.”  In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily “beyond challenge” by any and all powers for eons to come.  So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today?  Who could?

A Country in Need of Prozac

Have you noticed, by the way, 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 even were 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 in gridlock and 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 matter 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 at the 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 fabulists, 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 that 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, for example, would have been an obvious duty of the civil part 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 has mounted a large-scale recovery effort, involving 18,000 people, 20 U.S. Navy ships, and even fuel barges bringing fresh water for reactor-cooling efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.  The effort has been 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 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — he recently paid official visits to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt — as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.  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 have already stretched into more than a month of no-fly zone NATO squabbling and military stalemate (as the no-fly zone version of war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq stretched to 12 years without ultimate success).

Imperially speaking, two things are memorable about the American military effort in Libya.  First, Washington doesn’t seem to have the conviction of what’s left of its power, as its strange military dance in (and half-out of) the air over that country indicates. Second, even in the military realm, Washington is increasingly incapable of drawing lessons from its past actions.  As a result, its arsenal of potential tactics is made up largely of those that have failed in the recent past.  Innovation is no longer part of empire.

The Uses of Fear

From time to time, the U.S. government’s “Intelligence Community“  or IC musters its collective savvy and plants its flag in the future in periodic reports that go under the generic rubric of “Global Trends.”  The last of these, Global Trends 2025, was prepared for a new administration taking office in January 2009, and it was typical.

In a field once left to utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp-fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, and even outright cranks, these compromise bureaucratic documents break little ground and rock no boats, nor do they predict global tsunamis.  Better to forecast what the people you brief already believe, and skip the oddballs with their strange hunches, the sorts who might actually have a knack for recognizing the shock of the future lurking in the present.

As group efforts, then, these reports tend to project the trends of the present moment relatively seamlessly and reasonably reassuringly into the future.  For example, the last time around they daringly predicted a gradual, 15-year soft landing for a modestly declining America.  (“Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, [the country's] relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”)

Even though it was assumedly being finished amid the global meltdown of 2008, nothing in it would have kept you up at night, sleepless and fretting.  More than 15 years into the future, our IC could imagine no wheels falling off the American juggernaut, nothing that would make you wonder if this country could someday topple off the nearest cliff.  Twists, unpleasant surprises, unhappy endings?  Not for this empire, according to its corps of intelligence analysts.

And the future being what it is, if you read that document now, you’d find none of the more stunning events that have disrupted and radically altered our world since late 2008: no Arab lands boiling with revolt, no Hosni Mubarak under arrest with his sons in jail, no mass demonstrations in Syria, no economies of peripheral European countries imploding down one by one, nor a cluster of nuclear plants in Japan melting down.

You won’t find once subservient semi-client states thumbing their noses at Washington, not even in 2025.  You won’t, for example, find the Saudis in, say 2011, openly exploring deeper relations with Russia and China as a screw-you response to Washington’s belated decision that Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak should leave office, or Pakistani demands that the CIA and American special operations forces start scaling back activities on their turf, or American officials practically pleading with an Iraqi government it once helped put in power (and now moving ever closer to Iran) to please, please, please let U.S. troops stay past an agreed-upon withdrawal deadline of December 31, 2011, or Afghan President Hamid Karzai publicly blaming the Americans for the near collapse of his country’s major bank in a cesspool of corruption (in which his own administration was, of course, deeply implicated).

Only two-plus years after Global Trends 2025 appeared, it doesn’t take the combined powers of the IC to know that American decline looks an awful lot more precipitous and bumpier than imagined.  But let’s not just blame our intelligence functionaries for not divining the future we’re already in.  After all, they, too, were in the goldfish bowl, and when you’re there, it’s always hard to describe the nearest cats.

Nor should we be surprised that, like so many other Americans, they too were in denial.

After all, our leaders spent years organizing their version of the world around a “Global War on Terror,” when (despite the 9/11 attacks) terror was hardly America’s most obvious challenge.  It proved largely a “war” against phantoms and fantasies, or against modest-sized ragtag bands of enemies — even though it resulted in perfectly real conflicts, absolutely genuine new bases abroad, significant numbers of civilian dead, and the expansion of a secret army of operatives inside the U.S. military into a force of 13,000 or more operating in 75 countries.

The spasms of fear that coursed through our society in the near-decade after September 11, 2001, and the enemy, “Islamic terrorism,” to which those spasms were attached are likely to look far different to us in retrospect.  Yes, many factors — including the terrifyingly apocalyptic look of 9/11 in New York City — contributed to what happened.  There was fear’s usefulness in prosecuting wars in the Greater Middle East that President Bush and his top officials found appealing.  There was the way it ensured soaring budgets for the Pentagon and the national security state.  There was the way it helped the politicians, lobbyists, and corporations hooked into a developing homeland-security complex.  There was the handy-dandy way it glued eyeballs to a one-event-fits-all-sizes version of the world that made the media happy, and there was the way it justified ever increasing powers for our national security managers and ever lessening liberties for Americans.

But think of all that as only the icing on the cake.  Looking back, those terror fears coursing through the body politic will undoubtedly seem like Rambo’s muscles: a deflection from the country’s deepest fears.  They were, in that sense, consoling.  They allowed us to go on with our lives, to visit Disney World, as George W. Bush urged in the wake of 9/11 in order to prove our all-American steadfastness.

Above all, even as our imperial wars in the oil heartlands of the planet went desperately wrong, they allowed us not to think about empire or, until the economy melted down in 2008, decline.  They allowed us to focus our fears on “them,” not us.  They ensured that, like the other great imperial power of the Cold War era, when things began to spiral out of control we would indeed sleepwalk right into the imperial darkness.

Now that we’re so obviously there, the confusion is greater than ever.  Theoretically, none of this should necessarily be considered bad news, not if you don’t love empires and what they do.  A post-imperial U.S. could, of course, be open to all sorts of possibilities for change that might be exciting indeed.

Right now, though, it doesn’t feel that way, does it?  It makes me wonder: Could this be how it’s always felt inside a great imperial power on the downhill slide?  Could this be what it’s like to watch, paralyzed, as a country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still proclaiming itself “the greatest nation on Earth”?

I don’t know.  But I do know one thing: this can’t end well.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

Here are the Three Sacred Commandments for Americans who shape the public conversation on Israel:

1. For politicians, especially at the federal level: As soon as you say the [...]]]> Three Myths of Israel’s Insecurity
And Why They Must Be Debunked
By Ira Chernus

Here are the Three Sacred Commandments for Americans who shape the public conversation on Israel:

1. For politicians, especially at the federal level: As soon as you say the word “Israel,” you must also say the word “security” and promise that the United States will always, always, always be committed to Israel’s security. If you occasionally label an action by the Israeli government “unhelpful,” you must immediately reaffirm the eternal U.S. commitment to Israel’s security.

2. For TV talking heads and op-ed pundits: If you criticize any policies or actions of the Israeli government, you must immediately add that Israel does, of course, have very real and serious security needs that have to be addressed.

3. For journalists covering the Israel-Palestine conflict for major American news outlets: You must live in Jewish Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv and take only occasional day trips into the Occupied Territories. So your reporting must inevitably be slanted toward the perspective of the Jews you live among. And you must indicate in every report that Jewish Israeli life is dominated by anxiety about security.

U.S. opinion-shapers have obeyed the Three Commandments scrupulously for decades. As a result, they’ve created an indelible image of Israel as a deeply insecure nation. That image is a major, if often overlooked, factor that has shaped and continues to shape Washington’s policies in the Middle East and especially the longstanding American tilt toward Israel.

It’s often said that the number one factor in that tilt is the power of the right-wing “pro-Israel” (more accurately, “pro-Israeli-government”) lobby. That lobby certainly is a skillful, well-oiled machine. It uses every trick in the PR book to promote the myth of Israel as a brave little nation constantly forced to fight for its life against enemies all around who are eager to destroy it, a Jewish David withstanding the Arab Goliath. The lobby justifies everything Israel does to the Palestinians — military occupation, economic strangulation, expanding settlements, confiscating land, demolishing homes, imprisoning children — as perhaps unfortunate but absolutely necessary for Israel’s self-defense.

No matter how slick any lobby is, however, it can’t succeed without a substantial level of public support. (How powerful would the National Rifle Association be without the millions of Americans who truly love their guns?) Along with its other sources of power and influence, the right-wing Israel lobby needs a large majority of the U.S. public to believe in the myth of Israel’s insecurity as the God’s honest truth.

Ironically, that myth gets plenty of criticism and questioning in the Israeli press from writers like (to cite just some recent examples) Merav Michaeli and Doron Rosenblum in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, and even Alon Ben-Meir in the more conservative Jerusalem Post. In the United States, though, the myth of insecurity is the taken-for-granted lens through which the public views everything about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Like the air we breathe, it’s a view so pervasive that we hardly notice it.

Nor do we notice how reflexively most Americans accept the claim of self-defense as justification for everything Israel does, no matter how outrageous.  That reflex goes far to explain why, in the latest Gallup poll matchup (“Do you sympathize more with Israel or the Palestinians?”), Israel won by a nearly 4 to 1 margin.  And the pro-Israeli sentiment just keeps growing.

Our politicians, pundits, and correspondents breathe the same air in the same unthinking fashion, and so they hesitate to put much pressure on Israel to change its ways. As it happens, without such pressure, no Israeli government is likely to make the compromises needed for a just and lasting peace in the region.  Instead, Israel will keep up its attacks on Gaza.  In addition, if the Palestinians declare themselves an independent state come September, as many reports indicate might happen, Israel will feel free to quash that state by any means necessary — but only if Washington goes on giving it the old wink and nod.

If American attitudes and so policies are ever to change, one necessary (though not in itself sufficient) step is to confront and debunk the myth of Israel’s insecurity.

Three Myths in One

Israel actually promotes three separate myths of insecurity, although its PR machine weaves them into a single tightly knit fabric. To grasp the reality behind it, the three strands have to be teased apart and examined separately.

Myth Number 1: Israel’s existence is threatened by the ever-present possibility of military attack. In fact, there’s no chance that any of Israel’s neighbors will start a war to wipe out Israel. They know their history. Despite its size, ever since its war of independence in 1948, the Israeli military has been a better equipped, better trained, more effective, and in virtually every case a successful fighting force.  It clearly remains the strongest military power in the Middle East.

According to the authoritative volume, The Military Balance 2011, Israel still maintains a decisive edge over any of its neighbors. While the Israeli government constantly sounds alarms about imagined Iranian nuclear weapons — though its intelligence services now suggest Iran won’t have even one before 2015 at the earliest — Israel remains the region’s only nuclear power for the foreseeable future.  It possesses up to 200 nukes, in addition to “a significant number” of precision-guided 1,000 kg conventional bombs.

To deliver its most powerful weapons, Israel can rely on its 100 land-based missile launchers, 200 aircraft armed with cruise missiles, and (according to “repeated press reports”) cruise-missile-armed submarines.  The subs are key, of course, since they ensure that no future blow delivered to Israel would ever lack payback.

Israel spends far more on its military than any of the neighbors it claims to fear, largely because it gets more military aid from the U.S. than any other Mideast nation — $3 billion a year is the official figure, although no one is likely to know the full amount.

The Obama administration has continued a long tradition of guaranteeing Israel’s massive military superiority in the region. Israel will, for example, be the first foreign country to get the U.S.’s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35 joint strike fighter.  In fact, Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently complained that 20 of the promised planes aren’t enough, though he admitted that his country “faces no imminent threat” that would justify upping the numbers. Israel is also beginning to deploy its Iron Dome mobile air-defense system, with the U.S. funding at least half its cost.

In sum, none of the nations that Israel casts as a threat to its very existence can pose an existential military danger. Of course, that doesn’t mean all Jewish Israelis are safe from harm, which brings us to…

Myth Number 2: The personal safety of every Jewish Israeli is threatened daily by the possibility of violent attack. In fact, according to Israeli government statistics, since the beginning of 2009 only one Israeli civilian (and two non-Israelis) have been killed by politically motivated attacks inside the green line (Israel’s pre-1967 border).  Israelis who live inside that line go about their daily lives virtually free from such worry.

As a result, the insecurity myth has come to focus on rockets — the real ones launched from Gaza and the imaginary ones that supposedly could be launched from a future Palestinian state in the West Bank. Purveyors of the insecurity myth, including the American media, portray such rocket attacks as bolts from the blue, with no other motive than an irrational desire to kill and maim innocent Jews. As it happens, most of the rockets from Gaza have been fired in response to Israeli attacks that often broke ceasefires declared by the Palestinians.

Those rockets are part of an ongoing war in which each side uses the best weapons it has. The Palestinians, of course, have access to none of the high-tech Israeli guidance systems.  Their weaponry tends to be crude and often homemade.  They shoot their rockets, most of them unguided, and let them fall where they may (which means the vast majority harm no one).

Israel’s weapons actually do far more harm. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008, killed far more civilians than all the rockets Palestinians have ever launched at Israel. Despite (or perhaps because of) its grievous losses, the Hamas government in Gaza has generally tried to minimize the rocket fire. When Hamas calls for all factions in Gaza to observe a ceasefire, however, the Israelis often ramp up their attacks.

Jewish civilians do run some risk when they live in the West Bank settlements. In the most recent horrific incident, a Jewish family of five was slaughtered at the Itamar settlement.  In response, Israeli Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon showed clearly how the deaths of individual settlers are woven into the myth of Israel’s “existential insecurity.”  “This murder,” he declared, “reminds everyone that the struggle and conflict is not about Israel’s borders or about independence of a repressed nation but a struggle for our existence.”

The logic of the myth goes back to the premise of the earliest Zionists: All gentiles are implacably and eternally anti-semitic. By this logic, any attack on one Jew, no matter how random, becomes evidence that all Jews are permanently threatened with extinction.

Most Zionists have been unable to see that once they founded a state committed to regional military superiority, they were bound to be on the receiving as well as the giving end of acts of war. It is the absence of peace far more than the presence of anti-semitism that renders Israelis who live near Gaza or in the West Bank insecure.

However, according to the myth, it’s not only physical violence that threatens Israel’s existence. In the last two years, right-wing Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. have learned to lie awake at night worrying about another threat…

Myth Number 3: Israel’s existence is threatened by worldwide efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Early in 2010, Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that the country was not “suffering from terror or from an immediate military threat” — only to warn of a new peril: “The Palestinian Authority is encouraging the international arena to challenge Israel’s legitimacy.”

The “delegitimization” alarm was first sounded by an influential Israeli think tank and then spread like wildfire through the nation’s political and media ranks.

There are shreds of truth in it. There have always been people who saw the Jewish state, imposed on indigenous Palestinians, as illegitimate. Until recently, however, Israelis seemed to pay them little heed. Now, they are deemed an “existential threat,” as Yadlin explained, only because the old claims of “existential threat” via violence have grown unbelievable even to the Israeli military (though not to the government’s American supporters).

It’s also true that challenges to Israel’s legitimacy are growing rapidly around the world and that the specter of becoming a “pariah state” does pose a danger.  The head of that think tank got it half-right when he warned that Israel’s “survival and prosperity” depend on its relations with the world, “all of which rely on its legitimacy.” Survival? No. After all, being a pariah state doesn’t have to be existence threatening, as North Korea and Burma have proved.

But prosperity? That’s at least possible. When the Israelis complain about “delegitimization,” they focus most on the boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims not to eliminate the state of Israel, but to use economic pressure to end Israel’s occupation and economic strangulation of Palestinian lands. (Nor is there any real evidence to back up the charge that this is some vast conspiracy coordinated by the Palestinian Authority.)

Were Israel to start behaving by accepted international moral norms, the BDS movement would fade from the scene quickly enough, ending the crisis of “delegitimization” — just as the rockets from Gaza might well cease. But here’s the reality of this moment: The only genuine threat to Israel’s security comes from its own oppressive policies, which are the fuel propelling the BDS movement.

So far, however, “effects on the Israeli economy are marginal,” according to a popular Israeli newspaper. The BDS campaign, it reports, “has been far more damaging when it comes to the negative image that it spreads.” A growing number of foreign governments are criticizing Israel, and some already recognize an actual Palestinian state. In diplomatic terms, Israel’s legitimacy rests on the good will of its sole dependable ally, the United States.

More than any military need, that political need offers the U.S. powerful leverage in moving toward a settlement of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. The triple-stranded myth of Israel’s insecurity, however, makes the use of such leverage virtually impossible for Washington.  Israel’s president put his country’s needs plainly in March 2010: “[Israel] must forge good relations with other countries, primarily the United States, so as to guarantee political support in a time of need.” So far, the U.S. has continued to offer its strong support, even though President Obama knows, as he recently told American Jewish leaders, that “Israel is the stronger party here, militarily, culturally, and politically. And Israel needs to create the context for [peace] to happen.”

But what if the American public knew the facts that Obama acknowledged? What if every solemn reference to Israel’s “security needs” were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? What if Israel’s endless excesses and excuses — its claims that the occupation of the West Bank and the economic strangulation of Gaza are necessary “for the sake of security” — were regularly scoffed at by most Americans?

It’s hard to imagine the Obama administration, or any American administration, keeping up a pro-Israel tilt in the face of such public scorn.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writings on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog. To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Chernus discusses what to make of American attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2011 Ira Chernus