Today, Iraq is admittedly a mess. On our watch, the country crashed and burned. No one claims that we’ve put it back together. Multibillions of dollars in reconstruction funds later, the United States has been incapable of delivering the simplest things like reliable electricity or potable water to significant parts of the country. Now, the future sits empty and threatening before us. So much time in which so many things could happen, and all of them horrifying, all calling out for us to remain because
they
just can’t be trusted,
they
just don’t deliver.
The Sally Fields of American Foreign Policy
Talk about blaming the victim. An uninvited guest breaks into a lousy dinner party, sweeps the already meager meal off the table, smashes the patched-together silverware, busts up the rickety furniture, and then insists on staying ad infinitum because the place is such a mess that someone responsible has to oversee the cleanup process.
What’s remained in all this, remarkably enough, is our confidence in ourselves, our admiration for us, our—well, why not say it?—narcissism. Nothing we’ve done so far stops us from staring into that pool and being struck by what a kindly, helpful face stares back at us. Think of those gathering officials, pundits, journalists, and military figures seemingly eager to imagine the worst and so put the brakes on a full-scale American withdrawal as the Sally Fields of foreign policy. (“I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”)
When you have an administration that has made backpedaling its modus operandi, this rising chorus in Washington and perhaps among the military in Iraq could prove formidable in an election year (here, not there).
What, of course, makes their arguments particularly potent is the fact that they base them almost entirely on things that have yet to happen, that may, in fact, never happen. After all, humans have such a lousy track record as predictors of the future. History regularly surprises us, and yet their dismal tune about that future turns out to be an effective cudgel with which to beat those in favor of getting all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011.
Few remember anymore, but we went through a version of this forty years ago in Vietnam. There, too, Americans were repeatedly told that the United States couldn’t withdraw because, if we left, the enemy would launch a “bloodbath” in South Vietnam. This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared in innumerable official speeches and accounts. It became so real that sometimes it seemed to put the actual, ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam in the shade, and for years it provided a winning explanation for why any departure would have to be interminably and indefinitely delayed. The only problem was, when the last American took that last helicopter out, the bloodbath didn’t happen.
In Iraq, only one thing is really known: After our invasion and with U.S. and allied troops occupying the country in significant numbers, the Iraqis did descend into the charnel house of history, into a monumental bloodbath. It happened in our presence, on our watch, and in significant part thanks to us.
But why should the historical record—the only thing we can, in part, rely on—be taken into account when our pundits and strategists have such privileged access to an otherwise unknown future? Based on what we’re seeing now, such arguments may intensify. Terrible prophesies about Iraq’s future without us may multiply. And make no mistake, terrible things could indeed happen in Iraq. They could happen while we are there. They could happen with us gone. But history delivers its surprises more regularly than we imagine—even in Iraq.
In the meantime, it’s worth keeping in mind that not even Americans can occupy the future. It belongs to no one.
Note on the Text
If, soon after 9/11, you had told me that I would, in the coming years, write hundreds of thousands of words on America’s wars, the Pentagon, its garrisoning of the planet, and the militarization of the United States, I would, to say the least, have been surprised. I surely would have thought you had no knack for predicting the future. That this actually happened still surprises me. My only explanation is that I couldn’t help myself, that this was the way the world looked to me and I found myself continually amazed that it didn’t look similarly to hordes of reporters, pundits, and analysts.
Mind you, I was never in the military and I certainly think of myself as the most peaceable of guys. Sometimes, however, it takes a complete outsider to see that what’s in front of us all is a forest, not a random grouping of trees, or, in the case of this book, an identifiable American way of war rather than a set of disparate political and military acts full of sound and fury but signifying little.
The twenty-nine pieces that make up this book were written between March 2004 and the early months of 2010. They span the tumultuous era in which my website,
TomDispatch.com
, was born and has lived its relatively short life. However, I thought it important to acknowledge here that the essays you have just read are not simply the ones I originally wrote. Most have been trimmed, and the tell-tale signs of the immediate
moment—the recentlys and next weeks, along with examples that were gripping at the time but are forgotten today—have been removed; so have most of the thematic repetitions that are bound to pop up in any set of weekly responses to ongoing events. In a few cases, the essays have even been very modestly updated. Nothing basic about them has, however, been changed, including my conclusions, which, on the whole, still hold up well.
Generally speaking, the book moves chronologically from the moment before 9/11, through the disastrous Bush years and year one of the Obama administration, right up to late last night (thanks to the ability of a small independent press these days to put out a book with remarkable speed). For the sake of whatever flow this book may have, I decided not to include in the text the original date on which each piece was posted. But for the record, and in case readers should wish to check out any of the essays in their original form at
TomDispatch.com
, here is a list of them with their original titles and the dates they were posted. In each case below, the title of a piece in this book is followed by the original title and date, unless of course the title remained the same:
The World Before September 11—Shark-bit World, December 8, 2005
9/11 in a Movie-Made World—September 7, 2006
The Billion-Dollar Gravestone—May 16, 2006
Looking Forward, Looking Backward—Don’t Turn the Page on History, July 23, 2009
Twenty-First-Century Gunboat Diplomacy—March 30, 2004
Wonders of the Imperial World—The Colossus of Baghdad, May 29, 2007
How to Garrison a Planet (and Not Even Notice)—Going on an Imperial Bender, September 4, 2008
Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq—December 5, 2004
The Barbarism of War from the Air—Degrading Behavior, July 28, 2006
An Anatomy of Collateral Damage—The Value of One, the Value of None, September 11, 2008
Launching the Drone Wars—Terminator Planet, April 7, 2009
Which War Is This Anyway?—Are We in World War IV? March 10, 2005
The Imperial Unconscious—March 1, 2009
Fixing What’s Wrong in Washington…in Afghanistan—February 21, 2010
Ponzi Scheme Presidency—January 5, 2009
With Us or Against Us?—The $100 Barrel of Oil vs. the Global War on Terror, January 8, 2008
Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a National Emergency—February 14, 2010
How Safe Do You Want to Be?—Killing Civilians, April 23, 2009
General “Manhunter”—Going for Broke, May 21, 2009
Obama and the Imperial Presidency—Obama Looses the Manhunters, June 14, 2009
A War That No Longer Needs a Justification—Biking out of Iraq, August 13, 2009
How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington—Seven Days in January, January 31, 2010
G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero—August 26, 2009
Why Military Dreams Fail—and Why It Doesn’t Matter—Drone Race to a Known Future, November 10, 2009
The Afghan Speech Obama Should (But Won’t) Give—November 19, 2009
A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority—Meet the Commanded-in-Chief, December 3, 2009
The Nine Surges of Obama’s War—December 10, 2009
Pentagon Time: Tick…Tick…Tick…—January 26, 2010
Premature Withdrawal—March 10, 2010
This book has no footnotes. The original posts at
TomDispatch.com
were, however, heavily footnoted in the style of the Internet—through links that led readers to my sources and also sometimes offered directions for further exploration. Linking is, in fact, the first democratic form of foot-noting, making sources instantly accessible to normal readers who, unlike scholars, may not have quick access to a good library. URLs in a book, however, are both cumbersome and useless. So if you want to check my sources, you’ll need to go to the originals online at
TomDispatch.com
. Fair warning, however: One of the debits of linking is that links regularly die, so the older the piece, the greater the chance that some of the links won’t work.
Acknowledgments
I’ve been a book editor for almost forty years now and lived in a world of editors. I know good editing—a rare enough commodity—when I stumble across it. Anthony Arnove, who works at Haymarket Books, is a superb editor (as well as a jack-of-all-trades, the fate of any independent book publisher). If this collection is now really a book, it’s thanks to his ministrations. He made me work, which—having been on the other side of the process—I consider one of the best things you can say about an editor. A special bow to him. Thanks go as well to Mikki Smith, copyeditor extraordinaire, Dao Tran, eagle-eyed proofer, and to the hardworking duo, Rachel Cohen and Julie Fain, also of Haymarket.
TomDispatch.com
has been the odyssey of my later life and for its existence and ongoing health I have a number of people to thank: Ham Fish of The Nation Institute, who made it an institute project and me a fellow; Taya Kitman, also of the institute, who’s been remarkably supportive through the years; Joe Duax, who offers youth for my age and savvy about an Internet and computer world I don’t faintly grasp; Chris Holmes, who wandered into my life from Tokyo (as can only happen in the world of the Web), and defined generosity for me even as he stopped endless small mistakes and errors from entering the world; and Tam Turse, whose eagle eye has made such a difference. Another kind of gratitude is
reserved for Nick Turse, who has worked with me all these years, lived through my endless phone calls, and helped make TomDispatch such an adventure for me.
I also want to thank all those authors (and friends) who have written for TomDispatch. You add spice to my day, and sometimes a sense of collective joy as well. And let me offer a bow to those at other websites and blogs I’ve run into online (and sometimes in person). Dealing with, working with, exchanging ideas with you has been dizzying and wonderful. You include: David Swanson and Chip Yost of After Downing Street, Tony Allison of
Asia Times
, Jan Frel of AlterNet, Eric Garris of
Antiwar.com
, Mark Karlin of Buzzflash, Jon Queally and Andrea Germanos of Common-dreams, Rick Shenkman of History News Network, David Weiner and Cara Parks of the Huffington Post, Juan Cole of Informed Comment, Mamoon Alabbasi of Middle East Online, Sam Baldwin and Nikki Gloudeman of
Mother Jones
magazine, Tony Karon of Rootless Cosmopolitan, Victoria Harper of Truthout, and Paul Woodward of the War in Context, among others. You have helped keep a world of critical and oppositional thinking alive through the worst of times. My gratitude to all of you.
Finally, I want to offer thanks and love to my wife, Nancy, who lived her own life unflappably and wonderfully in the midst of my craziness.
Index
A
Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk
Aiken, George
airpower
airbases
Azizabad air strikes
civilian deaths and
drones
historical use of
newspeak and
proliferation of
space-based platforms and
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
Albright, Madeleine
al-Maliki, Nouri
al-Sadr, Moqtada/Sadrists
Alston, Philip
al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab
al-Zawihari, Ayman
American way of war, the
as conceptually unending
good governance
as Hollywood movie
militarization and
newspeak and
recent historical context/choice and
sovereignty and
victim discourse and
anthrax
Apple, R. W.
Arkin, William
Armitage, Richard
Ashcroft, John
Azizabad air strikes
B
Bacevich, Andrew J.
Bagram Air Base
Baker, Peter
Balad Air Base
barbarism
air wars and
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and
Barnard, Anne
Barnes, Julian
Barry, John
Barstow, David
Bayh, Evan
Bearak, Barry
Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc. (BDY)
Berke, Richard L.
Biddle, Stephen
Biden, Joseph
bin Laden, Osama
Blanchette, Richard
body counts
Bolton, John
Boyd, Robert S.
Boyer, Paul
Branigin, William
Bremer, L. Paul
Brokaw, Tom
Bumiller, Elisabeth
Burns, John
Bush, George W./Bush administration
9/11 and
armed diplomacy and
body counts
Bush Doctrine
homeland security and