[Note for TomDispatch Readers: And I do mean readers! A TomDispatch “library” of four popular new books is taking shape for fall 2010. The first is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo... Whoops, sorry... I meant, of course, my own thriller, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, which the U.S. military has been insistent about publicizing these last months (see below); the second, Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, has just gotten a superb review in Foreign Policy Journal; the third, Nick Turse’s The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, lays out the option that’s never on the table when “all options are on the table” in Washington (see below again); and the fourth is Andrew Bacevich’s bestselling Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. All four are connected, some more intimately than others, to this site. All four add up to a view of how our Pentagon-heavy American world now works. All four should be on your bookshelf. And by the way, every time you click on a TomDispatch book link and buy something at Amazon.com, we get a small cut of your purchase (at no cost to you). It’s a great way to support this website. While I’m at it, let me offer a deep bow to all TomDispatch readers who have become recurring contributors to this site. Your regularly arriving donations are a real factor in our survival. I wish I could thank each of you individually, but consider this my thanks to all of you at once! Tom]
The War Addicts
2016 and Then Some
By Tom Engelhardt
Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On Monday, theWashington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.
Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they move toward a theoretical goal of 400,000 -- an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.
The eye-catching detail, however, was the dating on the chart. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below -- don’t gasp -- the 68,000 level. In other words, three to six years from now, if all went as planned -- a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far -- the U.S. might be back close to the force levels of early 2009, before the President’s second surge was launched. (When Obama entered office, there were only 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)
And when would those troops dwindle to near zero? 2019? 2025? The chart-makers were far too politic to include the years beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing. But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, were dreaming of, and most forcefully recommending to the president, a forever war -- one which the Office of Budget and Management estimated would cost almost $900 billion?
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Since this website returns to environmental themes today, I thought it worth mentioning that Juan Cole’s September 9th piece, “The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened: Don’t Tune In, It’s Not Important,” looks ever more eerily on target as the weeks pass. Low-lying parts of the Pakistani province of Sindh are still suffering from severe flooding two months after the Indus River first crested its banks, and according to the New York Times, the United Nations now considers what happened to approximately 20% of that country “the worst natural disaster [it] has ever responded to in its 65-year history.” Yet the story of this catastrophe is already so long-gone from the U.S. media docket. It’s worth returning to Cole’s piece and thinking about the strangeness of all this. Tom]
The long vacation season of 2010 is, by now, a distant memory. But Chip Ward, who has covered everything from the aridifying of the West to the Tea Partying of the same territory for TomDispatch, reports from his tourist haven of a home in the backlands of Utah that, for the first time in years, there were more American visitors than French and German ones this summer. Perhaps it was a measure of a drooping economy as more Americans opt for cheaper domestic adventures. He gets a certain pleasure, he tells me, from watching them enjoy the redrock landscape he loves, but he always wonders how much they understand about what they’re obsessively photographing. Most of us, after all, are not ecologically literate. We might know how to email, tweet, and text, but we don’t know a keystone species from an ecotone.
That’s a shame, because we’ll need to be ecologically knowledgeable and aware to survive the human upheaval and ecological disruption that are likely to follow on the heels of what we call “global warming.” Just check out flooded Pakistan, if you want to get a sense of the enormity of what could be coming. And yet it’s not enough to simply, even obsessively, catalog the damage and the crises, and plot out the nightmares ahead. Anyone who can offer us some hints not just of why the world around us is falling apart, but of how it can be put back together, is doing us all a favor. Amazingly, amid the flood of bad environmental news, there’s some good news, too, and Ward directs us toward one stirring case of it -- and the opposition to it. In his case, it helps that, for the last year, he’s been listening in on the ongoing conversations of a group of biologists and environmentalists who have been dealing with the reintroduction of the wolf to the West -- and he has quite a story to tell. Tom
The Big Bad Wolf Makes Good
The Yellowstone Success Story and Those Who Want to Kill It
By Chip WardAt long last, good news. Fifteen years have passed since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the results are in. The controversial experiment has been a stellar success. The Big Bad Wolf is back and in this modern version of the old story, all that huffing and puffing has been good for the land and the creatures that live on it. Biggie, it turns out, got a bum rap.
The success of the Yellowstone project is the kind of good news we long for in this era of oil spills, monster storms, massive flooding, crushing heat waves, and bleaching corals. For once, a branch of our federal government, the Department of the Interior, saw something broken and actually fixed it. In a nutshell: conservation biologists considered a perplexing problem -- the slow but steady unraveling of the Yellowstone ecosystem -- figured out what was causing it, and then proposed a bold solution that worked even better than expected.
Sadly, the good news has been muted by subsequent political strife over wolf reintroduction outside of Yellowstone. Along the northern front of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, as well as New Mexico and Arizona, so-called wolf wars have added fuel to a decades-old battle over the right to graze cattle or hunt on public land. The shouting has overwhelmed both science and civil discourse. This makes it all the harder to convey the lessons learned to an American public that is mostly ecologically illiterate and never really understood why wolves were put back into Yellowstone in the first place. Even the legion of small donors who supported the project mostly missed the reasons it was undertaken, focusing instead on the “charismatic” qualities of wolves and the chance to see them in the wild.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Andrew Bacevich’s new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, is now deservedly a New York Times bestseller. This website first posted the introduction to the book, “The Unmaking of a Company Man,” already among TD’s most popular pieces, in August. If you missed it, check it out by clicking here. The book has since received superb reviews in the New York Times (“a tough-minded, bracing and intelligent polemic against some 60 years of American militarism... the country is lucky to have a fierce, smart peacemonger like Bacevich…”) and Washington Post (“brilliant”). Make sure it’s on your bookshelf and a small reminder: whenever you travel to Amazon.com by clicking on a TomDispatch book link or book-cover link and buy a book we recommend or anything else, we get a small cut of your purchase, which helps keep us afloat. Many thanks. Tom]
We know the endpoint of the story: another bestseller for Bob Woodward, in this case about a president sandbagged by his own high command and administration officials at one another’s throats over an inherited war gone wrong. But where did the story actually begin? Well, here’s the strange thing: in a sense, Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, which focuses heavily on an administration review of Afghan war policy in the fall of 2009, begins with... Woodward. Of course -- thank heavens for American media amnesia -- amid all the attention his book is getting, no one seems to recall that part of the tale.
Here it is: President Obama got sandbagged by the leaked release of what became known as “the McChrystal plan,” a call by his war commander in the field General Stanley McChrystal (and assumedly the man above him, then-Centcom Commander General David Petraeus) for a 40,000-troop counterinsurgency “surge.” As it happened, Bob Woodward, Washington Post reporter, not bestselling book writer, was assumedly the recipient of that judiciously leaked plan from a still-unknown figure, generally suspected of being in or close to the military. On September 21, 2009, Woodward was the one who then framed the story, writing the first stern front-page piece about the needs of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Its headline laid out, from that moment on, the president’s options: “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure’” And its first paragraph went this way: “The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict ‘will likely result in failure,’ according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.”
The frustration of a commander-in-chief backed into a corner by his own generals, the angry backbiting Woodward reportedly reveals in his book, all of it was, at least in part, a product of that leak and how it played out. In other words, looked at a certain way, Woodward facilitated the manufacture of the subject for his own bestseller. A nifty trick for Washington’s leading stenographer.
The set of leaks -- how appropriate for Woodward -- that were the drumbeat of publicity for the new book over the last week also offered a classic outline of just how limited inside-the-Beltway policy options invariably turn out to be (no matter how fierce the debate about them). As one Washington Post piece put it: “[T]he only options that were seriously considered in the White House involved 30,000 to 40,000 more troops.” All in all, it’s a striking example of how the system really works, of how incestuously and narrowly -- to cite the title of Andrew Bacevich’s bestselling new book -- Washington rules. Tom
Prisoners of War
Bob Woodward and All the President’s Men (2010 Edition)
By Andrew J. BacevichOnce a serious journalist, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class. Early on in his career, along with Carl Bernstein, his partner at the time, Woodward confronted power. Today, by relentlessly exalting Washington trivia, he flatters power. His reporting does not inform. It titillates.
A new Woodward book, Obama’s Wars, is a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s out this week, already causing a stir, and guaranteed to be forgotten the week after dropping off the bestseller lists. For good reason: when it comes to substance, any book written by Woodward has about as much heft as the latest potboiler penned by the likes of James Patterson or Tom Clancy.
Back in 2002, for example, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Woodward treated us to Bush at War. Based on interviews with unidentified officials close to President George W. Bush, the book offered a portrait of the president-as-resolute-war-leader that put him in a league with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the book’s real juice came from what it revealed about events behind the scenes. “Bush’s war cabinet is riven with feuding,” reported the Times of London, which credited Woodward with revealing “the furious arguments and personal animosity” that divided Bush’s lieutenants.
This has been the week of American decline at TomDispatch. On Sunday, Michael Klare considered that decline in the context of the rise of China as an energy superpower. I gave a muted cheer-and-a-half for it on Tuesday. Today, Dilip Hiro, who has been following the subject for this site, lays out what our power outage means in geopolitical terms. The last time Hiro (author most recently of After Empire: The Birth of a Multi-Polar World) appeared at TomDispatch, he noticed a striking stylistic sign of American decline in action, what might be called the Obama flip-flop. In one case after another, from Central America to China, Israel to Afghanistan, the Obama administration would pressure a foreign leader to bend to Washington’s will, threaten dire consequences, and then, when he refused to back off, move into a placatory mode. Strangely -- a sign of domestic power outages as well -- it hasn’t been hard to spot a similar style in action at home.
This was evident recently in the case of the “mosque at Ground Zero” (even if it’s neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero). If you remember, the administration’s position on this, when it was still a simmering controversy, was clear enough and enunciated by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs more than once: it was “a local matter” and not appropriate for the president to weigh in on. That was a perfectly reasonable, even understandable, political decision.
Then, on Friday August 13th at a traditional White House Ramadan Iftar dinner, President Obama shifted course and offered a strong statement of support for the Park 51 center. (“But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”) Again, fine. This seemed to be another kind of decision (described by Washington insiders as “a willingness to jettison calculation when core beliefs are in play”). The only thing it couldn’t have been was a decision taken without knowing that, as the first “Muslim” president, you would be roundly attacked by all the usual suspects.
When those attacks promptly and expectably arrived the next morning, however -- à la Hiro’s analysis -- the president backed off. He “clarified” his statement. (“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.”) It mattered little how the White House explained his clarifying remarks -- they could only be taken by his enemies as a visible sign of weakness and so, under the circumstances, were politically incomprehensible. And that flash of weakness, pure blood in the water for the sharks circling to his right, may have been the actual spark that turned the fire of the mosque debate into a five-alarm blaze. Keep that style in mind and consider that it’s as noticeable to other countries as to Obama’s domestic opposition. Tom
America Is Suffering a Power Outage
…and the Rest of the World Knows It
By Dilip Hiro“Make poverty history!” A catchy slogan, and an admirable aim, it was adopted by world leaders at the United Nations summit in New York on the eve of the New Millennium. A decade later, it is America which has made history -- even if in the opposite direction. The latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that, in 2009, one in seven Americans was living below the poverty line, the highest figure in half a century. Last month’s 95,000-plus home foreclosures broke all records.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Consider this American decline week at TomDispatch. On Sunday, Michael Klare wrote about American decline in the context of the rise of China as the twenty-first century energy superpower and TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro will add his own two cents on Thursday. In the meantime, here’s my entry in the decline sweepstakes in a rare themed week at this site. While you’re at it, remember to pick up a copy of my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. These days it couldn’t be more grimly germane. If you’ve already gotten yours, get one for a friend, and as long as you buy it or anything else at Amazon.com by traveling there via a book link at TomDispatch, this site gets a little cut of your purchase at no extra cost to you! Tom]
One and a Half Cheers for American Decline
The Future’s Not Ours -- and That’s Good News
By Tom Engelhardt
Compare two assessments of the American future:
In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in which 61% of Americans interviewed considered “things in the nation” to be “on the wrong track,” 66% did “not feel confident that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.” (Seven percent were “not sure,” and only 27% “felt confident.”) But here was the polling question you’re least likely to see discussed in your local newspaper or by Washington-based pundits: “Do you think America is in a state of decline, or do you feel that this is not the case?” Sixty-five percent of respondents chose as their answer: “in a state of decline.”
Meanwhile, Afghan war commander General David Petraeus was interviewed last week by Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Asked whether the American war in Afghanistan, almost a decade old, was finally on the right counterinsurgency track and could go on for another nine or ten years, Petraeus agreed that we were just at the beginning of the process, that the “clock” was only now ticking, and that we needed “realistic expectations” about what could happen and how fast. “Progress” in Afghanistan, he commented, was often so slow that it could feel like “watching grass grow or paint dry.”
Now, I’m not a betting man, but I’d head for Vegas tomorrow and put my money down against the general and on Americans generally when it comes to assessing the future. I’d put money on the fact that the United States is indeed “in a state of decline” and I’d make a wager at odds that U.S. troops won’t be in Afghanistan in nine or ten years. And I’d venture to suggest as well that the two bets would be intimately connected, and that the American people understand at a visceral level far more than Washington cares to know about our real situation in the world. And I’d put my money on one more thing: however lousy it may feel, it’s not all bad news, not by a long shot.
