Iraq pullout: The quicker the better

Critics of U.S. withdrawal plans are on the wrong side of history

By Jordan Michael Smith

A U.S. Marine helicopter lifts off from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy during the evacuation of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Bottom: US Army vehicles leave their base after a handover ceremony in May 2010. (Credit: AP)

Topics:Iraq war

Illinois Rep. Tim Johnson has been a weathervane on the Iraq War. He voted in 2002 to authorize the war. In 2006 he declared the Iraq War essential to the war on terror. In 2007 he voted against withdrawal — and then in 2008 he voted to investigate President Bush for lying about the war Johnson had passionately supported all along.

So when Johnson recently told an audience in Decatur that the U.S. needed to withdraw immediately from the Middle East, Johnson knew what he was doing. The war is no longer popular. The Republican congressman was speaking to a mostly white conservative crowd — and he received huge applause for his words.

Washington is slower to respond. Most policymakers are not yet heeding the two-thirds of Americans who want to withdraw completely from Iraq. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in September she would oppose any move by the Obama administration to whittle down the U.S. presence to 3,000 by the end of 2011. Sens. John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham all agreed, saying “a follow-on force might lack the capabilities and authorities necessary to help Iraqis ensure stability across the disputed territories in northern Iraq, which we consider an essential mission.”

The neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative is even blunter, hosting an open letter by 43 of the usual hawkish suspects that declares: “[A] failing state in the heart of the Middle East would destabilize the region, empower Iran, and make vain more than eight years of efforts by the United States in Iraq,” they wrote.

Behind these debates are the changing facts on the ground in Iraq. This week, U.S. officials denied that the United States had agreed to leave 5,000 troops there beyond 2011, but talks appear headed that way. Under a 2008 agreement, all American troops are supposed to be out of the country by the close of this year. Over the next few months, all 41,000 of the current troops are scheduled to leave in small units. U.S. military bases have already dwindled from 505 to 23. Remaining troops will be stationed mostly in consulates in Basra, a southern city, and Erbil, in the north.

The American diplomatic presence will drastically increase in the coming months, totaling 16,000 civilian employees working in Iraq under the American ambassador. Even if the U.S. military does leave Iraq, the American footprint will be far from invisible in the country for years to come. But that isn’t enough for hawks like McCain, who says that more than 10,000 troops need to stay lest anarchy reign.

As it happens, the United States has experience withdrawing from an ill-conceived, poorly executed, prolonged war in a distant land. Vietnam has faded as an analogy in American life, but it offers important lessons for the design of foreign policy strategy. How the U.S. recovered from its first defeat — and why it was able to do so with astonishing swiftness — suggests that swift withdrawal from Iraq may not be catastrophic for America. On the contrary, our experience in Vietnam suggests leaving Iraq immediately is the best thing we can do for ourselves.

Of course, the popular image of America’s departure from South Vietnam is hardly one that seems worth emulating. Iconic videos and photographs of U.S. helicopters leaving from the embassy in Saigon — the largest helicopter evacuation in history, in fact — seemed to encapsulate a weakness that Americans were unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. They provided a disturbing counterpoint to the uplifting iconic snapshot of GIs hoisting Betsy Ross’ flag on Iwo Jima in 1945.

Vietnam hawks maintain that withdrawal encouraged Soviet adventurism around the globe. “The collapse in 1975 not only led to genocidal horrors in Indochina; from Angola to Ethiopia to Iran to Afghanistan, it ushered in a period of American humiliation, an unprecedented Soviet geopolitical offensive all over the globe, and pervasive insecurity, instability and crisis,” wrote Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his memoirs.

U.S. withdrawal also proved disastrous for the South Vietnamese who had fought against the North. An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without trial or formal charges by the North Vietnamese and 165,000 died in “reeducation camps.” Thousands more were tortured. The so-called boat people, refugees fleeing Laos, Cambodia and especially South Vietnam, became an international humanitarian crisis on the Asian seas, where they were often at the mercy of pirates and placed in refugee camps with poor conditions.

And yet, for all this horror, it is unclear how things could have been any different. Depending on when one considers the official beginning of an undeclared war, the United States fought for as long as 25 years to defeat North Vietnam. Somewhere between 1 million and 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and citizens were killed, depending again on the source consulted. Some 200,000 to 300,000 Cambodians, 20,000 Laotians and more than 58,000 Americans were also killed during the conflict. Prolonging the war, in other words, was itself a humanitarian disaster.

From an American standpoint, there is less ambiguity. The dominant rationale for U.S. participation in Vietnam was one of credibility. “For the United States, this first defeat in our Nation’s history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world,” Richard Nixon declared in his famous “silent majority” speech. “Our defeat and humiliation in South Vietnam without question would promote recklessness in the councils of those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest,” a reference to the Soviet Union. To win the Cold War, the U.S. needed to win in Vietnam, it was argued. As Lyndon Johnson put it, “if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.”

We now know that this reasoning was completely false. Every president who waged war in Vietnam — Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford — feared to one extent or another that the loss of South Vietnam would mean the loss of all of Asia, and perhaps much more, to Soviet-led communism. All were wrong. The United States ran from the communists, but the communists didn’t follow. Instead, they turned on each other. Vietnam and Cambodia went to war, as did Vietnam and China. The victors in Indochina sat on their hands while a communist revolution in Thailand was defeated, and the Chinese and Soviet Union permanently split.

Even more amazingly, just 14 years after American helicopters left South Vietnam in shame, the United States won the Cold War. The Soviet Union unilaterally collapsed, ushering in an era of uncontested American supremacy that has yet to be eclipsed. In precise contradiction to the domino theorists, who swore America’s national security and honor rested on the security of a small, poor dictatorship in Southeast Asia, the United States lost the battle and won the war. It is also far from clear that the Soviet Union’s adventurism from 1975 to 1980 resulted from its perception of American weakness. Whatever gains the evil empire did make were ephemeral, as its collapse less than a decade later proved.

From Saigon to Baghdad

The parallels to Iraq are numerous. Just as in Vietnam, Iraq hawks swear that international catastrophe will result from a U.S. withdrawal. In August 2010, two Heritage Foundation staffers advised Obama that “he should reassure anxious Iraqis and U.S. allies in the region that he will not complacently declare victory and abandon the struggling Iraqi government, leaving a vacuum that would inevitably be exploited by Iran, Syria, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and other Islamist extremist groups.” Again, American credibility everywhere is on the line. According to Tom Ridge and Michael Mukasey, Obama’s plan “undermines the credibility of our promises around the world and is an affront to the sacrifices of countless U.S. service men and women who died for a free Iraq.”

In fact, any countries that depend on American security will likely be pleased with American withdrawal from Iraq. “The credibility of the United States now relies on the fact that it has signed an agreement with the government of Iraq to remove all its troops by the end of 2011,” says Matthew Duss, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress. Reneging on that promise is something all countries, especially those in the region wary of American power, will take note of. The debt America still owes Iraq will best be paid down “through diplomacy and development,” Duss says.

Just as withdrawing from Vietnam enabled the United States to concentrate on its only true foe in the Cold War, so leaving Iraq will permit us to focus on the anti-American terrorists that should always have been our only targets after the 9/11 attacks. Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges argues in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Al Qaeda,” that the terrorist organization is effectively decimated, its leadership destroyed and operational abilities devastated. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and senior military officials have made similar claims.

Even if they are too sanguine, withdrawal from Iraq will aid efforts against al-Qaida. Iraq has always been at best a distraction from campaigns to defeat those who attacked America on 9/11, and the war there continues to consume precious American resources, attention and, of course, human lives. Redirecting these against bin Laden’s few remaining followers is the wisest course of action.

None of this is to say that leaving Iraq will be completely painless. Leaving Vietnam was not, either. Ultimately, however, keeping tens of thousands of U.S. troops only delays the inevitable. Americans and Iraqis will be better off if the United States learns the most important lesson the Vietnam War teaches: Once you get into a losing venture, getting out as soon as possible is the only way to win.

: Jordan Michael Smith has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post. More Jordan Michael Smith

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The antiwar movement isn’t dead

Todd Gitlin says peace protesting is done. Just because we're not marching doesn't mean we're not fighting

By Medea Benjamin

Topics:Iraq war, Afghanistan, War Room

Todd Gitlin writes a convincing obituary for an antiwar movement killed by a thousand blows: crushed by Bush’s pigheadedness, dumped in the media’s black hole, rendered invisible by a volunteer army and drones, overshadowed by more urgent financial crises, chastened by the “unpleasantness” of adversaries from Taliban to al-Qaida to Gadhafi. He leaves out some other daggers to the heart of the movement: grass-roots election campaigns that lured away millions of activists; betrayals by the president and groups like MoveOn who used and abused the antiwar sentiment; craven congressional reps who violate the will of their constituents by continuing to fund war; powerful lobbyists for the war industry who wield enormous power in Washington; and the utter exhaustion that sets in after 10 years of standing up to the largest military complex the world has ever seen.

Despite all these challenges, however, the reports of the death of the antiwar movement are greatly exaggerated. Sure, there are no longer millions marching in the streets — but there aren’t millions marching in American streets for any cause these days. Lacking the staying power of Tahrir Square, our weekend rallies failed to effect policy and left people disillusioned — and bored. That’s why creative and media-savvy activism 2.0 tactics — like flash mobs, Twitter culture jams and YouTube videos — have emerged that engage with the younger generation.

And that’s why the movement has transformed as well. Rather than marching in circles and chanting slogans to ourselves, we’re reaching deep into our communities to make connections between the economic crises our neighborhoods face and the wars that rob us of scarce resources.

Take a look at the recent Bring Our War Dollars Home campaign spurred by CODEPINK, a campaign that gave a new burst of energy to the movement. We encouraged activists around the country to build local coalitions to push the passage of a resolution to stop funding wars and invest those monies into rebuilding America. From big cities like Los Angeles and Baltimore to towns like Ithaca, N.Y., and Worcester, Mass., coalitions of peace, labor, environmental, feminist and religious groups wrote letters, made calls, visited and otherwise cajoled their city officials. After dozens of victories, in June we took the resolution to the national U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing 1,200 American cities. Despite some hackneyed efforts to brand the resolution as being “against the troops,” it passed overwhelmingly and has become a useful tool against congressional members who continue to vote more money for war.

While many exasperated activists have given up on lobbying Congress, some antiwar groups like PeaceAction and Progressive Democrats of America continue to plug away, with a degree of success. In May, for example, they pushed for the McGovern-Jones amendment to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. While the amendment failed 215-204, the 178 Democrats and 26 Republicans voting yes made this the closest that any vote has come to repudiating our nation’s Afghanistan strategy in 10 years.

Another sign of life in the peace movement is the massive outcry it generated over the inhumane treatment of alleged WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. The uproar forced the U.S. military to improve Manning’s pre-trial conditions, moving him from the harsh military brig in Quantico, Va., to more humane facilities in Leavenworth, Kan. Activists also raised funds, in record time, for Manning’s legal fees and orchestrated creative visibility campaigns, from Bradley contingents in increasingly commercialized, “apolitical” gay pride parades to a skit performed at a high-dollar San Francisco fundraiser with President Obama.

Interfaith, anti-nuke, antiwar activists across the country are working together to oppose the use of the unmanned drones responsible for the civilian deaths in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. On Oct. 9, several hundred Catholic Workers, CODEPINK members and friends are expected to protest at Creech Air Force Base, home of the deadly Reaper drones.

As Todd Gitlin knows well, movements ebb and flow. We are certainly not at our zenith, but we are still breathing. The Arab Spring has given us new inspiration, and as the 10th anniversary of the senseless war in Afghanistan approaches in October, you can expect to see the antiwar movement not just breathing, but kicking into high gear with an open-ended mobilization in D.C. starting on Oct. 7 and artistic actions throughout the country under the banner of 10 Years and Counting. We invite Todd and others who have been writing about our demise to come join us.

: Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange. More Medea Benjamin

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Where have all the war protesters gone?

The largest demonstrations ever have largely dissipated, even as we've launched new wars. Why a movement sputtered

By Todd Gitlin

Topics:Iraq war, War Room, Afghanistan

The outrage that greeted the run-up to the Bush-Blair Iraq war debacle generated what must have been the largest antiwar rallies and demonstrations in the history of the world. Sometimes in subzero temperatures, millions of marchers in New York, London and elsewhere took to the streets to interrupt the roar of self-righteous crypto-imperial bravado, to barge through George Bush’s strutters’ ball and its fevers of fantastical, deceptive and self-deceptive claims about Saddam Hussein’s danger to the United States and Washington’s promise to parachute democracy into Saddam’s stricken land. In the well-chosen words of one London sign, the marchers were “Shocked, Not Awed.”

Then the marches stopped.

They stopped partly because the antiwar leadership was barely cobbled together, with some conspicuous quarters reluctant to speak harshly of the multi-murderous Saddam Hussein. The movement’s drawing power was limited from the start, and then, once the war was on in earnest, it felt — realistically — that it had run smack against the brick wall of George Bush’s manic pigheadedness. Demonstrators are unlikely to invest their energies in what look from the start like very lost causes. And the demonstrations also tailed off because the mainstream media didn’t pay attention — refused to pay attention. The story line they were promoting was: America kicks ass, new era begins!

Do not neglect the new wars’ insulation from the American population, either. A volunteer army, disproportionately staffed from rural areas, is an army insulated from the more vocal, influential sectors of the country. By the same token, drone wars in Yemen and Somalia take place behind thick curtains, with some effectiveness against hated jihadis, and the offstage moans are muffled. For the vast American majority, ordinary life goes on — business as usual. For that matter, too, it’s troubled business, with many people beleaguered by what feel like the more urgent cares of joblessness and eviction. Paradoxically, perhaps, a more prosperous country is better available to resist its own wars.

But also, in the new century, once war was on in earnest, the demonstrations dwindled because many former or potential demonstrators gravely doubted how nice the outcome would be if the expeditionary forces left — or at least, lacking a tragic sense, downplayed the human costs of withdrawal. This was true for Iraq as it had earlier been true for Afghanistan, where the pro-war momentum of October 2001 was fueled, at the start, by the direct connection of the Taliban with al-Qaida. But once al-Qaida was on the run (mostly over the border to Pakistan, as was predictable) it was hard to summon the will, the clarity, the intensity, the downright buoyancy of a street movement when one harbored a fear — sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not — that the victors in the case of an American defeat would be foul. In Afghanistan, they would be the burqa-enforcing Taliban committed to barring girls from school. As for “Iraqi Freedom,” Iraq with a zeroed-out American presence looked more like civil war between Shia fanatics and Baathist holdovers, garnished with torture.

During the Vietnam War, when the antiwar movement was challenged with the question — meant to be rhetorical — How can we leave? our common reply was, On ships. In the case of Vietnam, that was the right and sufficient answer. The aftermath of that hideous war was always going to be awful — and it was going to be the same kind of awfulness whether the United States accepted elections to unify the country in 1956, as the Geneva Accord required; or the U. S. had withdrawn in 1963, when Kennedy flirted with the idea; or not until 1975, as it came to pass. The Vietnamese Communists were always going to win, were going to reunify the country, were going to install a Communist government in the South, were going to set up so-called reeducation camps and the whole apparatus of dictatorship. They would have done so, given the chance, in 1956 or 1963, though if the war had ended then, some 3 million more Vietnamese would have stayed alive.

The domino theory that served to rationalize the Indochinese wars for years was always a fraud. The dominoes were the former French colonies of Indochina — and no more. As Vietnam went, so went Laos — and, horrendously (in no small part because America dragged Cambodia into the war), the Khmer Rouge genocide that was, in fact, opposed and finally halted by the Vietnamese army itself. The scare scenario in which all Southeast Asia would be dragged over the precipice — Thailand! Indonesia! Malaysia! Australia! — was always nothing more than a phantasmagorical nightmare in the fevered brains of Cold War fanatics.

By contrast, the case of Afghanistan, what was originally a just war of self-defense against al-Qaida — indeed, a “war of necessity” — devolved into an incoherent morass. Where was the necessity to shore up the corrupt, feckless government of Hamid Karzai facing a porous border and official Pakistani connivance? Was the Afghanistan intervention supposed to avert a 21st-century cascade of dominoes? We couldn’t leave, it was said, because leaving would empower jihadis. But on those grounds, should the United States have stayed in Lebanon in 1983? Ronald Reagan didn’t think so. And would a NATO pullout encourage violent jihadis in other Muslim countries any more than an American occupation of Afghanistan? Were millions of dollars and thousands of lives needed to crush a few hundred remnants of al-Qaida, obviously a stateless network already regathering in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen?

As for Libya, hardly any opponents of the NATO war are enamored of Col. Gadhafi, but the war is largely out of sight and the bodies don’t wear NATO uniforms. America’s air bombardment of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia came into the sights of an antiwar movement that had already reached critical mass while thousands of American soldiers were being killed. So far as NATO is concerned, this war is all bombardment, and the rebels have a very good press.

Anyway, “out” is not a plan — it is a goal, though not a utopian one. Pull out and there will still be avoidable suffering. As always in the actual world, there is that nettlesome problem of ends and means. Some ends justify some means. Just as the mindless apostles of purification claimed clean hands on the way in, there is sometimes a tendency to say that since we, the antiwarriors, aren’t the ones who got in, it’s not our responsibility to explain how to get out. Since we shouldn’t have been there in the first place, our hands are clean. But there are no clean hands — for anyone — on the way out. In a fine essay in a 2009 book edited by Michael Walzer and Nicolaus Mills, “Getting Out,” the Indian political scientist Rajiv Bhargava argues quite carefully that if the British had stayed in India one more year, and done the right things, the subcontinent could well have been spared the horrible war of partition that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

The military attacks now underway, in Libya and elsewhere, will mainly be fought by elite units — Special Forces, Navy SEALs, drone commanders — operating from far-flung American bases, without any civilian call-up. Any revulsion by well-informed citizens against what they do is counterbalanced by popular satisfaction at their successes, by their virtual invisibility, and the unpleasantness of their intended targets. These are not recipes for popular commotion — let alone opposition.

Todd Gitlin’s most recent books are “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election” (with Liel Leibovitz), and a novel, “Undying.”

: Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. His next book, available in December, is "The Intellectuals and the Flag" (Columbia University Press). More Todd Gitlin

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Panetta’s profanity-laced, flub-filled trip

The new Defense Secretary's maiden voyage abroad was a memorable one

By Natasha Lennard

FILE - In this July 10, 2011 file photo Defense Secretary Leon Panetta listens to a reporter's question while making an unannounced visit to Camp Dwyer, in southern Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Paul J. Richards, Pool, File) (Credit: AP)

Topics:Pentagon, War Room, Afghanistan, Al-Qaida, Iraq, Iraq war, U.S. Military

Newly minted Defense Secretary Leon Panetta inexplicably sprinkled his recently completed trip to to Iraq and Afghanistan with misstatements and mild profanities, earning some unfortunate headlines. Here are some highlights from the 73-year-old former CIA chief’s travels:

”Dammit, make a decision.” Panetta expresses his frustration with Iraq’s delay in making a decision on whether to ask the U.S. to keep some of its 46,000 troops in the country past the end of the year.
”This damn country has a hell of a lot of resources,” Panetta told troops in Baghdad. The New York Times counted “16 cheerful ‘damns’ and ‘hells’”during 28 minutes of remarks.
During the same speech, he described the operation to kill “that son of a bitch” Osama bin Laden.
Panetta told reporters that the United States would keep 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2014. The White House has pledged to bring many more service members home by then and aides were quick to say that Panetta had misspoken.
As President George W. Bush did before him, Panetta suggested the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 was related to the presence of al-Qaida there, telling troops in Baghdad that “the reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked.” This is something the Obama White House has denied.

What could possibly account for Panetta’s seemingly of-the-cuff manner? The Defense Secretary had a suggestion on MSNBC on Monday night: “I’m Italian, what the frick can I tell you?”

: More Natasha Lennard

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We’re stuck in Bush’s America

W. and Cheney have faded from public view, but Obama continues to carry out their destructive war on terror

By Tom Engelhardt

Topics:Terrorism, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Foreign policy, George W. Bush, Iraq war, War Room

George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big 6-5 the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already on to her next memoir, and yet it’s as if she’s been wiped from history, too. As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February and it hit the bestseller lists, but a few months later, where is he?

And can anyone be surprised? They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing. The country imploded economically while they were at the helm. Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff. In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about?

Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.) Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you’ll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: They didn’t turn the page on us.

They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn’t. It’s not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word “homeland,” both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever; or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie; or Guantánamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close; or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating; or the National Security Agency’s surveillance and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing. No, it’s scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over. Among them all, consider the Obama administration’s updated version of that signature Bush invention, the global war on terror.

Yes, Obama’s national security officials threw that term to the dogs back in 2009 and now pursue a no-name global strategy that’s meant not to remind you of the Bush era. Recently, the White House released an unclassified summary of its 2011 “National Strategy for Counterterrorism,” a 19-page document in prose only a giant bureaucracy with a desire to be impenetrable could produce. (Don’t bother to read it. I read it for you.) If it makes a feeble attempt to put a little rhetorical space between Obama-style counterterrorism and what the Bush administration was doing, it still manages to send one overwhelming message: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding among us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes.

The global war on terror (or GWOT in acronym-crazed Washington) was the bastard spawn of the disorientation and soaring hubris of the days after the 9/11 attacks, which set afire the delusional geopolitical dreams of Bush, Cheney, their top national security officials and their neocon supporters. And here’s the saddest thing: The Bush administration’s most extreme ideas when it comes to GWOT are now the humdrum norm of Obama administration policies — and hardly anyone thinks it’s worth a comment.

A history lesson from hell

It’s easy to forget just how quickly GWOT was upon us or how strange it really was. On the night of Sept. 11, 2001, addressing the nation, President Bush first spoke of winning “the war against terrorism.” Nine days later, in an address to a joint session of Congress, the phrase “war on terror” was already being expanded. “Our war on terror,” Bush said, “begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

In those early days, there were already clues aplenty as to which way the wind was gusting in Washington. Top administration officials immediately made it plain that a single yardstick was to measure planetary behavior from then on: Were you “with us or against us”? From the Gulf of Guinea to Central Asia, that question would reveal everything worth knowing, and terror would be its measure.

As the New York Times reported on Sept. 14, Bush’s top officials had “cast aside diplomatic niceties” and were giving Arab countries and “the nations of the world a stark choice: Stand with us against terrorism or face the certain prospect of death and destruction.” According to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage took that message directly to his country’s intelligence director: Either ally with Washington in the fight against al-Qaida, or prepare to be bombed “back to the Stone Age,” as Armitage reportedly put it.

Global war on terror? They weren’t exaggerating. These were people shocked by what had happened to iconic buildings in “the homeland” and overawed by what they imagined to be the all-conquering power of the U.S. military. In their fever dreams, they thought that this was their moment and the apocalyptic winds of history were at their backs. And they weren’t hiding where they wanted it to blow them either. That was why they tried to come up with names to replace GWOT — World War IV (the third was the Cold War) and the Long War being two of them — that would be even blunter about their desire to plunge us into a situation from which none of us would emerge in our lifetime. But to the extent anything stuck, GWOT did.

And if everything is in a name, then the significance of that one wasn’t hard to grasp. Bush’s national security folks focused on an area that they termed “the arc of instability.” It stretched from North Africa to the Chinese border, conveniently sweeping through the major oil lands of the planet. They would later dub it “the Greater Middle East.” In that vast region, they were ready to declare hunting season open and they would be the ones to hand out the hunting licenses.

Within weeks of 9/11, top administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were speaking of this vast region as a global “swamp,” an earthly miasma that they were going to “drain” of terrorists. As the U.S. military had declared whole areas of enemy-controlled rural Vietnam “free-fire zones” in the 1960s, so they were going to turn much of the planet into such a zone, a region where no national boundary, no claim of sovereignty would stop them from taking out whomever (or whatever government) they cared to.

Within days of 9/11, administration officials let it be known that, in their war, they were preparing to target terrorist groups in at least 60 countries. And if they were that blunt in public, in private they were exuberantly extreme. Top officials spoke with gusto about “taking off the gloves” or “the shackles” (the ones, as they saw it, that Congress had placed on the executive branch and the intelligence community in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair).

As journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” in a “Presidential Finding” on Sept. 17, 2011, only six days after the World Trade Center towers went down, Bush granted the CIA an unprecedented license to wage war globally. By then, the CIA had presented him with a plan whose name was worthy of a sci-fi film: the “Worldwide Attack Matrix.” According to Suskind, it already “detailed operations [to come] against terrorists in 80 countries.”

In other words, with less than 200 countries on the planet, the president had declared open season on nearly half of them. Of course, the Pentagon wasn’t about to be left out while the CIA was given the run of the globe. Soon enough, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld began building up an enormous CIA-style secret army of elite special operations forces within the military. By the end of the Bush years, these had reportedly been deployed in — don’t be surprised — 60 countries. In the Obama era, that number expanded to 75 — mighty close to the 80 in the Worldwide Attack Matrix.

And one more thing, there was a new weapon in the world, the perfect weapon to make mincemeat of all boundaries and a mockery of national sovereignty and international law (with little obvious danger to us): the pilotless drone. Surveillance drones already in existence were quickly armed with missiles and bombs and, in November 2002, one of these was sent out on the first CIA robot assassination mission — to Yemen, where six al-Qaida suspects in a vehicle were obliterated without a by-your-leave to anyone.

CT to the horizon

That CIA strike launched the drone wars, which are now a perfectly humdrum part of our American world of war. Only recently, the Obama administration leaked news that it was intensifying its military-run war against al-Qaida in Yemen by bringing the CIA into the action. The agency is now to build a base for its drone air wing somewhere in the Middle East to hunt Yemeni terrorists (and assumedly those elsewhere in the region as well). Yemen functionally has no government to cooperate with, but in pure Bushian fashion, who cares?

Similarly, as June ended, unnamed American officials leaked the news that, for the first time, a U.S. military drone had conducted a strike against al-Shabab militants in Somalia, with the implication that this was a “war” that would also be intensifying. At about the same time, curious reports emerged from Pakistan, where the CIA has been conducting an escalating drone war since 2004 (strikes viewed “negatively” by 97 percent of Pakistanis, according to a recent Pew poll). Top Pakistani officials were threatening to shut down the agency’s drone operations at Shamsi air base in Baluchistan. Shamsi is the biggest of the three borrowed Pakistani bases from which the CIA secretly launches its drones. The Obama administration responded bluntly. White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan insisted that, whatever happened, the U.S. would continue to “deliver precise and overwhelming force against al-Qaida” in the Pakistani tribal areas.

As Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog summed things up, “The harsh truth is that the Pakistanis can’t stop the drone war on their soil. But they can shift its launching points over the Afghan border. And the United States is already working on a backup plan for a long-term drone war, all without the Pakistanis’ help.” In other words, permission from a beleaguered local ally might be nice, but it isn’t a conceptual necessity. (And in any case, CIA flights from Shamsi still evidently continue uninterrupted.)

In other words, if Bush’s crew is long gone, the world they willed us is alive and well. After all, there are reasonable odds that, on the day you read this piece, somewhere in the free-fire zone of the Greater Middle East, a drone “piloted” from an air base in the western United States or perhaps a secret “suburban facility” near Langley, Va., will act as judge, jury and executioner somewhere in the “arc of instability.” It will take out a terrorist suspect or suspects, or a set of civilians mistaken for terrorists, or a “target” someone in Washington didn’t like, or that one of our allies-cum-intelligence-assets had it in for, or perhaps a mix of all of the above. We can’t be sure how many countries American drones, military or CIA, are patrolling, but in at least six of them — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq — they have launched strikes in recent years that have killed more “suspects” than ever died in the 9/11 attacks.

And there is more — possibly much more — to come. In late June, the Obama administration posted that unclassified summary of its 2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism at the White House website. It’s a document that carefully avoids using the the term “war on terror,” even though counterterrorism advisor Brennan did admit that the document “tracked closely with the goals” of the Bush administration.

The document tries to argue that, when it comes to counterterrorism (or CT), the Obama administration has actually pulled back somewhat from the expansiveness of Bush-era GWOT thinking. We are now, it insists, only going after “al Qaida and its affiliates and adherents,” not every “terror group” on the planet. But here’s the curious thing: When you check out its “areas of focus,” other than “the Homeland” (always capitalized as if our country were the United States of Homeland), what you find is an expanded version of the Bush global target zone, including the Maghreb and Sahel (northern Africa), East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, South Asia, Central Asia and — thrown in for good measure — Southeast Asia. In most of those areas, Bush-style hunting season is evidently still open.

If you consider deeds, not words, when it comes to drones the arc of instability is expanding; and based on the new counterterrorism document, the next place for our robotic assassins to cross borders in search of targets could be the Maghreb and Sahel. There, we’re told, al-Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), with roots in Algeria, but operatives in northern Mali, among other places, potentially threatens “U.S. citizens and interests in the region.”

Here’s how the document puts the matter in its classically bureaucratese version of English:

[W]e must therefore pursue near-term efforts and at times more targeted approaches that directly counter AQIM and its enabling elements. We must work actively to contain, disrupt, degrade, and dismantle AQIM as logical steps on the path to defeating the group. As appropriate, the United States will use its CT tools, weighing the costs and benefits of its approach in the context of regional dynamics and perceptions and the actions and capabilities of its partners in the region…

That may not sound so ominous, but best guess: the global war on terror is soon likely to be on the march across North Africa, heading south. And recent Obama national security appointments only emphasize how much the drone wars are on Washington’s future agenda. After all, Leon Panetta, the man who, since 2009, ran the CIA’s drone wars, has moved over to the Pentagon as secretary of defense; while Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus, the war commander who loosed American air power (including drone power) in a massive way in Afghanistan, is moving on to the CIA.

On his first visit to South Asia as secretary of defense, Panetta made the claim that Washington was “within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaida.” Perhaps it won’t surprise you that such news signals not a winding down, but a ratcheting up, of the global war on terror. Panetta, as Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported, “hinted of more to come, saying he would redouble efforts by the military and the spy agency to work together on counterterrorism missions outside the traditional war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

More to come, as two men switching their “civilian” and military roles partner up. Count on drone-factory assembly lines to rev up as well, and the military’s special operations forces to be in expansion mode. And note that by the penultimate page of that CT strategy summary, the administration has left al-Qaida behind and is muttering in bureau-speak about Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran and Syria (“active sponsors of terrorism”), and even the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

On the Bush administration’s watch, the U.S. blew a gasket, American power went into decline, and the everyday security of everyday Americans took a major hit. Still, give them credit. They were successful on at least one count: They made sure that we’d never stop fighting their war on terror. In this sense, Obama and his top officials are a drone national security team, carrying out the dreams and fantasies of their predecessors, while Bush and his men (and woman) give lucrative speeches and write books, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

: Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (Haymarket Books), has just been published. More Tom Engelhardt

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Cost of air conditioning in US wars: $20 billion

Or 40 times the annual federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

By Justin Elliott

Cost of air conditioning in US wars: $20 billion

Topics:Iraq war, War Room, Afghanistan

[UPDATED BELOW]

War critics in Congress would be foolish not to seize on the assertion from Gen. David Petraeus’ former chief logistician that the annual cost of air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan is over $20 billion:

“When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world — escorting, command and control, medevac support — when you throw all that infrastructure in, we’re talking over $20 billion,” Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. Anderson is a retired brigadier general who served as Gen. David Patreaus’ chief logistician in Iraq. …

To power an air conditioner at a remote outpost in land-locked Afghanistan, a gallon of fuel has to be shipped into Karachi, Pakistan, then driven 800 miles over 18 days to Afghanistan on roads that are sometimes little more than “improved goat trails,” Anderson says. “And you’ve got risks that are associated with moving the fuel almost every mile of the way.”

Like the $600 toilet seat, this is the sort of statistic that people remember.

Anderson’s methodology for reaching the figure is not entirely clear; for example it’s possible that he’s using the entire overhead cost of the fuel supply line in his calculations, which would produce an inflated figure. (If I’m able to reach him to detail his calculations, I will update this post.)

As NPR notes, the cost of air conditioning for Iraq and Afghanistan is more than the annual budget of NASA. How much is it in the context of other budget items in the news recently? $20.2 billion is …

40 times the federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last year
55 times the annual government funding of Planned Parenthood
20 times what the Libya conflict is projected to cost by the end of September

UPDATE: Anderson sends along a note about his methodology:

The short answer to your question is that my calculations are based on the Fully Burdened Cost of Fuel (FBCF), which includes overhead such as route clearance, road maint, security/escorts, command and control, medevac, etc. My conservative number is the fully burdened fuel costs are $30/gallon for Afghanistan, $18/gallon for Iraq (much better transportation network). When I was the senior staff logistician in Iraq from Aug 06 – Nov 07, DLA-Energy estimated the FBCF as $13.44/gallon, by the way. Deloitte studied issue in Nov 09 and wrote fully burdened cost is $45/gallon when ground transport exceeds 950 miles (see attached report). In consideration of the fact that most fuel is transported from US to Karachi, then driven over perhaps the most mountainous and challenging roads in the world to one of the two US/NATO Afghan log bases (Kandahar and Bagram), then downloaded to strategic storage, then uploaded to other trucks and moved to the actual requirement (usually in excess of 950 miles total) in hundreds of [Forward Operating Bases] throughout Afghanistan, one can see that my estimate is indeed quite conservative. I low-balled it so that folks don’t think I’m cooking the books somehow.