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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Remember the special offers still available on historian Alfred McCoy’s just-published Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. Of it, Ann Jones said, “As the empire’s political, economic, and military strategies unravel under cover of secrecy, America’s neglected citizens would do well to read this book." For a donation of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the U.S.A.), you can get a signed, personalized copy from the author. (For further details, go to our donation page.)  In addition, Haymarket Books, which produces and distributes our expanding line of volumes, will give any TD reader an exclusive 40% discount on the purchase of McCoy’s book. Simply click here to take advantage of this special offer and, while you're at it, offer a little always appreciated support for TD. Tom]

The United States just experienced its largest rainfall event in memory. For the first time in recorded weather history, two category 4 hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, hit in a single season (not yet over). And San Francisco, famed for its chilliness, experienced an unheard of 106 degree day as September began, while a record West Coast heat wave, essentially an unending Irma or Harvey of wildfires, left parts of the region, from Los Angeles to British Columbia, enwreathed in a pall of smoke and ash (without even an El Niño year to blame for it). And did I mention that both states hit by those recent hurricanes have climate-change denying governors? Or that the man now in charge in Washington also denies the reality of climate change (a Chinese hoax!) and has stocked his administration with a remarkable cast of fervent deniers (the latest such appointment being the head of NASA), who have essentially wiped all references to the phenomenon off every imaginable federal website, fired climate-change scientists, and -- as a crew regularly backed in their careers by big energy -- seem intent on recreating the fossil-fueled America of The Donald’s 1950s childhood.

Fortunately, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare tells us today, the cavalry is riding to the rescue -- more or less literally.  In a government shutting down anything faintly connected to global warming, only one institution isn’t now run by deniers and that’s the U.S. military.  As Klare points out, its high command is still planning for a radically climate-changed planet. Unfortunately, we’re talking about the same institution whose generals have been in a “generational struggle” to win even one of the endless wars they’ve launched or wandered into since 9/11. They belong to an institution, the Pentagon, that has gobbled up almost unimaginable sums of taxpayer dollars, without in those same years even being capable of successfully auditing itself. In other words, our potential saviors, at a moment when the very environment that has for millennia welcomed humanity is up for grabs, might be thought of as the Keystone Cops of the twenty-first century. Tom

Beyond Harvey and Irma
Militarizing Homeland Security in the Climate-Change Era
By Michael T. Klare

Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had sent members of the state National Guard to devastated Houston, anxiously recalled them while putting in place emergency measures for his own state. A small flotilla of naval vessels, originally sent to waters off Texas, was similarly redirected to the Caribbean, while specialized combat units drawn from as far afield as Colorado, Illinois, and Rhode Island were rushed to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, members of the California National Guard were being mobilized to fight wildfires raging across that state (as across much of the West) during its hottest summer on record.

Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the damage to America’s seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructive thanks to climate change. This is a “war” that won’t have a name -- not yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that. “The firepower of the federal government” was being trained on Harvey, as William Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), put it in a blunt expression of this warlike approach. But don’t expect any of the military officials involved in such efforts to identify climate change as the source of their new strategic orientation, not while Commander in Chief Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office refusing to acknowledge the reality of global warming or its role in heightening the intensity of major storms; not while he continues to stock his administration, top to bottom, with climate-change deniers.

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In 1985, at age 41, I visited Disney World for the first time. I remember the experience for two things: the endless lines so cleverly organized that you never knew how long they truly were and the Hawaiian Luau dinner I attended. Yes, a genuine Hawaiian feast that reminded me of American Chinese food circa 1953 and the unforgettable “entertainment” offered by “native” Hawaiian dancers with spears who smacked their weapons on the ground and rhythmically advanced on the diners glowering fiercely. Whoever those dancers were, they were quite skilled at playing “primitives” from elsewhere, also circa 1953, objects of fear, wonder, and scorn. (Oh yes, and Disney World was the place that first taught me this country had an obesity problem -- along with some of the most fattening food on the planet.)

I must admit that my grown-up’s eye view of Walt Disney’s fantasy universe left me a little shocked at the time, but I shouldn’t have been. After all, a decade or so earlier I had absorbed How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Matellart, an unforgettable exposé of the true nature of Disney-style American “innocence.” It was a document that had emerged from the democratic Chilean revolution of Salvador Allende, just one of the governing experiments of the twentieth century that the U.S. helped do in. (In fact, I still have my copy of that British-produced book from the mid-1970s, which, in its Spanish version, had quite literally been consigned to the flames and later in English was impounded by U.S. Customs. It was a work that no American publisher would put out at the time and so my well-worn copy has become a remarkably valuable collector’s item, as Dorfman points out in today’s post.)

Keep in mind that I had been a typical Disney kid of the 1950s. I read Walt's comics and raptly watched Walt Disney’s Disneyland on our black-and-white TV. That weekly extravaganza included such gems as “Our Friend the Atom,” a paean of praise to the all-American power source that, only a decade or so earlier, had obliterated two Japanese cities. Above all, though, the show was a living ad for the wonders of -- you guessed it -- Disneyland, which was partially constructed with money ABC paid to air it. (“Each week, as you enter this timeless land, one of these many worlds will open to you: Frontierland, tall tales and true from the legendary past!  Tomorrowland, promise of things to come! Adventureland, the wonder world of nature’s own realm! Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of them all!”) I can still remember yearning to visit Disneyland and see the guide on its “African” river at Adventureland shoot his pistol directly into the voracious maw of a hippopotamus. Of course, Uncle Walt’s showcase had been built in distant California at a moment when air travel wasn’t the commonplace of today and the farthest west I had ever been was Albany, New York.

Still, I do have something to thank Walt for. In the spring of 1980, in exile from his native Chile (then in the hands of its military), Ariel Dorfman walked unannounced into my office at Pantheon Books in New York City. Fortunately, thanks to Disney’s favorite duck, I already knew his work well and so was prepped to become the editor of his first two books in English. Now, another set of decades down the line, he completes the circle of our lives as he looks back by torchlight (so to speak) on his own experiences with Walt Disney and what they mean in the age of Donald Trump. Tom

How to Read Donald Trump
On Burning Books But Not Ideas
By Ariel Dorfman

The organizers of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville last month knew just what they were doing when they decided to carry torches on their nocturnal march to protest the dethroning of a statue of Robert E. Lee. That brandishing of fire in the night was meant to evoke memories of terror, of past parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany.

The organizers wanted to issue a warning to those watching: that past violence, perpetrated in defense of the “blood and soil” of the white race, would once again be harnessed and deployed in Donald Trump’s America. Indeed, the very next day, that fatal August 12th, those nationalist fanatics unleashed an orgy of brutality that led to the deaths of three people and the injuring of many more.

Millions around America and the world were horrified and revolted by that parade of torches.  In my case, however, they also brought to mind deeply personal memories of other fires that had burned darkly so many decades before, far from the United States or Nazi Europe. As I watched footage of that rally, I couldn’t help remembering the bonfires that lit up my own country, Chile, in the aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s September 11th coup in 1973 -- that “first 9/11,” which, with the active support of Washington and the CIA, had overthrown the popularly elected government of Salvador Allende.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Don’t forget our special offers on historian Alfred McCoy’s just-published Dispatch Book (already in its second printing!): In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. Of it, Andrew Bacevich said, “This is history with profound relevance to events that are unfolding before our eyes.” For a donation of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the U.S.A.), you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book. For further details, go to our donation page.  (Many, many thanks to those of you who have already done this and so lent us a hand in tough times.) In addition, Haymarket Books, which produces and distributes our expanding line of volumes, will give any TD reader an exclusive 40% discount on the purchase of McCoy’s book. Simply click here to take advantage of this special offer. It’s a great way to support our efforts. Tom]

After 19 al-Qaeda militants armed only with box-cutters and knives hijacked four American commercial airliners, the U.S. military moved with remarkable efficiency to rectify the problem. In the years since, in its global war on terror, the Pentagon has ensured that America’s enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere have regularly been able to arm themselves with... well, not to beat around the bush, a remarkable range of U.S. weaponry.  The latest such story: a report that in recent fighting around the city of Tal Afar, the Iraqi military recovered a U.S.-produced FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile and launcher from an Islamic State weapons cache. That’s a weapon capable of taking out an M1 Abrams tank. And this is hardly the first time U.S. anti-tank missiles meant either for the Iraqi military or Syrian rebels backed by the CIA have turned up in the hands of ISIS militants. In 2015, that group released photos of its fighters using U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles. 

Of course, when the American-trained, funded, and armed Iraqi army collapsed in the summer of 2014 in the face of relatively small numbers of ISIS fighters, that group took vast stores of U.S. weaponry and vehicles that they’ve used ever since. But that was hardly the end of it.  The U.S. soon began retraining and rearming its Iraqi allies to the tune of $1.6 billion for “tens of thousands of assault rifles, hundreds of armored vehicles, hundreds of mortar rounds, nearly 200 sniper rifles, and other gear,” much of which, a government audit found, the Pentagon simply lost track of. The weaponry, you might say, went missing in action. No one knew whose hands much of it ended up in and this wasn’t a new story, either.  For example, in 2007 the Government Accountability Office found that “the United States could not account for nearly 30% of the weapons it had distributed in Iraq since 2004 -- about 200,000 guns.”

Similar stories could be told about Afghanistan, another country where U.S. weaponry has disappeared in remarkable quantities. (The Taliban, for instance, recently released a video of their fighters sporting weaponry normally used only by U.S. Special Operations personnel.) In short, the Pentagon has been arming itself, its allies, and its enemies in a profligate fashion for years now in its never-ending conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. As TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore suggests today, since 9/11 the U.S. military has in some sense been fighting itself -- and losing. Someday, when historians look back on this bizarre tale, they will have to explain one thing above all: Why, year after year, in the face of obvious and repetitive failure in such conflicts, was no one in Washington capable of imagining another course of action? Tom

The American Military Uncontained
Out Everywhere and Winning Nowhere
By William J. Astore

When it comes to the “world’s greatest military,” the news has been shocking. Two fast U.S. Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with tragic loss of life.  An Air Force that has been in the air continuously for years and yet doesn’t have enough pilots to fly its combat jets.  Ground troops who find themselves fighting “rebels” in Syria previously armed and trained by the CIA.  Already overstretched Special Operations forces facing growing demands as their rates of mental distress and suicide rise.  Proxy armies in Iraq and Afghanistan that are unreliable, often delivering American-provided weaponry to black markets and into the hands of various enemies.  All of this and more coming at a time when defense spending is once again soaring and the national security state is awash in funds to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year.

What gives?  Why are highly maneuverable and sophisticated naval ships colliding with lumbering cargo vessels?  Why is an Air Force that exists to fly and fight short 1,200 pilots?  Why are U.S. Special Operations forces deployed everywhere and winning nowhere?  Why, in short, is the U.S. military fighting itself -- and losing?

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Finally, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, Alfred McCoy’s new Dispatch Book, long announced at this site, is out. You’ve already had a taste of it in previous posts of his and you’ll get another today. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower, the book immediately “joins the essential short list of scrupulous historical and comparative studies of the United States as an awesome, conflicted, technologically innovative, routinely atrocious, and ultimately hubristic imperial power,” and it’s now yours for the asking. 

If you’re in the mood to contribute $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the USA) to keep TomDispatch rolling along in the age of Trump, McCoy will send you a signed, personalized copy of the book, a little classic for your bookshelf. For the details, go to our donation page  (and we’ll be eternally grateful). If you just want to get your hands on In the Shadows of the American Century -- and you should, since American decline is the hidden theme of the Trump era and so of our lives -- then I have an offer for you. Haymarket Books, which produces and distributes our expanding line of volumes, will give any TD reader an exclusive 40% discount on the purchase of McCoy’s book. Simply click here to take advantage of this special offer.  Whatever you do, do something and so support us in our efforts. My thanks! Tom]

In the early 1950s, my father ran a gas station on Governors Island, a military base in New York harbor. In those years, it would be my only encounter with the suburbs. And there, for maybe a dime on any Saturday afternoon, I could join the kids from military families at the local movie house for the usual Westerns or war movies preceded by either a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon space adventure serial. Those films were old even then, but the future still looked remarkably new to me. They were my introduction to space and the wonders of the weaponry to someday be wielded there, including disintegrator pistols, flash rays, and other techno-advances in death and destruction.

Though such serials, if you see them today, couldn’t look campier, they seemed to me then like promises of a future almost beyond imagining. And we, the children of the 1950s, were being promised much, including, for instance, that we would all someday have our own individual jetpacks to travel the skyways of the great spired cities of the future. (Imagine traffic jams in the clouds, as I did then!) And in the 1960s, of course, many of us were prepared to join Captain James T. Kirk on the deck of the starship USS Enterprise and imagine “boldly going where no man has gone before” among the many alien races of the United Federation of Planets and beyond. The crew of that spacecraft, too, wielded or faced a remarkable range of weaponry in the 23rd century, including phasers, lasers, plasma cannons, and even Ferengi energy whips.

Aside from Star Trek-like “communicators” (think smartphones), the actual future, the one most of us are living in at the moment, has been something of a letdown by comparison. Its grim wonders include: thousand-year rain storms instead of jet-pack traffic jams, and one not particularly spired city that recently went almost completely underwater without any of the charm of Atlantis. But don’t think that somewhere out there people who, in their own youth, were influenced by Buck Rogers, Captain Kirk, and undoubtedly the Star Wars movies haven’t been trying to do something about this. Take historian Alfred McCoy’s word for it, they have -- and they've had techno-weapons, including space-based ones, endlessly on their minds.  At least since the 1960s, the Pentagon has, in fact, been pouring taxpayer dollars into the planning and testing of Buck Rogers-style techno-weapons and the possibility of bringing space war and all its “wonders” to planet Earth.

We’re talking about the same outfit that successfully developed robotic killers, the global assassins that now patrol the skies of the Greater Middle East daily, killing terrorists, insurgents, and plenty of civilians in the bargain (and so acting as a brilliant recruiting tool for just those insurgencies and terror groups). In his new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, just published this week, McCoy takes us on a grim and gripping tour of the present state of the Pentagon’s wonder weaponry and its plans for a future that will take us far beyond today’s one-way drone wars into a world in which the United States may look ever less like Buck Rogers or Captain Kirk and ever more like some of those malign aliens they confronted. Tom

The Pentagon’s New Wonder Weapons for World Dominion
Or Buck Rogers in the 21st Century
By Alfred W. McCoy

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] 

Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper readers across America were captivated by a brand-new comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.  It offered the country its first images of space-age death rays, atomic explosions, and inter-planetary travel.

“I was twenty years old,” World War I veteran Anthony “Buck” Rogers told readers in the very first strip, “surveying the lower levels of an abandoned mine near Pittsburgh... when suddenly... gas knocked me out. But I didn’t die. The peculiar gas... preserved me in suspended animation. Finally, another shifting of strata admitted fresh air and I revived.”

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In some closet, I still have toy soldiers from my 1950s childhood.  They played a crucial role in an all-American world of good guys and bad guys I learned about, in part, from the westerns and war movies my father took me to at local movie theaters. I can still remember playing out those long-lost stories out with a motley assortment of bluecoats, redcoats, GIs (of the green plastic variety), and Indians on the floor of my remarkably empty room in the era before childhood had been truly discovered as a marketplace of significance.  I didn’t even have blocks to build battlefields, so I used my books, which, in two facing rows, became cliffs on either side of a narrow defile. The treacherous Indians would peer over The Pony Express or Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia, commanding the heights of the valley of death below into which the cavalry would have to ride. Preparing their ambush, they would “lie” on top of books or “crouch” behind them, fingering -- in my imagination, of course -- bows, tomahawks, or guns.

Into that grim valley, the bluecoats (and because I had too few of them, the GIs and redcoats from other wars entirely) would ride.  Well, actually most of them weren’t mounted because I was short a reasonable troop of cavalry or even a full contingent of foot soldiers.  Choosing the order of the cast of characters for that “ride” and so who was to be handed over to destruction lent individual character and value to each treasured good guy.  Yet, if the initial ambush was to be satisfying, death had to be faced, which meant choosing the most lackluster of those figures -- casualties of previous battles with chipped paint, broken limbs, or busted-off rifles -- to fall in the first cascade of arrows.  The crucial question was when to stop the killing of the bluecoats and begin the destined slaughter of the Indians with which all such stories in that bygone era had to end. A satisfying cutoff point was needed, especially given a countervailing temptation -- to go all the way, to wipe out every last bluecoat.  Sometimes it was powerful enough that I found myself almost siding with the Indians, which hinted at something novel hidden away in this traditional storytelling process.  It also hinted at a moment, still years away in my life, when in the midst of a grim, never-ending war in Vietnam, that American war story of my childhood, the very definition of who was a good guy and a bad guy, would be turned on its head.  Yet, in all those “battles” on the floor of my room, I never gave in to that temptation and brought myself to test out what another kind of story would truly feel like. 

Amid the carnage, as arrows rained down, a few Indians would begin to fall. There was no particular order, no special precedence in the roll call of death, since bad guys were, by their nature, essentially indistinguishable, the only exception being “the chief.”  He held a silver-bladed tomahawk, and miraculously in those days, his arm actually pivoted at the shoulder.  As the sole Indian with a distinguishing trait, he was invariably the last to die. 

These scenes from my childhood -- and with minor variations I suspect, from so many childhoods of that era -- came to mind when I read the latest piece by TomDispatch regular and Army Major Danny Sjursen, author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge, on our never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East.  He raises a much-needed twenty-first-century question that still couldn’t be more awkward: Who, on the all-too-real, still-spreading American battlefields of our world, are the good guys and who are the bad guys of our time?  And then, of course, there’s that other question: What story, if any, about the wars of our moment will future American children, no longer undoubtedly on the floors of their rooms but in as yet unknown entertainment environments, play? Tom

Worth Dying For?
When It Comes to the War in the Greater Middle East, Maybe We’re the Bad Guys
By Danny Sjursen

I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas.  And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011. All of 18, he was short, scrawny, and popular. Nine months after graduating from high school, he’d found himself chasing the Taliban with the rest of our gang. At five foot nothing, I once saw him step into an irrigation canal and disappear from sight -- all but the two-foot antenna on his radio. In my daydreams, I always see the same scene, the moment his filthy, grizzled baby face reappeared above that ditch, a cigarette still dangling loosely from his lips. His name was Anderson and I can remember thinking at that moment: What will I tell his mother if he gets killed out here?

And then... poof... it’s 2017 again and I’m here in Kansas, pushing papers at Fort Leavenworth, those days in the field long gone.  Anderson himself survived his tour of duty in Afghanistan, though I’ve no idea where he is today.  A better commander might.  Several of his buddies were less fortunate.  They died, or found themselves short a limb or two, or emotionally and morally scarred for life. 

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