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No question about it. In 1991, it was the greatest power on the face of the Earth. There had never been anything like it -- or so it seemed when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union, that other superpower of the Cold War era, imploded. Left alone on the planet, then, was a single mighty nation, wealthy beyond compare. To that one-of-a-kind land fell the obvious task of reorganizing a world and, given its military, what could possibly stand in its way? After all, it already possessed an unprecedented number of military bases stretching across the globe. History had simply never seen anything like it.

In the history to come, there would be nothing like the America that the Washington elite of that moment imagined either. Up against only the most pathetic of local anything-but-superpowers, with Russia reduced to a shadow of its Soviet self and China just beginning its rise, the U.S. military, funded like none other on Earth, stood alone -- except for a few local autocrats and a small crew of Islamic extremists (whom the U.S. had once supported in a war against the Red Army in Afghanistan). And yet...

Oh yes, there was that First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It would be hailed as a wonder of a techno-triumph and celebrated with glorious victory parades here in the U.S., but somehow it would also prove strangely indecisive, leaving Saddam in power. Then, of course, there were the twenty-first-century invasions of Afghanistan and (again) Iraq and the utterly indecisive “forever wars” of this century that tossed trillions of American tax dollars down the drain to no purpose whatsoever. And all of that was, of course, before the pandemic arrived, turning this country’s disastrous wars into pandemic ones and its empire of bases into diseased and disease-spreading garrisons around the planet.

It's been quite a story, how the greatest power in history took itself down. TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino, a co-founder of the Costs of War Project, offers a very personal version of just what all of this means today. She does so from the point of view of someone who, as the spouse of a U.S. naval officer, is embedded in an increasingly diseased American military machine in this pandemic moment. Tom

The Military Is Sick
A Navy Spouse’s Take on Why We’re Not Getting Better
By Andrea Mazzarino

American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has emerged as a potential source of transmission both domestically and abroad.”

Indeed, the military is sick and I think of it as both a personal and an imperial disaster.

As the wife of a naval officer, I bear witness to the unexpected ways that disasters of all sorts play out among military families and lately I’ve been bracing for the Covid-19 version of just such a disaster. Normally, for my husband and me, the stressors are relatively mild. After all, between us we have well-paid jobs, two healthy children, and supportive family and friends, all of which allow us to weather the difficulties of military life fairly smoothly. In our 10 years together, however, over two submarine assignments and five moves, we’ve dealt with unpredictable months-long deployments, uncertainty about when I will next be left to care for our children alone, and periods of 16-hour workdays for my spouse that strained us both, not to speak of his surviving a major submarine accident.

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Yes, it’s possible that a vaccine for Covid-19 could be available by spring. I mean, I wouldn’t put my money on it, but it seems at least conceivable. Here’s something I would put a few bucks on, though: when a vaccine appears, the Trump administration will have so botched things that its widespread distribution any time soon -- even in what could by then be Joe Biden’s America -- will be, to put it mildly, a challenge.

Just imagine this for a moment: what’s still the world’s richest, most powerful country didn’t have a reasonable supply of protective gear and N95 masks when the virus hit. Nor, of course, did South Korea. That country’s government, however, managed to quickly intervene, ramp up production, and ensure that South Koreans got such masks on a national scale in a way that would help shut down the disease big time. The Donald and crew? They quite literally did the opposite, turning down an offer to ramp up mask production in January that could have made all the difference. In other words, the most powerful nation on the planet that, in a World War almost three-quarters of a century earlier, had geared up production lines at a remarkable speed to produce tanks and planes, couldn’t manage to coordinate the production of N95 masks, not even with a “wartime president” in the White House.

Call that remarkable indeed. Nor could the man in the Oval Office and his top officials produce a reasonable testing program for the coronavirus or a national team of contact tracers to track down those in touch with people who got the disease as, for instance, both China and Iceland were perfectly capable of doing. Yet the same president has proven quite capable of flooding the streets of Democratic-run cities with his own army of federal agents, togged out in military-style gear, and ready to promote his election-themed version of “law and order.”

Go figure. Or, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg does today, think about what else is missing in this land of ours in 2020 -- accountability -- and how we lost it. Tom

Missing in Action
Accountability Is Gone in America
By Karen J. Greenberg

Whether you consider the appalling death toll or the equally unacceptable rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, the United States has one of the worst records worldwide when it comes to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the president has continued to behave just as he promised he would in March when there had been only 40 deaths from the virus here and he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

In April, when 50,000 Americans had died, he praised himself and his administration, insisting, “I think we’ve done a great job.” In May, as deaths continued to mount nationwide, he insisted, “We have met the moment and we have prevailed.” In June, he swore the virus was “dying out,” contradicting the views and data of his just-swept-into-the-closet coronavirus task force. In July, he cast the blame for the ongoing disaster on state governors, who, he told the nation, had handled the virus “poorly,” adding, “I supplied everybody.” It was the governors, he assured the public, who had failed to acquire and distribute key supplies, including protective gear and testing supplies.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: In this ever-hotter pandemic summer of ours, here’s a TD classic from 2017. Historian John Dower wrote then on terror and what’s been billed as the war against it, a subject that, until Covid-19 (itself the terror of a lifetime) hit our shores, more or less defined this "American century" of ours. He offered a powerful look at how terror lay in the eyes of the beholder in these years. In case you haven’t read his work -- and he should be considered one of the premier historians of war in our time -- the two books mentioned in my 2017 introduction below, his unforgettable history of America’s savage conflict with Japan, 1941-1945, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, and his remarkable overview of war, American-style, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two, are both still abundantly available and, at least in my opinion (as you’ll see from what I wrote below), must-reads. Tom]

Our lives are, of course, our histories, which makes us all, however inadvertently, historians. Part of my own history, my other life -- not the TomDispatch one that’s consumed me for the last 14 years -- has been editing books. I have no idea how many books I’ve edited since I was in my twenties, but undoubtedly hundreds. Recently, I began rereading War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, perhaps 33 years after I first put pen to paper (in the days before personal computers were commonplace) and started marking up a draft of it for Pantheon Books, where I then worked, and where I later ushered it into the world.

As it happens, however, my history with the author of that book dips significantly deeper into time than that. I first met Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower in perhaps 1968, almost half a century ago. We were both graduate students in Asian studies then, nothing eminent or prize-winning about either of us in an era when so much of our time was swept away by opposition to the Vietnam War. Our lives, our stories, have crossed many times since, and so it was with a little rush of emotion that I opened his book all over again and began reading its very first paragraphs:

“World War Two meant many things to many people.

“To over fifty million men, women, and children, it meant death. To hundreds of millions more in the occupied areas and theaters of combat, the war meant hell on earth: suffering and grief, often with little if any awareness of a cause or reason beyond the terrifying events of the moment...”

That book -- on World War II in the Pacific as a brew of almost unbearable racial hatreds, stereotypes, and savagery -- would have a real impact in its moment (as, in fact, it still does) and would be followed by other award-winning books on war and violence and how, occasionally, we humans even manage to change and heal after such terrible, obliterating events. John's work has regularly offered stunning vistas of both horror and implicit hope. He’s an author (and friend) who, to my mind, will always be award-winning. So it was, I have to admit, with a certain strange nostalgia that, at age 72, so many decades after I first touched a manuscript of his, I found myself editing a new one. It proved to be a small, action- and shock-packed volume on American global violence and war-making in these last 75 years. In doing so, I met on the page both my old friend who had once stood with me in opposition to the horror that was America’s war in Indochina and the award-winning historian who has a unique perspective on our past that is deeply needed on this war- and violence-plagued planet of ours.

So many years later, it felt like a personal honor to be editing and then publishing his new work, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two, at Dispatch Books. If it’s a capstone work for him, it seemed like something of a capstone for me as well, both as an editor and, like all of us, as a historian of myself. Tom

Memory Loss in the Garden of Violence
How Americans Remember (and Forget) Their Wars
By John Dower

Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories. When it comes to the nation’s wars, however, he was not entirely on target. Americans embrace military histories of the heroic “band of [American] brothers” sort, especially involving World War II. They possess a seemingly boundless appetite for retellings of the Civil War, far and away the country’s most devastating conflict where American war deaths are concerned.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I must admit that I was touched by how many of you responded to my recent call for donations to keep this website afloat in tough times. Today’s author, John Feffer, will send any TD reader willing to donate at least $100 (at least $125 if you live outside the U.S.) a signed, personalized copy of his appropriately dystopian (and riveting) novel Frostlands, the moving second book in his Splinterlands series. If you’re willing, head to our donation page, knowing that I couldn’t be more appreciative of the way you keep TomDispatch alive and kicking. Tom]

It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t astrology. Not faintly. But it was in the stars. No, not this specific pandemic, but a pandemic. In fact, back in 2010, TomDispatch ran a piece by John Barry on that very subject. He’s the expert on the “Spanish Flu,” the 1918-1919 pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million or more people on a significantly less populated planet. His 2005 book, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, has fittingly returned to the bestseller lists in the Covid-19 moment. A decade ago, his TomDispatch post “How Prepared Are We for the Next Great Flu Breakout?” concluded all too presciently this way: “Because H5N1 has not become a pandemic and H1N1 turned out to be mild, the idea that influenza is no longer a threat has become pervasive. Everything that happened in 2009 suggests that, if a severe outbreak comes again, failure to improve on that response will threaten chaos and magnify the terror, the economic impact, and the death toll. And it will come again.”

Yes, the nature of “it” may have been unpredictable, but a pandemic wasn’t. That was a decade ago and something like the Spanish Flu redux was already all too imaginable then. As Politico reported in March, it was so imaginable that, seven days before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, Obama administration officials walked at least 30 members of his team, including future cabinet members, through a horrific pandemic scenario for 2017 in which a virus worse than the Spanish flu, let loose in Asia, began to spread across the planet.

Predictably enough, the Trump administration responded to this nightmare by “largely dismantling government units that were designed to protect against pandemics.” And then, of course, they were blindsided by what, to any virologist or epidemiologist, was all too predictable. With only election 2020 on their minds, the president and his crew suddenly faced their own version of the interloper from hell, Covid-19, and promptly ducked. They tried to push responsibility for dealing with it off on the states, even as they did their best to imagine it away and, in the process, consigned staggering numbers of Americans to an early grave. Thanks in part to such ignorant incompetents running the country, we now find ourselves in a version of hell (even if without the flames).

As TomDispatch regular John Feffer, weekly columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and author of the Splinterlands series of dystopian novels, suggests today, The Donald and his crew might be considered the Great Unwinders on a previously globalized planet that looks to be coming apart at the seams. What that could possibly mean I leave him to explore. Tom

This Changes Everything (or Nothing)
How Covid-19 Could Upend Geopolitics
By John Feffer

I don’t trust you.

Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a friend or a stranger. I don’t care about your identity or your politics, where you work or if you work, whether you wear a mask or carry a gun.

I don’t trust you because you are, for the time being, a potential carrier of a deadly virus. You don’t have any symptoms? Maybe you’re an asymptomatic superspreader. Show me your negative test results and I’ll still have my doubts. I have no idea what you’ve been up to between taking the test and receiving the results. And can we really trust that the test is accurate?

Frankly, you shouldn’t trust me for the same reasons. I’m not even sure that I can trust myself. Didn’t I just touch my face at the supermarket after palpating the avocados?

I’m learning to live with this mistrust. I’m keeping my distance from other people. I’m wearing my mask. I’m washing my hands. I’m staying far away from bars.

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He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his “unidentified storm troopers” togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with protesters in Portland, Oregon. Those camouflage-clad federal law enforcement agents were evidently from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service and the Customs and Border Protection agency. Soon, hundreds of them are evidently going to "surge" -- a term that should sound eerily familiar -- into Chicago and other cities run by Democratic mayors. In such a fashion, Donald Trump is quite literally bringing this country’s wars home. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, he recently described everyday violence in Chicago as “worse than Afghanistan, by far.” He was talking about the country the U.S. invaded in 2001 and in which it hasn't stopped fighting ever since, a land where more than 100,000 civilians reportedly died violently between 2010 and 2019. By now, violence in Chicago (which is indeed grim) has, in the mind of the Great Confabulator, become “worse than anything anyone has ever seen” and so worthy of yet more militarized chaos.

Of course, in speaking of such violence, the president clearly wasn’t talking about Christopher David’s broken bones. That Navy veteran, having read of unidentified federal agents snatching protesters off Portland’s streets in unmarked vans, took a bus to the city’s nighttime protests. He wanted to ask such agents personally how they could justify their actions in terms of the oath they took to support the Constitution. For doing just that, they beat and pepper-sprayed him. Now, the president who claimed he would end all American wars (but hasn’t faintly done so) has offered a footnote to that promise. Admittedly, he's only recently agreed, so it seems, to leave at least 4,000 American troops (and god knows how many private contractors) in Afghanistan beyond the November election, while U.S. air strikes there continue into what will be their 19th year. Now, however, he’s stoking violence at home as well in search of an issue to mobilize and strengthen his waning support in the upcoming election.

In other words, he’s giving the very idea of our wars coming home new meaning. As retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore suggests today, this country’s “forever wars” have become a kind of global pandemic of their own. It tells you all you need to know about this country in July 2020 that, even as congressional Democrats and Republicans fight over what kind of new bill to pass to help coronavirus-riven America, another bill will face no such issues in Congress. I’m thinking of the one that Republican Senator James Inhofe has labeled “the most important bill of the year”: to fund the U.S. military (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it). Oh, wait, unless the president decides to veto it because a mandate may be included in it to remove the names of Confederate generals from U.S. military bases.

Really, can you imagine a world in more of a pandemic mess than this one? Well, let Astore take a shot at it. Tom

Killing Democracy in America
The Military-Industrial Complex as a Cytokine Storm
By William J. Astore

The phrase “thinking about the unthinkable” has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I’ve been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one that’s been rolling out in far slower motion: that America’s war on terror never ends because it’s far more convenient for America’s leaders to keep it going -- until, that is, it tears apart anything we ever imagined as democracy.

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