The United States of Fear Read online

  The United States of Fear

  Tom Engelhardt

  Haymarket Books

  Chicago, Illinois

  © 2011 by Tom Engelhardt

  Published in 2011 by Haymarket Books

  PO Box 180165

  Chicago, IL 60618

  www.haymarketbooks.org

  773-583-7884

  [email protected]

  EAN: 9781608461547

  Trade distribution:

  In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

  In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

  In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

  In Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.au

  All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

  Cover design by Eric Ruder

  Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation

  and the Wallace Global Fund.

  Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Praise for The United States of Fear

  “Tom Engelhardt, as always, focuses his laser-like intelligence on a core problem that the media avoid: Obama’s stunning embrace of Bush’s secret government by surveillance, torture, and sanctioned assassination. A stunning polemic.”

  —Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians and Planet of Slums

  Praise for The American Way of War

  “A tour de force.”

  —Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater

  “There are a lot of ways to describe Tom Engelhardt’s astonishing service to this country’s conscience and imagination: you could portray him as our generation’s Orwell, standing aside from all conventional framings to see afresh our dilemmas and blind spots, as the diligent little boy sending in regular dispatches on the nakedness of the emperor and his empire, as a Bodhisattva dedicated to saving all beings through compassion and awareness, but analogies don’t really describe the mix of clear and sometimes hilarious writing, deep insight, superb information, empathy, and outrage that has been the core of Tom’s TomDispatches for almost a decade, or the extraordinary contribution they’ve made to the American dialogue. Check out this bundle of some of the best from that time span.”

  —Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and A Paradise Built in Hell

  “They may have Blackwater/Xe, Halliburton, aircraft-carrier battle groups, deadly drones by the score, and the world’s largest military budget, but we have Tom Engelhardt—and a more powerful truth-seeking missile has seldom been invented. Long-time fans like me will be happy to see some of his most memorable pieces reprinted here, although woven together in a way that makes them still stronger; for anyone not yet familiar with his work, this is your chance to meet one of the most forceful analysts alive of our country’s dangerous, costly addiction to all things military.”

  —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost

  “Tom Engelhardt is the I. F. Stone of the post–9/11 age—seeing what others miss, calling attention to contradictions that others willfully ignore, insisting that Americans examine in full precisely those things that make us most uncomfortable.”

  —Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War

  “Tom Engelhardt is among our most trenchant critics of American perpetual war. Like I. F. Stone in the 1960s, he has an uncanny ability to ferret out and see clearly the ugly truths hidden in government reports and statistics. No cynic, he always measures the sordid reality against a bright vision of an America that lives up to its highest ideals.”

  —Juan R. Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan

  “Like an extended Motown shuffle with some hard-hitting Stax breaks, and never devoid of an all-too-human sense of humor and pathos, Tom’s book takes us for the ride. . . . [I]nvaluable in showing how the empire walks the walk and talks the talk.”

  —Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

  “In The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, Tom Engelhardt provides a clear-eyed examination of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush and Obama years, and details unsparingly how Obama has inherited—and in many cases exacerbated—the ills of the Bush era. . . . [A]n important book for anyone hoping to understand how the U.S. arrived at its current predicament during the Bush years, and how it remains in this predicament despite Obama’s best efforts—or perhaps because of them.”

  —Inter Press Service

  “Tom Engelhardt’s biting look at United States militarism, The American Way of War . . . [is] pithy . . . [and] alarming. . . . He takes on our war-possessed world with clear-eyed, penetrating precision.”

  —Mother Jones

  “Essential . . . seamlessly edited . . . establishes him as one of the grand chroniclers of the post-9/11 era.”

  —Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post

  “These simple pleas for readers to reconsider an idea they might previously have taken for granted are one of the strengths of this book. Demonstrating Engelhardt’s experience as a professional editor, he avoids the overly strident or self-righteous condescension that characterizes too much online political writing, instead using clear and unvarnished prose to attack the fundamental principles of the post–September 11 mindset.”

  —Foreign Policy in Focus

  “American history does not begin with 9/11, yet the worldview of so many in the United States since then has been shaped by how the mainstream media had colored events following the terrorist attacks. But to break free from that distorted perception which bears little resemblance to reality—as people once knew it—one needs the help of a little imagination. In Tom Engelhardt’s The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, you could step back and see all the views that you had taken for granted challenged, as you indulge yourself in a world of ideas that are logical and straightforward but just were not quite vis-ible to you before. All of course are backed by key facts, sound analysis and invaluable context.”

  —Middle East Online

  “With an excellent mind and an equally fine pen, Engelhardt demonstrates true patriotism to the American founding. . . . Reading such good prose invigorates like little else in this world of sorrows. But one should not consider Engelhardt merely a writer of golden prose. This body has a soul as well, and Engelhardt convincingly presents evidence as well as argument throughout the book. . . . The American Way of War is brimming with insights.”

  —American Conservative

  “Excellent. . . . Anyone who wants to rebuild an antiwar movement . . . should read The American Way of War. . . . Reading this book feels like poking around with a flashlight in the unexamined corners of the post-9/11 American imperial mindset. . . . Sharp wit runs throughout the book. The section about the lack of media coverage of air campaigns, for example, is wonderfully titled ‘On Not Looking Up.’ Not only does this humor make The American Way of War a surprisingly entertaining read given the subject matter, it reminds us of something all great antiwar movements have known—the war machine is not just evil, it’s often absurd.”

  —Socialist Worker

  Praise for TomDispatch

  “One of my favorite websites.”

  —Bill Moyers

  “At a time when the mainstream media leave out half of what the public needs to know, while at the same time purveying oceans of official nonsense, the public needs an alternative source of news. Tom Engelhardt’s TomDispatch has been that for me. With unerring touch, he finds the stories I need to read, prefacing them each day with introductions that in themselves form a witty, hugely enjoyable, brilliant running commentary on the times
. He is my mainstream.”

  —Jonathan Schell

  “Tom Engelhardt [is] the finest and hardest working essayist and editor of the post–9/11 era, who has kept a steady eye on Washington’s ‘baser’ intentions since even before the 2003 invasion.”

  —Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service

  “These are the traits of a TomDispatch essay: unapologetically intellectual, relentlessly original, a little bit dangerous. For many of us, these are the key pieces of analysis that make sense of our post-9/11 world. How odd that many of them have never actually been printed. Until now.”

  —Naomi Klein

  “TomDispatch is one of the wonders of the electronic age. A touch of the finger and you get the juiciest, meatiest information and analysis, so rich a feast of intelligence and insight I often felt short of breath.”

  —Howard Zinn

  “TomDispatch is essential reading. It is a one-stop shop where you can find the most provocative thinkers writing the most eloquent and hard-hitting articles about the most pressing issues of the day. Read, get mad, and take action.”

  —Amy Goodman

  Introduction

  American Warscapes

  A World Made by War

  When you look at me, you can’t mistake the fact that I’m of a certain age. But just for a moment, think of me as ten years old. You could even say that I celebrated my ninth birthday recently, without cake, candles, presents, or certainly joy.

  I’ve had two mobilized moments in my life. The first was in the Vietnam War years; the second, the one that leaves me as a ten-year-old, began on the morning of September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV while doing my morning exercises, saw a smoking hole in a World Trade Center tower, and thought that, as in 1945 when a B-25 slammed into the Empire State Building, a terrible accident had happened.

  Later, after the drums of war had begun to beat, after the first headlines had screamed their World War II–style messages (“The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century”), I had another thought. And for a reasonably politically sophisticated guy, my second response was at least as off-base as the first. I thought that this horrific event taking place in my hometown might open Americans up to the pain of the world. No such luck, of course.

  If you had told me then that we would henceforth be in a state of eternal war, as well as living in a permanent war state, that, to face a ragtag enemy of a few thousand stateless terrorists, the national security establishment in Washington would pump itself up to levels not faintly reached when facing the Soviet Union—a major power with thousands of nuclear weapons and an enormous military—that “homeland”—a distinctly un-American word—would land in our vocabulary never to leave, and that a second Defense Department dubbed the Department of Homeland Security would be set up not to be dismantled in my lifetime, that torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) would become as American as apple pie and that some of those “techniques” would actually be demonstrated to leading Bush administration officials inside the White House, that we would pour money into the Pentagon at ever-escalating levels even after the economy crashed in 2008, that we would be fighting two potentially trillion-dollar-plus wars without end in two distant lands, that we would spend untold billions constructing hundreds of military bases in those same lands, that the CIA would be conducting the first drone air war in history over a country we were officially not at war with, that most of us would live in a remarkable state of detachment from all of this, and finally—only, by the way, because I’m cutting this list arbitrarily short—that I would spend my time writing incessantly about “the American way of war” and produce a book with that title, I would have thought you were nuts.

  But every bit of that happened, making clear that, like human beings everywhere, I have no special knack for peering into the future. If it were otherwise, I would undoubtedly now be zipping through fabulous spired cities with a jetpack on my back (as I was assured would happen in my distant youth). But if prediction isn’t our forte, then adaptability to changing circumstances may be—as my trajectory for the past ten years proves.

  A decade ago, in response to the bizarre spectacle of this nation going to war while living at peace, even if in a spasmodic state of collective national fear, I did something I hardly understood at the time. I launched a nameless listserv of collected articles and my own expanding commentary that ran against the common wisdom of that October moment when our second Afghan War was just beginning. A little more than a year later, thanks to the Nation Institute, it became a website with the name TomDispatch.com. And because our leaders swore we were “a nation at war,” because we were in fact killing people in quantity in distant lands, because the power of the state at home was being strengthened in startling ways, while everything still open about our society seemed to be shutting down, even as the military was being pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian dimensions, I started writing about war.

  At some level, I can’t tell you how ridiculous that was. After all, I’m the most civilian and peaceable of guys. I’ve never even been in the military. I was, however, upset with the Bush administration, the connect-no-dots media coverage of that moment, and the repeated 9/11 rites that proclaimed us the planet’s greatest victim, survivor, and dominator, leaving only one role, greatest Evildoer, open for the rest of the planet (and you know who auditioned for, and won, that part hands down).

  Things That Go Boom in the Night

  I won’t say, however, that I had no expertise whatsoever with a permanent state of war and a permanent war state, only that the expertise I had was available to anyone who had lived through the post–World War II era. I was reminded of this on a recent glorious Sunday when, from the foot of Manhattan, I set out, for the first time in more than half a century, on a brief ferry ride that proved, for me, as effective a time machine as anything H. G. Wells had ever imagined. That ferry was not, of course, taking me to a future civilization at the edge of time, but to Governor’s Island, now a park and national monument in the eddying waters of New York harbor and to the rubble of a gas station my father, a World War II veteran, ran there in the early 1950s when the island was still a major U.S. Army base.

  On many mornings in those years, I accompanied him on that short ride across the East River and found myself amid buzzing jeeps and drilling soldiers in a world of army kids with, among other wonders, access to giant swimming pools and kiddie-matinee Westerns. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, it was my only real exposure to the suburbs, and it proved an edenic one that also caught something of the exotically militarized mood of that Korean War moment.

  As on that island, as for most Americans then, the worlds of the warrior and of abundance were no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers using a rising military budget and the fear of communism to create a new national security economy. An alliance between big industry, big science, and the military had been forged during World War II that blurred the boundaries between the military and the civilian by fusing together a double set of desires: for technological breakthroughs leading to ever more efficient weapons of destruction and to ever easier living. The arms race—the race, that is, for future “good wars”—and the race for the good life were being put on the same “war” footing.

  In the 1950s, a military Keynesianism was already driving the U.S. economy toward a consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and submarine were wedded in single corporate entities. The companies producing the large objects for the American home—General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others—were also major contractors developing the big-ticket weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance.

  More than half a century later, the Pentagon is still living a life of abundance—despite one less-than-victorious, less-then-good war after another—while we, increasingly, are not. In the years in between, the developing national security state of
my childhood just kept growing, and in the process the country militarized in the strangest of ways.

  Only once in that period did a sense of actual war seem to hover over the nation. That was, of course, in the Vietnam years of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the draft brought a dirty war up close and personal, driving it into American homes and out onto the streets, when a kind of intermittent warfare seemed to break out in this country’s cities and ghettos, and when impending defeat drove the military itself to the edge of revolt and collapse.

  From the 1970s until 2001, as that military rebuilt itself as an all-volunteer force and finally went back to war in distant lands, it seemed to disappear from everyday life. There were no soldiers in sight, nothing we would consider commonplace today—from uniforms and guns in train stations to military flyovers at football games, and the repeated rites of praise for American troops that are now everyday fare in a world where, otherwise, we largely ignore our wars.

  In 1989, for instance, in the Progressive magazine I described a country that seemed to me to be undergoing further militarization, even if in a particularly strange way. Ours was, I wrote, an

  America that conforms to no notions we hold of militarism. . . . Militarization is, of course, commonly associated with uniformed, usually exalted troops in evidence and a dictatorship, possibly military, in power. The United States, by such standards, still has the look of a civilian society. Our military is, if anything, less visible in our lives than it was a decade ago: No uniforms in the streets, seldom even for our traditional parades; a civilian-elected government; weaponry out of sight . . . the draft and the idea of a civilian army a thing of the past.

  In the Reagan-Bush era, the military has gone undercover in the world that we see, though not in the world that sees us. For if it is absent from our everyday culture, its influence is omnipresent in corporate America, that world beyond our politics and out of our control—the world which, nonetheless, plans our high-tech future of work and consumption. There, the militarization of the economy and the corporatization of the military are processes so far gone that it seems reasonable to ask whether the United States can even be said to have a civilian economy.