Originally published at TomDispatch.com

We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years.  Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad.  And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded?  In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better.  In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.    

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us.  After all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they’ve done best in recent years: cut one another’s throats?    

Modesty in Washington?  Humility?  The ability to draw new lessons from long-term experience?  None of the above is evidently appropriate for “the indispensable nation,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called the United States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to “see further into the future.”  None of the above is part of the American arsenal, not when Washington’s weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrapheap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us. 

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Iraq remains a mess from which the U.S. military seems increasingly uninterested in withdrawing fully and Afghanistan a disaster area, but it’s never too soon to think about the next war.  The subject is already on the minds of Pentagon planners.  The question is:  Are they focusing on how to manage future wars so that they won’t last longer than the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II combined? 

There’s reason to worry, especially since the lessons of both Iraq and Afghanistan are clear: it takes years after a war has been launched for the U.S. military to develop tactics that lead to stasis.  (“Victory” is a word that has gone out of fashion.)

Here, then, are three modest suggestions for recalibrating the American way of war.  All are based on a simple principle -- “preventive war planning” -- and are focused on getting the next war right before it begins, not decades after it’s launched.

1.  Make the Apologies in Advance

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Explain something to me.

In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn’t help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States.  State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker.  The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, “paralyzed” and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything. 

Only the other day, no less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, “Washington, right now, is broken." Indiana Senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced recently that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, “The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it.” Voters seem to agree.  Two words, “polarization” and “gridlock” -- or hyperbolic cousins like “paralyzing hyperpartisanship” -- dominate the news when the media describes that dysfunctionalism.  Foreign observers have been similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, “America’s Democracy, A Study in Paralysis.”

Washington’s incapacity to govern now evidently seems to ever more Americans at the root of many looming problems.  As the New York Times summed up one of them in a recent headline: “Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis.” When President Obama leaves the confines of Washington for the campaign trail, he promptly attacks congressional “gridlock” and the “slash and burn politics” that have left the nation’s capital tied in knots.

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Hold Onto Your Underwear
This Is Not a National Emergency

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI.  In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire.  More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported.  In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died.  In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226.  Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006.  And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued.  In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport.  (No one was killed.)    

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Americans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest “embassy” on the planet (and still growing).  We’ve generally chalked up our war in Iraq to the failed past, and some Americans, after the surge of 2007, even think of it as, if not a success, at least no longer a debacle.  Few care to spend much time considering the catastrophe we actually brought down on the Iraqis in “liberating” them. 

Remember when we used to talk about Saddam Hussein’s “killing fields”?  The world of mayhem and horror that followed the U.S. invasion and occupation delivered new, even larger “killing fields” that we don’t care to discuss, or that we prefer to consider the responsibility of the Iraqis themselves.  Even with violence far lower today, Baghdad certainly remains one of the more dangerous cities on the planet.  The bombs continue to go off there regularly and devastatingly, while the killing, even if not of American troops who rarely patrol any longer and are largely confined to their mega-bases, has not ended, not by a long shot; nor has the anger, suspicion, and depression that go with all of this. 

A striking recent article in the British Guardian by reporter Martin Chulov seemed to catch something of what the U.S. actually accomplished in Iraq in a nutshell.  It describes a country in “environmental ruin” (and, let’s not forget, taxed with an ongoing drought of monumental proportions).  The headline tells the story:  “Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds.”  The contamination from depleted uranium weapons, bombed pipelines, and other disasters of the years of war, civil war, and chaos seems centered around Iraq’s population centers and, perhaps not surprisingly, coincides with a massive rise in birth defects. 

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Just before Haiti was devastated by the most powerful earthquake to hit the island in more than 200 years, when, that is, it was only devastated by the hemisphere’s worst poverty, there were but one or two full-time foreign correspondents in the country.  No longer. 

Within days, the networks, CNN, and Fox had more or less transferred their news operations (already slimmed down by years of attrition) onto the island.  CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it first on Wednesday morning.  Katie flew in later that day.  By the time Diane made it out ofKabul and into Port-au-Prince, Brian had already long since hit “the tarmac.”  (All but Anderson were gone again by the weekend.)  Along with them, in a situation in which resources were nearly nonexistent, went at least 44 CNN correspondents, producers, and technicians, a crew of 25 from Fox, and undoubtedly similar contingents from CBS, NBC, and ABC.  Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times, this was “the biggest U.S. television news deployment to an international crisis since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami” -- at a cost that can only have been obscene.

In the process, as happens on our obsessionally eyeball-gluing, single-event, 24/7 media planet, “world news” essentially became Haiti with the usual logos, tags, and drum rolls (“Earthquake in Haiti”).  The three networks even briefly expanded the length of their half-hour news shows to an all-Haiti-all-the-time hour, with just bare minutes leftover for the rest of the planet.  In a sense, as the earthquake had blotted out Haiti, so the news coverage blotted out everything else with an almost religious fervor and the language to match. 

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world.  The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves -- in Afghanistan.  In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future exploitation of Iraq’s massive oil reserves than had U.S. multinationals.  The ironies were legion and painfully visible. 

Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories.  “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”

Already, the follow-up pieces are starting to come out and heady cocktails they are:  one part awe and one part bitterness mixed with one part despair.  In Esquire online, Thomas P.M. Barnett put it this way:  “Worse still: Will the rest of the world end up profiting from our blood and money?... The reason why Obama neglects to mention any regional interests like Pakistan's? Admitting the larger logic of regionalization would make too painfully obvious the nature of our current strategic bankruptcy. Because it would suggest that the only 'victory' to be found would be 'won' by those neighboring powers who did nothing to stabilize the situation. In other words, their 'treasure' and our 'blood.'"  At Foreign Policy online, Stephen M. Walt chimed in:  “While we've been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and 'investing' billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government, China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.”

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Originally published at TomDispatch

[The Obama administration’s surge math:  In his speech on Tuesday night at West Point, the president announced a surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan in the coming months.  That sounded way higher than a lot of Democrats might have wanted, but still below the optimal figure -- 40,000 -- that Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal had requested. (or, depending on how you read the various leaks and news stories of the last months, perhaps demanded).  Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post now reports, however, that the President granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.”  Think of it, in restaurant terms, as the equivalent of a surge tip.  In addition, DeYoung adds that an unnamed “senior military official” claimed “that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.”  So now, in surge math, we’re at 35,000 U.S. troops.  Add in the expected NATO contribution of about 5,000 extra troops and -- voilà -- you have 40,000 on the button.  No wonder the Afghan War commander is reportedly satisfied.  Tom] 

[Note for Readers:  Last week, I wrote an address for the president, “The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give (But Won’t),” which got a fair amount of attention.  Now that the president has given a far more predictable speech, I thought some of you might still be interested in taking a look and thinking about what possibilities exist, even if only outside Washington’s airless corridors of power, when it comes to the Afghan War.  Tom]

Victory at Last!
Monty Python in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt

Let others deal with the details of President Obama’s Afghan speech, with the on-ramps and off-ramps, those 30,000 U.S. troops going in and just where they will be deployed, the benchmarks for what’s called “good governance” in Afghanistan, the corruption of the Karzai regime, the viability of counterinsurgency warfare, the reliability of NATO allies, and so on.  Let’s just skip to the most essential point which, in a nutshell, is this:  Victory at Last!

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

In our day, the American way of war, especially against lightly armed guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists, has proved remarkably heavy. Elephantine might be the appropriate word. The Pentagon likes to talk about its "footprint" on the geopolitical landscape. In terms of the infrastructure it's built in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps "crater" would be a more reasonable image.

American wars are now gargantuan undertakings. The prospective withdrawal of significant numbers/most/all American forces from Iraq, for instance, will -- in terms of time and effort -- make the 2003 invasion look like the vaunted "cakewalk" it was supposed to be. According to Pentagon estimates, more than 1.5 million (yes, that is "million") pieces of U.S. equipment need to be removed from the country. Just stop and take that in for a second.

Of course, it's a less surprising figure when you realize that the Pentagon managed to build, furnish, and supply almost 300 bases, macro to micro, in Iraq alone in the war years. And some of those bases were -- and still are -- the size of small American towns with tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, and others, as well as massive perimeters, multiple bus routes, full-scale PX's, fast-food outlets, movie theaters, and the like.

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Originally posted at TomDispatch

The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give
(But Won't)

Sure, the quote in the over-title is only my fantasy. No one in Washington -- no less President Obama -- ever said, "This administration ended, rather than extended, two wars," and right now, it looks as if no one in an official capacity is likely to do so any time soon. It's common knowledge that a president -- but above all a Democratic president -- who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat.

This everyday bit of engrained Washington wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evidence in the historical record. We do, however, know something about what could happen to a president who escalated a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled the president who "lost" that country to the communists (as Harry Truman had supposedly "lost" China). And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey who -- incapable of rejecting Johnson's war policy -- lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a candidate pushing a fraudulent "peace with honor" formula for downsizing the war.

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