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The American
Empire Project
Americans have long
believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our
democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words --
American empire -- have been on everyone's lips. At this moment of
unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the
United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly. How did we
get to this point? And what lies down the road?
Read more>>
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The Books
 Imperial Ambitions
Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
by Noam Chomsky
Now available!
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 Empire's Workshop
Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
by Greg GrandinNow available!
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 A Question of Torture
CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror
by Alfred McCoyNow available!
Alfred McCoy on How Not to Ban Torture in Congress
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 Blood
and Oil
The Dangers and
Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency
by Michael T. Klare
Now available in paperback, including a new afterword! |
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visit tomdispatch.com |
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| New from The American Empire Project |
 Now Available in Paperback!
The Limits of Power
by Andrew J. Bacevich
“Andrew Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who’s in power, which may be why those of both the left and right listen to him.”—Bill Moyers
An immediate New York Times bestseller, The Limits of Power offers an unparalleled examination of the profound triple crisis facing America: an economy in disarray that can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad; a government transformed by an imperial presidency into a democracy in name only; and an engagement in endless wars that has severely undermined the body politic.
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Seven Days in January
How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington
By Tom Engelhardt
Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a
reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe
just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn’t
fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away
in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your
editor is likely to give you a free pass.
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Obama’s Secret Prisons
Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the “Black Jail,” and the Dogs of War in Afghanistan
By Anand Gopal
[The research for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.]
One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of
Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished.
He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends.
Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village
elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap
government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the
governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome
criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with
no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village
elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat,
handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it,
Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more
than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his
way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know
when he would be freed.
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The Drone Surge
Today, Tomorrow, and 2047
By Nick Turse
One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next,
on a recent morning in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a missile blasted a
home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar
mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a
compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.
What
were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of
suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become
commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating
December 30th suicide attack by
a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in
Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the
Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an “unprecedented
number” of strikes --
which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike -- have led to
more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with
help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public “secret” war of
modern times.
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When the Media Is the Disaster
Covering Haiti
By Rebecca Solnit
Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless,
selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more
suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further
crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for
property. They act without regard for consequences.
I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose
misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies
a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of
sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the
endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol.
They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they
are staining themselves anew in Haiti.
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666 to 1
The U.S. Military, al-Qaeda, and a War of Futility
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
In his book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, John Dower tells
an extraordinary tale about the changing American image of the Japanese
fighting man. In the period before the surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor, it was well accepted in military and political circles that the
Japanese were inferior fighters on the land, in the air, and at sea --
“little men,” in the phrase of the moment. It was a commonplace of
“expert” opinion, for instance, that the Japanese had supposedly
congenital nearsightedness and certain inner-ear defects, while lacking
individualism, making it hard to show initiative. In battle, the
result was poor pilots in Japanese-made (and so inferior) planes, who
could not fly effectively at night or launch successful attacks.
In the wake of their precision assault on Pearl Harbor, their wiping
out of U.S. air power in the Philippines in the first moments of the
war, and a sweeping set of other victories, the Japanese suddenly went
from “little men” to supermen in the American imagination (without ever
passing through a human phase). They became “invincible” --
natural-born jungle- and night-fighters, as well as “utterly ruthless,
utterly cruel and utterly blind to any of the values which make up our
civilization.”
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The Shadow War
Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
It was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth
of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old
year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies,
which managed not to connect every obvious clue to a (literally)
seat-of-the-pants al-Qaeda operation. It hardly mattered that the
underwear bomber’s case -- except for the placement of the bomb
material -- almost exactly, even outrageously, replicated the infamous, and equally inept, “shoe bomber” plot of eight years ago.
That would have been bad enough, but the New Year brought worse.
Army Major General Michael Flynn, U.S. and NATO forces deputy chief of
staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, released a report in which he labeled military
intelligence in the war zone -- but by implication U.S. intelligence
operatives generally -- “clueless.” They were, he wrote, "ignorant of
local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and
how they might be influenced... and disengaged from people in the best
position to find answers... Eight years into the war in Afghanistan,
the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the
overall strategy."
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The Second Decade
The World in 2020
By Michael T. Klare
As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find
ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major
power shifts become visible to all. If the first decade of the century
witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at
least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects:
the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the
dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its
foremost military alliance, to name just three.
By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world
is likely to have a genuinely different look to it. Momentous shifts
in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just
now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new
actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the
global space. Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no
matter how dramatic it may seem to us.
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An American World of War
What to Watch for in 2010
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger.
We don’t name our years, but if we did, this one might prospectively be
called the Year of the Assassin.
We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable
kingdom. After all, the shock of September 11, 2001 was that “war”
came to “the homeland,” a mighty blow delivered against the very
symbols of our economic, military, and -- had Flight 93 not gone down
in a field in Pennsylvania -- political power.
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The Nine Surges of Obama’s War
How to Escalate in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt
In his Afghan “surge” speech
at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some
specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of
the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country
over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it
would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And
finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those
were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time,
longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for.
Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has
committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to
become.
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The Physics of Copenhagen
Why Politics-As-Usual May Mean the End of Civilization
By Bill McKibben
Most political arguments don’t really have a right and a wrong, no
matter how passionately they’re argued. They’re about human preferences
-- for more health care or lower taxes, for a war to secure some
particular end or a peace that leaves some danger intact. On occasion,
there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to
a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most
passionate about human affairs recognize that we’re on one side of a
debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless
deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda). We need people
taking strong positions to move issues forward, which is why I’m always
ready to carry a placard or sign a petition, but most of us also
realize that, sooner or later, we have to come to some sort of
compromise.
That’s why standard political operating procedure is to move slowly,
taking matters in small bites instead of big gulps. That’s why, from
the very beginning, we seemed unlikely to take what I thought was the
correct course for our health-care system: a single-payer model like
the rest of the world. It was too much change for the country to
digest. That’s undoubtedly part of the reason why almost nobody who
ran for president supported it, and those who did went nowhere.
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Not So Pretty in Pink
The Uproar Over New Breast Cancer Screening Guidelines
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult?
When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which
would take abortion rights away even from women who have private
insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.
A few weeks later, when the United States Preventive Services Task
Force recommended that regular screening mammography not start until
age 50, all hell broke loose. Sheryl Crow, Whoopi Goldberg, and Olivia
Newton-John raised their voices in protest; a few dozen non-boldface
women picketed
the Department of Health and Human Services. If you didn’t look too
closely, it almost seemed as if the women’s health movement of the
1970s and 1980s had returned in full force.
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The Pentagon Garrisons the Gulf
As Washington Talks Iraq Withdrawal, the Pentagon Builds Up Bases in the Region
By Nick Turse
Despite recent large-scale insurgent suicide bombings that have killed
scores of civilians and the fact that well over 100,000 U.S. troops are
still deployed in that country, coverage of the U.S. war in Iraq has
been largely replaced in the mainstream press by the (previously)
"forgotten war" in Afghanistan. A major reason for this is the plan,
developed at the end of the Bush years and confirmed by President
Obama, to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq to 50,000 by August 2010 and withdraw most of the remaining forces by December 2011.
Getting out of Iraq, however, doesn't mean getting out of the Middle
East. For one thing, it's likely that a sizeable contingent of U.S.
forces will remain garrisoned on several large and remotely situated
U.S. bases in Iraq well past December 2011. Still others will be
stationed close by -- on bases throughout the region where, with little
media attention
since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, construction to
harden, expand, and upgrade U.S. and allied facilities has gone on to
this day.
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The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give
(But Won't)
By Tom Engelhardt
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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Welcome Home, War!
How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties
By Alfred W. McCoy
In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as
CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President
Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers
championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This
bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations,"
warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law
School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid
seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet
surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already
endless war has taken on our civil liberties.
Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future
crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in
our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and
Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim
that nobody told you this could happen -- at least not if you care to
read on.
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2014 or Bust
The Pentagon's Building Boom in Afghanistan Indicates a Long War Ahead
By Nick Turse
In recent weeks, President Obama has been contemplating the future of
U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. He has also been touting the effects
of his policies at home, reporting that this year's Recovery Act not
only saved jobs, but also was "the largest investment in infrastructure
since [President Dwight] Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System
in the 1950s." At the same time, another much less publicized
U.S.-taxpayer-funded infrastructure boom has been underway. This one in
Afghanistan.
While Washington has put modest funding into civilian projects in Afghanistan this year -- ranging from small-scale power plants to "public latrines" to a meat market
-- the real construction boom is military in nature. The Pentagon has
been funneling stimulus-sized sums of money to defense contractors to
markedly boost its military infrastructure in that country.
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The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up
Optimism as a Public Health Problem
By Barbara Ehrenreich
If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for
a lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being
blamed on "undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration
and Big Pharma.
Optimism is supposed to be good for our health. According to the
academic "positive psychologists," as well as legions of unlicensed
life coaches and inspirational speakers, optimism wards off common
illnesses, contributes to recovery from cancer, and extends longevity.
To its promoters, optimism is practically a miracle vaccine, so
essential that we need to start inoculating Americans with it in the
public schools -- in the form of "optimism training."
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Too Big to Fail?
Why All the President's Afghan Options Are Bad Ones
By Tom Engelhardt
In the worst of times, my father always used to say, "A good gambler
cuts his losses." It's a formulation imprinted on my brain forever.
That no-nonsense piece of advice still seems reasonable to me, but it
doesn't apply to American war policy. Our leaders evidently never saw a
war to which the word "more" didn't apply. Hence the Afghan War, where
impending disaster is just an invitation to fuel the flames of an
already roaring fire.
Here's a partial rundown of news from that devolving conflict: In the
last week, Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell
to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases.
Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where
U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard
Holbrooke, now President Obama's special envoy to the region, termed
"an American success story"), the Taliban is largely in control. It is,
according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal,
now "one of the most dangerous provinces" in the country. Similarly,
the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south,
has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military.
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Welcome to 2025
American Preeminence Is Disappearing Fifteen Years Early
By Michael T. Klare
Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome
to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to
demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the
amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to
be your reality from now on.
Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the
National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central
Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic
publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration.
Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025,
it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually
disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new
global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined
many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most
startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term
erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global
competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single
most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's
"relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and
U.S. leverage will become more constrained."
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Obama's Choice
Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?
By Nick Turse
When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to President
Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to
American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide
to go the peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really
accomplishing something significant. On the other hand, history
suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser. As president after
president has discovered, especially since World War II, the U.S.
military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war.
While the armed forces can do many things, the one thing that has
generally escaped them is that ultimate endpoint: lasting victory. This
might have been driven home recently -- had anyone noticed -- when, in
the midst of the Washington debate over the Afghan War, a forgotten
front in President Bush's Global War on Terror, the Philippines, popped
back into the news. On September 25th, New York Times correspondent Norimitsu Onishi wrote:
"Early this decade, American soldiers landed on the
island of Basilan, here in the southern Philippines, to help root out
the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf. Now, Basilan's
biggest towns, once overrun by Abu Sayyaf and criminal groups, have
become safe enough that a local Avon lady trolls unworriedly for
customers. Still, despite seven years of joint military missions and
American development projects, much of the island outside main towns
like Lamitan remains unsafe."
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Are Women Getting Sadder?
Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most
popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.
On Slate's DoubleX website,
a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the
1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised
as manifestos… and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that
it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a
feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as
Phyllis Schlafly put it,
more soberly: "[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves
as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will
never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach...
[S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."
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War of the Worlds
London, 1898; Kabul, 2009
By Tom Engelhardt
An unremarkable paragraph in a piece
in my hometown paper recently caught my eye. It was headlined "White
House Believes Karzai Will Be Re-elected," but in mid-report Helene
Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times turned to Afghan
War commander General Stanley McChrystal's "redeployment option."
Here's the humdrum paragraph in question: "The redeployment option
calls for moving troops from sparsely populated and lawless areas of
the countryside to urban areas, including Kandahar and Kabul. Many
rural areas 'would be better left to Predators,' said an administration
official, referring to drone aircraft."
In other words, the United States may now be represented in the Afghan
countryside, as it already is in the tribal areas on the Pakistani side
of the border, mainly by Predators and their even more powerful
cousins, Reapers, unmanned aerial vehicles with names straight out of a
sci-fi film about implacable aliens. If you happen to be an Afghan
villager in some underpopulated part of that country where the U.S. has
set up small bases -- two of which were almost overrun recently -- they will be gone and "America" will instead be soaring overhead. We're talking about planes
without human beings in them tirelessly scanning the ground with their
cameras for up to 22 hours at a stretch. Launched from Afghanistan but
flown by pilots thousands of miles away in the American West, they are
armed with two to four Hellfire missiles or the equivalent in 500-pound
bombs.
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How to Trap a President in a Losing War
Petraeus, McChrystal, and the Surgettes
By Tom Engelhardt
Front and center in the debate over the Afghan War these days are
General Stanley "Stan" McChrystal, Afghan war commander, whose "classified, pre-decisional" and devastating report -- almost eight years and at least $220 billion later, the war is a complete disaster -- was conveniently, not to say suspiciously, leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post by we-know-not-who
at a particularly embarrassing moment for Barack Obama; Admiral Michael
"Mike" Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has been increasingly vocal about a "deteriorating" war and the need for more American boots on the ground; and the president himself, who blitzed every TV show in sight last Sunday and Monday for his health reform program, but spent significant time expressing doubts
about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. ("I'm not interested
in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan... or
sending a message that America is here for the duration.")
On the other hand, here's someone you haven't seen front and center for
a while: General David Petraeus. He was, of course, George W. Bush's
pick to lead the president's last-ditch effort in Iraq. He was the
poster boy for Bush's military policies in his last two years. He was
the highly praised architect and symbol of "the surge." He appeared repeatedly, his chest a mass of medals and ribbons,
for heavily publicized, widely televised congressional testimony,
complete with charts and graphs, that was meant, at least in part, for
the American public. He was the man who, to use an image from that period which has recently resurfaced, managed to synchronize the American and Baghdad "clocks," pacifying for a time both the home and war fronts.
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