Where are they now? Last winter, when record snowstorms brought life in the northeast corridor to a halt, Virginia Republicans launched a web ad, “12 inches of global warming,” and the family of Oklahoma senator and global warming “skeptic” Jim Inhofe built an igloo on the national mall, labeling it “Al Gore’s new home.” Now, as Xtreme weather has been setting new records for pure swelter along that same corridor (and pure drench in the Midwest), who’s building a sweat lodge on the Mall labeled “Jim Inhofe’s new home”? Where are the mocking Democratic web ads? Has the president said a word? In fact, amid temperatures that hit 105 degrees and above in the East, has anyone said a word? Do you realize just how rare are the stories in major papers or on the TV news that even suggest heavily covered weird weather in our nation and elsewhere could in any way be linked to global warming in a year that may break world warmth records?
Sweltering New York -- 103 in the shade and getting hotter, it seemed -- with its aging power infrastructure teetering at the edge of serial blackout, was the drumroll for the start of my 66th year on this planet. Now, at a moment when you can hardly check out the news and not notice a weather anomaly that looks curiously like the new norm -- heat of a sort Moscow has never seen, drenching monsoon rains and floods, killing more than a thousand people, that are a singular first in Pakistan -- the mainstream media has largely left global warming in a ditch somewhere, especially when it comes to weather reporting. Writers at Scientific American may think that global warming is, by now, “undeniable,” but the U.S. Senate, undoubtedly aware not only of the temperature outside but of the degree of American media (and public) denial about it, has reached other conclusions entirely.
Bill McKibben, TomDispatch regular and author of the invaluable new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, assesses our national moment in the heat and just how wilted we’ve seemed to be. (And while you're at it, catch him in Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview discussing why the public needs to lead the fight against global warming by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
We’re Hot as Hell and We’re Not Going to Take It Any More
Three Steps to Establish a Politics of Global Warming
By Bill McKibbenTry to fit these facts together:
* According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.
* A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.
* Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.
* And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn’t do less than they could have -- they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.
As the Wikileaks document-dump week ends, perhaps the real significance of what happened lay not in the specific revelations in those 92,000 pieces of raw data from American frustration-ville in Afghanistan, 2004-2009 (much of which would have been no news to anyone reading TomDispatch all these years). It may simply be that, for the second time in a month -- the first being the McChrystal firing/Petraeus hiring -- the war that time forgot has burst onto the front pages of American newspapers and made it to the top of the TV news as a runaway story.
Given an increasingly unpopular war, the headlines spell bad news for Washington. Pakistani double-crosses, Taliban surges, Afghan corruption, the woeful state of the American-trained Afghan army and police, and -- a subject far less emphasized in U.S. than British coverage -- the unreported killing or wounding of large numbers of civilians by U.S. forces (as well as cover-ups of the same) are not what the Obama administration would have chosen for the week’s war news. The U.S. war effort was already visibly stumbling and desperately in need of continuing anonymity, so all-consuming news, including reports on spiking American and NATO deaths, certainly wasn’t on the Obama wish list. And it’s not just the public either. As reporter Jim Lobe notes, the Wikileaks story “can only add to the pessimism that has spread from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the heart of the foreign policy establishment, and even to a growing number of Republicans.”
The release of these documents has certainly not helped bolster NATO allies, whose citizens are ever more eager to head for the exits in Afghanistan. But in all this, one thing -- quite unnoted -- has been missing: what these events have looked like through Afghan eyes. However striking the Wikileaks revelations may have been, in one way at least they paralleled the coverage we’ve seen for years. These documents came from relatively low-level American military and intelligence officers and largely reflect the war as seen through American eyes. What they deliver -- potentially devastatingly -- is U.S. military frustration over a situation that has long been going from bad to worse. In this morass of reports, not surprisingly, Afghans play a distinctly collateral role.
Reading these documents, we remain, as is generally the case in our news reports, embedded with Americans in the field, viewing a treacherous Afghan (and Pakistani) minefield of a world. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones approaches Afghanistan and the American war effort from quite a different perspective. She’s proven a rarity in the way she’s reported back to us in these years. She arrived in Kabul in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to work with Afghan women on their problems. Unlike almost any other American who wrote about the experience, she embedded herself in an Afghan world.
Her moving book Kabul in Winter offered us a window into Afghan lives and worries, not American ones. Now, she’s arrived at a U.S. military base, bringing Afghan eyes with her. Among all the reporters who have embedded with the U.S. military, that may make her unique -- so prepare yourself for a look at the American way of war on the ground that won’t be like anything you’ve read. By the way, in Jones’s new book, War Is Not Over When It’s Over (to be published in September), she embeds herself with women who have suffered through trauma and nightmare in other global combat zones. It’s not to be missed. Tom
Here Be Dragons
MRAPs, Sprained Ankles, Air Conditioning, Farting Contests, and Other Snapshots from the American War in Afghanistan
By Ann JonesIn the eight years I’ve reported on Afghanistan, I’ve “embedded” regularly with Afghan civilians, especially women. Recently, however, with American troops “surging” and journalists getting into the swing of the military’s counterinsurgency “strategy” (better known by its acronym, COIN), I decided to get with the program as well. Last June, I filed a request to embed with the U.S. Army.
If you ever needed convincing that the world of American “national security” is well along the road to profligate lunacy, read the striking three-part “Top Secret America” series by Dana Priest and William Arkin that the Washington Post published last week. When it comes to the expansion of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), which claims 17 major agencies and organizations, the figures are staggering. Here’s just a taste: “Twenty-four [new intelligence] organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips, and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008, and 2009. In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11.”
More striking yet, the articles make clear (admittedly a few years late) that no one has a complete picture of the extent of the American intelligence quagmire -- from its finances (announced at $75 billion but, the authors assure us, significantly higher) to its geography, its output (the 50,000 top-secret reports it churns out yearly that no one has time to read or track), its composition, or even its office space. (“In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.”) And keep in mind that all of this and more was created not to keep track of or fight a series of covert wars with another major imperial power like the Soviet Union, but to track and hunt down a rag-tag terrorist outfit with a couple of thousand members, including modest-sized groups in countries like Yemen and small numbers of individual wannabe terrorists like the “underwear bomber.” In much of this, as anyone who bothers to scan front-page headlines knows, the IC has been remarkably unsuccessful. Such staggeringly out-of-control expansion should, of course, be a major scandal, but along with our constant wars, it’s already so much a part of the new national security norm that the publication of the Post series is unlikely to have any significant effect.
All this has, in turn, been driven by Fear Inc. To fuel its profitable if cancerous growth, it has vastly exaggerated the relatively minor and largely manageable danger of Islamic terrorism -- since 9/11, above shark attacks but way below drunken-driving accidents -- among the many far more serious dangers this country faces. If the IC actually worked as an effective intelligence delivery system, we would be a Mensa among states. But how could such a proliferation of overlapping agencies and outfits, aided and abetted by a burgeoning privatized, mercenary version of the same, provide “intelligence”? With more than two-thirds of all intelligence programs militarized and overseen by the Pentagon, itself driven to paroxysms of spending and expansion since 2001 (despite the fact that all major military challengers to the U.S. are long gone), labeling this morass “intelligence” should be considered a joke. However absurd, though, don’t expect any of those organizations or agencies to disappear any time soon. They’re ours for the duration.
It’s into such national security institutional madness that Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestselling The Limits of Power, strides in his latest work, to be published this week, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. It is the single best source for understanding how Washington came to garrison the planet, intervene regularly in distant lands, and turn war-making -- and not even successful war-making at that -- into an American norm. It’s simply a must-read. Think of today’s TomDispatch post as a little introduction to just a few of that book’s themes. (And while you’re at it, catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses his new book by clicking here, or to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
The End of (Military) History?
The United States, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
By Andrew J. Bacevich“In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Don’t miss the review Dan Froomkin, the Huffington Post’s senior Washington correspondent, wrote about my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, under the title “The Essential, Undistractable Engelhardt” for his Neiman Watchdog website (cross-posted at the Huffington Post). Here are a few excerpts: “The mainstream media have always been easily distracted and beguiled... This makes us particularly fortunate to have a few relentless souls like Tom Engelhardt around, using the Internet not to chase the latest chatter but to tenaciously chronicle, explore, and illuminate the unspoken realities that shape our political discourse... Engelhardt, a longtime book editor, is the creator and editor of the TomDispatch.com website… He is the finder and cultivator of important progressive voices… But at the heart of TomDispatch.com is Engelhardt's own work and his... thesis that America is a modern empire that has become addicted to the wars that are hastening its decline... His new book is a seamlessly edited collection of his writings... and establishes him as one of the grand chroniclers of the post-9/11 era.” And keep in mind that if you buy my book, or anything else, after arriving at Amazon.com via a book link at this site, TD gets a small percentage of your purchase at no cost to you. If you’re an Amazon shopper, get in the habit. It’s an easy way to support TomDispatch and is greatly appreciated! Keep an eye out for the next TD post Thursday on our more relaxed summer schedule, a new piece by Andrew Bacevich. Tom]
The Opposites Game
All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
By Tom Engelhardt
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19th and was headlined, “U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that by year's end U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for $350 billion dollars. And, of course, those dollars do have to go somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the U.S., state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police -- and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force -- little used in the Taliban era -- was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force” (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.
Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.”
So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.
But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands -- and in Washington.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: If you have a moment, check out my latest piece, "Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement: It's Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or." It appeared Tuesday at Juan Cole’s invaluable Informed Comment website as part of my minuscule campaign to get word out about my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. You can check out the first reviews of the book by clicking here. The next TomDispatch piece will be posted Monday on a slightly slower summer schedule.]
Consider a strange aspect of our wars since October 2001: they have yet to establish a bona fide American hero, a national household name. Two were actually “nominated” early by the Bush administration -- Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old private and clerk captured by the Iraqis in the early days of the American invasion and later “rescued” by Army Rangers and Navy Seals, and Pat Tillman, the former NFL safety who volunteered for service in the Army Rangers eight months after 9/11 and died under “enemy” gunfire in Afghanistan.
Both stories were later revealed to be put-up jobs, pure Bush-era propaganda and deceit. In Lynch’s case, almost every element in the instant patriotic myth about her rescue proved either phony or highly exaggerated; in Tillman’s, it turned out that he had been killed by friendly fire, but -- thanks to a military cover-up (that involved General Stanley McChrystal, later to become Afghan war commander) -- was still given a Silver Star and a posthumous promotion. Members of his unit were even ordered by the military to lie at his funeral, and he was made into a convenient “hero” and recruitment poster boy for the Afghan War. Both were shameful episodes, involving administration manipulation and media gullibility. Since then, as TomDispatch regular and retired lieutenant colonel William Astore points out, U.S. troops as a whole have been labeled “our heroes,” but individual heroes have been in vanishingly short supply.
In fact, the only specific figures who get the heroic treatment these days are our military commanders. They tend to be written about like so many demi-gods (until they fall). General McChrystal, before his ignominious nosedive, was presented in the press (with the Tillman incident all but forgotten) as a cross between a Spartan ascetic and a strategic genius (with the brain of a military Stephen Hawking). Present war commander General David Petraeus regularly receives even more fawning media treatment and seems to be worshipped in Washington these days as if he were not only “an American hero,” but a genuine military god (as well as a future presidential candidate). Yet, in the way they’ve been treated, both of these figures seem closer to celebrities than heroes in any traditional sense.
Perhaps this catches something essential about America’s unending wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and also what used to be called the Global War on Terror but now has no name. Like the drone pilots who sit at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, killing peasants and terrorists 7,000 miles away and to whom new standards of “valor” are now being applied, most Americans are remarkably detached from the wars our “all volunteer” military force (and its vast contingent of for-profit mercenary warriors) fight in distant lands. Our forces have become generically heroic, but no one cares to look too closely at the specifics of these bloody, dirty wars that will never end in victory, not close enough to end up with actual heroes. Our “heroic” troops have no real names, any more than the wars they fight, and so individual heroics are perhaps beside the point. (Check out the latest TomCast audio interview in which William Astore discusses heroism and the military by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, here.) Tom
“Our American Heroes”
Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism
By William J. AstoreWhen I was a kid in the 1970s, I loved reading accounts of American heroism from World War II. I remember being riveted by a book about the staunch Marine defenders of Wake Island and inspired by John F. Kennedy’s exploits saving the sailors he commanded on PT-109. Closer to home, I had an uncle -- like so many vets of that war, relatively silent on his own experiences -- who had been at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, and then fought them in a brutal campaign on Guadalcanal, where he earned a Bronze Star. Such men seemed like heroes to me, so it came as something of a shock when, in 1980, I first heard Yoda’s summary of war in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke Skywalker, if you remember, tells the wizened Jedi master that he seeks “a great warrior.” “Wars not make one great,” Yoda replies.
