American Empire Project

Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan…

But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On 
By Ann Jones

President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy isn’t working.  So said a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander General Stanley McChrystal’s firing.  But what does that phrase, so often in the media these days, really mean?  And if the strategy really isn’t working, just how can you tell?

The answers to these questions raise even more important ones, including: Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn’t working, what about the enemy’s? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way?  Let’s take these one at a time.

1.  What do you mean by “it’s not working”?

“It” is counterinsurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy.  Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of “protecting the population” above pursuing the bad guys at all cost.  Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.

I just spent some time embedded with the U.S. Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily “sig acts” -- significant activity of a hostile nature -- virtually every “lethal” American soldier is matched by a “nonlethal” counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for “protection.”

General McChrystal himself played both roles.  As the U.S. commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, “an amazing number of people” who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s palace to say, “Sorry.”  Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.

The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counterbalanced by the “sorry” part, which may be as simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local “key leaders.”  Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts.  The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road.  This trade-off explains why, as you travel parts of the country, interminable (and often empty) strips of black asphalt now traverse Afghanistan’s vast expanses of sand and rock, but it doesn’t explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever.

Many Afghans, of course, are angry because they haven’t been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere.  Worse yet, more often than not, they’ve been promised things that never materialize.  (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these last years, it might go like this: big men -- both Afghan and American -- make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)

And don’t forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely been consulted at all: women.  To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them up -- the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win the “hearts and minds” of something less than half “the population.”

It’s only in the last year or two that the Marines and the Army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women.  As with so many innovative new plans in our counterinsurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.

Commanders have casually sent noncombatant American women soldiers -- supply clerks and radio operators -- outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission, and no follow up.  Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind.  So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new Army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.

Imagine.  This is hardly a big item like the “government in a box” that General McChrystal promised and failed to deliver in Marja.  It’s just seeds.  How hard could that be?

Our visit did, however, open a window into a world military and political policymakers have ignored for all too long.  It turns out that the women of Afghanistan, whom George W. Bush claimed to have liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds, and mad as hell.

Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that “it’s not working” at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest.  And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of “the population,” those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the U.S. military and President Obama.

Moreover, it’s not working for a significant subgroup of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I’ve heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy’s combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement (“courageous restraint,” as it’s called) imposed by General McChrystal’s version of COIN strategy.  Taking a page from Vietnam, they claim their hands are tied, while the enemy plays by its own rules.  Rightly or wrongly, this opinion is spreading fast among grieving soldiers as casualties mount.

It’s also clear that even the lethal part of counterinsurgency isn’t working.  Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores.  To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar Province which they’d been told was used by terrorists.  Another case of false information.  It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine.  The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher.  The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him, and the Army hospitalized him with profuse apologies.  Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.

Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal’s cleared, held, built, and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim.  Before his resignation, the general himself was already referring to Marja -- the farming area (initially trumpeted as a “city of 80,000 people”) where he launched his first offensive -- as “a bleeding ulcer.”  He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country’s second largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing populace, which includes President Karzai.  Meanwhile, humanitarian NGOs based in Kandahar complain that they can’t do their routine work assisting the city’s inhabitants while the area lies under threat of combat.  Without assistance, Kandaharis grow -- you guessed it -- angrier.

From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment -- right down to bottled drinking water -- from the U.S. military and selling it to the Taliban.  U.S. commanders can’t do much about it because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over responsibility for national defense.

NATO soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters.  American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don’t tell their ANA colleagues when and where they’re going on patrol.  Back in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad we supported, we trained Afghan jihadists who have today become our worst enemies, and now we may be doing it again.

Factor in accounts of what General McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys.  Reportedly, he was vigorously directing Special Forces’ assassinations of high and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for “peeling off” the “good” Taliban -- that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money.  According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs.  But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -- or those we call the bad Taliban -- actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we’re supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty.  From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our “good Taliban” are the worst of all.

I could go on.  If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys traveling on U.S. built, but Taliban-controlled, roads.  Strategy doesn’t get much worse than that: financing both sides, and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.

 2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?

Go figure.  Maybe he’s been persuaded by Pentagon hype.  Replacing General McChrystal with Centcom commander General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus’s greatest hits: his authorship of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition, and of Bush’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing now routinely called a “success.”  If you can apply the word “success” to any operation in Iraq, you’re surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petreus can find it again in Afghanistan.

But like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already misapplied the “lessons” of Iraq to the decidedly different circumstances of Afghanistan and so producing a striking set of failures.  A deal to buy off the Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib.  Not so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight are not foreign invaders -- that would be us -- but their Pashtun cousins.

Moreover, the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local residents.  It has also come at the expense of American troops in the east, the ones I was recently embedded with, who face an onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.

3.  What about the enemy strategy?  How’s that working?

It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus’s surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own.  An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. “They opened the gate,” he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who’s paying attention?  In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties.  In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.

And all the while America’s “partner” in this strategy, the dubious President Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali.  In the process, he studiously ignores the parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis.  He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces, and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his “angry brothers.”  As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: “This is our big problem.”  They’re talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up, and pretend to be “partners” with.

In fact, America’s silent acceptance of President Karzai’s flagrantly fraudulent election last summer -- all those stuffed ballot boxes -- seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy. They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents.  They probably won’t be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad, and elsewhere.  The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war -- though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too -- than the Afghans.

Think of what’s happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well.  In Marja, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we can’t and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box, ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes, and enforce “virtue.” In Herat, the Ulema of the West issue a fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without a mahram, or male relative as escort. In Kabul, the police raid restaurants that serve alcohol, and the government shuts down reputable, secular international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing.  Taliban influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts where corruption flourishes, and into the provisional peace jirga tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban.  Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side by side with warlords and war criminals, mujahideen brothers under the skin. Embraced by President Karzai.  Perhaps even welcomed one day by American strategists and President Obama himself as a way out. 

4.  If it’s so bad, why can’t it be stopped?

The threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story.  There are young progressive men and women running for Parliament in the coming September elections.  There are women organizing to keep hold of the modest gains they’ve made, though how they will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away remains a mystery.  There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly devout Muslims who wish to live in the twenty-first century.  When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however, they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other -- and if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.

American development was supposed to have made it all so much better.  But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their Embassy fortress in Kabul.  Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of “aid” money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits, and outright fraud should be a national scandal. 

This, too, is a process everyone knows but can’t speak about because it’s not part of the official script in which the U.S. must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages.  Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but “a contracting shop.”  Well, here’s a flash from Afghanistan: it’s still a contracting shop, and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent, and criminal.

Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone -- except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation -- Clinton presides over a fraudulent aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies.  If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue, and why do the members of the international community -- the U.N., all those international NGOs, and our fast-fading coalition allies -- sign off on it? 

You have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month, to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members of the international community who choose to stay and spend their time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing their useful work.

And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever more incentives for almost everyone involved -- except ordinary Afghans, of course -- to keep on keeping on.  There’s a little something for quite a few: government officials in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army, and the police, and the Taliban, and their various pals, and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.

It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers, and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage, and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair.

Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter.  Her new book, War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be published by Metropolitan Books in September.  She is at work on her next book about what happens when America’s wars come home.  To visit her website, click here.

Copyright 2010 Ann Jones

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

BP in the Gulf -- The Persian Gulf

How an Oil Company Helped Destroy Democracy in Iran
By Stephen Kinzer

To frustrated Americans who have begun boycotting BP: Welcome to the club.  It's great not to be the only member any more!

Does boycotting BP really make sense?  Perhaps not.  After all, many BP filling stations are actually owned by local people, not the corporation itself.  Besides, when you're filling up at a Shell or ExxonMobil station, it's hard to feel much sense of moral triumph. Nonetheless, I reserve my right to drive by BP stations. I started doing it long before this year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

My decision not to give this company my business came after I learned about its role in another kind of “spill” entirely -- the destruction of Iran's democracy more than half a century ago.

The history of the company we now call BP has, over the last 100 years, traced the arc of transnational capitalism.  Its roots lie in the early years of the twentieth century when a wealthy bon vivant named William Knox D'Arcy decided, with encouragement from the British government, to begin looking for oil in Iran.  He struck a concession agreement with the dissolute Iranian monarchy, using the proven expedient of bribing the three Iranians negotiating with him.

Under this contract, which he designed, D'Arcy was to own whatever oil he found in Iran and pay the government just 16% of any profits he made -- never allowing any Iranian to review his accounting.  After his first strike in 1908, he became sole owner of the entire ocean of oil that lies beneath Iran's soil.  No one else was allowed to drill for, refine, extract, or sell “Iranian” oil.

”Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams,” Winston Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, wrote later. “Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.”

Soon afterward, the British government bought the D'Arcy concession, which it named the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.  It then built the world's biggest refinery at the port of Abadan on the Persian Gulf.  From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain's standard of living was supported by oil from Iran.  British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with Iranian oil.

After World War II, the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism blew through the developing world.  In Iran, nationalism meant one thing: we’ve got to take back our oil.  Driven by this passion, Parliament voted on April 28, 1951, to choose its most passionate champion of oil nationalization, Mohammad Mossadegh, as prime minister.  Days later, it unanimously approved his bill nationalizing the oil company.  Mossadegh promised that, henceforth, oil profits would be used to develop Iran, not enrich Britain.

This oil company was the most lucrative British enterprise anywhere on the planet.  To the British, nationalization seemed, at first, like some kind of immense joke, a step so absurdly contrary to the unwritten rules of the world that it could hardly be real.  Early in this confrontation, the directors of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and their partners in Britain's government settled on their strategy: no mediation, no compromise, no acceptance of nationalization in any form.

The British took a series of steps meant to push Mossadegh off his nationalist path.

They withdrew their technicians from Abadan, blockaded the port, cut off exports of vital goods to Iran, froze the country’s hard-currency accounts in British banks, and tried to win anti-Iran resolutions from the U.N. and the World Court.  This campaign only intensified Iranian determination.  Finally, the British turned to Washington and asked for a favor: please overthrow this madman for us so we can have our oil company back.

American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, encouraged by his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a lifelong defender of transnational corporate power, agreed to send the Central Intelligence Agency in to depose Mossadegh.  The operation took less than a month in the summer of 1953.  It was the first time the CIA had ever overthrown a government.

At first, this seemed like a remarkably successful covert operation.  The West had deposed a leader it didn't like, and replaced him with someone who would perform as bidden -- Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

From the perspective of history, though, it is clear that Operation Ajax, as the operation was code-named, had devastating effects.  It not only brought down Mossadegh's government, but ended democracy in Iran.  It returned the Shah to his Peacock Throne.  His increasing repression set off the explosion of the late 1970s, which brought to power Ayatollah Khomeini and the bitterly anti-Western regime that has been in control ever since.

The oil company re-branded itself as British Petroleum, BP Amoco, and then, in 2000, BP.  During its decades in Iran, it had operated as it pleased, with little regard for the interests of local people.  This corporate tradition has evidently remained strong. 

Many Americans are outraged by the relentless images of oil gushing into Gulf waters from the Deepwater Horizon well, and by the corporate recklessness that allowed this spill to happen.  Those who know Iranian history have been less surprised.

Stephen Kinzer is a veteran foreign correspondent and the author of Bitter Fruit and Overthrow, among other works.  His newest book is Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future.

Copyright 2010 Stephen Kinzer

This article was originally published at TomDispatch.com.

America Detached from War

Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
By Tom Engelhardt

Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s.  By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.

In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war.  Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.

Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country.  A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.

According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry.  Worse yet, these were capable -- so the CIA director and vice president claimed -- of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States.  It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."

In a speech in October 2002, President Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public.  Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten.  Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.

In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly.  They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“U.S. missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.

And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream.  The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.

CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line.  Our American world is being redefined accordingly.

In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement.  Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” -- a necessity for most combat award citations -- to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles.  “Valor to me is not risking your life," the colonel told the reporter. "Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor."

Smoking Drones

These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding,” and taking out key figures in the Taliban.  Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably.  The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands.  In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).

If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it.  Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.

Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized.  It's the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier.  It's the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.

Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.”  It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions.  He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.”  Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”

Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war.  “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing.”

Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”

But pay no mind to all this.  The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter.  The die is cast, the money committed.  The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming. 

It’s a done deal.  Drone war is, and will be, us.

A Pilotless Military

If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well.  The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment. 

It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times).  It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk... and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice -- the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away -- or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.

The drones -- their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” -- could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the U.S.) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution.  Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone.  Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one.  Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.

As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us.  In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove.  With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games.  That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.

The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t.  If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.

After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this.  If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.

As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families).  It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity.  As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.”  And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.

If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace.  In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones.  We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind.  The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?

Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a “pilotless” force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Obama administration officials.

The Globalization of Death

Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred.  He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come.  There are now reportedly more than 40 countries developing versions of those pilot-less planes.  Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones.  Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.

Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight.  In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances.  In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.

We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo.  And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of "terrorists," we won’t like it one bit.  When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less.  And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.

In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news.  Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones.  It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, just published, is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).  Watch a Timothy MacBain TomCast video of him discussing the American way of war by clicking here.

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

BP-Style Extreme Energy Nightmares to Come

Four Scenarios for the Next Energy Mega-Disaster 
By Michael T. Klare

On June 15^th, in their testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the chief executives of America’s leading oil companies argued that BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was an aberration -- something that would not have occurred with proper corporate oversight and will not happen again once proper safeguards are put in place.  This is fallacious, if not an outright lie.  The Deep Horizon explosion was the inevitable result of a relentless effort to extract oil from ever deeper and more hazardous locations.  In fact, as long as the industry continues its relentless, reckless pursuit of “extreme energy” -- oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium obtained from geologically, environmentally, and politically unsafe areas -- more such calamities are destined to occur.

At the onset of the modern industrial era, basic fuels were easy to obtain from large, near-at-hand energy deposits in relatively safe and friendly locations.  The rise of the automobile and the spread of suburbia, for example, were made possible by the availability of cheap and abundant oil from large reservoirs in California, Texas, and Oklahoma, and from the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  But these and equivalent deposits of coal, gas, and uranium have been depleted.  This means the survival of our energy-centric civilization increasingly relies on supplies obtained from risky locations -- deep underground, far at sea, north of the Arctic circle, in complex geological formations, or in unsafe political environments.  That guarantees the equivalent of two, three, four, or more Gulf-oil-spill-style disasters in our energy future.

Back in 2005, the CEO of Chevron, David O’Reilly, put the situation about as bluntly as an oil executive could. “One thing is clear,” he said, “the era of easy oil is over.  Demand is soaring like never before… At the same time, many of the world’s oil and gas fields are maturing.  And new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically, and even politically.”

O’Reilly promised then that his firm, like the other energy giants, would do whatever it took to secure this “difficult energy” to satisfy rising global demand.  And he proved a man of his word.  As a result, BP, Chevron, Exxon, and the rest of the energy giants launched a drive to obtain traditional fuels from hazardous locations, setting the stage for the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and those sure to follow.  As long as the industry stays on this course, rather than undertaking the transition to an alternative energy future, more such catastrophes are inevitable, no matter how sophisticated the technology or scrupulous the oversight.

The only question is:  What will the next Deepwater Horizon disaster look like (other than another Deepwater Horizon disaster)?  The choices are many, but here are four possible scenarios for future Gulf-scale energy calamities.  None of these is inevitable, but each has a plausible basis in fact.

Scenario 1: Newfoundland -- Hibernia Platform Destroyed by Iceberg

Approximately 190 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in what locals call “Iceberg Alley” sits the Hibernia oil platform, the world’s largest offshore drilling facility.  Built at a cost of some $5 billion, Hibernia consists of a 37,000-ton “topsides” facility mounted on a 600,000-ton steel-and-concrete gravity base structure (GBS) resting on the ocean floor, some 260 feet below the surface.  This mammoth facility, normally manned by 185 crew members, produces about 135,000 barrels of oil per day.  Four companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Murphy Oil, and Statoil) plus the government of Canada participate in the joint venture established to operate the platform.

The Hibernia platform is reinforced to withstand a direct impact by one of the icebergs that regularly sail through this stretch of water, located just a few hundred miles from where the Titanic infamously hit an iceberg and sank in 1912.  Sixteen giant steel ribs protrude from the GBS, positioned in such a way as to absorb the blow of an iceberg and distribute it over the entire structure.  However, the GBS itself is hollow, and contains a storage container for 1.3 million barrels of crude oil -- about five times the amount released in the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

The owners of the Hibernia platform insist that the design will withstand a blow from even the largest iceberg.  As global warming advances and the Greenland glaciers melt, however, massive chunks of ice will be sent floating into the North Atlantic on a path past Hibernia.  Add increased storm activity (another effect of global warming) to an increase in iceberg frequency and you have a formula for overwhelming the Hibernia’s defenses.

Here’s the scenario:  It’s the stormy winter of 2018, not an uncommon situation in the North Atlantic at that time of year.  Winds exceed 80 miles per hour, visibility is zilch, and iceberg-spotter planes are grounded.  Towering waves rise to heights of 50 feet or more, leaving harbor-bound the giant tugs the Hibernia’s owners use to nudge icebergs from the platform’s path.  Evacuation of the crew by ship or helicopter is impossible.

Without warning, a gigantic, storm-propelled iceberg strikes the Hibernia, rupturing the GBS and spilling more than one million barrels of oil into rough waters.  The topside facility is severed from the base structure and plunges into the ocean, killing all 185 crew members.  Every connection to the undersea wells is ruptured, and 135,000 barrels of oil start flowing into the Atlantic every day (approximately twice the amount now coming from the BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico).  The area is impossible to reach by plane or ship in the constant bad weather, meaning emergency repairs can’t be undertaken for weeks -- not until at least five million additional barrels of oil have poured into the ocean.  As a result, one of the world’s most prolific fishing grounds -- the Grand Banks off Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Cape Cod -- is thoroughly poisoned.

Does this sound extreme?  Think again.  On February 15, 1982, a giant drillship, the Ocean Ranger (the “Ocean Danger” to its habitués), was operating in the very spot Hibernia now occupies when it was struck by 50-foot waves in a storm and sank, taking the lives of 84 crew members.  Because no drilling was under way at the time, there were no environmental consequences, but the loss of the Ocean Ranger -- a vessel very much like the Deepwater Horizon -- should be a reminder of just how vulnerable otherwise strong structures can be to the North Atlantic’s winter fury.

Scenario 2: Nigeria -- America’s Oil Quagmire

Nigeria is now America’s fifth leading supplier of oil (after Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela).  Long worried about the possibility that political turmoil in the Middle East might diminish the oil flow from Saudi Arabia just as Mexico’s major fields were reaching a state of depletion, American officials have worked hard to increase Nigerian imports.  However, most of that country’s oil comes from the troubled Niger Delta region, whose impoverished residents receive few benefits but all of the environmental damage from the oil extraction there.  As a result, they have taken up arms in a bid for a greater share of the revenues the Nigerian government collects from the foreign energy companies doing the drilling.  Leading this drive is the Movement for the Emancipation for the Niger Delta (MEND), a ragtag guerrilla group that has demonstrated remarkable success in disrupting oil company operations.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) rates Nigeria’s innate oil-production capacity at about 2.7 million barrels per day.  Thanks to insurgent activity in the Delta, however, actual output has fallen significantly below this.  “Since December 2005, Nigeria has experienced increased pipeline vandalism, kidnappings, and militant takeovers of oil facilities in the Niger Delta,” the department reported in May 2009.  “[K]idnappings of oil workers for ransom are common and security concerns have led some oil services firms to pull out of the country.”

Washington views the insurgency as a threat to America’s “energy security,” and so a reason for aiding the Nigerian military.  “Disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to U.S. oil security,” the State Department noted in 2006.  In August 2009, on a visit to Nigeria, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised even more military aid for oil protection purposes.

Here, then, is scenario #2:  It’s 2013.  The Delta insurgency has only grown, driving Nigeria’s oil output down to a third of its capacity.  Global oil demand is substantially higher and rising, while production slips everywhere.  Gasoline prices have reached $5 per gallon in the U.S. with no end in sight, and the economy seems headed toward yet another deep recession.

The barely functioning civilian government in Abuja, the capital, is overthrown by a Muslim-dominated military junta that promises to impose order and restore the oil flow in the Delta.  Some Christian elements of the military promptly defect, joining MEND.  Oil facilities across the country are suddenly under attack; oil pipelines are bombed, while foreign oil workers are kidnapped or killed in record numbers.  The foreign oil companies running the show begin to shut down operations.  Global oil prices go through the roof. 

When a dozen American oil workers are executed and a like number held hostage by a newly announced rebel group, the president addresses the nation from the Oval Office, declares that U.S. energy security is at risk, and sends 20,000 Marines and Army troops into the Delta to join the Special Operations forces already there.  Major port facilities are quickly secured, but the American expeditionary force soon finds itself literally in an oil quagmire, an almost unimaginable landscape of oil spills in which they find themselves fighting a set of interlocked insurgencies that show no sign of fading.  Casualties rise as they attempt to protect far-flung pipelines in an impenetrable swamp not unlike the Mekong Delta of Vietnam War fame.

Sound implausible?  Consider this: in May 2008, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and the Joint Forces Command conducted a crisis simulation at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that involved precisely such a scenario, also set in 2013.  The simulation, “Unified Quest 2008,” was linked to the formation of the U.S. Africa Command (Africom), the new combat organization established by President Bush in February 2007 to oversee American military operations in Africa.  An oil-related crisis in Nigeria, it was suggested, represented one of the more likely scenarios for intervention by U.S. forces assigned to Africom.  Although the exercise did not explicitly endorse a military move of this sort, it left little doubt that such a response would be Washington’s only practical choice.

Scenario 3: Brazil -- Cyclone Hits “Pre-Salt” Oil Rigs

In November 2007, Brazil’s state-run oil company, Petróleo Brasileiro (Petrobras), announced a remarkable discovery: in a tract of the South Atlantic some 180 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, it had found a giant oil reservoir buried beneath a mile and a half of water and a thick layer of salt.  Called “pre-salt” oil because of its unique geological positioning, the deposit was estimated to hold 8 to 12 billion barrels of oil, making this the biggest discovery in the Western Hemisphere in 40 years.  Further test drilling by Petrobras and its partners revealed that the initial find -- at a field called Tupi -- was linked to other deepwater “pre-salt” reservoirs, bringing the total offshore potential to 50 billion barrels or more.  (To put that in perspective, Saudi Arabia is believed to possess reserves of 264 billion barrels and the United States, 30 billion.)

With this discovery, Brazil could “jump from an intermediate producer to among the world’s largest producers,” said Dilma Rousseff, chief cabinet official under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and thought to be his most likely successor.  To ensure that the Brazilian state exercises ultimate control over the development of these reservoirs, President da Silva -- “Lula,” as he is widely known -- and Rousseff have introduced legislation in the Brazilian Congress giving Petrobras control over all new fields in the basin.  In addition, Lula has proposed that profits from the pre-salt fields be channeled into a new social fund to alleviate poverty and underdevelopment in the country.  All this has given the government a huge stake in the accelerated development of the pre-salt fields.

Extracting oil a mile and half under the water and from beneath two-and-a-half miles of shifting sand and salt will, however, require the utilization of technology even more advanced than that employed on the Deepwater Horizon.  In addition, the pre-salt fields are interspersed with layers of high-pressure gas (as appears to have been the case in the Gulf), increasing the risk of a blow-out.  Brazil does not experience hurricanes as does the Gulf of Mexico, but in 2004, its coastline was ravaged by a surprise subtropical cyclone that achieved hurricane strength.  Some climatologists believe that hurricane-like storms of this sort, once largely unknown in the South Atlantic, will become more common as global warming only increases.

Which brings us to scenario #3: It’s 2020, by which time the pre-salt area off Rio will be host to hundreds of deepwater drilling rigs.  Imagine, then, a subtropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds and massive waves that suddenly strikes this area, toppling dozens of the rigs and damaging most of the others, wiping out in a matter of hours an investment of over $200 billion.  Given a few days warning, most of the crews of these platforms have been evacuated.  Freak winds, however, down several helicopters, killing some 50 oil workers and flight crew members.  Adding to the horror, attempts to seal so many undersea wells at such depths fail, and oil in historically unprecedented quantities begins gushing into the South Atlantic.  As the cyclone grows to full strength, giant waves carry the oil inexorably toward shore.

Since the storm-driven assault cannot be stopped, Rio de Janeiro’s famous snow-white beaches are soon blanketed in a layer of sticky black petroleum, and in a matter of weeks, parts of Brazil’s coastal waters have become a “dead ocean.”  Clean-up efforts, when finally initiated, prove exceedingly difficult and costly, adding immeasurably to the financial burden of the Brazilian state, now saddled with a broken and bankrupt Petrobras.  Meanwhile, the struggle to seal all the leaking pre-salt wells in the deep Atlantic proves a Herculean task as, month after month, oil continues to gush into the Atlantic.

Scenario 4: East China Sea -- A Clash Over Subsea Gas

At one time, most wars between states were fought over disputed borders or contested pieces of land.  Today, most boundaries are fixed by international treaty and few wars are fought over territory.  But a new type of conflict is arising: contests over disputed maritime boundaries in areas that harbor valuable subsea resources, particularly oil and natural gas deposits.  Such disputes have already occurred in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the East and South China Seas, and other circumscribed bodies of water.  In each case, the surrounding states claim vast offshore tracts that overlap, producing -- in a world that may be increasingly starved for energy -- potentially explosive disputes.

One of them is between China and Japan over their mutual boundary in the East China Sea.  Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which both countries have signed, each is allowed to exercise control over an “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ) extending 200 nautical miles (about 230 standard miles) from its coastline.  But the East China Sea is only about 360 miles across at its widest point between the two countries.  You see the problem.

In addition, the U.N. convention allows mainland states to claim an extended EEZ stretching to their outer continental shelf (OCS).  In China’s case, that means nearly all the way to Japan -- or so say the Chinese.  Japan insists that the offshore boundary between the two countries should fall midway between them, or about 180 miles from either shore.  This means that there are now two competing boundaries in the East China Sea.  As fate would have it, in the gray area between them houses a promising natural gas field called Chunxiao by the Chinese and Shirakaba by the Japanese.  Both countries claim that the field lies within their EEZ, and is theirs alone to exploit.

For years, Chinese and Japanese officials have been meeting to resolve this dispute -- to no avail.  In the meantime, each side has taken steps to begin the exploitation of the undersea gas field.  China has installed drilling rigs right up to the median line claimed by Japan as the boundary between them and is now drilling for gas there; Japan has conducted seismic surveys in the gray area between the two lines.  China claims that Japan’s actions represent an illegal infringement; Japan says that the Chinese rigs are sucking up gas from the Japanese side of the median line, and so stealing their property.  Each side sees this dispute through a highly nationalistic prism and appears unwilling to back down.  Both sides have deployed military forces in the contested area, seeking to demonstrate their resolve to prevail in the dispute.

Here, then, is Scenario #4:  It’s 2022.  Successive attempts to resolve the boundary dispute through negotiations have failed.  China has installed a string of drilling platforms along the median line claimed by Japan and, according to Japanese officials, has extended undersea drill pipes deep into Japanese territory.  An ultra-nationalistic, right-wing government has taken power in Japan, vowing finally to assert control over Japanese sovereign territory.  Japanese drill ships, accompanied by naval escorts and fighter planes, are sent into the area claimed by China.  The Chinese respond with their warships and order the Japanese to withdraw.  The two fleets converge and begin to target each other with guns, missiles, and torpedoes.

At this point, the “fog of war” (in strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s famous phrase) takes over.  As a Chinese vessel steams perilously close to a Japanese ship in an attempt to drive it off, the captain of that vessel panics, and orders his crew to open fire; other Japanese crews, disobeying orders from superior officers, do the same.  Before long, a full-scale naval battle ensues, with several sunken ships and hundreds of casualties.  Japanese aircraft then attack the nearby Chinese drill rigs, producing hundreds of additional casualties and yet another deep-sea environmental disaster.  At this point, with both sides bringing in reinforcements and girding for full-scale war, the U.S. president makes an emergency visit to the region in a desperate effort to negotiate a cease-fire.

Such a scenario is hardly implausible.  Since September 2005, China has deployed a naval squadron in the East China Sea, sending its ships right up to the median line -- a boundary that exists in Japanese documents, but is not, of course, visible to the naked eye (and so can be easily overstepped).  On one occasion, Japanese naval aircraft flew close to a Chinese ship in what must have seemed a menacing fashion, leading the crew to train its antiaircraft guns on the approaching plane.  Fortunately, no shots were fired.  But what would have happened if the Japanese plane had come a little bit closer, or the Chinese captain was a bit more worried?  One of these days, as those gas supplies become even more valuable and the hair-trigger quality of the situation increases, the outcome may not be so benign.

These are, of course, only a few examples of why, in a world ever more reliant on energy supplies acquired from remote and hazardous locations, BP-like catastrophes are sure to occur.  While none of these specific calamities are guaranteed to happen, something like them surely will -- unless we take dramatic steps now to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and speed the transition to a post-carbon world.  In such a world, most of our energy would come from renewable wind, solar, and geothermal sources that are commonplace and don’t have to be tracked down a mile or more under the water or in the icebound north.  Such resources generally would not be linked to the sort of disputed boundaries or borderlands that can produce future resource wars.

Until then, prepare yourselves.  The disaster in the Gulf is no anomaly.  It’s an arrow pointing toward future nightmares. 

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, TomDispatch.com regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.  A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.  To catch him discussing our dystopian energy future on the latest TomCast audio interview, click here, or to download it to your iPod, click here.

Copyright 2010 Michael T. Klare

Call the Politburo, We’re in Trouble

Entering the Soviet Era in America 
By Tom Engelhardt

[Note for American Empire Project blog readers:  Tom Engelhardt here.  Steve Fraser and I started, and now co-edit, Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project.  I also run the website TomDispatch.com.  If you’ve spent time at the AEP blog, you’ve undoubtedly been reading some of the pieces I regularly write there on Washington and its wars, as well as those of other authors you know well from the AEP series, including Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, and Andrew Bacevich.  My new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, is being published this week.  From garrisoning the planet to drone warfare, “collateral damage” to Obama’s Afghan “surges,” it explores the new norm of American life: unending war and preparations for the same.  You can read the first review of it -- Pepe Escobar’s “Infinite War” at Asia Times -- by clicking here. 

Of the book, Juan Cole, who runs the well-known Informed Comment website, says, “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.”

And Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, has written of The American Way of War: “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… 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.” 

I hope you’ll give some thought to picking up a copy.  You can click here to buy it, if you wish.  In addition, if I could put on my editor’s hat for a moment, two remarkable books I’ve edited for the AEP series are due out in August.  They are, in my opinion, must-reads:  Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope and Andrew Bacevich’s Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

I’m sure that I hardly need to introduce either of those bestselling authors and critics of American foreign policy to you.  Pre-order their books and be the first on your block (as they used to say in my childhood) to get both.  Each of them is likely to be much attended to -- and add mine to the list while you’re at it.  If you want to explore the American imperium and its ways of war in 2010, they’re a threesome that can’t be beat. 

Below is my most recent TomDispatch take on what our addiction to war and to garrisoning the globe is likely to mean for us all.  Tom]

Mark it on your calendar.  It seems we’ve finally entered the Soviet era in America.

You remember the Soviet Union, now almost 20 years in its grave.  But who gives it a second thought today?  Even in its glory years that “evil empire” was sometimes referred to as “the second superpower.”  In 1991, after seven decades, it suddenly disintegrated and disappeared, leaving the United States -- the “sole superpower,” even the “hyperpower,” on planet Earth -- surprised but triumphant.

The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that official Washington had a clue.  At the moment it happened, Soviet “experts” like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (then director of the CIA) still expected the Cold War to go on and on.  In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military, which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring, indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare payments were eating into what funds remained.  Not even a vigorous, reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could staunch the rot, especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell drastically.

Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military -- and its military adventure in Afghanistan -- when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it.  In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation.  They mistook military power for power on this planet.  Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.

In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration whose national security advisor was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a “Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a weak communist government in Kabul.  When resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.

Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist.  For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.”  If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t.  (And if you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the U.S., you should.)

In Washington, the Bush administration -- G.H.W.’s, not G.W.’s -- declared victory and then left the much ballyhooed “peace dividend” in the nearest ditch.  Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington’s consensus policymakers drew no meaningful lessons from it (just as they had drawn few that mattered from their Vietnam defeat 16 years earlier).

Quite the opposite, successive American administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin.  They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to U.S. global power still was the care and feeding of the American military and the military-industrial complex that went with it.  As the years passed, that military would be sent ever more regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet.

This urge, delusional in retrospect, seemed to reach its ultimate expression in the second Bush administration, whose infamous “unilateralism” rested on a belief that no country or even bloc of countries should ever again be allowed to come close to matching U.S. military power.  (As its National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter -- and it couldn’t have been blunter on the subject -- the U.S. was to “build and maintain” its military power “beyond challenge.”)  Bush’s military fundamentalists firmly believed that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force around, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of its power and friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well.  After all, as the president said in front of a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”

In this way, far more than the Soviets, the top officials of the Bush administration mistook military power for power, a gargantuan misreading of the U.S. economic position in the world and of their moment.

Boundless Military Ambitions

The attacks of September 11, 2001, that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” clinched the deal.  In the space the Soviet Union had deserted, which had been occupied by minor outlaw states like North Korea for years, there was a new shape-shifting enemy, al-Qaeda (aka Islamic extremism, aka the new “totalitarianism”), which could be just as big as you wanted to make it.  Suddenly, we were in what the Bush administration instantly dubbed “the Global War on Terror” (GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever invented) -- and this time there would be nothing “cold” about it.

Bush administration officials promptly suggested that they were prepared to use a newly agile American military to “drain the swamp” of global terrorism.  ("While we'll try to find every snake in the swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp," insisted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz two weeks after 9/11.)  They were prepared, they made clear, to undertake those draining operations against Islamic “terrorist networks” in no less than 60 countries around the planet.

Their military ambitions, in other words, knew no bounds; nor, it seemed, did the money and resources which began to flow into the Pentagon, the weapons industries, the country’s increasingly militarized intelligence services, mercenary companies like Blackwater and KBR that grew fat on a privatizing administration’s war plans and the multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts it was eager to proffer, the new Department of Homeland Security, and a ramped-up, ever more powerful national security state.

As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles, the numbers would prove staggering.  By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under half the world’s total.  Similarly, by 2008, the U.S. controlled almost 70% of the global arms market. It also had 11 aircraft carrier battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future enemy had more than one.

By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost 300 military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive “American towns” holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors, with multiple bus lines, PX’s, fast-food “boardwalks,” massage parlors, water treatment and power plants, barracks, and airfields.  They were in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region generally.  This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet.  As right-wing pundit Max Boot put it after a recent flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the U.S. possesses military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”

Depending on just what you counted, there were anywhere from 700 to perhaps 1,200 or more U.S. bases, micro to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe.  Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, DARPA, whose budget grew by 50%.  Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight sci-fi-style wars in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for instance, how to improve the education of young Americans).  The Pentagon was also pioneering a new form of air power, drone warfare, in which “we” wouldn’t be within thousands of miles of the battlefield, and the battlefield would no longer necessarily be in a country with which we were at war.

It was also embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar wars (and various global skirmishes) -- and all this at top dollar at a time when next to no money was being invested in, among other things, the bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging American infrastructure.  Except when it came to victory, the military stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even as the domestic economy was spinning out of control, budget deficits were increasing rapidly, the governmental bureaucracy was growing ever more sclerotic, and indebtedness to other nations was rising by leaps and bounds.

In other words, in a far wealthier country, another set of leaders, having watched the Soviet Union implode, decisively embarked on the Soviet path to disaster.

Military Profligacy

In the fall of 2008, the abyss opened under the U.S. economy, which the Bush administration had been blissfully ignoring, and millions of people fell into it.  Giant institutions wobbled or crashed; extended unemployment wouldn’t go away; foreclosures happened on a mind-boggling scale; infrastructure began to buckle; state budgets were caught in a death grip; teachers’ jobs, another kind of infrastructure, went down the tubes in startling numbers; and the federal deficit soared.

Of course, a new president also entered the Oval Office, someone (many voters believed) intent on winding up (or at least down) Bush’s wars and the delusions of military omnipotence and technological omniscience that went with them.  If George W. Bush had pushed this country to the edge of disaster, at least his military policies, as many of his critics saw it, were as extreme and anomalous as the cult of executive power his top officials fostered.

But here was the strange thing.  In the midst of the Great Recession, under a new president with assumedly far fewer illusions about American omnipotence and power, war policy continued to expand in just about every way.  The Pentagon budget rose by Bushian increments in fiscal year 2010; and while the Iraq War reached a kind of dismal stasis, the new president doubled down in Afghanistan on entering office -- and then doubled down again before the end of 2009.  There, he “surged” in multiple ways.  At best, the U.S. was only drawing down one war, in Iraq, to feed the flames of another.

As in the Soviet Union before its collapse, the exaltation and feeding of the military at the expense of the rest of society and the economy had by now become the new normal; so much so that hardly a serious word could be said -- lest you not “support our troops” -- when it came to ending the American way of war or downsizing the global mission or ponying up the funds demanded of Congress to pursue war preparations and war-making.

Even when, after years of astronomical growth, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began to talk about cost-cutting at the Pentagon, it was in the service of the reallocation of ever more money to war-fighting.  Here was how the New York Times summed up what reduction actually meant for our ultimate super-sized institution in tough times: “Current budget plans project growth of only 1 percent in the Pentagon budget, after inflation, over the next five years.”  Only 1% growth -- at a time when state budgets, for instance, are being slashed to the bone.  Like the Soviet military, the Pentagon, in other words, is planning to remain obese whatever else goes down.

Meanwhile, the “anti-war” president has been overseeing the expansion of the new normal on many fronts, including the expanding size of the Army itself.  In fact, when it comes to the Global War on Terror -- even with the name now in disuse -- the profligacy can still take your breath away.

Consider, for instance, the $2.2 billion Host Nation Trucking contract the Pentagon uses to pay protection money to Afghan security companies which, in turn, slip some part of those payments to the Taliban to let American supplies travel safely on Afghan roads.  Or if you don’t want to think about how your tax dollar supports the Taliban, consider the $683,000 the Pentagon spent, according to the Washington Post, to “renovate a cafe that sells ice cream and Starbucks coffee” at its base/prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Or the $773,000 used there “to remodel a cinder-block building to house a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant,” or the $7.3 million spent on baseball and football fields, or the $60,000 batting cage, or a promised $20,000 soccer cage, all part of the approximately two billion dollars that have gone into the American base and prison complex that Barack Obama promised to, but can’t, close.

Or what about the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, that 104-acre, almost three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar, 21-building homage to the American-mall-as-fortified-citadel?  It costs more than $1.5 billion a year to run, and bears about as much relationship to an “embassy” as MacDonald’s does to a neighborhood hamburger joint.  According to a recent audit, millions of dollars in “federal property” assigned to what is essentially a vast command center for the region, including 159 of the embassy's 1,168 vehicles, are missing or unaccounted for.

And as long as we’re talking about expansion in distant lands, how about the Pentagon’s most recent construction plans in Central Asia, part of a prospective “mini-building boom” there.  They are to include an anti-terrorism training center to be constructed for a bargain basement $5.5 million in... no, not Toledo or Akron or El Paso, but the combustible city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan.  And that’s just one of several projects there and in neighboring Tajikistan that are reportedly to be funded out of the U.S. Central Command’s “counter-narcotics fund” (and ultimately, of course, your pocket).     

Or consider a particularly striking example of military expansion under President Obama, superbly reported by the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe in a piece headlined, “U.S. 'secret war' expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role.” As a story, it sank without a trace in a country evidently unfazed by the idea of having its forces garrisoned and potentially readying to fight everywhere on the planet. 

Here’s how the piece began:

“Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.  Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year.”

Now, without opening an atlas, just try to name any 75 countries on this planet -- more than one-third, that is, of the states belonging to the United Nations.  And yet U.S. special operatives are now engaging in war, or preparing for war, or training others to do so, or covertly collecting intelligence in that many countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.  Fifteen more than in the Bush era.    

Whatever it is or isn’t called, this remains Bush’s Global War on Terror on an expansionist trajectory.  DeYoung and Jaffe quote an unnamed “senior military official” saying that the Obama administration has allowed "things that the previous administration did not," and report that Special Operations commanders are now “a far more regular presence at the White House” than in the Bush years.

Not surprisingly, those Special Operations forces have themselves expanded in the first year and a half of the Obama presidency and, for fiscal year 2011, with 13,000 of them already deployed abroad, the administration has requested a 5.7% hike in their budget to $6.3 billion.

Once upon a time, Special Operations forces got their name because they were small and “special.”  Now, they are, in essence, being transformed into a covert military within the military and, as befits their growing size, reports Noah Shachtman of the Wired's Danger Room, the Army Special Forces alone are slated to get a new $100 million “headquarters” in northern Afghanistan.  It will cover about 17 acres and will include a “communications building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance Facility... dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support working dogs... Supporting facilities include roads, power production system and electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water production, water storage, water distribution, sanitary sewer collection system, communication manhole/duct system, curbs, walkways, drainage and parking.”  

This headquarters, adds Shachtman, will take a year to build, “at which point, the U.S. is allegedly supposed to begin drawing down its forces in Afghanistan. Allegedly.”  And mind you, the Special Operations troops are but one expanding part of the U.S. military. 

Creeping Gigantism

The first year and a half of the Obama administration has seen a continuation of what could be considered the monumental socialist-realist era of American war-making (including a decision to construct another huge, Baghdad-style “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan). This sort of creeping gigantism, with all its assorted cost overruns and private perks, would undoubtedly have seemed familiar to the Soviets.  Certainly no less familiar will be the near decade the U.S. military has spent, increasingly disastrously, in the Afghan graveyard.

Drunk on war as Washington may be, the U.S. is still not the Soviet Union in 1991 -- not yet.  But it’s not the triumphant “sole superpower” anymore either.  Its global power is visibly waning, its ability to win wars distinctly in question, its economic viability open to doubt.  It has been transformed from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, a fact only highlighted by the ongoing BP catastrophe and “rescue” in the Gulf of Mexico.  Its airports are less shiny and more Third World-like every year.  Unlike France or China, it has not a mile of high-speed rail. And when it comes to the future, especially the creation and support of innovative industries in alternative energy, it’s chasing the pack.  It is increasingly a low-end service economy, losing good jobs that will never return.   

And if its armies come home in defeat... watch out.

In 1991, the Soviet Union suddenly evaporated.  The Cold War was over.  Like many wars, it seemed to have an obvious winner and an obvious loser.  Nearly 20 years later, as the U.S. heads down the Soviet road to disaster -- even if the world can’t imagine what a bankrupt America might mean -- it’s far clearer that, in the titanic struggle of the two superpowers that we came to call the Cold War, there were actually two losers, and that, when the “second superpower” left the scene, the first was already heading for the exits, just ever so slowly and in a state of self-intoxicated self-congratulation.  Nearly every decision in Washington since then, including Barack Obama’s to expand both the Afghan War and the war on terror, has only made what, in 1991, was one possible path seem like fate itself.

Call up the Politburo in Washington.  We’re in trouble.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), will be published this week. To catch him discussing America in the “Soviet era," as well as his new book, on the latest TomCast audio interview, click here, or to download it to your iPod, click here.

[Note on sources and readings:  I regularly rely on the invaluable Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room (for all things strange and military), as well as Katherine Tiedemann’s Daily Brief at the AfPak Channel, and recommend them often enough.  Let me suggest another interesting place to visit: TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg’s Center on Law and Security at NYU has a new website, the CenterLine, which has just launched a daily round-up report on “war on terror” issues of every sort: “Today’s Terrorism News.” It’s well worth attending to.  Finally, as ever, my special thanks go to Christopher Holmes, who patrols the borders of TomDispatchland, day and night, in search of error.  He’s indefatigable.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

If There Was Ever a Moment to Seize

Will Obama Stand Up to Big Energy in Deeds as Well as Words? 
By Bill McKibben

Here's the president on March 31st, announcing his plan to lift a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling: "Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy."

Here he is on May 26th, as political pressure starts to really build over the hole in the bottom of the sea that BP somehow seems unable to plug: "We're not going to be able to sustain this kind of fossil fuel use. The planet can't sustain it."  Still, he added quickly, there's no need for any dramatics: “We’re not going to transition out of oil next year or 10 years from now.”

And here is the president last Wednesday, after yet another gimcrack solution at 5,000 feet under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico had gone awry, and real anger at the administration's lackluster performance crested: "[T]he time has come to aggressively accelerate [the transition from fossil fuels.] The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future."

The question is: which one is the real Obama? Has he really been transformed by the oil spill in the Gulf, or is he merely trying to ride out the public reaction with stronger words? I think the answer is as murky as the water off Mobile. We don't know because so far it's all words -- the closest he's come to specifics is that pledge that we won't be off oil in a decade.

Which, of course, is true.  Ten years from now, we’ll still be using oil -- many of the people who bought new Fords this year will still be driving them in 2020. Exxon will still be in business. But this realism didn’t necessarily preclude him from saying so much more than he did. Had he chosen to, he could have declared: “Ten years from now, America will be using half the oil we do today and producing ten times as much solar power.” That would have been stirring.  That would have put something on the line.  

He could, in other words, have done what President John F. Kennedy did, when he found himself with a 10-year timetable. In a special address to Congress in May 1961, JFK urged that America commit itself to the goal, “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”  He demanded of Congress “a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs.”  

A year later, at roughly the same stage in his presidency as Obama is in his, Kennedy took to the stage at Rice University, having just toured nearby NASA labs. There, he gave a great speech. (If you think Obama has a masterful speechwriting team, compare his flabby remarks in California to Kennedy’s slightly shorter gem.) Its core went like this:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.”

Now, let’s catalogue the differences: Kennedy had the Cold War to help him, along with an accelerating economy and a strong congressional majority. Obama presides over a fragile economy, a fractious Congress, and must deal with a lunatic right that, at the last Republican convention, came together around the slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

Not only that, but the challenge he faces is so much tougher.  The Apollo mission was technically complex, but in a sense the very opposite of our energy challenge: a moon shot meant focusing all our energy on three guys and a rocket, while an energy revolution would mean, in essence, landing all of us on a different planet, one where we no longer need the fossil fuels that are currently the engine for our economy. So, advantage Kennedy. In addition, no organized interest was fighting the space shot -- if anything, big corporations were lining up for a piece of the action.

Still, as Andy Revkin recently pointed out in the New York Times, there is “every reason to think a contemporary president could articulate how this remarkable juncture in human history, as infinite aspirations butt up against planetary limits, can be met with a grand, sustained effort.”

Especially because Kennedy was taking a flier, there was no one demanding he go to the moon, and no real penalty for not even trying. (Lots of people thought we could have spent the money better close to home.) Obama, however, has no choice. The planet’s future (and his legacy) will, in the long run, be defined by his response to global warming, which is clearly the greatest problem humans have ever faced.

Forget the Cold War.  Last week, new satellite data showed that this summer’s melt of the Arctic is already ahead of 2007’s record pace. We’re in the middle of a Heat War, and we’re losing badly.  Globally, we’ve just come through the warmest winter on record, and it seems all but certain that 2010 will set a new record for the hottest calendar year. Every week we seem to see record deluges somewhere: May began with crazy flooding in Nashville and ended with inundation in Guatemala.  Last week saw the warmest temperatures ever recorded in Asia and Southeast Asia.

So far, Obama’s barely broken a sweat on climate change: a few paragraphs in a few speeches. Now, the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf offers him the best chance he’s ever going to get to go to work.  The president could stand on the Louisiana shore and say: “Bad as this is, it’s only a small and visible symbol of the greater damage we do each day simply by burning coal and gas and oil. If that black gunk now washing up here had ended up safely in the gas tanks of our cars, it would nonetheless have done great damage. It’s all dirty, every last drop and lump.”

The president already has the podium he needs to start turning history, which means more than merely pushing for the climate and energy bill introduced last month by senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman -- a prime example of baby-step politics. As with his health care bill, on energy matters, too, the administration and its envoys sought out in advance the industries most likely to raise a fuss and cut the deals those cartels wanted.  Just as big pharma knew it wouldn’t face negotiated drug prices, so big oil and big electricity have been assured that there will be no serious opposition to their business model.

The bottom line: if you neglect all the offsets and loopholes, we’re aiming for a 4% reduction in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2020. Make your blood stir?  Obama’s not proposing real solutions to real problems; he’s ticking off items on a list. He got a health care bill, and just maybe he’ll get an energy bill (though that’s an increasingly slim "maybe").  But we don’t need the bill, we need the thing.

I’m putting this all on Obama, even though it’s clear that he can’t do it by himself. He’d need a movement to make real progress. That’s the tragedy, though: he’s already got a movement. He was elected with millions of us sending him money, knocking on doors, standing in snow banks with signs. He commands a standing army (albeit one that’s growing rusty from disuse and a little demoralized).

And it’s not just here. Across the world, we at 350.org were able to organize giant demonstrations last year -- 5,200 of them in 181 countries, what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind." We did it the way Kennedy did, by rallying people around a hard goal instead of an easy one: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide which, according to NASA scientists, is the most we can safely have in the atmosphere. Since we’re already past that point -- at 390 ppm -- we need to work harder than we could ever have imagined. We really do need to get off oil in the coming decade. 

But to have a chance we need a leader. We need someone to stand up and tell it the way it is, and in language so compelling and dramatic it sets us on a new path. On this planet of nearly seven billion, at this moment in history, there’s exactly one person who could play that role. And so far he hasn't decided.

Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the founder of 350.org and the author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Copyright 2010 Bill McKibben

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

American Denial

Living in a Can’t-Do Nation
By Tom Engelhardt

Graduates of the class of 2010, I’m honored to have been asked to address you today, but I would not want to be you.

I graduated in 1966 on a gloriously sunny day; then again, it was a sunnier moment in this country.  We were, after all, still surfing the crest of post-World War II American wealth and productivity.  The first oil crisis of 1973 wasn’t even on the horizon.  I never gave a thought to the gas I put in the tank of the used Volkswagen "bug" I bought with a friend my last year in college.  In those days, the oil for that gas had probably been pumped out of an American well on land (and not dumped in the Gulf of Mexico).  Gas, in any case, was dirt cheap.  No one thought about it -- or Saudi Arabia (unless they were working for an oil company or the State Department).

Think of it this way: in 1966, the United States was, in your terms, China, while China was just a giant, poor country, a land of -- as the American media liked to write back then -- “blue ants.”  Seventeen years earlier, it had, in the words of its leader Mao Ze-dong, “stood up” and declared itself a revolutionary people’s republic; but just a couple of years before I graduated, that country went nuts in something called the Cultural Revolution.

Back in 1966, the world was in debt to us.  We were the high-tech brand you wanted to own -- unless, of course, you were a guerrilla in the jungles of Southeast Asia who held some quaint notion about having a nation of your own.

Here’s what I didn’t doubt then: that I would get a job.  I didn’t spend much time thinking about my working future, because American affluence and the global dominance that went with it left me unshakably confident that, when I was ready, I would land somewhere effortlessly.  The road trips of that era, the fabled counterculture, so much of daily life would be predicated on, and tied to, the country’s economic power, cheap oil, staggering productivity, and an ability to act imperially on a global stage without seeming (to us Americans at least) like an imperial entity.

I was living in denial then about the nature of our government, our military, and our country, but it was an understandable state.  After all, we -- the “sixties generation” -- grew up so much closer to a tale of American democracy and responsive government. We had faith, however unexamined, that an American government should and would hear us, that if we raised our voices loudly enough, our leaders would listen.  We had, in other words, a powerful, deeply ingrained sense of agency, now absent in this country.

That, I suspect, is why we took to the streets in protest -- not just because we despaired of American war policy, which we did, but because under that despair we still held on tightly to a hope, which the next decades would strip from our world and your generation.  And we had hopeful models as well.  Remember, the great Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was still a force to be reckoned with -- and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, the riots of 1968, the burning ghettoes, the shock of American troops occupying American inner cities, as yet had no reality for us.

Even in protest, there was a sense of... well, the only word I can think of is “abundance.”  At the time, everything seemed abundant.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was expansively underway in the midst of war -- and even guns and butter seemed (for a while) a plausible enough combination for a country like ours.  The Peace Corps, that creation of the Kennedy presidency -- which my future wife joined in 1964 -- was still new and it, too, encapsulated that sense of American abundance and the hubris that went with it.  It was based, after all, on the idea that you could take a bunch of American kids like you, just out of college, with no particular skills, and ship them off with minimal training to needy nations around the world to improve life, all as part of a great Cold War publicity face-off with the Soviet Union.

And those kids, who turned out in droves to experience something bigger and better than themselves, did often enough find ingenious ways to offer limited amounts of help.  The Peace Corps was but one small measure of a pervasive sense -- about to be shattered -- of our country’s status as the globe’s preeminent can-do nation.  There was nothing we couldn’t do.  (Hadn’t we, after all, singlehandedly rebuilt devastated Europe and Japan after World War II?)

Then, of course, there was “the war.”  Vietnam, that is.  It was the oozing oil spill of that moment, regularly referred to as “an American tragedy” (never a Vietnamese one).  The tragic aspect of it, above all, seemed to be that victory would not come; that, as Henry Kissinger would later put it, speaking of communist North Vietnam, “I can’t believe a fourth-rate power doesn’t have a breaking point.”

The very idea of defeat -- hardly mentionable in those years but ever-present -- was corrosive to what, in a book of mine, I once called America’s “victory culture.”  Because the Vietnamese refused to give way in that “meat grinder” of a war in which millions of Vietnamese (and tens of thousands of American soldiers) would die, doubt, like that oil seeping into the Louisiana marshes today, oozed into the crevices of American life, and began to eat away at confidence.

Even the nightmare of war, however, had a positive side -- and you can thank the draft for that.  The U.S. then had a civilian, rather than a professional (verging on mercenary) army.  It was, in a sense, still faintly in the tradition of the “people’s armies” that began with the French Revolution’s levée en masse.  For young men nationwide and those who knew them, the draft -- the possibility that you, or your son, husband, lover, friend, might actually end up fighting America’s misbegotten war in Southeast Asia -- ensured, strangely enough, a deeper connection both to war and country, something now absent in most of your lives.

With rare exceptions, you, the class of 2010, live unconnected to the wars America has been fighting these last nine-plus years.  As a result, you also live in avoidance not of a draft, but of the damage our country is doing to itself and others in distant lands.  That kind of denial is a luxury in a country now far less well known for its affluence and still squandering what wealth it has on wars and armaments.  Today, it’s guns, not butter, and that fateful choice, regularly renewed, seems totally divorced from your lives (though you will, in the end, pay a price for it).

When it came to this country and its wars, my education took place not in the classroom, but extracurricularly, as part of an antiwar movement.  It involved a kind of stripping down of so much I thought I knew, so much I had been taught or simply absorbed.  Much that I had to unlearn about this country is now your birthright, for better or worse.

Can’t-Do America

Who can deny that our American world is in trouble?  Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest; that we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens?

You, the graduating class of 2010, are caught in a system; then again, so are our leaders.  In recent years, we’ve had two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who could not be mistaken for one another.  In most obvious ways -- style, thinking, personality, politics, sensibility, impulses -- they couldn’t be more different, as have been the ways they have approached problems.  One was a true believer in the glories of American military and executive power, the other is a manager of a declining power and what passes for a political “pragmatist” in our world.  Yet, more times than is faintly comfortable, the two of them have ended up in approximately the same policy places -- whether on the abridgement of liberties, the expansion of the secret activities of military special operations forces across the Greater Middle East, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands and elsewhere, the treatment of prisoners, our expanding wars, Pentagon budgets, offshore oil drilling and nuclear power, or other topics which matter in our lives.

This should be more startling than it evidently is for most Americans.  If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems.  We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas.

Compared to the long-gone world I graduated into, yours seems to me little short of dystopian, even if, on the surface, it still has something of the look of American abundance.  If nothing changes in this equation, your experience, as far as I can tell, will be of ever less available, ever less decent jobs and of ever less wealth ever less well distributed, as well as of a federal government (“the bureaucracy”) that has everything to do with giant corporations, their lobbyists and publicists, and the military-industrial complex -- and nothing to do with you.

You have grown increasingly used to an American world in which a war-fighting state armed with increasingly oppressive powers offers you a national security version of “safety,” directed by Fear Inc. and based on waning liberties.  You seem to me deeply affected by, but detached from, all of this.

In many ways, given our situation, your response seems reasonable enough.  The problem is: if you simply duck and go about your lives as best you can, what can this country hope for?

Unfortunately, your disconnect is, I suspect, made more severe because your lives are encased in what I would call a grid of exterminationism.  It was in my youth, of course, that the world became exterminable, thanks to nuclear weapons.  Today -- with other threats, especially global warming and resource scarcity, joining those doomsday weapons in what feels like a fatal brew -- how could you not feel despair, whether fully recognized or not?  How could you not have the urge to avoid looking toward the horizon, toward a future too grim to think about?  If you can’t imagine a future, however, you probably can’t form a movement to change anything.

In short, you, graduates of 2010, through no fault of your own are, it seems, living in our 51^st state, a state of American denial, in a nation that is being hollowed out (as the paltry governmental response to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico indicates).  As we now know, America’s aging infrastructure -- its bridges, dikes, levees, dams, drinking water transport systems, roads, and the like -- is quite literally hollowing out, as well as springing “leaks,” and not a mile under the water either.  Little is being done about this.

The hollowing out, however, goes deeper -- right down to the feeling that, with disaster in the air, little can be done and nothing reversed.  The can-do nation of my youth has given way to a can’t-do nation with a busted government.

I think I can guarantee you one thing, for instance, about the historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  When the commissions have commished, and Congress has investigated, and the president has re-staffed the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, and the pundits have pontificated, and everything else that could possibly happen has happened, we will, once again, have learned next to nothing -- other than, perhaps, how to drill for offshore oil at the depth of one mile marginally more safely.  We will not be any closer to an alternative energy future.  We will not have one mile more of high-speed rail.

Nothing that matters will have happened.  And months from now, BP will again be announcing profits in the billions and pouring more money into the pockets of politicians heading for Washington, while the people of Louisiana, among others, will be left to their misery as the 24/7 media moves on to the next set of disasters, real or ephemeral.

When the first deep-water oil spill happened in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969, Americans were shocked and there were actual protests.  In the streets.  Shock, that is, was followed by the urge to act.  As parts of the Gulf of Mexico are being turned into a dead sea, shock there may be and even complaint, but next to no protest.  Here’s a recent headline that catches something of the mood of the moment: “A nation mesmerized: Can BP plug the Gulf gusher?”  Mesmerized is a good word for it.  The whole world is watching -- and nothing more.  The media tells us that there is anger, and there’s certainly plenty to be angry about.  But look around.  Do you see anger?  Does outrage march past you any day of the week?

Is this the American world you really want?

Leaving the 51st State

Call it fate, but on this graduation day, the skies are grey, a light rain is falling, and a surprisingly heavy fog has cut this tent off from the campus on which you’ve spent four years.  Think of it as a message from the gods and let me, like any reader of oracles, do my best to interpret it for you.

Usually, graduation speakers are intent on encouraging graduates to sally forth into the world, get a job, and have a life.  I have a different message in mind.  After all those courses, seminars, papers, tests, it’s time for you to sally forth and get an education -- on your own and under terrible circumstances.  You’ll have to find your own teachers, assign your own papers, and carry on your own seminars in the noisy precinct of your mind or among your friends and acquaintances.  The subject?  What is to be done with America.

I was born in a country that thought it could rebuild anything.  You’re living in one lacking recuperative powers.  Our resources are now being mobilized to fight two obscure and remarkably pointless, if destructive, trillion-dollar wars in distant Afghanistan and Iraq that most Americans pretend aren’t even going on.  In the meantime, you have never been called upon to mobilize for anything.  You have never been asked to sacrifice anything for the greater good.  Even as nothing is being asked of you, your future is nonetheless being sacrificed.  If you leave this campus and do nothing, your life will be far worse for it.

When I began, I said I wouldn’t want to be you.  That’s because the task before you is grotesquely super-sized.  You undoubtedly sense this, sense that somehow you need to free yourself from so much these years have taught you in order to imagine a future for us all.

You’ve been robbed of the sense that you could matter -- outside your own small world and your individual life.  It’s the worst sort of thievery.  Worse than that, it’s a lie.  If you believe it, though, it will become so.  Given the size of the problems at hand, given what needs to be mended on our wounded planet, the easier path is to settle down for good in the 51st state.

On the other hand, yours could be the ultimate American odyssey.  You could have stories to tell your children, and your children’s children that would be memorable indeed.  The question is: What is to be done with America?  What will you do with it?

I know what I’d suggest as a start.  Tens of thousands of dollars and, for many of you, mountains of debt later, get an education.  If you can’t do it in the daylight of the workaday world, do it at night.  You’re young.  Drink coffee.  Stay up late.  If you don’t feel that you owe it to yourself (and you do), then you owe it to the American world that you would like your children to live in.

I feel no pride over the oil-slimed, war-making, money-blowing country that my generation has left you.  Not for a second.  I wouldn’t chose to be you, not given the tools we’ve left you to work with.  But you are, of course, you.  That’s the one choice you can’t make, so make something of it.

We’re constantly reminded that we need heroes.  We have a tendency now to call the soldiers fighting needless wars thousands of miles away our “heroes.”  But what hero struggles halfway across the planet when his home is on fire?  What we need is another kind of hero, another kind of bravery: you marching off this campus and out of the 51st state.  You facing up to the miserable world you’re in, figuring out its parameters, and doing something about it.

And here’s the good news: in bad times, action engenders hope.  So act.  It’ll feel better to do so.

It’s time for me to end and for you to form into your ranks, depart this tent, and with your banners flying, your heads held high, go into the fog that covers this campus, into a future that’s anything but clear or beckoning.  Still, I’m counting on you.  End the American state of denial -- or else.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.

[Note for Readers: Just to be completely clear, I was invited to no campus to give this commencement speech. I gave it in the campus of my mind, which was indeed foggy that day.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

This artile was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

Citizen Alioune

How Not to Deal with Muslims in America 
By Stephan Salisbury

Alioune Niass, the Sengalese Muslim vendor who first spotted the now infamous smoking SUV in Times Square and alerted police, is no hero.

If it were not for the Times of London, we would not even know of his pivotal role in the story. No mainstream American newspaper bothered to mention or profile Niass, who peddles framed photographs of celebs and the Manhattan skyline. None of the big television stations interviewed him.

As far as the readers of the New York Times are concerned -- not to mention the New York Post and the Daily News -- Niass doesn’t exist.  Nor does he exist for President Obama, who telephoned Lance Orton and Duane Jackson, two fellow vendors, to thank them for their alertness in reporting the SUV. The New York Mets even feted Jackson and Orton as heroes at a game with the San Francisco Giants.

And Niass? Well, no presidential phone calls, no encomiums, no articles (though his name did finally surface briefly at a New York Times blog several days after the incident), no free Mets tickets. Yet as the London Times reported, it was Niass who first saw the clouds of smoke seeping from the SUV on that Saturday night.

He hadn’t seen the car drive up, because he was attending to customers -- and, for a vendor in Times Square, Saturday nights are not to be taken lightly. Niass was alarmed, however, when he saw that smoke. “I thought I should call 911,” he told the Times, “but my English is not very good and I had no credit left on my phone, so I walked over to Lance, who has the T-shirt stall next to mine, and told him. He said we shouldn’t call 911. Immediately he alerted a police officer nearby.”  Then the cop called 911.

So Lance got the press, and he and Jackson, who also reported the SUV, have been celebrated as “heroes.” As the Times interview with Niass has made the internet rounds, there have been calls for the recognition of his “heroism,” too.

These three men all acted admirably. The two other vendors did what any citizen ought to do on spotting a smoldering car illegally parked on a busy street. But heroes? In the case of Niass, characterizing him as a hero may in a sense diminish the significance of his act.

A vendor in New York since 9/11, he saw something amiss and reported it, leading him into contact with the police. That a Muslim immigrant would not think twice about this simple civic act speaks volumes about the power of American society and the actual day-to-day lives and conduct of Muslims in this nation, particularly immigrant Muslims.

This was a reasonably routine act for Orton and Jackson, but for Niass it required special courage, and the fact that he acted anyway only underscores what should be an obvious fact about Muslims in post-9/11 America: they represent a socially responsible and engaged community like any other.

Assault on American Muslims

Why do I say that his act required courage?

Like many Muslim immigrants in New York City and around the country, Niass senses that he is viewed with suspicion by fellow citizens -- and particularly by law enforcement authorities -- simply because of his religion.  In an interview with Democracy Now, that essential independent radio and television news program, Niass said that, in terrorism cases, law enforcement authorities view every Muslim as a potential threat.  Ordinary citizens become objects of suspicion for their very ordinariness. “If one person is bad, they are going to say everybody for this religion. That is, I think, wrong.”

As far as Niass is concerned, terrorists are, at best, apostates, irreligious deviants. “That not religion,” he told his interviewer, “because Islam religion is not terrorist. Because if I know this guy is Muslim, if I know that, I’m going to catch him before he run away.”

The New York Police Department Intelligence Division, the FBI, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all routinely run armies of informers through the city’s Middle Eastern and South Asian communities. In the immediate wake of 9/11, sections of New York experienced sweeps by local and federal agents. The same in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Houston, and communities on the West Coast -- everywhere, in fact, that Muslims cluster together.

I’ve been reporting on this for years (and have made it the subject of my book Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland). Despite the demurrals of law enforcement officials, these sweeps and on-going, ever-widening investigations have focused exclusively on Muslim enclaves. I have seen the destructive impact on family and community such covert police activity can have: broken homes, deported parents, bereft children, suicides, killings, neighbors filled with mutual suspicions, daily shunning as a fact of life. “Since when is being Muslim a crime?” one woman whose husband had been swept up off a street in Philadelphia asked me.

Muslim residents have been detained, jailed, and deported by the thousands since 9/11.  We all know this and law enforcement and federal officials have repeatedly argued that these measures are necessary in the new era ushered in by al-Qaeda.  A prosecutor once candidly told me that it made no sense to spend time investigating or watching non-Muslims. Go to the source, he said.

Radicalization Is a Problem of Limited Proportions

There are many problems with this facile view, and two recent studies -- one from a think-tank funded in large part by the federal government, the other from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and the University of North Carolina’s departments of religion and sociology (using a U.S. Department of Justice grant) -- highlight some of the most glaring contradictions.

The Rand Corporation studied the incidence of terrorist acts since September 11, 2001, and found that the problem, while serious, was wildly overblown. There have been, Rand researchers determined, all of 46 incidents of Americans or long-time U.S. residents being radicalized and attempting to commit acts of terror (most failing woefully) since 9/11. Those incidents involved a total of 125 people. Think about that number for a moment: it averages out to about six cases of purported radicalization and terrorism a year. Faisal Shahzad’s utterly inept effort in Times Square would make incident 47. In the 1970s, the report points out, the country endured, on average, around 70 terrorist incidents a year. From January 1969 to April 1970 alone, the U.S. somehow managed to survive 4,330 bombings, 43 deaths, and $22 million of property damage.

The Rand report, “Would-Be Warriors: Incidents of Jihadist Terrorist Radicalization in the United States since September 11, 2001,” argues that ham-handed surveillance and aggressive police investigations can be, and often are, counter-productive, sowing a deep-seated fear of law enforcement and immigration authorities throughout Muslim communities -- whose assistance is vital in coping with the threat of Islamic terrorism, tiny as it is here.

Family members, friends, and neighbors are far more likely to know when someone is headed down a dangerously radical path than the police, no matter how many informers may be in a neighborhood. “On occasion, relatives and friends have intervened,” the Rand researchers write. “But will they trust the authorities enough to notify them when persuasion does not work?” And will the authorities actually use the information provided by family members when they receive it? Don’t forget the perfunctory manner in which CIA officials treated the father of the underwear bomber when he tried to report his son as an imminent threat.

The second study, conducted by a research team from Duke University and the University of North Carolina, found similarly small numbers of domestic terror plots and incidents since 9/11. The report identifies 139 Muslim Americans who have been prosecuted for planning or executing acts of terrorist violence since September 11, 2001, an average of 17 a year. (Again, most of these attempted acts of terror, as in the Shahzad case, were ineptly planned, if planned at all.)  Like the Rand report, the Duke-UNC study highlights the meager numbers: “This level of 17 individuals a year is small compared to other violent crime in America but not insignificant. Homegrown terrorism is a serious but limited problem.”

The Duke-UNC researchers conducted 120 in-depth interviews with Muslims in four American cities to gain insight into the problem of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the response of Muslim Americans to it. Why so few cases? Why so little radicalization? Not surprisingly, what the researchers found was widespread hostility to extremist ideologies and strong Muslim community efforts to quash them -- efforts partially driven by a desire for self-protection, but more significantly by moral, ethical, and theological hostility to violent fundamentalist ideologies.

Both of these reports underscore the importance of what the researchers call “self-policing” within Muslim communities.  They consider it a critical and underutilized factor in combating terrorism in the U.S. Far from being secretive breeding grounds for radicalism, the Duke-UNC report argues, mosques and other Muslim community institutions build ties to the nation and larger world while working to root out extremist political fundamentalism. It was not for nothing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed instructed his 9/11 hijackers to steer clear of Muslim Americans, their mosques, and their institutions.

The UNC-Duke report urges federal and local officials to work aggressively to integrate Muslim communities even more fully into the American political process. Authorities, it suggests, should be considering ways of supporting and strengthening those communities by actively promoting repeated Muslim denunciations of violence. (Such condemnations have been continuous since 9/11 but are rarely reported in the press.) Public officials should also work to insure that social service agencies are active in Muslim neighborhoods, should aggressively pursue claimed infractions of civil rights laws, and should focus on establishing working relationships with Muslim groups when it comes to terrorism and law enforcement issues.

The Times Square incident -- and, yes, the small but vital role played by Alioune Niass -- illustrate the importance of these commonsensical recommendations. Yet the media has ignored Niass, and law-enforcement agencies have once again mounted a highly public, fear-inducing investigation justified in the media largely by anonymous leaks. This recreates the creepy feeling of what happened in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: the appearance of a massive, chaotic, paranoid probe backed by media speculation disguised as reporting. A warehouse raided in South Jersey. Why? No answers. A man led away in handcuffs from a Boston-area home. Who is he? What is his role? Was he a money man? Maybe. But maybe not.  Suspicious packages. Oddly parked trucks. Tips. Streets closed. Bomb squads cautiously approaching ordinary boxes or vehicles. No answers -- even after the all-clear rings out and the yellow caution tape comes down.

More importantly, the controlled flow of anonymous leaks to the mainstream press has laid the groundwork for the Obama administration to threaten Pakistan harshly -- even as Iraq and Afghanistan sink further into deadly and destructive fighting -- and to ponder extreme revisions of criminal procedures involving the rights of suspects. The administration’s radical suggestion to suspend Miranda rights and delay court hearings for terrorism suspects amounts to a threat to every American citizen’s right to an attorney and a defense against state power. Is this the message the country wants to send “the evil doers,” as President Bush used to call them?

Or have we already taken the message of those evil doers to heart? Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen taken into custody on American soil, disappeared into the black hole of interrogation for more than two weeks -- despite President Obama’s assertion to a CIA audience over a year ago that “what makes the United States special... is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it's hard, not just when it's easy, even when we are afraid and under threat, not just when it's expedient to do so.”

When the going gets tough, as Attorney General Holder made clear on “Meet the Press” on May 9th, the tough change the rules. “We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” he said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.” None of this is good news for Muslims in America -- or for the rest of us.

Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.  The latest TomCast audio interview in which he discusses the words that changed our world since September 11, 2001, can be heard by clicking here or downloaded to your ipod by clicking here.

[Note to Readers: If you are interested in reading the Duke University-University of North Carolina study, it is available by clicking here, as is the Rand report by clicking here.  (Note that both are PDF files.)  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s aversion to contact with U.S. Muslims is mentioned in evidence presented at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui and can be found in PDF format on page 36 of defense exhibit 941 here. For another view of just how overblown the Islamic terrorist threat in the U.S. is, check out Tom Engelhardt’s “Fear Inc.”]

Copyright 2010 Stephan Salisbury

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

The Relentless Pursuit of Extreme Energy

A New Oil Rush Endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the Planet
By Michael T. Klare

Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history.  Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources.  Make no mistake: we’re entering the danger zone.  And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake. 

It may never be possible to pin down the precise cause of the massive explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20th, killing 11 of its 126 workers.  Possible culprits include a faulty cement plug in the undersea oil bore and a disabled cutoff device known as a blow-out preventer.  Inadequate governmental oversight of safety procedures undoubtedly also contributed to the disaster, which may have been set off by a combination of defective equipment and human error.  But whether or not the immediate trigger of the explosion is ever fully determined, there can be no mistaking the underlying cause: a government-backed corporate drive to exploit oil and natural gas reserves in extreme environments under increasingly hazardous operating conditions.

The New Oil Rush and Its Dangers

The United States entered the hydrocarbon era with one of the world’s largest pools of oil and natural gas.  The exploitation of these valuable and versatile commodities has long contributed to the nation’s wealth and power, as well as to the profitability of giant energy firms like BP and Exxon.  In the process, however, most of our easily accessible onshore oil and gas reservoirs have been depleted, leaving only less accessible reserves in offshore areas, Alaska, and the melting Arctic.  To ensure a continued supply of hydrocarbons -- and the continued prosperity of the giant energy companies -- successive administrations have promoted the exploitation of these extreme energy options with a striking disregard for the resulting dangers.  By their very nature, such efforts involve an ever increasing risk of human and environmental catastrophe -- something that has been far too little acknowledged.

The hunt for oil and gas has always entailed a certain amount of risk.  After all, most energy reserves are trapped deep below the Earth’s surface by overlying rock formations.  When punctured by oil drills, these are likely to erupt in an explosive release of hydrocarbons, the well-known “gusher” effect.  In the swashbuckling early days of the oil industry, this phenomenon -- familiar to us from movies like There Will Be Blood -- often caused human and environmental injury.  Over the years, however, the oil companies became far more adept at anticipating such events and preventing harm to workers or the surrounding countryside. 

Now, in the rush to develop hard-to-reach reserves in Alaska, the Arctic, and deep-offshore waters, we’re returning to a particularly dangerous version of those swashbuckling days.  As energy companies encounter fresh and unexpected hazards, their existing technologies -- largely developed in more benign environments -- often prove incapable of responding adequately to the new challenges.  And when disasters occur, as is increasingly likely, the resulting environmental damage is sure to prove exponentially more devastating than anything experienced in the industrial annals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Deepwater Horizon operation was characteristic of this trend.  BP, the company which leased the rig and was overseeing the drilling effort, has for some years been in a rush to extract oil from ever greater depths in the Gulf of Mexico.  The well in question, known as Mississippi Canyon 252, was located in 5,000 feet of water, some 50 miles south of the Louisiana coastline; the well bore itself extended another 13,000 feet into the earth.  At depths this great, all work on the ocean floor has to be performed by remotely-controlled robotic devices overseen by technicians on the rig.  There was little margin for error to begin with, and no tolerance for the corner-cutting, penny-pinching, and lax oversight that appears to have characterized the Deepwater Horizon operation.  Once predictable problems did arise, it was, of course, impossible to send human troubleshooters one mile beneath the ocean’s surface to assess the situation and devise a solution.

Drilling in Alaska and the Arctic poses, if anything, even more perilous challenges, given the extreme environmental and climatic conditions to be dealt with.  Any drilling rigs deployed offshore in, say, Alaska’s Beaufort or Chukchi Seas must be hardened to withstand collisions with floating sea ice, a perennial danger, and capable of withstanding extreme temperatures and powerful storms.  In addition, in such hard-to-reach locations, BP-style oil spills, whether at sea or on land, will be even more difficult to deal with than in the Gulf.  In any such situation, an uncontrolled oil flow is likely to prove lethal to many species, endangered or otherwise, which have little tolerance for environmental hazards. 

The major energy firms insist that they have adopted ironclad safeguards against such perils, but the disaster in the Gulf has already made mockery of such claims, as does history.  In 2006, for instance, a poorly-maintained pipeline at a BP facility ruptured, spewing 267,000 gallons of crude oil over Alaska’s North Slope in an area frequented by migrating caribou.  (Because the spill occurred in winter, no caribou were present at the time and it was possible to scoop up the oil from surrounding snow banks; had it occurred in summer, the risk to the Caribou herds would have been substantial.) 

If It’s Oil, It’s Okay

Despite obvious hazards and dangers, as well as inadequate safety practices, a succession of administrations, including Barack Obama’s, have backed corporate strategies strongly favoring the exploitation of oil and gas reservoirs in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and other environmentally sensitive areas. 

On the government’s side, this outlook was first fully articulated in the National Energy Policy (NEP) adopted by President George W. Bush on May 17, 2001.  Led by former Halliburton CEO Vice President Dick Cheney, the framers of the policy warned that the United States was becoming ever more dependent on imported energy, thereby endangering national security.  They called for increased reliance on domestic energy sources, especially oil and natural gas.  “A primary goal of the National Energy Policy is to add supply from diverse sources,” the document declared.  “This means domestic oil, gas, and coal.”

As the NEP made clear, however, the United States was running out of conventional, easily tapped reservoirs of oil and natural gas located on land or in shallow coastal waters.  “U.S. oil production is expected to decline over the next two decades, [while] demand for natural gas will most likely continue to outpace domestic production,” the document noted.  The only solution, it claimed, would be to increase exploitation of unconventional energy reserves -- oil and gas found in deep offshore areas of the Gulf of Mexico, the Outer Continental Shelf, Alaska, and the American Arctic, as well as in complex geological formations such as shale oil and gas.  “Producing oil and gas from geologically challenging areas while protecting the environment is important to Americans and to the future of our nation’s energy security,” the policy affirmed.  (The phrase in italics was evidently added by the White House to counter charges -- painfully accurate, as it turned out -- that the administration was unmindful of the environmental consequences of its energy policies.)

First and foremost among the NEP’s recommendations was the development of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal that generated intense media interest and produced widespread opposition from environmentalists.  Equally significant, however, was its call for increased exploration and drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf, as well as the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off northern Alaska. 

While drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was, in the end, blocked by Congress, an oil rush to exploit the other areas proceeded with little governmental opposition.  In fact, as has now become evident, the government’s deeply corrupted regulatory arm, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), has for years facilitated the awarding of leases for exploration and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while systematically ignoring environmental regulations and concerns.  Common practice during the Bush years, this was not altered when Barack Obama took over the presidency.  Indeed, he gave his own stamp of approval to a potentially massive increase in offshore drilling when on March 30th -- three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- he announced that vast areas of the Atlantic, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaskan waters would be opened to oil and gas drilling for the first time. 

In addition to accelerating the development of the Gulf of Mexico, while overruling government scientists and other officials who warned of the dangers, the MMS also approved offshore drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.  This happened despite strong opposition from environmentalists and native peoples who fear a risk to whales and other endangered species crucial to their way of life.  In October, for example, the MMS gave Shell Oil preliminary approval to conduct exploratory drilling on two offshore blocks in the Beaufort Sea.  Opponents of the plan have warned that any oil spills produced by such activities would pose a severe threat to endangered animals, but these concerns were, as usual, ignored.  (On April 30th, 10 days after the Gulf explosion, final approval of the plan was suddenly ordered withheld by President Obama, pending a review of offshore drilling activities.)

A BP Hall of Shame

The major energy firms have their own compelling reasons for a growing involvement in the exploitation of extreme energy options.  Each year, to prevent the value of their shares from falling, these companies must replace the oil extracted from their existing reservoirs with new reserves.  Most of the oil and gas basins in their traditional areas of supply have, however, been depleted, while many promising fields in the Middle East, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union are now under the exclusive control of state-owned national oil companies like Saudi Aramco, Mexico’s Pemex, and Venezuela’s PdVSA. 

This leaves the private firms, widely known as international oil companies (IOCs), with ever fewer areas in which to replenish their supplies.  They are now deeply involved in an ongoing oil rush in sub-Saharan Africa, where most countries still allow some participation by IOCs, but there they face dauntingly stiff competition from Chinese companies and other state-backed companies.  The only areas where they still have a virtually free hand are the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Atlantic, and the North Sea.  Not surprisingly, this is where they are concentrating their efforts, whatever the dangers to us or to the planet.

Take BP.  Originally known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, still later British Petroleum), BP got its start in southwestern Iran, where it once enjoyed a monopoly on the production of crude petroleum.  In 1951, its Iranian holdings were nationalized by the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadeq.  The company returned to Iran in 1953, following a U.S.-backed coup that put the Shah in power, and was finally expelled again in 1979 following the Islamic Revolution.  The company still retains a significant foothold in oil-rich but unstable Nigeria, a former British colony, and in Azerbaijan.  However, since its takeover of Amoco (once the Standard Oil Company of Indiana) in 1998, BP has concentrated its energies on the exploitation of Alaskan reserves and tough-oil locations in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and off the African coast. 

“Operating at the Energy Frontiers” is the title of BP’s Annual Review for 2009, which proudly began: “BP operates at the frontiers of the energy industry.  From deep beneath the ocean to complex refining environments, from remote tropical islands to next-generation biofuels -- a revitalized BP is driving greater efficiency, sustained momentum and business growth.” 

Within this mandate, moreover, the Gulf of Mexico held center stage.  “BP is the leading operator in the Gulf of Mexico,” the review asserted.  “We are the biggest producer, the leading resource holder and have the largest exploration acreage position… With new discoveries, successful start-ups, efficient operations, and a strong portfolio of new projects, we are exceptionally well placed to sustain our success in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico over the long run.”

Clearly, BP’s top executives believed that a rapid ramp-up in production in the Gulf was essential to the company’s long-term financial health (and indeed, only days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the company announced that it had made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2010 alone).  To what degree BP’s corporate culture contributed to the Deepwater Horizon accident has yet to be determined.  There is, however, some indication that the company was in an unseemly rush to complete the cementing of the Mississippi Canyon 252 well -- a procedure that would cap it until the company was ready to undertake commercial extraction of the oil stored below.  It could then have moved the rig, rented from Transocean Ltd. at $500,000 per day, to another prospective drill site in search of yet more oil.

While BP may prove to be the principal villain in this case, other large energy firms -- egged on by the government and state officials -- are engaged in similar reckless drives to extract oil and natural gas from extreme environmental locations.  These companies and their government backers insist that, with proper precautions, it is safe to operate in these conditions, but the Deepwater Horizon incident shows that the more extreme the environment, the more unlikely such statements will prove accurate.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion, we assuredly will be told, was an unfortunate fluke: a confluence of improper management and faulty equipment.  With tightened oversight, it will be said, such accidents can be averted -- and so it will be safe to go back into the deep waters again and drill for oil a mile or more beneath the ocean’s surface. 

Don’t believe it.  While poor oversight and faulty equipment may have played a critical role in BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf, the ultimate source of the disaster is big oil’s compulsive drive to compensate for the decline in its conventional oil reserves by seeking supplies in inherently hazardous areas -- risks be damned. 

So long as this compulsion prevails, more such disasters will follow.  Bet on it.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College.  His most recent book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.  A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Copyright 2010 Michael T. Klare

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

Obama’s Flailing Wars

A Study in BP-Style “Pragmatism” 
By Tom Engelhardt

On stage, it would be farce.  In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s bound to play out as tragedy.

Less than two months ago, Barack Obama flew into Afghanistan for six hours -- essentially to read the riot act to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whom his ambassador had only months before termed “not an adequate strategic partner.”  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen followed within a day to deliver his own “stern message.”

While still on Air Force One, National Security Adviser James Jones offered reporters a version of the tough talk Obama was bringing with him.  Karzai would later see one of Jones’s comments and find it insulting.  Brought to his attention as well would be a newspaper article that quoted an anonymous senior U.S. military official as saying of his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputedly corrupt powerbroker in the southern city of Kandahar: “I'd like him out of there... But there's nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency, then we can put him on the [target list] and capture and kill him."  This was tough talk indeed.

At the time, the media repeatedly pointed out that President Obama, unlike his predecessor, had consciously developed a standoffish relationship with Karzai.  Meanwhile, both named and anonymous officials regularly castigated the Afghan president in the press for stealing an election and running a hopelessly corrupt, inefficient government that had little power outside Kabul, the capital.  A previously planned Karzai visit to Washington was soon put on hold to emphasize the toughness of the new approach.

The administration was clearly intent on fighting a better version of the Afghan war with a new commander, a new plan of action, and a well-tamed Afghan president, a client head of state who would finally accept his lesser place in the greater scheme of things.  A little blunt talk, some necessary threats, and the big stick of American power and money were sure to do the trick.

Meanwhile, across the border in Pakistan, the administration was in an all-carrots mood when it came to the local military and civilian leadership -- billions of dollars of carrots, in fact.  Our top military and civilian officials had all but taken up residence in Islamabad.  By March, for instance, Admiral Mullen had already visited the country 15 times and U.S. dollars (and promises of more) were flowing in.  Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations Forces were arriving in the country’s wild borderlands to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps and the skies were filling with CIA-directed unmanned aerial vehicles pounding those same borderlands, where the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other insurgent groups involved in the Afghan War were located.

In Pakistan, it was said, a crucial “strategic relationship” was being carefully cultivated.  As the New York Times reported, “In March, [the Obama administration] held a high-level strategic dialogue with Pakistan’s government, which officials said went a long way toward building up trust between the two sides.”  Trust indeed.

Skip ahead to mid-May and somehow, like so many stealthy insurgents, the carrots and sticks had crossed the poorly marked, porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan heading in opposite directions.  Last week, Karzai was in Washington being given “the red carpet treatment” as part of what was termed an Obama administration “charm offensive” and a “four-day love fest.”

The president set aside a rare stretch of hours to entertain Karzai and the planeload of ministers he brought with him.  At a joint news conference, Obama insisted that “perceived tensions” between the two men had been “overstated.”  Specific orders went out from the White House to curb public criticism of the Afghan president and give him “more public respect” as “the chief U.S. partner in the war effort.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured Karzai of Washington’s long-term “commitment” to his country, as did Obama and Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal.  Praise was the order of the day.

John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, interrupted a financial reform debate to invite Karzai onto the Senate floor where he was mobbed by senators eager to shake his hand (an honor not bestowed on a head of state since 1967).  He was once again our man in Kabul.  It was a stunning turnaround: a president almost without power in his own country had somehow tamed the commander-in-chief of the globe’s lone superpower.

Meanwhile, Clinton, who had shepherded the Afghan president on a walk through a “private enclave” in Georgetown and hosted a “glittering reception” for him, appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” to flay Pakistan.  In the wake of an inept failed car bombing in Times Square, she had this stern message to send to the Pakistani leadership: "We want more, we expect more... We've made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences."  Such consequences would evidently include a halt to the flow of U.S. aid to a country in economically disastrous shape.  She also accused at least some Pakistani officials of “practically harboring” Osama bin Laden.  So much for the carrots.

According to the Washington Post, General McChrystal delivered a “similar message” to the chief of staff of the Pakistani Army.  To back up Clinton’s public threats and McChrystal’s private ones, hordes of anonymous American military and civilian officials were ready to pepper reporters with leaks about the tough love that might now be in store for Pakistan.  The same Post story, for instance, spoke of “some officials... weighing in favor of a far more muscular and unilateral U.S. policy. It would include a geographically expanded use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan and pressure for a stronger U.S. military presence there.”

According to similar accounts, “more pointed” messages were heading for key Pakistanis and “new and stiff warnings” were being issued. Americans were said to be pushing for expanded Special Operations training programs in the Pakistani tribal areas and insisting that the Pakistani military launch a major campaign in North Waziristan, the heartland of various resistance groups including, possibly, al-Qaeda.  “The element of threat” was now in the air, according to Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador, while in press reports you could hear rumblings about an “internal debate” in Washington that might result in more American “boots on the ground.”

Helpless Escalation

In other words, in the space of two months the Obama administration had flip-flopped when it came to who exactly was to be pressured and who reassured.  A typically anonymous “former U.S. official who advises the administration on Afghan policy” caught the moment well in a comment to the Wall Street Journal.  “This whole bending over backwards to show Karzai the red carpet,” he told journalist Peter Spiegel, “is a result of not having had a concerted strategy for how to grapple with him."

On a larger scale, the flip-flop seemed to reflect tactical and strategic incoherence -- and not just in relation to Karzai.  To all appearances, when it comes to the administration's two South Asian wars, one open, one more hidden, Obama and his top officials are flailing around.  They are evidently trying whatever comes to mind in much the manner of the oil company BP as it repeatedly fails to cap a demolished oil well 5,000 feet under the waves in the Gulf of Mexico.  In a sense, when it comes to Washington’s ability to control the situation, Pakistan and Afghanistan might as well be 5,000 feet underwater.  Like BP, Obama’s officials, military and civilian, seem to be operating in the dark, using unmanned robotic vehicles.  And as in the Gulf, after each new failure, the destruction only spreads.

For all the policy reviews and shuttling officials, the surging troops, extra private contractors, and new bases, Obama’s wars are worsening.  Lacking is any coherent regional policy or semblance of real strategy -- counterinsurgency being only a method of fighting and a set of tactics for doing so.  In place of strategic coherence there is just one knee-jerk response: escalation.  As unexpected events grip the Obama administration by the throat, its officials increasingly act as if further escalation were their only choice, their fated choice.

This response is eerily familiar.  It permeated Washington’s mentality in the Vietnam War years.  In fact, one of the strangest aspects of that war was the way America’s leaders -- including President Lyndon Johnson -- felt increasingly helpless and hopeless even as they committed themselves to further steps up the ladder of escalation.

We don’t know what the main actors in Obama’s war are feeling.  We don’t have their private documents or their secret taped conversations.  Nonetheless, it should ring a bell when, as wars devolve, the only response Washington can imagine is further escalation.

Washington Boxed In

By just about every recent account, including new reports from the independent Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon, the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is going dreadfully, even as the Taliban insurgency gains potency and expands.  This spring, preparing for his first relatively minor U.S. offensive in Marja, a Taliban-controlled area of Helmand Province, General McChrystal confidently announced that, after the insurgents were dislodged, an Afghan “government in a box” would be rolled out. From a governing point of view, however, the offensive seems to have been a fiasco.  The Taliban is now reportedly re-infiltrating the area, while the governmental apparatus in that nation-building “box” has proven next to nonexistent, corrupt, and thoroughly incompetent.

Today, according to a report by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS), the local population is far more hostile to the American effort.  According to the ICOS, “61% of Afghans interviewed feel more negative about NATO forces after Operation Moshtarak than they did before the February military offensive in Marja.”

As Alissa Rubin of the New York Times summed up the situation in Afghanistan more generally:

"Even as American troops clear areas of militants, they find either no government to fill the vacuum, as in Marja, or entrenched power brokers, like President Karzai's brother in Kandahar, who monopolize NATO contracts and other development projects and are resented by large portions of the population. In still other places, government officials rarely show up at work and do little to help local people, and in most places the Afghan police are incapable of providing security. Corruption, big and small, remains an overwhelming complaint."

In other words, the U.S. really doesn’t have an “adequate partner,” and this is all the more striking since the Taliban is by no stretch of the imagination a particularly popular movement of national resistance.  As in Vietnam, a counterinsurgency war lacking a genuine governmental partner is an oxymoron, not to speak of a recipe for disaster.

Not surprisingly, doubts about General McChrystal’s war plan are reportedly spreading inside the Pentagon and in Washington, even before it’s been fully launched.  The major U.S. summer “operation” -- it’s no longer being labeled an “offensive” -- in the Kandahar region already shows signs of “faltering” and its unpopularity is rising among an increasingly resistant local population.  In addition, civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO actions are distinctly on the rise and widely unsettling to Afghans.  Meanwhile, military and police forces being trained in U.S./NATO mentoring programs considered crucial to Obama’s war plans are proving remarkably hapless.

McClatchy News, for example, recently reported that the new Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), a specially trained elite force brought into the Marja area and “touted as the country's best and brightest” is, according to “U.S. military strategists[,] plagued by the same problems as Afghanistan's conventional police, who are widely considered corrupt, ineffective and inept.”  Drug use and desertions in ANCOP have been rife.

And yet, it seems as if all that American officials can come up with, in response to the failed Times Square car bombing and the “news” that the bomber was supposedly trained in Waziristan by the Pakistani Taliban, is the demand that Pakistan allow “more of a boots-on-the-ground strategy” and more American trainers into the country.  Such additional U.S. forces would serve only “as advisers and trainers, not as combat forces.”  So the mantra now goes reassuringly, but given the history of the Vietnam War, it’s a cringe-worthy demand.

In the meantime, the Obama administration has officially widened its targeting in the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands to include low-level, no-name militants.  It is also ratcheting up such attacks, deeply unpopular in a country where 64% of the inhabitants, according to a recent poll, already view the United States as an "enemy" and only 9% as a “partner.”

Since the Times Square incident, the CIA has specifically been striking North Waziristan, where the Pakistani army has as yet refrained from launching operations.  The U.S., as the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill reports, has also increased its support for the Pakistani Air Force, which will only add to the wars in the skies of that country.

All of this represents escalation of the “covert” U.S. war in Pakistan.  None of it offers particular hope of success.  All of it stokes enmity and undoubtedly encourages more “lone wolf” jihadis to lash out at the U.S.  It’s a formula for blowback, but not for victory.

BP-Style Pragmatism Goes to War

One thing can be said about the Bush administration: it had a grand strategic vision to go with its wars.  Its top officials were convinced that the American military, a force they saw as unparalleled on planet Earth, would be capable of unilaterally shock-and-awing America’s enemies in what they liked to call “the arc of instability” or “the Greater Middle East” (that is, the oil heartlands of the planet).  Its two wars would bring not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Iran and Syria to their knees, leaving Washington to impose a Pax Americana on the Middle East and Central Asia (in the process of which groups like Hamas and Hezbollah would be subdued and anti-American jihadism ended).

They couldn’t, of course, have been more wrong, something quite apparent to the Obama team.  Now, however, we have a crew in Washington who seem to have no vision, great or small, when it comes to American foreign or imperial policy, and who seem, in fact, to lack any sense of strategy at all.  What they have is a set of increasingly discredited tactics and an approach that might pass for good old American see-what-works “pragmatism,” but these days might more aptly be labeled “BP-style pragmatism.”

The vision may be long gone, but the wars live on with their own inexorable momentum.  Add into the mix American domestic politics, which could discourage any president from changing course and de-escalating a war, and you have what looks like a fatal -- and fatally expensive -- brew.

We’ve moved from Bush’s visionary disasters to Obama’s flailing wars, while the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq continue to pay the price.  If only we could close the curtain on this strange mix of farce and tragedy, but evidently we’re still stuck in act four of a five-act nightmare.

Even as our Afghan and Pakistani wars are being sucked dry of whatever meaning might remain, the momentum is in only one direction -- toward escalation.  A thousand repetitions of an al-Qaeda-must-be-destroyed mantra won’t change that one bit.  More escalation, unfortunately, is yet to come.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.

[Note on Sources: Let me offer one of my periodic appreciative bows to several websites I rely on for crucial information and interpretation when it comes to America’s wars: Juan Cole’s invaluable, often incandescent, Informed Comment blog, Antiwar.com (especially Jason Ditz’s remarkable daily war news summaries), the thoughtful framing and good eye of Paul Woodward at the War in Context website, and Katherine Tiedemann’s concise, useful daily briefs of the most interesting mainstream reportage on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the AfPak Channel website.  A special bow to historian Marilyn Young, author of the classic book The Vietnam Wars, who keeps me abreast of the latest thinking on all sorts of war-related subjects via her own informal information service for friends and fellow historians.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.