[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The offer of a signed, personalized copy of Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren's remarkable new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, is still open, but only until Thursday afternoon. The response has been little short of staggering and books will be in the mail later this week. In the meantime, thanks to all of you who contributed. What a difference it makes! For those still interested, you can read Van Buren's vivid account of how the State Department treats a truth-teller by clicking here and an excerpt from his book by clicking here. To learn more about the offer or make a donation, click here.]
Usually it’s the giant stories that catch your eye. The wars, the uproars, the Arab Spring -- the things you can’t miss. But every now and then, news stories about easily overlooked subjects somehow manage to shine the strongest light on a changing world.
The Cohn sisters, Claribel and Etta, from a wealthy Baltimore family, arrived in Paris in 1905, spent time with Gertrude Stein, and soon began buying the work of unknown artists with names like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for a song. Before they were done, they had amassed a remarkable collection of modern art (and artistic objects from around the world), now lodged permanently at the Baltimore Museum of Art. They were art admirers, collectors, and at heart early global shoppers par excellence. It was, of course, the beginning of what would soon enough be known as the American Century and American writers, artists, and shoppers, too, were flocking to the Old World for solace, refuge, and kicks.
They have their surprising equivalents today, the New York Times reported recently, even if the newest shoppers to hit Paris en masse evidently aren’t buying the art of obscure painters. We’re talking here about Chinese tourism (rising in the French capital at a 15% clip annually). The latest round of tourists to climb the Eiffel Tower are spending, on average, $1,800 each on shopping. The money is mainly going for luxury brand products, often at large department stores like Galeries Lafayette, which now have Chinese-language briefings, “Chinese-speaking personal shoppers, and Chinese public-address announcements.”
China’s Atlantic Century? Crazier things have happened in history.
American Publisher Henry Luce announced the coming of the American Century in Life, his own magazine, in 1941. Americans, he wrote, were to “accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” Luce, the son of American missionaries born in China, had no doubt that it would be a Pacific Century. In those years, Americans, in fact, liked to refer to the Pacific as an “American Lake,” and in World War II we did indeed take ownership of it. (As a Tin Pan Alley song title of the era put it, “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific.”)
Seventy years later, TomDispatch regular and co-director of the website Foreign Policy in Focus John Feffer suggests that, despite all our military bases in the region, the Pacific is now anything but an American lake and -- just in case we hadn’t noticed -- election year 2012 will make that so much clearer to us. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Feffer discusses the 2012 election season in Asia click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Why 2012 Will Shake Up Asia and the World
Can Washington Move from Pacific Power to Pacific Partner?
By John FefferThe United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel.
It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation. And the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.
Elections will be part of the change. Next year, South Koreans, Russians, and Taiwanese will all go to the polls. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party will also ratify its choice of a new leader to take over from President Hu Jintao. He will be the man expected to preside over the country’s rise from the number two spot to the pinnacle of the global economy.
But here’s the real surprise in store for Washington. The catalyst of change may turn out to be the country in the region that has so far changed the least: North Korea. In 2012, the North Korean government has trumpeted to its people a promise to create kangsong taeguk, or an economically prosperous and militarily strong country. Pyongyang now has to deliver somehow on that promise -- at a time of food shortages, overall economic stagnation, and political uncertainty. This dream of 2012 is propelling the regime in Pyongyang to shift into diplomatic high gear, and that, in turn, is already creating enormous opportunities for key Pacific powers.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s twisted treat for you is a slightly adapted chapter from Peter Van Buren’s new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. I’m sure you remember Van Buren. Last Tuesday, he wrote a vivid first-person piece for this site, perhaps the first by a government truth-teller, on what it’s like to be harried by the government you’ve served for 23 years. It can be read by clicking here or you can catch him discussing it here. (Or you can listen to him talk about his book and experience in Iraq on Fresh Air by clicking here.)
Keep in mind that the offer I made then -- your own signed, personalized copy of Van Buren’s remarkable book in return for a $100 contribution to TomDispatch -- is still open, and your contributions, believe me, are deeply appreciated! To get your book or find out more, click here. Those of you who already gave, please be patient. There was such a run on the book that we weren’t able to get our expected shipment. It will be in soon and I hope the books will be winging their way toward you by week’s end.
What follows is a favorite excerpt of mine from Van Buren's new book. Like nothing else I’ve read, it catches the particular madness of the American occupation and “reconstruction” of Iraq. And here’s a rarity at this site: I thought it made sense to ask Van Buren himself to introduce the excerpt and he’s done so in his own inimitable fashion. Tom]
Who doesn’t like roasted chicken? Fresh, crispy with a little salt, it falls off the bone into your mouth. It’s a great thing, unless the price is $2.5 million of your tax dollars.
As a Foreign Service Officer with a 20-year career in the State Department, and as part of the George W. Obama global wars of terror, I was sent to play a small part in the largest nation-building project since the post-World War II Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Iraq following the American invasion of 2003. My contractor colleagues and I were told to spend money, lots of money, to rebuild water and sewage systems, fix up schools, and most of all, create an economic base so wonderful that Iraqis would turn away from terrorism for a shot at capitalism. Shopping bags full of affirmation would displace suicide vests.
Through a process amply illustrated below, in my neck of rural Iraq all this lofty sounding idealism translated into putting millions of dollars into building a chicken-processing plant. It would, so the thinking went, push aside the live-chickens-in-the-marketplace system that Iraqis had used for 5,000 years, including 4,992 years without either the Americans or al-Qaeda around. It did not work, for all sorts of reasons illustrated in the story below. We did have great ambitions, however, and even made a video to celebrate opening day. Don't miss the sign at the very the beginning thanking us Americans for "the rehabilitation of [the] massacre of poultry." We sure paid for the sign, but the quality of the proofreading gives you an idea of how much thought went into the whole affair.
If the old saying that there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action is true, you should be terrified after reading this excerpt from my new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. And keep in mind that it all happened on your dime. What follows catches my experience of what was blithely called “reconstruction” in post-invasion Iraq. I can assure you of one thing: the State Department isn’t exactly thrilled with my version of their operations in Iraq -- and they’ve acted accordingly when it comes to me (something you can read about by clicking here). For this excerpt, I suggest adding only a little salt. Peter Van Buren
Chickening Out in Iraq
How Your Tax Dollars Financed “Reconstruction” Madness in the Middle East
By Peter Van BurenVery few people outside the agricultural world know that if the rooster in a flock dies the hens will continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks because “sperm nests,” located in the ovary ducts of hens, collect and store sperm as a survival mechanism to ensure fertile eggs even after the male is gone. I had to know this as part of my role in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Like learning that Baghdad produced 8,000 tons of trash every day, who could have imagined when we invaded Iraq that such information would be important to the Global War on Terror? If I were to meet George W., I would tell him this by way of suggesting that he did not know what he was getting the country into.
I would also invite the former president along to visit a chicken-processing plant built with your tax dollars and overseen by my ePRT (embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team). We really bought into the chicken idea and spent like drunken sailors on shore leave to prove it. In this case, the price was $2.58 million for the facility.
The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken-killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers.
When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased 25 chickens that morning specifically to kill for us and to feature in a video on the glories of the new plant. This was good news, a 100% jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just to let you know, a little memoir of my growing-up years, “Movies Saved My Life, A Young New Yorker Meets Foreigners in Film,” is in the October Harper’s Magazine and on your local newsstands now. Check it out. In addition, in May I wrote a piece for TomDispatch, “Welcome to Post-Legal America,” about ways in which, in the name of protecting American “safety,” the very concept of legality has ceased to be applied to our National Security Complex -- other than, of course, to whistle-blowers who want to tell Americans what’s going on inside it. Think of today’s piece as part two in an ongoing post-legal series, this one focused on the administration's war policy. Tom]
Sex and the Single Drone
The Latest in Guarding the Empire
By Tom Engelhardt
In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around. Others countries are desperate to have them. Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie. Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents. They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers.
As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them “the only game in town.” As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and increase their funding drastically. The U.S. Air Force is already training more personnel to become drone “pilots” than to pilot actual planes. You don’t need it in skywriting to know that, as icons of American-style war, they are clearly in our future -- and they’re even heading for the homeland as police departments clamor for them.
They are relatively cheap. When they “hunt,” no one dies (at least on our side). They are capable of roaming the world. Someday, they will land on the decks of aircraft carriers or, tiny as hummingbirds, drop onto a windowsill, maybe even yours, or in their hundreds, the size of bees, swarm to targets and, if all goes well, coordinate their actions using the artificial intelligence version of “hive minds.”
“The drone,” writes Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, “has increasingly become the [Obama] administration's 'weapon of choice' in its efforts to subdue al-Qaeda and its affiliates.” In hundreds of attacks over the last years in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, they have killed thousands, including al-Qaeda figures, Taliban militants, and civilians. They have played a significant and growing role in the skies over Afghanistan. They are now loosing their missiles ever more often over Yemen, sometimes over Libya, and less often over Somalia. Their bases are spreading. No one in Congress will be able to resist them. They are defining the new world of war for the twenty-first century -- and many of the humans who theoretically command and control them can hardly keep up.
Reach for Your Dictionaries
On September 15th, the New York Times front-paged a piece by the estimable Charlie Savage, based on leaks from inside the administration. It was headlined “At White House, Weighing Limits of Terror Fight,” and started this way:
“The Obama administration’s legal team is split over how much latitude the United States has to kill Islamist militants in Yemen and Somalia, a question that could define the limits of the war against al-Qaeda and its allies, according to administration and Congressional officials.”
Lawyers for the Pentagon and the State Department, Savage reported, were debating whether, outside of hot-war zones, the Obama administration could call in the drones (as well as special operations forces) not just to go after top al-Qaeda figures planning attacks on the United States, but al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers (and vaguely allied groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and al-Shabab in Somalia).
That those lawyers are arguing fiercely over such a matter is certainly a curiosity. As presented, the issue behind their disagreement is how to square modern realities with outmoded rules of war written for another age (which also, by the way, had its terrorists). And yet such debates, front-paged or not, fierce or not, will one day undoubtedly be seen as analogous to supposed ancient clerical arguments over just how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. In fact, their import lies mainly in the fascinating pattern they reveal about the way forces that could care less about questions of legality are driving developments in American-style war.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The book series I co-founded and co-edit, the American Empire Project, is rolling out its latest volume today, and it’s a news-maker. Peter Van Buren, a Foreign Service Officer, spent a year at two forward operating bases in Iraq helping to “reconstruct” that country. With its ironic title, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, his work, a remarkable deconstruction of that effort and more generally of the debacle of American-style armed “nation-building,” will be a classic in the annals of anti-interventionism. He’s also a natural as a writer. Think of him as the State Department’s Michael Herr, though in its first rave reviews his book is being compared to Joseph Heller’s classic World War II novel Catch-22. As it happens (again see below), Van Buren is now paying for the devastating portrait he’s painted of America in action in Iraq quite personally.
Here in any case is the offer: your own signed, personalized copy of a remarkable book in return for a $100 contribution to this site. I hope it’s an offer you can’t refuse. The money will be a boon for TomDispatch as we plan for the future. To find out more, visit our donation page by clicking here. Tom]
It’s hardly a secret at this late date that, while the Obama administration arrived in office promoting “a new standard of openness” in government, in practice it’s cast not sunshine, but a penumbra of gloom over the workings of Washington. Talk about a closed and punitive crew. Its Justice Department has notoriously gone after government whistleblowers and leakers, launching significantly more (largely unsuccessful) prosecutions than any of Obama's predecessors. His people lit out with particular ferocity after WikiLeaks, and specifically Bradley Manning, the young Army private accused of passing enormous caches of Army and State Department documents to that website. In the process, the administration developed special forms of pre-punishment to torment him while he was confined, still uncharged, at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. (It also went to ludicrous lengths to bar government officials, workers, contractors, the military, and anyone else linked to them from reading the leaked documents to which everyone else on Earth already had access.)
When it came to books by witnesses within the government or the military offering some version of critical openness, darkness has again been the order of the day. The Pentagon actually bought up and burned more or less the complete stock of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s insider’s account of Pentagon and Defense Information Agency mistakes in the invasion of Afghanistan, Operation Dark Heart (already thoroughly vetted by the Army Reserve), and forced his publisher to put out a highly redacted second edition.
More recently, the CIA took out after The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda, a memoir by Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent long involved in the battle against al-Qaeda, demanding “extensive cuts.” “In fact,” wrote New York Times reporter Scott Shane, “some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11, and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”
In recent weeks, a third version of this particular “national security” mania hit my radar screen. The State Department is now hassling one of its own employees whose book is being published by a venture I co-run, the American Empire Project, and who has become a regular at this site. State has taken out after Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren, calling for redactions of information (all easily Googleable online) in his new book, published today and long ago vetted by the Department, about his year running a provincial reconstruction team in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. There can’t be a more devastating (or, I must admit, enjoyable) account of the particular form of misery we brought to Iraq than his. Van Buren describes his own distinctly absurd situation in today’s post. Kafka would have blushed and Orwell would have had a hearty laugh, but evidently at the State Department no one even blinks.
In increasingly post-legal America, Van Buren has, it seems, committed a new crime: the spreading of public knowledge. Truly, if shame had any meaning, the State Department and the Obama administration should be filled with it. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses what it’s like to be interrogated by the State Department click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Freedom Isn’t Free at the State Department
The Only Employee at State Who May Be Fired Because of WikiLeaks
By Peter Van BurenOn the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Web.
As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material. In other words, a link to a document posted by who-knows-who on a public website available at this moment to anyone in the world was the legal equivalent of me stealing a Top Secret report, hiding it under my coat, and passing it to a Chinese spy in a dark alley.
The agents demanded to know who might be helping me with my blog (“Name names!”), if I had donated any money from my upcoming book on my wacky year-long State Department assignment to a forward military base in Iraq, and if so to which charities, the details of my contract with my publisher, how much money (if any) I had been paid, and -- by the way -- whether I had otherwise “transferred” classified information.
Had I, they asked, looked at the WikiLeaks site at home on my own time on my own computer? Every blog post, every Facebook post, and every Tweet by every State Department employee, they told me, must be pre-cleared by the Department prior to “publication.” Then they called me back for a second 90-minute interview, stating that my refusal to answer questions would lead to my being fired, never mind the Fifth (or the First) Amendments.
Why me? It’s not like the Bureau of Diplomatic Security has the staff or the interest to monitor the hundreds of blogs, thousands of posts, and millions of tweets by Foreign Service personnel. The answer undoubtedly is my new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Its unvarnished portrait of State’s efforts and the U.S. at work in Iraq has clearly angered someone, even though one part of State signed off on the book under internal clearance procedures some 13 months ago. I spent a year in Iraq leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) and sadly know exactly what I am talking about. DS monitoring my blog is like a small-town cop pulling over every African-American driver: vindictive, selective prosecution. "Ya’ll be careful in these parts, ‘hear, ‘cause we’re gonna set an example for your kind of people."
Pepe Escobar, that ever-energetic, globetrotting correspondent for Asia Times, has long been on the Pipelinestan beat for TomDispatch, covering the skeletal geography of energy that girds the planet. Today, however, he leaves pipelines behind to consider the planet they service -- or is it we who service them? His topic: if the West is going down, and Atlantic bust is giving way to Pacific boom, what’s to be made of the fate of a planet in the embrace of a single grim model of economic “development”?
Last Tuesday, my hometown paper had, I thought, a relevant article, a seemingly triumphalist reportorial shout of joy that the Americas, from Patagonia to the Arctic seas, might be the next Saudi Arabia. “New Fields May Propel Americas to Top of Oil Companies’ Lists,” the headline went. (“For the first time in decades, the emerging prize of global energy may be the Americas, where Western oil companies are refocusing their gaze in a rush to explore clusters of coveted oil fields.”)
Huzzah! We should all feel great, it turns out, because that tilting imperial slope on which the U.S. seems to be sliding downhill has long been linked to Middle Eastern oil dependency. Now, so says the New York Times, that might be reversed.
Only one minor problem: just about every bit of that energy -- tar sands in Canada, oil shale in the American West, pre-salt oil deposits in the Atlantic Ocean (way) off Brazil’s coast, oil in the Arctic seas (where Shell has just gotten its latest permit from the Obama administration), and oil fields in Colombia in a region embroiled in an ongoing civil war -- involves what Michael Klare has long called “tough oil” or “extreme energy.” Those fossil fuels -- dirtier, harder to extract, or existing under the worst possible political, environmental, or weather conditions -- guarantee nightmares to come.
But take that zeitgeist Times piece as a triumphalist signal that someone up there really doesn't care. As with the proposed 1,700-mile XL Keystone tar-sands pipeline through the U.S., Washington -- and the Americas -- are planning to go for broke when it comes to greenlighting the exploitation of any potential fossil-fuel deposit, no matter how deep, distant, or dirty. As it happens, National Geographic recently ran a report, “World Without Ice,” on a period 56 million years ago when, relatively suddenly, huge amounts of carbon flooded the oceans and atmosphere -- about the equivalent amount, scientists suggest, to “the total carbon now estimated to be locked up in fossil fuel deposits” on this planet. The Earth heated up drastically, turning life upside down. Not to worry though, that little spasm of global warming that scientists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum lasted a mere 150,000 years before Earth reestablished its equilibrium.
When you read Escobar, keep in mind just what this means: we need a new model for living on this planet fast, one that doesn’t involve the short-term thrill of exploiting every last bit of fossil fuel anywhere, no matter what. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Escobar reflects on the fate of the global economy click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The West and the Rest in a One-Model-Fits-All World
The Decline and Fall of Just About Everyone
By Pepe EscobarMore than 10 years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) would make the world economy’s top ten -- but not until 2040. Skip a decade and the Chinese economy already has the number two spot all to itself, Brazil is number seven, India 10, and even Russia is creeping closer. In purchasing power parity, or PPP, things look even better. There, China is in second place, India is now fourth, Russia sixth, and Brazil seventh.
No wonder Jim O’Neill, who coined the neologism BRIC and is now chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has been stressing that “the world is no longer dependent on the leadership of the U.S. and Europe.” After all, since 2007, China’s economy has grown by 45%, the American economy by less than 1% -- figures startling enough to make anyone take back their predictions. American anxiety and puzzlement reached new heights when the latest International Monetary Fund projections indicated that, at least by certain measurements, the Chinese economy would overtake the U.S. by 2016. (Until recently, Goldman Sachs was pointing towards 2050 for that first-place exchange.)
Within the next 30 years, the top five will, according to Goldman Sachs, likely be China, the U.S., India, Brazil, and Mexico. Western Europe? Bye-bye!
