Tomgram: Engelhardt, They Just Can't Stop Themselves
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on May 12, 2016, Printed on May 20, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176139/ ;
Washingtons Military Addiction
And The Ruins Still to Come
By Tom Engelhardt
There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then there are
the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let me
concoct an example for you:
Top American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up
the fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly
sending more U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington
confirmed the second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.
Oh wait, that was actually the lead sentence in a May 3rd Washington Times
piece by Carlo Muñoz. Honestly, though, it could have been written anytime
in the last few months by just about anyone paying any attention whatsoever,
and it surely will prove reusable in the months to come (with casualty
figures altered, of course). The sad truth is that across the Greater
Middle East and expanding parts of Africa, a similar set of lines could be
written ahead of time about the use of Special Operations forces, drones,
advisers, whatever, as could the sorry results of making such moves in [add
the name of your country of choice here].
Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing anything but
worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking has
become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition. Its as
if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked
solutions and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking,
over-armed soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.
How Much, How Many, How Often, and How Destructively
In Iraq and Syria, its been mission creep all the way. The B-52s barely
made it to the battle zone for the first time and were almost
instantaneously in the air, attacking Islamic State militants. U.S.
firebases are built ever closer to the front lines. The number of special
ops forces continues to edge up. American weapons flow in (ending up in god
knows whose hands). American trainers and advisers follow in ever
increasing numbers, and those numbers are repeatedly fiddled with to
deemphasize how many of them are actually there. The private contractors
begin to arrive in numbers never to be counted. The local forces being
trained or retrained have their usual problems in battle. American troops
and advisers who were never, never going to be in combat or boots on the
ground themselves now have their boots distinctly on the ground in combat
situations. The first American casualties are dribbling in. Meanwhile,
conditions in tottering Iraq and the former nation of Syria grow ever
murkier, more chaotic, and less amenable by the week to any solution
American officials might care for.
And the response to all this in present-day Washington?
You know perfectly well what the sole imaginable response can be: sending in
yet more weapons, boots, air power, special ops types, trainers, advisers,
private contractors, drones, and funds to increasingly chaotic conflict
zones across significant swaths of the planet. Above all, there can be no
serious thought, discussion, or debate about how such a militarized approach
to our world might have contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the
very problems it was meant to solve. Not in our nations capital, anyway.
The only questions to be argued about are how much, how many, how often, and
how destructively. In other words, the only antiwar position imaginable
in Washington, where accusations of weakness or wimpishness are a dime a
dozen and considered lethal to a political career, is how much less of more
we can afford, militarily speaking, or how much more of somewhat less we can
settle for when it comes to militarized death and destruction. Never, of
course, is a genuine version of less or a none-at-all option really on that
table where, its said, all policy options are kept.
Think of this as Washingtons military addiction in action. Weve been
watching it for almost 15 years without drawing any of the obvious
conclusions. And lest you imagine that addiction is just a figure of
speech, it isnt. Washingtons attachment -- financial, tactical, and
strategic -- to the U.S. military and its supposed solutions to more or less
all problems in what used to be called foreign policy should by now be
categorized as addictive. Otherwise, how can you explain the last decade
and a half in which no military action from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to
Libya worked out half-well in the long run (or even, often enough, in the
short run), and yet the U.S. military remains the option of first, not last,
resort in just about any imaginable situation? All this in a vast region in
which failed states are piling up, nations are disintegrating, terror
insurgencies are spreading, humongous population upheavals are becoming the
norm, and there are refugee flows of a sort not seen since significant parts
of the planet were destroyed during World War II.
Either were talking addictive behavior or failure is the new success.
Keep in mind, for instance, that the president who came into office swearing
he would end a disastrous war and occupation in Iraq is now overseeing a new
war in an even wider region that includes Iraq, a country that is no longer
quite a country, and Syria, a country that is now officially kaput.
Meanwhile, in the other war he inherited, Barack Obama almost immediately
launched a military-backed surge of U.S. forces, the only real argument
being over whether 40,000 (or even as many as 80,000) new U.S. troops would
be sent into Afghanistan or, as the antiwar president finally decided, a
mere 30,000 (which made him an absolute wimp to his opponents). That was
2009. Part of that surge involved an announcement that the withdrawal of
American combat forces would begin in 2011. Seven years later, that
withdrawal has once again been halted in favor of what the military has
taken to privately calling a generational approach -- that is, U.S. forces
remaining in Afghanistan into at least the 2020s.
The military term withdrawal may, however, still be appropriate even if
the troops are staying in place. After all, as with addicts of any sort,
the military ones in Washington cant go cold turkey without experiencing
painful symptoms of withdrawal. In American political culture, these
manifest themselves in charges of weakness when it comes to national
security that could prove devastating in the next election. Thats why
those running for office compete with one another in over-the-top
descriptions of what they will do to enemies and terrorists (from acts of
torture to carpet-bombing) and in even more over-the-top promises of
rebuilding or strengthening whats already the largest, most expensive
military on the planet, a force better funded at present than those of at
least the next seven nations combined.
Such promises, the bigger the better, are now a necessity if you happen to
be a Republican candidate for president. The Democrats have a lesser but
similar set of options available, which is why even Bernie Sanders only
calls for holding the Pentagon budget at its present staggering level or for
the most modest of cuts, not for reducing it significantly. And even when,
for instance, the urge to rein in military expenses did sweep Washington as
part of an overall urge to cut back government expenses, it only resulted in
a half-secret slush fund or war budget that kept the goodies flowing in.
These should all be taken as symptoms of Washingtons military addiction and
of what happens when the slightest signs of withdrawal set in. The U.S.
military is visibly the drug of choice in the American political arena and,
as is only appropriate for the force that has, since 2002, funded, armed,
and propped up the planets largest supplier of opium, once youre hooked,
theres no shaking it.
Hawkish Washington
Recently, in the New York Times Magazine, journalist Mark Landler offered a
political portrait entitled How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk. He laid
out just how the senator and later secretary of state remade herself as,
essentially, a military groupie, fawning over commanders or former
commanders ranging from then-General David Petraeus to Fox analyst and
retired general Jack Keane; how, that is, she became a figure, even on the
present political landscape, notable for her appetite for military
engagement abroad (and as a consequence, well-defended against Republican
charges of weakness).
Theres no reason, however, to pin the war-lover or last true hawk label
on her alone, not in present-day Washington. After all, just about everyone
there wants a piece of the action. During their primary season debates, for
instance, a number of the Republican candidates spoke repeatedly about
building up the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, while making that
already growing force sound like a set of decrepit barges.
To offer another example, no presidential candidate these days could afford
to reject the White House-run drone assassination program. To be
assassin-in-chief is now considered as much a part of the presidential job
description as commander-in-chief, even though the drone program, like so
many other militarized foreign policy operations these days, shows little
sign of reining in terrorism despite the number of bad guys and terror
leaders it kills (along with significant numbers of civilian bystanders).
To take Bernie Sanders as an example -- because hes as close to an antiwar
candidate as youll find in the present election season -- he recently put
something like his stamp of approval on the White House drone assassination
project and the kill list that goes with it.
Mind you, there is simply no compelling evidence that the usual military
solutions have worked or are likely to work in any imaginable sense in the
present conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. They have
clearly, in fact, played a major role in the creation of the present
disaster, and yet there is no place at all in our political system for
genuinely antiwar figures (as there was in the Vietnam era, when a massive
antiwar movement created space for such politics). Antiwar opinions and
activities have now been driven to the peripheries of the political system
along with a word like, say, peace, which you will be hard-pressed to
find, even rhetorically, in the language of wartime Washington.
The Look of Victory
If a history were to be written of how the U.S. military became Washingtons
drug of choice, it would undoubtedly have to begin in the Cold War era. It
was, however, in the prolonged moment of triumphalism that followed the
Soviet Unions implosion in 1991 that the military gained its present
position of unquestioned dominance.
In those days, people were still speculating about whether the country would
reap a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War. If there was ever a
moment when the diversion of money from the U.S. military and the national
security state to domestic concerns might have seemed like a no-brainer,
that was it. After all, except for a couple of rickety rogue states like
North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where exactly were this countrys
enemies to be found? And why should such a muscle-bound military continue
to gobble up tax dollars at such a staggering rate in a reasonably peaceable
world?
In the decade or so that followed, however, Washingtons dreams turned out
to run in a very different direction -- toward a war dividend at a moment
when the U.S. had, by more or less universal agreement, become the planets
sole superpower. The crew who entered the White House with George W. Bush
in a deeply contested election in 2000 had already been mainlining the
military drug for years. To them, this seemed a planet ripe for the taking.
When 9/11 hit, it loosed their dreams of conquest and control, and their
faith in a military that they believed to be unstoppable. Of course, given
the previous century of successful anti-imperial and national independence
movements, anyone should have known that, no matter the armaments at hand,
resistance was an inescapable reality on Planet Earth.
Thanks to such predictable resistance, the drug-induced imperial dreamscape
of the Busheviks would prove a fantasy of the first order, even if, in that
post-9/11 moment, it passed for bedrock (neo)realism. If you remember, the
U.S. was to take the gloves off and release a military machine so beyond
compare that nothing would be capable of standing in its path. So the dream
went, so the drug spoke. Dont forget that the greatest military blunder
(and crime) of this century, the invasion of Iraq, wasnt supposed to be the
end of something, but merely its beginning. With Iraq in hand and
garrisoned, Washington was to take down Iran and sweep up what Russian
property from the Cold War era still remained in the Middle East. (Think:
Syria.)
A decade and a half later, those dreams have been shattered, and yet the
drug still courses through the bloodstream, the military bands play on, and
the march to... well, who knows where... continues. In a way, of course, we
do know where (to the extent that we humans, with our limited sense of the
future, can know anything). In a way, weve already been shown a spectacle
of what victory might look like once the Greater Middle East is finally
liberated from the Islamic State.
The descriptions of one widely hailed victory over that brutal crew in Iraq
-- the liberation of the city of Ramadi by a U.S.-trained elite Iraqi
counterterrorism force backed by artillery and American air power -- are
devastating. Aided and abetted by Islamic State militants igniting or
demolishing whole neighborhoods of that city, the look of Ramadi retaken
should give us a grim sense of where the region is heading. Heres how the
Associated Press recently described the scene, four months after the city
fell:
This is what victory looks like...: in the once thriving Haji Ziad Square,
not a single structure still stands. Turning in every direction yields a
picture of devastation. A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream
shops -- reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair
garages -- obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The squares Haji
Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats
-- flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger,
fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile
of concrete and twisted iron rods.
The destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1
million people and now virtually empty.
Keep in mind that, with oil prices still deeply depressed, Iraq essentially
has no money to rebuild Ramadi or anyplace else. Now imagine, as such
victories multiply, versions of similar devastation spreading across the
region.
In other words, one likely end result of the thoroughly militarized process
that began with the invasion of Iraq (if not of Afghanistan) is already
visible: a region shattered and in ruins, filled with uprooted and
impoverished people. In such circumstances, it may not even matter if the
Islamic State is defeated. Just imagine what Mosul, Iraqs second largest
city and still in the Islamic State's hands, will be like if, someday, the
long-promised offensive to liberate it is ever truly launched. Now, try to
imagine that movement itself destroyed, with its capital, Raqqa, turned
into another set of ruins, and remind me: What exactly is likely to emerge
from such a future nightmare? Nothing, I suspect, that is likely to cheer
up anyone in Washington.
And what should be done about all this? You already know Washingtons
solution -- more of the same -- and breaking such a cycle of addiction is
difficult even under the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, at the
moment there is no force, no movement on the American scene that could open
up space for such a possibility. No matter who is elected president, you
already know more or less what American policy is going to be.
But dont bother to blame the politicians and national security nabobs in
Washington for this. Theyre addicts. They cant help themselves. What
they need is rehab. Instead, they continue to run our world. Be suitably
scared for the ruins still to come.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176139
Tomgram: Engelhardt, They Just Can't Stop Themselves
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on May 12, 2016, Printed on May 20, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176139/ ;
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Signed, personalized copies of Nick Turses
powerful, first-person exploration of life in a war-crimes zone that is also
the planets newest nation, Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead: War
and Survival in South Sudan, are still available for a contribution of $100
or more ($125 if you live outside the United States). Of this newest
Dispatch Book, Ann Jones writes, Nick Turse, alone among war reporters, is
the wandering scribe of war crimes. Reading Turse will turn your view of war
upside down. In South Sudan, troops run amok, desperate civilians shelter in
squalid U.N. camps, international officials fail to record evidence of
atrocities, while military and political bigwigs battle for power at the
cost of their country. No glory here in Turses pages, but the clear voices
of people caught up in this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves.
Check our donation page for the details. Tom]
Washingtons Military Addiction
And The Ruins Still to Come
By Tom Engelhardt
There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then there are
the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let me
concoct an example for you:
Top American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up
the fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly
sending more U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington
confirmed the second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.
Oh wait, that was actually the lead sentence in a May 3rd Washington Times
piece by Carlo Muñoz. Honestly, though, it could have been written anytime
in the last few months by just about anyone paying any attention whatsoever,
and it surely will prove reusable in the months to come (with casualty
figures altered, of course). The sad truth is that across the Greater Middle
East and expanding parts of Africa, a similar set of lines could be written
ahead of time about the use of Special Operations forces, drones, advisers,
whatever, as could the sorry results of making such moves in [add the name
of your country of choice here].
Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing anything but
worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking has
become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition. Its as
if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked
solutions and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking,
over-armed soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.
How Much, How Many, How Often, and How Destructively
In Iraq and Syria, its been mission creep all the way. The B-52s barely
made it to the battle zone for the first time and were almost
instantaneously in the air, attacking Islamic State militants. U.S.
firebases are built ever closer to the front lines. The number of special
ops forces continues to edge up. American weapons flow in (ending up in god
knows whose hands). American trainers and advisers follow in ever increasing
numbers, and those numbers are repeatedly fiddled with to deemphasize how
many of them are actually there. The private contractors begin to arrive in
numbers never to be counted. The local forces being trained or retrained
have their usual problems in battle. American troops and advisers who were
never, never going to be in combat or boots on the ground themselves now
have their boots distinctly on the ground in combat situations. The first
American casualties are dribbling in. Meanwhile, conditions in tottering
Iraq and the former nation of Syria grow ever murkier, more chaotic, and
less amenable by the week to any solution American officials might care for.
And the response to all this in present-day Washington?
You know perfectly well what the sole imaginable response can be: sending in
yet more weapons, boots, air power, special ops types, trainers, advisers,
private contractors, drones, and funds to increasingly chaotic conflict
zones across significant swaths of the planet. Above all, there can be no
serious thought, discussion, or debate about how such a militarized approach
to our world might have contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the
very problems it was meant to solve. Not in our nations capital, anyway.
The only questions to be argued about are how much, how many, how often, and
how destructively. In other words, the only antiwar position imaginable in
Washington, where accusations of weakness or wimpishness are a dime a dozen
and considered lethal to a political career, is how much less of more we can
afford, militarily speaking, or how much more of somewhat less we can settle
for when it comes to militarized death and destruction. Never, of course, is
a genuine version of less or a none-at-all option really on that table
where, its said, all policy options are kept.
Think of this as Washingtons military addiction in action. Weve been
watching it for almost 15 years without drawing any of the obvious
conclusions. And lest you imagine that addiction is just a figure of
speech, it isnt. Washingtons attachment -- financial, tactical, and
strategic -- to the U.S. military and its supposed solutions to more or less
all problems in what used to be called foreign policy should by now be
categorized as addictive. Otherwise, how can you explain the last decade and
a half in which no military action from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to Libya
worked out half-well in the long run (or even, often enough, in the short
run), and yet the U.S. military remains the option of first, not last,
resort in just about any imaginable situation? All this in a vast region in
which failed states are piling up, nations are disintegrating, terror
insurgencies are spreading, humongous population upheavals are becoming the
norm, and there are refugee flows of a sort not seen since significant parts
of the planet were destroyed during World War II.
Either were talking addictive behavior or failure is the new success.
Keep in mind, for instance, that the president who came into office swearing
he would end a disastrous war and occupation in Iraq is now overseeing a new
war in an even wider region that includes Iraq, a country that is no longer
quite a country, and Syria, a country that is now officially kaput.
Meanwhile, in the other war he inherited, Barack Obama almost immediately
launched a military-backed surge of U.S. forces, the only real argument
being over whether 40,000 (or even as many as 80,000) new U.S. troops would
be sent into Afghanistan or, as the antiwar president finally decided, a
mere 30,000 (which made him an absolute wimp to his opponents). That was
2009. Part of that surge involved an announcement that the withdrawal of
American combat forces would begin in 2011. Seven years later, that
withdrawal has once again been halted in favor of what the military has
taken to privately calling a generational approach -- that is, U.S. forces
remaining in Afghanistan into at least the 2020s.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20The
military term withdrawal may, however, still be appropriate even if the
troops are staying in place. After all, as with addicts of any sort, the
military ones in Washington cant go cold turkey without experiencing
painful symptoms of withdrawal. In American political culture, these
manifest themselves in charges of weakness when it comes to national
security that could prove devastating in the next election. Thats why
those running for office compete with one another in over-the-top
descriptions of what they will do to enemies and terrorists (from acts of
torture to carpet-bombing) and in even more over-the-top promises of
rebuilding or strengthening whats already the largest, most expensive
military on the planet, a force better funded at present than those of at
least the next seven nations combined.
Such promises, the bigger the better, are now a necessity if you happen to
be a Republican candidate for president. The Democrats have a lesser but
similar set of options available, which is why even Bernie Sanders only
calls for holding the Pentagon budget at its present staggering level or for
the most modest of cuts, not for reducing it significantly. And even when,
for instance, the urge to rein in military expenses did sweep Washington as
part of an overall urge to cut back government expenses, it only resulted in
a half-secret slush fund or war budget that kept the goodies flowing in.
These should all be taken as symptoms of Washingtons military addiction and
of what happens when the slightest signs of withdrawal set in. The U.S.
military is visibly the drug of choice in the American political arena and,
as is only appropriate for the force that has, since 2002, funded, armed,
and propped up the planets largest supplier of opium, once youre hooked,
theres no shaking it.
Hawkish Washington
Recently, in the New York Times Magazine, journalist Mark Landler offered a
political portrait entitled How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk. He laid out
just how the senator and later secretary of state remade herself as,
essentially, a military groupie, fawning over commanders or former
commanders ranging from then-General David Petraeus to Fox analyst and
retired general Jack Keane; how, that is, she became a figure, even on the
present political landscape, notable for her appetite for military
engagement abroad (and as a consequence, well-defended against Republican
charges of weakness).
Theres no reason, however, to pin the war-lover or last true hawk label
on her alone, not in present-day Washington. After all, just about everyone
there wants a piece of the action. During their primary season debates, for
instance, a number of the Republican candidates spoke repeatedly about
building up the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, while making that
already growing force sound like a set of decrepit barges.
To offer another example, no presidential candidate these days could afford
to reject the White House-run drone assassination program. To be
assassin-in-chief is now considered as much a part of the presidential job
description as commander-in-chief, even though the drone program, like so
many other militarized foreign policy operations these days, shows little
sign of reining in terrorism despite the number of bad guys and terror
leaders it kills (along with significant numbers of civilian bystanders).
To take Bernie Sanders as an example -- because hes as close to an antiwar
candidate as youll find in the present election season -- he recently put
something like his stamp of approval on the White House drone assassination
project and the kill list that goes with it.
Mind you, there is simply no compelling evidence that the usual military
solutions have worked or are likely to work in any imaginable sense in the
present conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. They have
clearly, in fact, played a major role in the creation of the present
disaster, and yet there is no place at all in our political system for
genuinely antiwar figures (as there was in the Vietnam era, when a massive
antiwar movement created space for such politics). Antiwar opinions and
activities have now been driven to the peripheries of the political system
along with a word like, say, peace, which you will be hard-pressed to
find, even rhetorically, in the language of wartime Washington.
The Look of Victory
If a history were to be written of how the U.S. military became Washingtons
drug of choice, it would undoubtedly have to begin in the Cold War era. It
was, however, in the prolonged moment of triumphalism that followed the
Soviet Unions implosion in 1991 that the military gained its present
position of unquestioned dominance.
In those days, people were still speculating about whether the country would
reap a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War. If there was ever a
moment when the diversion of money from the U.S. military and the national
security state to domestic concerns might have seemed like a no-brainer,
that was it. After all, except for a couple of rickety rogue states like
North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where exactly were this countrys
enemies to be found? And why should such a muscle-bound military continue to
gobble up tax dollars at such a staggering rate in a reasonably peaceable
world?
In the decade or so that followed, however, Washingtons dreams turned out
to run in a very different direction -- toward a war dividend at a moment
when the U.S. had, by more or less universal agreement, become the planets
sole superpower. The crew who entered the White House with George W. Bush
in a deeply contested election in 2000 had already been mainlining the
military drug for years. To them, this seemed a planet ripe for the taking.
When 9/11 hit, it loosed their dreams of conquest and control, and their
faith in a military that they believed to be unstoppable. Of course, given
the previous century of successful anti-imperial and national independence
movements, anyone should have known that, no matter the armaments at hand,
resistance was an inescapable reality on Planet Earth.
Thanks to such predictable resistance, the drug-induced imperial dreamscape
of the Busheviks would prove a fantasy of the first order, even if, in that
post-9/11 moment, it passed for bedrock (neo)realism. If you remember, the
U.S. was to take the gloves off and release a military machine so beyond
compare that nothing would be capable of standing in its path. So the dream
went, so the drug spoke. Dont forget that the greatest military blunder
(and crime) of this century, the invasion of Iraq, wasnt supposed to be the
end of something, but merely its beginning. With Iraq in hand and
garrisoned, Washington was to take down Iran and sweep up what Russian
property from the Cold War era still remained in the Middle East. (Think:
Syria.)
A decade and a half later, those dreams have been shattered, and yet the
drug still courses through the bloodstream, the military bands play on, and
the march to... well, who knows where... continues. In a way, of course, we
do know where (to the extent that we humans, with our limited sense of the
future, can know anything). In a way, weve already been shown a spectacle
of what victory might look like once the Greater Middle East is finally
liberated from the Islamic State.
The descriptions of one widely hailed victory over that brutal crew in Iraq
-- the liberation of the city of Ramadi by a U.S.-trained elite Iraqi
counterterrorism force backed by artillery and American air power -- are
devastating. Aided and abetted by Islamic State militants igniting or
demolishing whole neighborhoods of that city, the look of Ramadi retaken
should give us a grim sense of where the region is heading. Heres how the
Associated Press recently described the scene, four months after the city
fell:
This is what victory looks like...: in the once thriving Haji Ziad Square,
not a single structure still stands. Turning in every direction yields a
picture of devastation. A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream
shops -- reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair
garages -- obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The squares Haji
Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats
-- flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger,
fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile
of concrete and twisted iron rods.
The destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1
million people and now virtually empty.
Keep in mind that, with oil prices still deeply depressed, Iraq essentially
has no money to rebuild Ramadi or anyplace else. Now imagine, as such
victories multiply, versions of similar devastation spreading across the
region.
In other words, one likely end result of the thoroughly militarized process
that began with the invasion of Iraq (if not of Afghanistan) is already
visible: a region shattered and in ruins, filled with uprooted and
impoverished people. In such circumstances, it may not even matter if the
Islamic State is defeated. Just imagine what Mosul, Iraqs second largest
city and still in the Islamic State's hands, will be like if, someday, the
long-promisedhttp://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/09/26/us-backed-r
ebels-give-arms-al-qaeda-group/72831840/ offensive to liberate it is ever
truly launched. Now, try to imagine that movement itself destroyed, with its
capital, Raqqa, turned into another set of ruins, and remind me: What
exactly is likely to emerge from such a future nightmare? Nothing, I
suspect, that is likely to cheer up anyone in Washington.
And what should be done about all this? You already know Washingtons
solution -- more of the same -- and breaking such a cycle of addiction is
difficult even under the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, at the moment
there is no force, no movement on the American scene that could open up
space for such a possibility. No matter who is elected president, you
already know more or less what American policy is going to be.
But dont bother to blame the politicians and national security nabobs in
Washington for this. Theyre addicts. They cant help themselves. What they
need is rehab. Instead, they continue to run our world. Be suitably scared
for the ruins still to come.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176139
