From: "Wahome, Kimamo" <WAHOMEK@uwec.edu> Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 09:48:53 -0600 Subject: 'The Empire v. The Graveyard' Message-ID: <E3F0E607B3CF71418CE725F002B5F6047A4A61C4C1@CHERRYPEPSI.uwec.edu>
Tom Dispatch
posted 2009-02-05 09:32:40
Tomgram: The Empire v. The Graveyard
Whistling Past the Afghan Graveyard
Where Empires Go to Die
By Tom Engelhardt
It is now a commonplace -- as a lead article<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01
/25/weekinreview/25cooper.html> in the New York Times's Week in Review poin
ted out recently -- that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires." Given B
arack Obama's call<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17460.html> fo
r a greater focus on the Afghan War ("we took our eye off the ball when we
invaded Iraq..."), and given indications that a "surge" of U.S. troops is a
bout to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the new
s lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by J
uan Cole<http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/01/26/obama/print.html>
at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/39695
7/obama_and_the_middle_east_part_ii> at the Nation, and John Robertson<http
://warincontext.org/2009/01/25/guest-contributor-john-robertson-surging-int
o-a-perfect-storm/> at the War in Context website, has been incisive on jus
t how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanist
an and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's
War."
In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attentio
n has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good re
ason for that -- at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries<http://
www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KB05Df01.html> about the deteriorating sit
uation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan
could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant he
gemon on this planet.
In truth, to give "empire" its due you would have to start with a reassessm
ent of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the
Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence c
ommunity, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washin
gton's politicians, the Soviet Union, that "evil empire," that colossus of
repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened n
uclear MADness -- as in "mutually assured destruction" -- simply evaporated
, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cus
hy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in
no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire tha
n U.S. troops stationed<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1112/chalmers_johns
on_on_imperial_rights> in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)
In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stun
ned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost
half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triump
halism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-p
articipants still on its feet.
The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the US
SR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a des
perate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its "near abroad," to replace it; erg
o, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the
planet's "sole superpower." Huzzah!
Masters of the Universe
The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: "hubris." The ancient Greek playw
rights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the heights. But
that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in those y
ears.
Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to act as if
the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans and t
he Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd
scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and
two losers<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/119758/chernus_cornered_empire_
the_legacy_of_9_11> in the Cold War, that the weaker superpower had simply
left the scene first, while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was
inching its way toward the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.
In the 1990s, "globalization" -- the worldwide spread of the Golden Arches,
the Swoosh, and Mickey Mouse -- was on all lips in Washington, while the m
en who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to the
mselves, as "masters of the universe."
The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand name<http://w
ww.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553381344&view=excerp
t> of the superhero action figures his protagonist's daughter plays with in
his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. ("On Wall Street he and a few othe
rs -- how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become preci
sely that... Masters of the Universe...") As a result, the label initially
had something of Wolfe's cheekiness about it. In the post-Cold War world, h
owever, it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.
In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly cratered, Wa
shington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to "discipline" them
. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain of whole soci
eties, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry open countr
ies to the deregulatory wonders of "the Washington consensus." (Just imagin
e how Americans would react if, today, the IMF arrived at our battered door
s with a similar menu of must-dos!)
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>[c
id:id:image001.gif@01C98840.1062BA80]<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref
=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20><http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref
=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>Now, as the planet totters financially, wh
ile from Germany<http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-01-31-voa11.cfm> to Ru
ssia<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123315961511224575.html> and China, wo
rld leaders blame the Bush administration's deregulatory blindness and Wall
Street's derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing out of the glo
bal economy, it's far more apparent that those titans of finance were actua
lly masters of a flim-flam universe. Retrospectively, it's clearer that, in
those post-Cold War years, Wall Street was already heading for the exits,
that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative pa
per tiger. Someday, it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington
.
Almost twenty years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptab
le to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers
were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out<http://www.
iht.com/articles/2009/01/28/business/wbecon.1-415835.php> recently:
"Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the U.S. bubble economy
had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's gro
wth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having
little use. America's was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities
, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme."
Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger rising<http://w
ww.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/business/03bankers.html> on Main Street as Americ
ans grasp that those supposed masters of the universe actually hollowed out
their world and brought immense suffering down on them. They understand wh
at those former masters of financial firms, who handed out $18.4 billion<ht
tp://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/business/29bonus.html> in bonuses to their
employees at the end of 2008, clearly don't. John Thain, former CEO of Merr
ill Lynch, for instance, still continues to defend<http://www.cnbc.com/id/2
2716054> his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode<http://blogs.wsj.com/dea
ls/2009/01/23/deal-journal-explainer-the-35000-commode-outrage/> for his of
fice, as well as the $4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters
under him in a quarter in which his group racked up more than $15 billion<
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28861294> in losses, in a year in which his firm's l
osses reached $27 billion<http://www.lvrj.com/business/38208989.html>.
At least now, however, no one -- except perhaps Thain himself -- would mist
ake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the U.S. for a financ
ial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed out economic powerhouse l
aid low.
As it happens, however, there was another set of all-American "masters of t
he universe," even if never given that label. I'm speaking of the top offic
ials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and militar
y policy. They, too, came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They
came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global d
omination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a ne
w Rome or imperial Great Britain, but of a kind never before encountered, a
nd that the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Power
s had been reduced to solitaire.
For them, the very idea that the U.S. might be the other loser in the Cold
War was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them, aft
er all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence, Afghani
stan.
Twice in the Same Graveyard
It's here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just a graveyard,
but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In November 2001,
knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan, the Bush
administration invaded anyway -- and with a clear intent to build bases, oc
cupy the country, and install a government of its choice.
When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris remains a
weak word. Breathless<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/101850/bush_s_faith_a
nd_the_middle_east_aflame> at the thought of the supposed power of the U.S.
military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power rea
lities and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.
Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing short of inv
incible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn't possibly ha
ppen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they conqu
ered, they celebrated, they settled in, and then they invaded again -- this
time in Iraq. A trillion dollars<http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0
,8599,1868367,00.html> in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot more l
ike the Russians.
What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no other supe
rpower to ambush them in Afghanistan, as the U.S. had once done to the Sovi
et Union. George W. Bush's crew, it turned out, didn't need another superpo
wer, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that Af
ghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin La
den could muster.
They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for their global
actions, but also gave in to it, and it has yet to be dispelled, even now
that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of
the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the pla
net's "sole superpower" came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the
relatively modest moneys a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed, while
the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launch
ed a devastating and televisually spectacular<http://www.tomdispatch.com/po
st/118775/9_11_an_explosion_out_of_the_towering_inferno_> set of assaults o
n major American landmarks of power -- financial, military, and (except for
the crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind
, however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Fl
orida as from the Afghan backlands.
Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked t
heir plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and take
n their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing
real harm every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, thei
r "caliphate" a joke, and Afghanistan -- for anyone but Afghans -- truly re
presented the backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go ho
me and, disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become unde
r our ministrations, do less harm than we're going to do with our prospecti
ve surges in the years to come.
The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush's peo
ple really wouldn't have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This was
n't atomic science or brain surgery. They needn't have been experts on Cent
ral Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-S
oviet War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the propheti
c November 2001 essay<http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20011101facomment5771/m
ilton-bearden/afghanistan-graveyard-of-empires.html> in Foreign Affairs mag
azine, "Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires," by former CIA station chief in
Pakistan Michael Bearden, which concluded: "The United States must proceed
with caution -- or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history."
They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback
copy of George MacDonald Fraser's rollicking novel Flashman<http://www.amaz
on.com/dp/0452259614/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>, and followed his
blackguard of an anti-hero<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_(novel)>
through England's disastrous Afghan War of 1839-1842 from which only one En
glishman returned alive. In addition to a night's reading pleasure, that wo
uld have provided any neocon national security manager with all he needed t
o know when it came to getting in and out of Afghanistan fast.
Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian ambas
sador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union's Afghan catastrophe. He
complained<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/europe/20russian.html> t
o John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans nor NAT
O representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the U.S. had r
epeated "all of our mistakes," which he carefully enumerated. "Now," he add
ed, "they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the
copyright."
True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the
State Department, the Pentagon, and in the U.S. military, even holdovers l
ike Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus,
are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about
the world. Yes, they believe -- and say so -- that we're, at best, in a sta
lemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it's going to be truly tough sledd
ing, that it probably will take years and years, and that the end result wo
n't be victory. Yes, they want some "new thinking," some actual negotiation
s with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and
above all, they want to "lower expectations."
As Gates summed things up<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
cle/2009/01/27/AR2009012700472_pf.html> in congressional testimony recently
:
"This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to b
e very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghan
istan... If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central
Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has t
hat kind of time, patience and money."
Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for dead warriors
and the Secretary of Defense may have meant an "Asian Eden," but cut him a
little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial limits to
the American role in the world. That's a new note in official Washington, w
here global military and diplomatic policy have, until now, existed in sple
ndid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the plan
et.
Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a "mul
ti-polar world," rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the first
-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a rel
atively distant moment when the U.S. will have "reduced dominance," as Glob
al Trends 2025, a futuristic report<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174985>
produced for the new President by the National Intelligence Council, put i
t. Or as Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's "top analyst," su
ggested of the same moment:
"[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance w
ill be much diminished over this period of time... [T]he overwhelming domin
ance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in mili
tary, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and wil
l erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military."
Still, it's a long way from fretting about finances, while calling<http://b
log.wired.com/defense/2009/02/40-billion-incr.html#more> for more dollars<h
ttp://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/KB06Aa03.html> for the Pentagon, to
imagining that we already might be something less than the dominant hegemon
on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of Afghanistan, hal
f a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for the Afghans
, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).
For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the O
bama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they st
ill think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they
can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this wo
rld spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as a
n imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Back in 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to dr
aw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote<http://www.tomdispatch
.com/post/1984/chalmers_johnson_on_the_cia_and_a_blowback_world> President
Jimmy Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietna
m War."
In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted throug
h the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam
War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.
In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War a
s a "bleeding wound." Three years later, by which time it had long been obv
ious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out,
however, that the bleeding still couldn't be staunched, and so the Soviet U
nion, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on it
s peripheries, went down the tubes.
Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. h
as essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself.
Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thi
nking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical<http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/03/AR2009020302858_pf
.html>. Whether the new team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afgha
nistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside t
he point. The term Pyrrhic victory<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_vic
tory>, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such mo
ments.
After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to
show except an unbroken record<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090216/tirman
> of destruction, corruption<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n21/harr04_.html>, an
d an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing
down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surgin
g yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possib
ly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its ar
med forces and to garrison the globe<http://www.motherjones.com/news/featur
e/2008/09/chalmers-johnson-on-pentagon.html>, even as it attempts to bail o
ut an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is
a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration
took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major w
ay.
Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and P
akistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but wheth
er it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don
't expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what
it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans a
re already itching<http://news.antiwar.com/2008/09/08/the-war-in-afghanista
n-unpopular-among-afghans-unpopular-among-allies/> to get out of town. The
Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians... who exactly will ride t
o our rescue?
Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They ar
e, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project<http://www.americ
anempireproject.com/>, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is t
he author of The End of Victory Culture<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X
/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>, a history of the American Age of Den
ial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New
Age of Empire<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=nation
books08-20> (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his
site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt