This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

US Soldiers in Iraq handle unexploded ordnance. It can only take one "close call" to cause symptoms of PTSD.

“Shell shock,” the psychological scourge of World War I, occurred after “a man has been buried, lifted, or otherwise subjected to the physical effects of a bursting shell or other similar explosive.”  So wrote Charles Myers, an officer in the British army’s medical corps, in his 1940 book, Shell Shock in France, 1914-18. Additionally, he noted, shell shock could result even “when the soldier is remote from the exploding missile, provided that he be subject to an emotional disturbance or mental strain sufficiently severe.” Of course, Myers warned, the effects of shell shock could also appear in those “who have never been near any such exploding missile… or indeed have never come under fire at all.”

Shell shock without the shells or the shock? What in the world did that mean? What did it say about war and those called upon to fight in them?

War-related psychiatric conditions have long been a slippery subject. Soldier’s heart, Da Costa syndrome, trench neurosis, shell shock, war neurosis, acute combat stress reaction, battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — each of these maladies has been a product of its time and each has been all too real, painful, and debilitating to the men and women who have suffered from them.

In his 1919 text, Shell-Shock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems, Elmer Southard — an Army veteran, Harvard Medical School professor, and former director of a unit of the U.S. Army’s Neuropsychiatric Training School — profiled a Russian officer who became afflicted by tremors, was incapacitated by fear that “the Germans were going to break through and capture him [and] shells were about to burst over his head,” and started suffering “hallucinations of shots and the voices of soldiers” that he was unable to distinguish from reality. In February 1915, this officer was medically evacuated, but not from the front lines. He had, Southard explained, never served there nor even “had occasion to visit the line or the trenches.”

In fact, a study of a group of British soldiers suffering from war psychoses during World War I found that just 20% had been under fire.  Late in World War II, a study of Australian psychiatric casualties concluded that 60% had had no contact with the enemy.  Given all of this, it isn’t surprising that TomDispatch regular Jeremiah Goulka’s brief tour in Iraq has continued to affect him years later despite the fact that “he hardly saw a thing.”

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, almost 30% of the post-9/11 veterans — close to 250,000 men and women — treated at V.A. hospitals and clinics have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. To that total, you would have to add American civilian advisors and contractors like Goulka, State Department officials, CIA agents, mercenaries, aid workers, reporters, and others who also bear the psychic scars of America’s recent wars. And then consider all those Iraqis and Afghans, millions of them, combatants and noncombatants — without a veterans’ administration in sight, benefits of any sort, or even the possibility of psychiatric counseling. Consider all those inhabitants of American war zones who have had no choice but to spend not a few weeks, several tours of duty, or even the length of a world war under such stress, but often a decade or more in countries wracked by violence, privation, and distress. Perhaps we need yet another diagnosis to accurately capture the essence of what war has done to them. Neither shell shock nor PTSD seems remotely sufficient. Nick Turse

It Doesn’t Take Much
On Almost Getting PTSD in Iraq
By Jeremiah Goulka

I was one nightmare short of PTSD.

It didn’t take much, that’s what surprised me.  No battles.  No dead bodies.  I spent just three and a half weeks as a contractor in Iraq, when the war there was at its height, rarely leaving the security of American military bases.

For several years now, Americans have become increasingly aware that a large number of veterans have gotten post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Studies estimate that at least 1 in 5 returning vets — possibly as many as 1 in 3 – have it. Less notice has been given to the huge numbers of veterans who suffer some PTSD symptoms but not quite enough to be diagnosed as having the disorder.  Civilian employees of the U.S. government, contractors, and of course the inhabitants of the countries caught up in America’s wars have gotten even less notice.

The thing is: It doesn’t take much to develop the symptoms of PTSD.  Our idea of what used to be called “shell shock” tends to be limited to terrible battles, not just the daily stress of living in a war zone or surviving a couple of close calls.

This is a story of how little it can take. I hardly saw a thing.

I.

My first day in Iraq ended with an explosion.

Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

American Anniversaries from Hell 

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
By Tom Engelhardt

An Apache helicopter in Iraq. July 12th is the 6th anniversary of the "collateral murder" massacre leaked by Bradley Manning to Wikileaks.

It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad — the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — were at least noted in passing in our world.  In my hometown paper, the New York Times, the Iraq anniversary was memorialized with a lead op-ed by a former advisor to General David Petraeus who, amid the rubble, went in search of all-American “silver linings.”

Still, in our post-9/11 world, there are so many other anniversaries from hell whose silver linings don’t get noticed.  Take this April.  It will be the ninth anniversary of the widespread release of the now infamous photos of torture, abuse, and humiliation from Abu Ghraib.  In case you’ve forgotten, that was Saddam Hussein’s old prison where the U.S. military taught the fallen Iraqi dictator a trick or two about the destruction of human beings.  Shouldn’t there be an anniversary of some note there?  I mean, how many cultures have turned dog collars (and the dogs that go with them), thumbs-up signs over dead bodies, and a mockery of the crucified Christ into screensavers?

Or to pick another not-to-be-missed anniversary that, strangely enough, goes uncelebrated here, consider the passage of the USA Patriot Act, that ten-letter acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”?  This October 26th will be the 11th anniversary of the hurried congressional vote on that 363-page (essentially unread) document filled with right-wing hobbyhorses and a range of provisions meant to curtail American liberties in the name of keeping us safe from terror.  “Small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats rushed to support it back then.  It passed in the Senate in record time by 98-1, with only Russ Feingold in opposition, and in the House by 357-66 — and so began the process of taking the oppressive powers of the American state into a new dimension. It would signal the launch of a world of ever-expanding American surveillance and secrecy (and it would be renewed by the Obama administration at its leisure in 2011).

Or what about celebrating the 12th anniversary of Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force, the joint resolution that a panicked and cowed body passed on September 14, 2001?  It wasn’t a declaration of war — there was no one to declare war on — but an open-ended grant to the president of the unfettered power to use “all necessary and appropriate force” in what would become a never-ending (and still expanding) “Global War on Terror.”

Or how about the 11th anniversary on January 11th – like so many such moments, it passed unnoted — of the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that jewel in the crown of George W. Bush’s offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, with its indefinite detention of the innocent and the guilty without charges, its hunger strikes, and abuses, and above all its remarkable ability to embed itself in our world and never go away?  Given that, on much of the rest of the planet, Guantanamo is now an icon of the post-9/11 American way of life, on a par with Mickey Mouse and the Golden Arches, shouldn’t its anniversary be noted?

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Ann Jones examines our culture of masculine violence at home and abroad.

Recently, American newscasts have uncharacteristically devoted lots of time to African stories.  Okay, one African story anyway.  No, not French intervention in Mali.  Nor the election in Kenya.  Nor even the food crisis in Lesotho.  (Yes, there is a food crisis in Lesotho.)  Instead, the focus has been on the tragic death of a white South African model at the hands of her white Paralympic sprinter boyfriend.  Accounts of the killing vary, but what no one disputes is that Oscar “Blade Runner” Pistorius gunned down Reeva Steenkamp while she was locked in a bathroom stall in his home on February 14th.

In a front-page feature, the New York Times reported that on the day before Steenkamp died, she was preparing to give a speech “on a subject that she had known first hand and that is endemic in South Africa: violence against women.”  The article, however, proceeded to focus mainly on what the Times termed “Mr. Pistorius’s less savory behavior” over the years, not the fact that South Africa is among the most lethal countries on the planet for women.  It has “10 femicides per 100,000 female population,” according to a 2011 “Global Burden of Armed Violence” report by the Swiss-based organization Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development.

South Africa, of course, has no monopoly on violence against women on that continent.  For example, a recent working paper by the Small Arms Survey, “Battering, Rape, and Lethal Violence: A Baseline of Information on Physical Threats against Women in Nairobi,” found that nearly “one-half of Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence.” The paper adds that “[e]xtreme and even fatal acts of violence — targeting poor women in particular — are common enough to be considered unremarkable, a non-issue for the media, the political class, the police, and by extension, the Kenyan state.”

And the situation is similarly grim in much of the rest of the world.  According to the “Global Burden of Armed Violence” report, “roughly 66,000 women are violently killed around the world each year, accounting for around 17% of all intentional homicides.”  Its analysis of data from 111 countries and territories finds that home is where the violence is and “the perpetrator is the current or former partner in just under half of the cases.”  Additionally, the findings suggest that violence against women, perhaps not surprisingly, follows overall rates of societal violence, since “countries featuring high homicide rates in the male population also typically experience high femicide rates.”  The report also finds that “one in every ten of all reported violent deaths around the world occurs in so-called conflict settings or during terrorist activities.”

Then what about the country that generates so many of these conflict settings?  And what about the men of its home front?

TomDispatch regular Ann Jones takes up these and other important questions in her latest provocative piece on violence, both in our war zones and back home.  And she’s just the woman to do it.  For the last several decades, Jones has been on the frontlines of both — reporting on abused women and children from the U.S. to the Congo and covering America’s festering war in Afghanistan, including spending time with American troops on the Afghan/Pakistan border.  As the U.S. wages semi-covert conflicts in the wilds of Yemen and Pakistan, Jones sheds light on another covert war hidden in plain sight.  Whatever you choose to call it — “wife torture” or “domestic violence” or a “war on women” — Jones raises uncomfortable questions you’re unlikely to hear on the nightly news, no matter how much Oscar Pistorius coverage you watch. Nick Turse

Men Who Kick Down Doors
Tyrants at Home and Abroad
By Ann Jones

Picture this.  A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room not his own.  He confronts an enemy. He barks orders. He throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall.  He plants himself in the middle of the room, feet widespread, fists clenched, muscles straining, face contorted in a scream of rage.  The tendons in his neck are taut with the intensity of his terrifying performance.  He chases the enemy to the next room, stopping escape with a quick grab and thrust and body block that pins the enemy, bent back, against a counter. He shouts more orders: his enemy can go with him to the basement for a “private talk,” or be beaten to a pulp right here. Then he wraps his fingers around the neck of his enemy and begins to choke her.

No, that invader isn’t an American soldier leading a night raid on an Afghan village, nor is the enemy an anonymous Afghan householder.  This combat warrior is just a guy in Ohio named Shane. He’s doing what so many men find exhilarating: disciplining his girlfriend with a heavy dose of the violence we render harmless by calling it “domestic.”

It’s easy to figure out from a few basic facts that Shane is a skilled predator.  Why else does a 31-year-old man lavish attention on a pretty 19-year-old with two children (ages four and two, the latter an equally pretty and potentially targeted little female)?  And what more vulnerable girlfriend could he find than this one, named Maggie: a neglected young woman, still a teenager, who for two years had been raising her kids on her own while her husband fought a war in Afghanistan?  That war had broken the family apart, leaving Maggie with no financial support and more alone than ever.

But the way Shane assaulted Maggie, he might just as well have been a night-raiding soldier terrorizing an Afghan civilian family in pursuit of some dangerous Talib, real or imagined.  For all we know, Maggie’s estranged husband/soldier might have acted in the same way in some Afghan living room and not only been paid but also honored for it.  The basic behavior is quite alike: an overwhelming display of superior force. The tactics: shock and awe.  The goal: to control the behavior, the very life, of the designated target.  The mind set: a sense of entitlement when it comes to determining the fate of a subhuman creature.  The dark side: the fear and brutal rage of a scared loser who inflicts his miserable self on others.

Since 9/11, the further militarization of our already militarized culture has reached new levels.  Official America, as embodied in our political system and national security state, now seems to be thoroughly masculine, paranoid, quarrelsome, secretive, greedy, aggressive, and violent.  Readers familiar with “domestic violence” will recognize those traits as equally descriptive of the average American wife beater: scared but angry and aggressive, and feeling absolutely entitled to control something, whether it’s just a woman, or a small wretched country like Afghanistan.

Connecting the Dots

Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Another dispatch from Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves, about the forgotten victims of war.

Here’s how I met Nick Turse.  I have a friend who’s a professor of public health and one day in 2003 he asked me if I’d be willing to spend a little time with one of his graduate students who was doing some curious work on the Vietnam War.  This student had read my book The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War era that had a significant Vietnam component, and was eager to get together with me.  One morning a week or two later, at the local diner near my apartment, I met this scraggly kid lugging a giant army surplus rucksack stuffed to the brim with god-knew-what.  And it was true.  Though born the year the Vietnam War ended, he did indeed know an inordinate amount about that conflict and had, he told me, stumbled upon a trove of forgotten files at the National Archives from a secret Vietnam-era Pentagon working group investigating U.S. war crimes.  Those files, he added, were both sobering and startlingly extensive and they had been carefully buried at war’s end.  It was the subject of his dissertation.

I must admit I only half paid attention.  Not long after, he started sending me little TomDispatch-like emails he was circulating to friends.  At first, I barely glanced at them, but — whatever “it” is — he had it and that included an incredible eye for strange war toys, odd military research, and bizarre Pentagon weapons programs.  After a while, I found myself compulsively reading those idiosyncratic emails of his.  Finally, I picked up the phone and suggested he turn one of them into a TD piece — and so he did.  On October 16, 2003, I published “Zap, Zap, You’re Dead,” an article on militarized video games, and our collaboration has never ended.

A couple of years later, I got him to turn his Pentagon research into The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives for the American Empire Project series I co-run with Steve Fraser.  In the meantime, that dissertation of his, compounded by years of further research in Vietnam and here, was slowly being transformed into what became Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Over that period, both as his editor and a friend, I’ve witnessed his obsessional journey, a genuine odyssey, through a nightmarish landscape of war and crime long buried, like those Pentagon files, in the memories of American veterans and Vietnamese peasants.  He spent years tracking down and interviewing those who had committed war crimes, those who tried to expose them, and those who suffered from them.  At the same time, he was working to grasp the nature of the American way of war in Vietnam that had made all this possible.

I knew something about what had already been written on that war here (though nobody could begin to read the 30,000 books that have poured out since that disaster of a conflict ended), and I had no doubt that his would be unique.  I knew something else as well: that Americans had, since 1973, been remarkably uninterested in the war crimes their troops had committed there and so I expected one of the great books on that war to disappear more or less without a trace, no matter when it came out.

Most of the time, being wrong is, at best, an uncomfortable experience.  Every now and then, though, it’s a wonder.  So it’s been with his book.  Instead of instantly heading down the tubes, it landed on the New York Times extended bestseller list, is being widely reviewed, and is now in its fifth printing.  Nick has appeared on shows ranging from Fresh Air and Democracy Now! to Moyers & Company.  Letters filled with terrifying memories from Vietnam vets, who have lived all these decades with their private nightmares, have been pouring in, offering powerful confirmation of what he’s written and enough new material for him to write volume two, if he ever wants.

Undoubtedly, this is an odd way to introduce his post for today, a sobering look at what we’re never told about war, but I wanted TomDispatch readers to know just how proud I am of Nick for not stopping, not caring what the future might hold, and especially for keeping faith with those, American and Vietnamese, who suffered grievously. Tom

Who Did You Rape in the War, Daddy?
A Question for Veterans that Needs Answering
By Nick Turse

On August 31, 1969, a rape was committed in Vietnam.  Maybe numerous rapes were committed there that day, but this was a rare one involving American GIs that actually made its way into the military justice system.

And that wasn’t the only thing that set it apart.

War is obscene.  I mean that in every sense of the word.  Some veterans will tell you that you can’t know war if you haven’t served in one, if you haven’t seen combat.  These are often the same guys who won’t tell you the truths that they know about war and who never think to blame themselves in any way for our collective ignorance.

The truth is, you actually can know a lot about war without fighting in one.  It just isn’t the sort of knowledge that’s easy to come by.

The main problem with most of those books is the complete lack of Vietnamese voices.  The Vietnam War killed more than 58,000 Americans.  That’s a lot of people and a lot of heartache.  It deserves attention.  But it killed several million Vietnamese and severely affected — and I mean severely — the lives of many millions more.  That deserves a whole lot more focus.

Missing in Action (From Our Histories)   

Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

[Editor's Note: The Firedoglake Book Salon will host Nick Turse for a discussion of Kill Anything That Moves on January 19. -MyFDL Editor]

Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse, a new look at the cost of Vietnam in civilian lives

In late December 2001, not long after Washington’s second Afghan War began, there was that wedding celebration in eastern Afghanistan in which 110 of 112 villagers were reportedly killed by American B-52 and B-1B bombers using precision guided weapons.  Then there were the more than 40 Iraqi wedding celebrants (27 from one extended family, including 14 children) who died when U.S. planes struck their party at a village near the Syrian border back in May 2004, and the Afghan bridal party of 70 to 90 who were taken out by a U.S. airstrike on a road near the Pakistani border in July 2008.  (The bride and 46 of those accompanying her died, according to an Afghan inquiry, including 39 women and children.)  Added to this list should be the 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children, ranging in age from 3 to 76, murdered by U.S. Marines in November 2005 in the long-forgotten Haditha massacre. And the 14-year-old girl whom American soldiers gang-raped and murdered along with her family in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, the next year.  And then there was the headline-grabbing case of those 16 civilians, nine of them children, 11 from one family, reportedly slaughtered (and some of their corpses burned) by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in two southern Afghan villages in the course of a single night in March 2012.

Let’s not forget either the 12 Iraqis, including two Reuters employees, shot dead (and two children badly wounded) on a Baghdad street in July 2007 by the laughing crew of an Apache helicopter, as revealed in an infamous video released by WikiLeaks.  There were also the 60 children (and up to 30 adults) who died in the Afghan village of Azizabad on an August night in 2008 while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had been, villagers reported, anti-Taliban.  That, too, was thanks to air strikes. There were also those three (or more) Afghan civilians hunted down “for sport” in the summer of 2010 by a self-appointed U.S. “kill team” who were collecting trophy body parts.  And there were the 10 boys, including two sets of brothers, collecting wood for their families in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province early in 2011, who were attacked by U.S. helicopters.  Only one wounded boy survived.  Or most recently, the 11 Yemeni civilians, including women and children, in a Toyota truck killed by a U.S. airstrike and initially labeled “al-Qaeda militants.”

Such a list, of course, only scratches the surface of a reality that we in the United States have hardly noticed and so have to expend no effort whatsoever to ignore.  Unlike for the victims of 9/11 or more recently of Newtown, there will be no memorials, no teddy bears, no special rites, no solemn ceremonies.  Nothing.  The distant dead of our wars have largely paid the price in silence and anonymity for what the U.S. intelligence community likes to call the last superpower’s duty of being a “global security provider” — and which elsewhere often looks more like inflicting mayhem on local populations.

In addition, the particular form of “security” we’ve brought to such areas via the U.S. military continues even after we leave.  U.S. troops are gone from Iraq, for example, but the violence our invasion and occupation set loose has never ended. Iraq Body Count has just issued its report on rising deaths from violence in that country in 2012, both among the Iraqi police (922) and civilians (4,471). It concludes: “In sum the latest evidence suggests that the country remains in a state of low-level war little changed since early 2009, with a ‘background’ level of everyday armed violence punctuated by occasional larger-scale attacks designed to kill many people at once.” We bear genuine responsibility for this, but no longer care a whit.

It’s good that one American did care and has spent the last decade preparing to help us remember what kind of “security” our wars have long brought to such distant regions.  Nick Turse’s new book, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, paints a memorable portrait of the war that, unlike Iraq and undoubtedly someday Afghanistan, we can’t seem to forget.  Today, from his groundbreaking work on civilian suffering, he suggests the one way the “Vietnam analogy” really does apply to Iraq and Afghanistan. Tom  

“So Many People Died”
The American System of Suffering, 1965-2014
By Nick Turse

Pham To looked great for 78 years old.  (At least, that’s about how old he thought he was.)  His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique robust — all the more remarkable given what he had lived through.  I listened intently, as I had so many times before to so many similar stories, but it was still beyond my ability to comprehend.  It’s probably beyond yours, too.

Pham To told me that the planes began their bombing runs in 1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started about the same time.  Nobody will ever know just how many civilians were killed in the years after that.  “The number is uncountable,” he said one spring day a few years ago in a village in the mountains of rural central Vietnam.  “So many people died.”

And it only got worse.  Chemical defoliants came next, ravaging the land.  Helicopter machine gunners began firing on locals.  By 1969, bombing and shelling were day-and-night occurrences.  Many villagers fled.  Some headed further into the mountains, trading the terror of imminent death for a daily struggle of hardscrabble privation; others were forced into squalid refugee resettlement areas.  Those who remained in the village suffered more when the troops came through.  Homes were burned as a matter of course.  People were kicked and beaten.  Men were shot when they ran in fear.  Women were raped.  One morning, a massacre by American soldiers wiped out 21 fellow villagers.  This was the Vietnam War for Pham To, as for so many rural Vietnamese.

One, Two… Many Vietnams?

Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

(Photo: Karen Eliot/flickr)

It was never exactly rocket science.  You didn’t have to be Einstein to figure it out.  In early 2003, the Bush administration was visibly preparing to invade Iraq, a nation with a nasty ruler who himself hadn’t hesitated to invade another country, Iran, in the early 1980s for no purpose except self-aggrandizement.  (And the Reagan administration had backed him in that disastrous war because then, as now, Washington loathed the Iranians.)  There was never the slightest evidence of the involvement of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 9/11 attacks or in support of al-Qaeda; and despite the Bush administration’s drumbeat of supposed information about Saddam’s nuclear program (which was said, somehow, to threaten to put mushroom clouds over American cities), the evidence was always, at best, beyond thin and at worst, a potage of lies, concoctions, and wishful thinking. The program, of course, proved nonexistent, but too late to matter.

There was only one reason to invade Iraq and it could be captured in a single word, “oil,” even if George W. Bush and his top officials generally went out of their way to avoid mentioning it.  (At one point, post-invasion, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did point out that Iraq was indeed afloat “on a sea of oil.”)  Unfortunately, oil as a significant factor in invasion planning was considered far too simpleminded for the sophisticated pundits and reporters of the mainstream media.  They were unimpressed by it even when, as the looting began in Baghdad, it turned out that U.S. troops only had orders to guard the Oil Ministry and Interior Ministry (which housed Saddam’s dreaded secret police).

Mind you, far more than Iraqi oil was in the administration’s crosshairs, though that country, with its then-crippled energy sector, was considered a giant oil reservoir just waiting for Big Oil to set it free.  To conquer and garrison — “liberate” — Iraq would put the U.S. in a position of ultimate domination in the oil heartlands of the planet, or so thought the top officials of the Bush administration, a number of whom had been in or associated with the energy business before scaling the heights of Washington. As Dick Cheney put it to the Institute of Petroleum Engineers in 1999, when he was still running the energy company Halliburton, “The Middle East, with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”

And the millions of protestors who took to the streets of the great cities (and small towns) of the planet in unprecedented numbers to oppose the coming invasion, waving signs like “No Blood for Oil!” “How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” and “Don’t trade lives for oil!” grasped perfectly well just what they had in mind — and more prescient still, they knew it would be a disaster.  If only they had been listened to.  Instead, they were generally dismissed in the mainstream media for their hopeless naïveté.

They were right.  It was about oil (though not oil alone, given the over-determined nature of all events on this planet of ours), while so many of the sophisticated types as well as the geopolitical visionaries of the Bush administration proved dismally wrong, completely mistaken in their assessment of our world of energy and how it might be controlled.  Now, more than eight years later, no one here even wants to think about Iraq and the multi-trillion-dollar war we fought there.  Mission accomplished?  You be the judge.  Recent headlines indicate that the new Iraq is actually helping Iran evade the Obama administration’s oil sanctions.  Think of it as the grim geopolitical version of slapstick comedy.

As it happens, it took slightly longer than the disastrous invasion, occupation, and retreat from Iraq for a book to finally be published that actually focuses on oil as the pivotal commodity in America’s debacle there. I’m talking about Greg Muttitt’s new book, Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq. For all those of you who marched in the global streets, holding signs warning Bush and his cronies not to do it, this is the book that tells the story of just exactly how right you were. Tom

Mission Accomplished for Big Oil?
How an American Disaster Paved the Way for Big Oil’s Rise — and Possible Fall — in Iraq
By Greg Muttitt

In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and occupation, U.S. troops finally left Iraq. In their place, Big Oil is now present in force and the country’s oil output, crippled for decades, is growing again. Iraq recently reclaimed the number two position in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), overtaking oil-sanctioned Iran. Now, there’s talk of a new world petroleum glut. So is this finally mission accomplished?

Well, not exactly. In fact, any oil company victory in Iraq is likely to prove as temporary as George W. Bush’s triumph in 2003. The main reason is yet another of those stories the mainstream media didn’t quite find room for: the role of Iraqi civil society. But before telling that story, let’s look at what’s happening to Iraqi oil today, and how we got from the “no blood for oil” global protests of 2003 to the present moment.

Here, as a start, is a little scorecard of what’s gone on in Iraq since Big Oil arrived two and a half years ago: corruption’s skyrocketed; two Western oil companies are being investigated for either giving or receiving bribes; the Iraqi government is paying oil companies a per-barrel fee according to wildly unrealistic production targets they’ve set, whether or not they deliver that number of barrels; contractors are heavily over-charging for drilling wells, which the companies don’t mind since the Iraqi government picks up the tab.

Meanwhile, to protect the oil giants from dissent and protest, trade union offices have been raided, computers seized and equipment smashed, leaders arrested and prosecuted. And that’s just in the oil-rich southern part of the country.

In Kurdistan in the north, the regional government awards contracts on land outside its jurisdiction, contracts which permit the government to transfer its stake in the oil projects — up to 25% — to private companies of its choice. Fuel is smuggled across the border to the tune of hundreds of tankers a day.

In Kurdistan, at least the approach is deliberate: the two ruling families of the region, the Barzanis and Talabanis, know that they can do whatever they like, since their Peshmerga militia control the territory. In contrast, the Iraqi federal government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has little control over anything. As a result, in the rest of the country the oil industry operates, gold-rush-style, in an almost complete absence of oversight or regulation.

Oil companies differ as to which of these two Iraqs they prefer to operate in. BP and Shell have opted to rush for black gold in the super-giant oilfields of southern Iraq. Exxon has hedged its bets by investing in both options. This summer, Chevron and the French oil company Total voted for the Kurdish approach, trading smaller oil fields for better terms and a bit more stability.

Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The world can be a luckless place, but every now and then serendipity just knocks you off a cliff. In what passed for my real life before TomDispatch intervened, I was (and remain, on a part-time basis) a book editor in mainstream publishing. The “slush pile” in a publishing house is normally the equivalent of an elephant’s graveyard, the place prospective books go to die. It’s made up of proposals or manuscripts arriving over the transom from potential authors who have no literary agents, no contacts, and normally — whether they know it or not — no hope.

The odds for getting published that way these days must fall into the miracle category (which is why successful books from the slush pile often make the news). Peter Van Buren’s journey to publication — and so to whistleblower status — was among the more improbable slush-pile odysseys of our times.

In 2009-2010, he was a State Department official on a godforsaken forward operating base south of Baghdad, his mind boggled by what he was seeing of the grim farce of American “reconstruction” in Iraq. He was then sending emails home to his wife in the States that would, sooner or later, become part of his Iraq manuscript, and at night wandering the Web trying to learn more about the country and situation he had been plunged into. In that process, he stumbled upon TomDispatch, began following it, and noticed that, from time to time, authors writing for the site produced books that TD then highlighted.

In 2010, back in the States with a rough manuscript in hand, knowing no one in publishing nor anything about it, not even realizing I was a book editor, he sent an improbable email to the TomDispatch mail box that began: “I am a Foreign Service Officer just returned from a year in the field in Iraq (PRT leader) and I have a completed book draft. Would you be willing to read it as a possible title to publish, for a prepublication comment, and/or for a later excerpt on your site?”

As it happens, I do read everything that comes in to the TomDispatch “slush pile” (though sometimes, sadly, I’m too busy to answer), because I consider it the university of my later life. Along with much appreciated encouragement, and reasonable dollops of criticism and complaint, people from around the world write me about what matters to them or tell me about lives I might otherwise never have imagined. Who could resist?

Because of my busy life, I’ve nonetheless made TomDispatch a no-submissions site and normally I would simply have nixed Van Buren’s requests, but something stopped me, maybe only the fact that he had only recently returned from service in Iraq. I wouldn’t say I replied positively — “chances are always slim” was my discouraging phrase — but I did ask him to write me a description of his book and himself, and because I had no time just then, passed it on to Steve Fraser, my partner at our co-publishing venture at Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project. A few days later, the phone rang. It was Steve, telling me that I really did need to read Van Buren’s manuscript, that he was a natural, and it was the real McCoy.

In other words, the wildest sort of online slush-pile luck turned Steve into his editor and Van Buren into a published author and so dispatched him willy-nilly into the strange, embattled world of Obama-era governmental whistleblowers. As a group, they are, after all, just about the only people inside the National Security Complex who ever get in trouble for their acts. In our era, the illegal surveillers, the torturers, the kidnappers, those who launch and pursue undeclared and aggressive wars, and those who squander taxpayer dollars all run free. Later, if they were important enough, they write their memoirs for millions of dollars, peddle their speeches for hundreds of thousands more, and live the good life. Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In a recent TomDispatch introduction, I pointed out that, when it comes to America’s wars, you can’t afford to be right. I suggested that those who had foreseen disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan should logically be celebrated in this country and “should be in the Rolodexes of every journalist reporting on American foreign policy, the Iran crisis, or our wars.” But, I asked, “When was the last time you heard from one of them or saw one spotlighted?”

The interviewee in today’s post is a case in point. When it comes to being right, there may be no journalist, analyst, or writer who has been more on target than Jonathan Schell, whether on Vietnam, the Nixon White House (and its early cult of executive power), nuclear weapons, the Afghan War, or the invasion of Iraq. His is a remarkable and remarkably unblemished record. If you want to know what to expect from the latest in American war, who better to go to than the man who was never wrong?

Now that a possible war with Iran is regularly in the news, every week reporters are scrambling to check in with “experts” who couldn’t have been more mistaken when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Who else should you ask in Washington, where “wrong” is the ticket to media success, a guarantee that your opinion will have value?

As for right? Well, just how many calls a week do you imagine Jonathan Schell gets from reporters wanting his opinion on the latest in American war.

Zero.

Of course, give the media credit. Schell’s record does have a blemish. He wrote a book called The Unconquerable World (and in a world of full disclosure and with great pride let me add that, in my other life as a book editor, I edited it). As TomDispatch Associate Editor Andy Kroll points out today, in that volume Schell essentially foresaw the path that would lead to both Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park, but — and here’s the blemish — he didn’t know that. So when those events unfolded, he was as startled as the rest of us. Still, we at TomDispatch thought it our duty to step out of line, do the unpopular thing, and ask someone who has a record for being right, not wrong, about the present moment and how we got to it. Tom Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.

To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact.  It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana.  It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way.  And then, of course, it wasn’t.  And then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over (sorta).

It was the Iraq War, and we were the uninvited guests who didn’t want to go home.  To the last second, despite President Obama’s repeated promise that all American troops were leaving, despite an agreement the Iraqi government had signed with George W. Bush’s administration in 2008, America’s military commanders continued to lobby and Washington continued to negotiate for 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain in-country as advisors and trainers.

Only when the Iraqis simply refused to guarantee those troops immunity from local law did the last Americans begin to cross the border into Kuwait.  It was only then that our top officials began to hail the thing they had never wanted, the end of the American military presence in Iraq, as marking an era of “accomplishment.”  They also began praising their own “decision” to leave as a triumph, and proclaimed that the troops were departing with — as the president put it — “their heads held high.”

In a final flag-lowering ceremony in Baghdad, clearly meant for U.S. domestic consumption and well attended by the American press corps but not by Iraqi officials or the local media, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta spoke glowingly of having achieved “ultimate success.”  He assured the departing troops that they had been a “driving force for remarkable progress” and that they could proudly leave the country “secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people begin a new chapter in history, free from tyranny and full of hope for prosperity and peace.”  Later on his trip to the Middle East, speaking of the human cost of the war, he added, “I think the price has been worth it.”

And then the last of those troops really did “come home” — if you define “home” broadly enough to include not just bases in the U.S. but also garrisons in Kuwait, elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, and sooner or later in Afghanistan.

On December 14th at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the president and his wife gave returning war veterans from the 82nd Airborne Division and other units a rousing welcome.  With some in picturesque maroon berets, they picturesquely hooahed the man who had once called their war “dumb.” Undoubtedly looking toward his 2012 campaign, President Obama, too, now spoke stirringly of “success” in Iraq, of “gains,” of his pride in the troops, of the country’s “gratitude” to them, of the spectacular accomplishments achieved as well as the hard times endured by “the finest fighting force in the history of the world,” and of the sacrifices made by our “wounded warriors” and “fallen heroes.”

He praised “an extraordinary achievement nine years in the making,” framing their departure this way: “Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq — all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering — all of it has led to this moment of success… [W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

And these themes — including the “gains” and the “successes,” as well as the pride and gratitude, which Americans were assumed to feel for the troops — were picked up by the media and various pundits.  At the same time, other news reports were highlighting the possibility that Iraq was descending into a new sectarian hell, fueled by an American-built but largely Shiite military, in a land in which oil revenues barely exceeded the levels of the Saddam Hussein era, in a capital city which still had only a few hours of electricity a day, and that was promptly hit by a string of bombings and suicide attacks from an al-Qaeda affiliated group (nonexistent before the invasion of 2003), even as the influence of Iran grew and Washington quietly fretted.

A Consumer Society at War

It’s true that, if you were looking for low-rent victories in a near trillion-dollar war, this time, as various reporters and pundits pointed out, U.S. diplomats weren’t rushing for the last helicopter off an embassy roof amid chaos and burning barrels of dollars.  In other words, it wasn’t Vietnam and, as everyone knew, that was a defeat.  In fact, as other articles pointed out, our — as no fitting word has been found for it, let’s go with — withdrawal was a magnificent feat of reverse engineering, worthy of a force that was a nonpareil on the planet.

Even the president mentioned it.  After all, having seemingly moved much of the U.S. to Iraq, leaving was no small thing.  When the U.S. military began stripping the 505 bases it had built there at the cost of unknown multibillions of taxpayer dollars, it sloughed off $580 million worth of no-longer-wanted equipment on the Iraqis.  And yet it still managed to ship to Kuwait, other Persian Gulf garrisons, Afghanistan, and even small towns in the U.S. more than two million items ranging from Kevlar armored vests to port-a-potties.  We’re talking about the equivalent of 20,000 truckloads of materiel.

Not surprisingly, given the society it comes from, the U.S. military fights a consumer-intensive style of war and so, in purely commercial terms, the leaving of Iraq was a withdrawal for the ages.  Nor should we overlook the trophies the military took home with it, including a vast Pentagon database of thumbprints and retinal scans from approximately 10% of the Iraqi population.  (A similar program is still underway in Afghanistan.) 

When it came to “success,” Washington had a good deal more than that going for it.  After all, it plans to maintain a Baghdad embassy so gigantic it puts the Saigon embassy of 1973 to shame.  With a contingent of 16,000 to 18,000 people, including a force of perhaps 5,000 armed mercenaries (provided by private security contractors like Triple Canopy with its $1.5 billion State Department contract), the “mission” leaves any normal definition of “embassy” or “diplomacy” in the dust.

In 2012 alone, it is slated to spend $3.8 billion, a billion of that on a much criticized police-training program, only 12% of whose funds actually go to the Iraqi police.  To be left behind in the “postwar era,” in other words, will be something new under the sun.

Still, set aside the euphemisms and the soaring rhetoric, and if you want a simple gauge of the depths of America’s debacle in the oil heartlands of the planet, consider just how the final unit of American troops left Iraq. According to Tim Arango and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, they pulled out at 2:30 a.m. in the dead of night.  No helicopters off rooftops, but 110 vehicles setting out in the dark from Contingency Operating Base Adder.  The day before they left, according to the Times reporters, the unit’s interpreters were ordered to call local Iraqi officials and sheiks with whom the Americans had close relations and make future plans, as if everything would continue in the usual way in the week to come.

In other words, the Iraqis were meant to wake up the morning after to find their foreign comrades gone, without so much as a goodbye.  This is how much the last American unit trusted its closest local allies.  After shock and awe, the taking of Baghdad, the mission-accomplished moment, and the capture, trial, and execution of Saddam Hussein, after Abu Ghraib and the bloodletting of the civil war, after the surge and the Sunni Awakening movement, after the purple fingers and the reconstruction funds gone awry, after all the killing and the dying, the U.S. military slipped into the night without a word.

If, however, you did happen to be looking for a word or two to capture the whole affair, something less polite than those presently circulating, “debacle” and “defeat” might fit the bill.  The military of the self-proclaimed single greatest power of planet Earth, whose leaders once considered the occupation of the Middle East the key to future global policy and planned for a multi-generational garrisoning of Iraq, had been sent packing.  That should have been considered little short of stunning.

Face what happened in Iraq directly and you know that you’re on a new planet.

Doubling Down on Debacle

Of course, Iraq was just one of our invasions-turned-counterinsurgencies-turned-disasters.  The other, which started first and is still ongoing, may prove the greater debacle.  Though less costly so far in both American lives and national treasure, it threatens to become the more decisive of the two defeats, even though the forces opposing the U.S. military in Afghanistan remain an ill-armed, relatively weak set of minority insurgencies.

As great as was the feat of building the infrastructure for a military occupation and war in Iraq, and then equipping and supplying a massive military force there year after year, it was nothing compared to what the U.S had to do in Afghanistan.  Someday, the decision to invade that country, occupy it, build more than 400 bases there, surge in an extra 60,000 or more troops, masses of contractors, CIA agents, diplomats, and other civilian officials, and then push a weak local government to grant Washington the right to remain more or less in perpetuity will be seen as the delusional actions of a Washington incapable of gauging the limits of its power in the world.

Talk about learning curves: having watched their country fail disastrously in a major war on the Asian mainland three decades earlier, America’s leaders somehow convinced themselves that nothing was beyond the military prowess of the “sole superpower.”  So they sent more than 250,000 American troops (along with all those Burger Kings, Subways, and Cinnabons) into two land wars in Eurasia.  The result has been another chapter in a history of American defeat — this time of a power that, despite its pretensions, was not only weaker than in the Vietnam era, but also far weaker than its leaders were capable of imagining.

You would think that, after a decade of watching this double debacle unfold, there might be a full-scale rush for the exits.  And yet the drawdown of U.S. “combat” troops in Afghanistan is not scheduled to be completed until December 31, 2014 (with thousands of advisors, trainers, and special operations forces slated to remain behind); the Obama administration is still negotiating feverishly with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on an agreement that — whatever the euphemisms chosen — would leave Americans garrisoned there for years to come; and, as in Iraq in 2010 and 2011, American commanders are openly lobbying for an even slower withdrawal schedule.

Again as in Iraq, in the face of the obvious, the official word couldn’t be peachier.  In mid-December, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta actually told frontline American troops there that they were “winning” the war.  Our commanders there similarly continue to tout “progress” and “gains,” as well as a weakening of the Taliban grip on the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, thanks to the flooding of the region with U.S. surge troops and continual, devastating night raids by U.S. special operations forces.

Nonetheless, the real story in Afghanistan remains grim for a squirming former superpower — as it has been ever since its occupation resuscitated the Taliban, the least popular popular movement imaginable. Typically, the U.N. has recently calculated that “security-related events” in the first 11 months of 2011 rose 21% over the same period in 2010 (something denied by NATO).  Similarly, yet more resources are being poured into an endless effort to build and train Afghan security forces.  Almost $12 billion went into the project in 2011 and a similar sum is slated for 2012, and yet those forces still can’t operate on their own, nor do they fight particularly effectively (though their Taliban opposites have few such problems).

Afghan police and soldiers continue to desert in droves and the U.S. general in charge of the training operation suggested last year that, to have the slightest chance of success, it would need to be extended through at least 2016 or 2017.  (Forget for a moment that an impoverished Afghan government will be utterly incapable of supporting or financing the forces being created for it.)

The Pashtun-based Taliban, like any classic guerrilla force, has faded away before the overwhelming military of a major power, yet it still clearly has significant control over the southern countryside, and in the last year its acts of violence have spread ever more deeply into the non-Pashtun north.  And if U.S. forces in Iraq didn’t trust their local partners at the moment of departure, Americans in Afghanistan have every reason to be far more nervous.  Afghans in police or army uniforms — some trained by the Americans or NATO, some possibly Taliban guerrillas dressed in outfits bought on the black market — have regularly turned their guns on their putative allies in what’s referred to as “green-on-blue violence.”  As 2012 ended, for instance, an Afghan army soldier shot and killed two French soldiers.  Not long before, several NATO troops were wounded when a man in an Afghan army uniform opened fire on them. 

In the meantime, U.S. troop strength is starting to drop; NATO allies look unsteady indeed; and the Taliban, whatever its trials and tribulations, undoubtedly senses that time is on its side.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers

Weak as the several outfits that make up the Taliban may be, there can be no question that they are preparing to successfully outlast the greatest military power of our time.  And mind you, none of this does more than touch on the debacle that the Afghan War could become.  If you want to judge the full folly of the American war (and gauge the waning of U.S. power globally), don’t even bother to look at Afghanistan.  Instead, check out the supply lines leading to it.

After all, Afghanistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia.  The U.S. is thousands of miles away.  No giant ports-cum-bases as at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam in the 1960s are available to bring in supplies.  For Washington, if the guerrillas it opposes go to war with little more than the clothes on their backs, its military is another matter.  From meals to body armor, building supplies to ammunition, it needs a massive — and massively expensive — supply system.  It also guzzles fuel the way a drunk downs liquor and has spent more than $20 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq annually just on air conditioning.

To keep itself in good shape, it must rely on tortuous supply lines thousands of miles long.  Because of this, it is not the arbiter of its own fate in Afghanistan, though this seems to have gone almost unnoticed for years.

Of all the impractical wars a declining empire could fight, the Afghan one may be the most impractical of all.  Hand it to the Soviet Union, at least its “bleeding wound” — the phrase Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave to its Afghan debacle of the 1980s — was conveniently next door.  For the nearly 91,000 American troops now in that country, their 40,000 NATO counterparts, and thousands of private contractors, the supplies that make the war possible can only enter Afghanistan three ways: perhaps 20% come in by air at staggering expense; more than a third arrive by the shortest and cheapest route — through the Pakistani port of Karachi, by truck or train north, and then by truck across narrow mountain defiles; and perhaps 40% (only “non-lethal” supplies allowed) via the Northern Distribution Network (NDN).

The NDN was fully developed only beginning in 2009, when it belatedly became clear to Washington that Pakistan had a potential stranglehold on the American war effort.  Involving at least 16 countries and just about every form of transport imaginable, the NDN is actually three routes, two of them via Russia, that funnel just about everything through the bottleneck of corrupt, autocratic Uzbekistan.

In other words, simply to fight its war, Washington has made itself dependent on the kindness of strangers — in this case, Pakistan and Russia.  It’s one thing when a superpower or great power on the rise casts its lot with countries that may not be natural allies; it’s quite a different story when a declining power does so.  Russian leaders are already making noises about the viability of the northern route if the U.S. continues to displease it on the placement of its prospective European missile defense system.

But the more immediate psychodrama of the Afghan War is in Pakistan.  There, the massive resupply operation is already a major scandal.  It was estimated, for instance, that, in 2008, 12% of all U.S. supplies heading from Karachi to Bagram Air Base went missing somewhere en route.  In what Karachi’s police chief has called “the mother of all scams,” 29,000 cargo loads of U.S. supplies have disappeared after being unloaded at that port.

In fact, the whole supply system — together with the local security and protection agreements and bribes to various groups that are part and parcel of it along the way — has evidently helped fund and supply the Taliban, as well as stocking every bazaar en route and supporting local warlords and crooks of every sort.

Recently, in response to American air strikes that killed 24 of their border troops, the Pakistani leadership forced the Americans to leave Shamsi air base, where the CIA ran some of its drone operations, successfully pressured Washington into at least temporarily halting its drone air campaign in Pakistan’s borderlands, and closed the border crossings through which the whole American supply system must pass.  They remain closed almost two months later.  Without those routes, in the long run, the American war simply cannot be fought.

Though those crossings are likely to be reopened after a significant renegotiation of U.S.-Pakistani relations, the message couldn’t be clearer.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in those Pakistani borderlands, have not only drained American treasure, but exposed the relative helplessness of the “sole superpower.”  Ten (or even five) years ago, the Pakistanis would simply never have dared to take actions like these.

As it turned out, the power of the U.S. military was threateningly impressive, but only until George W. Bush pulled the trigger twice.  In doing so, he revealed to the world that the U.S. could not win distant land wars against minimalist enemies or impose its will on two weak countries in the Greater Middle East.  Another reality was exposed as well, even if it has taken time to sink in: we no longer live on a planet where it’s obvious how to leverage staggering advantages in military technology into any other kind of power.

In the process, all the world could see what the United States was: the other declining power of the Cold War era.  Washington’s state of dependence on the Eurasian mainland is now clear enough, which means that, whatever “agreements” are reached with the Afghan government, the future in that country is not American.

Over the last decade, the U.S. has been taught a repetitive lesson when it comes to ground wars on the Eurasian mainland: don’t launch them.  The debacle of the impending double defeat this time around couldn’t be more obvious.  The only question that remains is just how humiliating the coming retreat from Afghanistan will turn out to be. The longer the U.S. stays, the more devastating the blow to its power.

All of this should hardly need to be said and yet, as 2012 begins, with the next political season already upon us, it is no less painfully clear that Washington will be incapable of ending the Afghan War any time soon.

At the height of what looked like success in Iraq and Afghanistan, American officials fretted endlessly about how, in the condescending phrase of the moment, to put an “Afghan face” or “Iraqi face” on America’s wars.  Now, at a nadir moment in the Greater Middle East, perhaps it’s finally time to put an American face on America’s wars, to see them clearly for the imperial debacles they have been — and act accordingly.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been published.

Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt