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Filling the Empty Battlefield 
Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter 
By Tom Engelhardt

Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill

Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 — and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.”  In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened.  Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power.  He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world… for future forms of blowback.”

Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.”  In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged.  It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.

Talk about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did. All of this laid the foundation for… well, in 1999 when Johnson was writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had “freed ourselves of… any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe.”

With Blowback, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically unprecedented garrisoning of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally.  After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to the center of the 9/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and became a bestseller, while “blowback” and that phrase “unintended consequences” made their way into our everyday language.

Chalmers Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar.  Now, more than a decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter.  His name is Jeremy Scahill.  In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in service to its foreign wars, was working manically to “privatize” national security and the U.S. military by hiring rent-a-spies, rent-a-guns, and rent-a-corporations for its proliferating wars.

In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation to heart — that we Americans can’t see our world as it is.  And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows.  As two administrations in Washington arrogated ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making.  In the process, they transformed an increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military.

In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state — and no one else.  Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end.  It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name.  As a result, there was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written.  Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.

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President Obama shakes hands with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Had you searched for “Israel, nuclear weapons” at Google News in the wake of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: “Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon” (CNN), “Obama vows to thwart Tehran’s nuclear driverdquo; (the Times of Israel), Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran (the San Angelo Times), “US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran’s plutonium-producing reactor” (Associated Press), “Obama says ‘there is still time’ to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute; Netanyahu hints at impatience” (NBC), “Iran’s leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks” (Fox).

By now, we’re so used to such a world of headlines — about Iran’s threatening nuclear weapons and its urge to “wipe out” Israel — that we simply don’t see how strange it is.  At the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia (theoretically because of sequester budget cuts), the U.S. continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran.  That modest-sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever-tightening sanctions, its skies filled with U.S. spy drones, its offshore waters with U.S. warships.  Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv in the first cyberwar in history. As early as 2007, the U.S. Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross-border activities, assumedly using U.S. special operations forces — and that’s only what’s known about the pressure being exerted on Iran.  With this, and the near-apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called “regime change.”  (Who can forget the neocon quip of the pre-Iraq-invasion moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran”?)

And all of this is due, so we’re told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one because it doesn’t exist, and most observers don’t think that Tehran is in the process of preparing to build one either.  In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it — if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject — is a nuclear will-o’-the-wisp.  In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan’s expanding nuclear arsenal.  And yet, in that shaky, increasingly destabilized country, such an existing arsenal has to qualify as a genuine and growing regional danger.

Similarly, you can read endlessly in the mainstream about President Obama’s recent triumphs in the Middle East and that Iranian nuclear program without ever stumbling upon anything of significance about the only genuine nuclear arsenal in the vicinity: Israel’s.  On the rare occasions when it is even mentioned, it’s spoken of as if it might or might not exist.  Israel, Fox News typically reports, “is believed to have the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Mideast.”  It is, of course, Israeli policy (and a carefully crafted fiction) never to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal.  But the arsenal itself isn’t just “believed” to exist, it is known to exist — 100-300 nuclear weapons’ worth or enough destructive power to turn not just Iran but the Greater Middle East into an ash heap.

To sum up: we continue to obsess about fantasy weapons, base an ever more threatening and dangerous policy in the region on their possible future existence, might conceivably end up in a war over them, and yet pay remarkably little attention to the existing nuclear weapons in the region.  If this were the approach of countries other than either the U.S. or Israel, you would know what to make of it and undoubtedly words like “paranoia” and “fantasy” would quickly creep into any discussion.

With that in mind, let Ira Chernus, TomDispatch regular and an expert on separating fantasy from reality, take on the tough task of putting aside the media hosannas about the president’s recent Middle Eastern travels and making sense of what actually happened. Tom

Obama Walks the High Wire, Eyes Closed
When It Comes to Israel, Palestine, and Iran, It Could All Come Crashing Down
By Ira Chernus

Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. But if the president doesn’t wake up and look at the hard realities he chose to ignore, his dream of being the great peacemaker will surely crumble, as it has before.

Like most myths, this one has elements of truth. Obama did say some important things. In a speech to young Israelis, he insisted that their nation’s occupation of the West Bank is not merely bad for their country, it is downright immoral, “not fair… not just … not right.”

I’ve been decrying the immorality of the occupation for four decades, yet I must admit I never dreamed I would hear an American president, standing in Jerusalem, do the same.

Despite those words, however, Obama is no idealist. He’s a strategist. His Jerusalem speech was clearly meant to widen the gap between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the substantial center-left portion of Israeli Jews, who are open to a deal with the Palestinians and showed unexpected strength in recent elections. The growing political tensions in Israel and a weakened prime minister give the American president a potential opening to maneuver, manipulate, and perhaps even control the outcome of events.

How to do so, though? Obama himself probably has no clear idea.  Whatever Washington’s Middle Eastern script, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, it will require an extraordinary balancing act.

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A glimpse of Tehran at night. Can we change the nature of our dialogue with Iran?

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which the United States is a regional power, not a superpower.  A world in which the globe’s mightiest nation, China, invades Mexico and Canada, deposing the leaders of both countries.  A world in which China has also ringed the Americas, from Canada to Central America, with military bases.  A world in which Chinese officials openly brag about conducting covert operations against and within the United States.  A world in which the Chinese launch a sophisticated and crippling cyber attack on America’s nuclear facilities.  A world in which the Chinese send spy drones soaring over the United States and position aircraft carrier battle groups off its shores.  What would Americans think?  How would Washington react?  Perhaps something like Iran’s theocratic leadership today.  After all, Iran has seen the United States invade its neighbors Iraq and Afghanistan, announce covert operations against it, surround it with military bases, fly drones over it, carry out naval operations off its coast, conduct a gigantic build-up of military forces all around it, and launch a cyberwar against it.

Imagine again, in this alternate universe, that China forged military alliances throughout the Americas, pulling Mexico and Canada, as well as Caribbean and Central American nations into its orbit.  Imagine that it started selling advanced military technology to those countries.  How might the U.S. government and its citizens respond?

It’s a question worth pondering given Washington’s recent actions.  Last month, for instance, the U.S. quietly announced plans to further flood the Middle East with advanced weaponry. According to November notices sent by the Pentagon to Congress, the Department of Defense intends to oversee a $300 million deal with Saudi Arabia for spare parts for Abrams Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and Humvees, and another for $6.7 billion in new advanced aircraft.  Add to this a proposed sale of $9.9 billion in Patriot missiles to Qatar, a $96 million deal with Oman for hundreds of Javelin guided missiles, and more than $1.1 billion in Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles for the United Arab Emirates.  And this was on top of deals struck earlier in the year that include a $63 million sale of Huey II helicopters to Lebanon, $4.2 billion in Patriot missiles for Kuwait, a $3 billion agreement to arm Qatar with advanced Apache attack helicopters, more than $1 billion in upgrades for Abrams tanks belonging to Morocco’s military, and the sale of $428 million worth of radar equipment and tactical vehicles to Iraq.

All this is worth keeping in mind while reading the latest assessment of U.S.-Iranian relations by that peripatetic reporter extraordinaire and TomDispatch regular Pepe Escobar who conjures up a very different alternate reality in which President Obama morphs into President Richard Nixon heading for Beijing, and Washington acts far less bellicose. Nick Turse

Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall
Washington’s Iranian Future
By Pepe Escobar

In Election 2012’s theatre-of-the-absurd “foreign policy” debate, Iran came up no less than 47 times. Despite all the fear, loathing, threats, and lies in that billionaire’s circus of a campaign season, Americans were nonetheless offered virtually nothing substantial about Iran, although its (non-existent) WMDs were relentlessly hawked as the top U.S. national security issue. (The world was, however, astonished to learn from candidate Romney that Syria, not the Persian Gulf, was that country’s “route to the sea.”)

Now, with the campaign Sturm und Drang behind us but the threats still around, the question is: Can Obama 2.0 bridge the gap between current U.S. policy (we don’t want war, but there will be war if you try to build a bomb) and Persian optics (we don’t want a bomb — the Supreme Leader said so — and we want a deal, but only if you grant us some measure of respect)? Don’t forget that a soon-to-be-reelected President Obama signaled in October the tiniest of possible openings toward reconciliation while talking about the “pressure” he was applying to that country, when he spoke of “our policy of… potentially having bilateral discussions with the Iranians to end their nuclear program.”

Tehran won’t, of course, “end” its (legal) nuclear program.  As for that “potentially,” it should be a graphic reminder of how the establishment in Washington loathes even the possibility of bilateral negotiations.

Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall

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US Army Soldier in Qatar

Part of a slogan from my hometown past sticks in my mind.  “Build we must,” it went.  Such an American phrase, really.  Evidence of a can-do spirit from another country in another age.  Now, in can’t-do America with its disintegrating infrastructure, “build we mustn’t” seems more in the spirit of the times — with one obvious exception.  As TomDispatch’s Nick Turse, author of The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare, points out today, the Pentagon remains a distinctly build-we-must outfit.

Admittedly, it’s experienced more than a decade of build-we-can’t failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, involving a crew of warrior corporations along for the ride on Washington’s dual occupations in the Greater Middle East.  These companies succeeded mainly in massively overcharging the American taxpayer for “reconstruction” projects in each of those countries, while establishing a remarkable record for underbuilding almost anything they took up, from a water purification facility to a power plant to a police academy.  It’s proven to be a tale of corruption, cronyism, and malfeasance, and was undoubtedly one factor in driving “nation-building” out of favor in Washington.

However, when it comes to the Pentagon, as Turse’s fine reporting reveals, military building isn’t at all out of favor.  In fact, if you happen to be a resident of the superstorm Sandy-shattered Jersey shore or parts of New York’s outer boroughs, it should boggle your mind to learn that the U.S. military is still building up a storm on shorelines and in deserts throughout that distant region.  The Afghan war may be a disaster, we may have the white elephant of all embassies in Baghdad to show for our efforts in Iraq, our Benghazi consulate may be in ruins, and American policy may be unraveling in the post-Arab-Spring Middle East, but the Pentagon remains in the grips of an imperial compulsion and so is as busy in the region as the proverbial beaver.  Perhaps what we need is a new slogan to cover the strange reality of Washington’s congressionally unquestioned stimulus package abroad.  (Where are the House Republicans when we really need them?) It would have to go something like: Build?  We just can’t help ourselves. Tom

America Begins Nation-Building at Home
(Provided Your Home is the Middle East)
By Nick Turse

A billion dollars from the federal government: that kind of money could go a long way toward revitalizing a country’s aging infrastructure.  It could provide housing or better water and sewer systems.  It could enhance a transportation network or develop an urban waterfront.  It could provide local jobs.  It could do any or all of these things.  And, in fact, it did.  It just happened to be in the Middle East, not the United States.

The Pentagon awarded $667.2 million in contracts in 2012, and more than $1 billion during Barack Obama’s first term in office for construction projects in largely autocratic Middle Eastern nations, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Middle East District (USACE-MED).  More than $178 million in similar funding is already anticipated for 2013.  These contracts represent a mix of projects, including expanding and upgrading military bases used by U.S. troops in the region, building facilities for indigenous security forces, and launching infrastructure projects meant to improve the lives of local populations.

The figures are telling, but far from complete.  They do not, for example, cover any of the billions spent on work at the more than 1,000 U.S. and coalition bases, outposts, and other facilities in Afghanistan or the thousands more manned by local forces.  They also leave out construction projects undertaken in the region by other military services like the U.S. Air Force, as well as money spent at an unspecified number of bases in the Middle East that the Corps of Engineers “has no involvement with,” according to Joan Kibler, chief of the Middle East District’s public affairs office.

How many of these projects are obscured by a thick veil of secrecy is unknown, with U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) refusing to name or even offer a full count of all U.S. bases in the region.  On the record, CENTCOM will acknowledge only 10 bases as in its area of operations outside of Afghanistan, even though there are more than two dozen, according to a CENTCOM official who spoke to TomDispatch on the condition of anonymity.  Exactly how many more and just where all U.S. construction work in the region is taking place continues to be kept under tight wraps.  Still, Army Corps of Engineers data, other official documents, and publicly available contract information offer a baseline indication of the way the Pentagon is garrisoning the Greater Middle East and which countries are becoming ever more integral allies.

Nation Building: Public Talk, Secret Action

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Democratic Mockpocalypse
How Big Can One Election Get?
By Tom Engelhardt

Photo: CoreMedia Product Demo / Flickr

Obesity is an American plague — and no, I’m not talking about overweight Americans.  I’m talking about our overweight, supersized presidential campaign.  I’m talking about Big Election, the thing that’s moved into our homes and, especially if you live in a “swing state,” is now hogging your television almost 24/7.

There’s a wonderful old American postcard tradition of gigantism, a mixture of (and gentle mocking of) a national, but especially Western, urge toward bravado, braggadocio, and pride when it comes to this country.  The imagery on those cards once ranged from giant navel oranges on railroad flatcars to saddled jackalopes (rabbits with antlers) mounted by cowboy riders on the range.  Think of the 2012 election season as just such a postcard — without the charm.

Though no one’s bothered to say it, the most striking aspect of this election is its gigantism.  American politics is being supersized.  Everything — everything — is bigger. There are now scores of super PACs and “social welfare” organizations, hundreds of focus groups, thousands upon thousands of polls, hundreds of thousands of TV ads, copious multi-million dollar contributions to the dark side by the .001%, billions of ad dollars flooding the media, up to $3 billion pouring into the coffers of political consultants, and oh yes, though it’s seldom mentioned, trillions of words.

It’s as if no one can stop talking about what might otherwise be one of the least energizing elections in recent history: the most vulnerable president in memory versus a candidate who somehow threatens not to beat him, two men about as inspired as a couple of old beanbag chairs.  And yet the words about the thrill of it all just keep on pouring out.  They stagger (or perhaps stun) the imagination.  They are almost all horse race- and performance-oriented.  Who is ahead and why?  Who is preparing for what and how?  Who has the most momentary of advantages and why?  Who looked better, talked tougher, or out-maneuvered whom?

It never seems to end, and why should it?  After all, it’s the profit-center of the ages, pure money on a stick. And there’s just so much to say about what is surely an event for the record books.  The only question (and it’s not one to be taken lightly) is: What is it?

The Jumbotron Election

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(Photo: tonynetone/flickr)

If you want a particularly hard-headed assessment of how successfully Barack Obama, the most vulnerable president in memory, is pursuing his reelection campaign, don’t bother to check the polls; just read “Bibi” Netanyahu’s U.N. speech of last week.  The Israeli Prime Minister had, until then, all but campaigned for Mitt Romney, his old Boston Consulting Group pal, who claims Obama has thrown Israel “under the bus.”

Suddenly, he essentially switched sides.  Having pounded the Obama administration for weeks on its Iran nuclear policy and its need to set “red lines” before the election, having implicitly threatened an Israeli air force “October surprise,” he turned out to have a September surprise of his own. He hoisted a bizarre and confusing drawing of a cartoon bomb in front of the General Assembly and essentially announced that his red-line demands had just pinked-out, and that 2013 was time enough to worry about red-lining Iran.  (“By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage,” he explained.)

Though it’s not been treated this way, this calculated change of geopolitical heart, undoubtedly driven by a faltering Romney campaign and the fear of totally alienating an Obama heading into a second term, was also an election story about energy.  After all, whatever the talk about future U.S. “energy independence,” what happens to Middle Eastern oil is crucial to the price at the gas station nearest you (which has been on the rise all fall).  So when Netanyahu ratchets down the threats to Iran (that is, the promise of even greater chaos in the oil heartlands of the planet), he potentially does the same with oil prices.  If the Saudis suddenly decide to pump more oil into the global economy and so depress the price of oil — assumedly to similar effect before November 6th — you get another vote for the reality of Obama’s reelection.

Consider it the strangest election-season alliance of convenience around: Obama, Netanyahu, and Saudi King Abdullah.  And to this there’s a grim corollary, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of The Race for What’s Left, makes clear today.  Despite a spate of proclamations that North America is heading for future energy independence, you can count on one thing energy-wise: presidential candidates in the years to come aren’t going to be worrying about the Canadian prime minister or the Brazilian president in the way they’ll continue to fret about the Israelis, Saudis, and Iranians. Tom

The New “Golden Age of Oil” That Wasn’t
Forecasts of Abundance Collide with Planetary Realities
By Michael T. Klare
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Photo by U.S. Embassy Jakarta, Indonesia

Think back to the election of 2008. Do you remember how one candidate had it easy?  He had eight years of abject failure to run against.  Eight years that included the launching of two dismal wars, the creation of a torture gulag with its crown jewel at Guantánamo Bay, the ushering in of a program of robotic assassination missions and secret spying programs, all presided over by an administration that talked tough about silencing leakers and reporters who aided them, and a president who kept a list with mug shots of people he wanted bumped off.  (When his triggermen killed one, he’d cross off his face.)  The roster of the administration’s “triumphs” reads like something out of dystopian fiction and people were tired of it.  They wanted change, which was good news for the change candidate, because his rival was an old hawk who talked more of the same.

Fast forward to today.  The candidate who won the 2008 contest expanded the country’s war in Afghanistan, struggled to keep American troops in Iraq (before fulfilling his predecessor’s pledge to withdraw), and oversaw escalating military interventions in Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere.  The winning candidate failed to close Guantánamo, radically expanded the robotic assassination program, continued and expanded domestic surveillance, vigorously pursued and used the Espionage Act against more governmental whistleblowers than all other administrations combined (but prosecuted no one else in the National Security Complex for illegal activities), and kept his own extensive kill list, personally okaying assassinations.  Could it really be that the “change” candidate won?  Could it have been any worse than if the old hawk had?

Another question follows.  Almost four years later, are people happy about the types of “change” he ushered in?  After all, as president, the change candidate killed public enemy number one and he’s still fighting for his political life against a challenger whose own party once rejected him and now does little more than tolerate him. He, too, is now talking “change.”  Yet the type of change the challenger is speaking about includes even more profligate military spending, even more troops to send to war, and possibly the addition of a new war or two to the American agenda.  So much change and yet so much remains the same.  Confusing, isn’t it?  Luckily, TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam, makes some sense of this strain of American politics and what four more years under President Obama or four years under President Romney is likely to mean for us — and the rest of the world.  No matter who wins, be ready to lose hope and fear change. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which John Feffer discusses power — hard, soft, smart, and dumb — click here or download it to your iPod here.)  Nick Turse

Dumb and Dumber
Obama’s “Smart Power” Foreign Policy Not Smart at All
By John Feffer

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(image: safety superhero, flickr)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.

Obama’s Mission Accomplished Moment?
And a Military-First Policy on a Destabilizing Planet
By Tom Engelhardt

Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world.  Needs advice.  Will pay.  Pls respond qkly.  PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.

Here’s the way it actually went down in Washington last week: a triumphant performance by a commander-in-chief who wants you to know that he’s at the top of his game.

When it came to rolling out a new 10-year plan for the future of the U.S. military, the leaks to the media began early and the message was clear.  One man is in charge of your future safety and security.  His name is Barack Obama.  And — not to worry — he has things in hand.

Unlike the typical president, so the reports went, he held six (count ‘em: six!) meetings with top Pentagon officials, the Joint Chiefs, the service heads, and his military commanders to plan out the next decade of American war making.  And he was no civilian bystander at those meetings either.  On a planet where no other power has more than two aircraft carriers in service, he personally nixed a Pentagon suggestion that the country’s aircraft carrier battle groups be reduced from 11 to 10, lest China think our power-projection capabilities were weakening in Asia.

His secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, spared no words when it came to the president’s role, praising his “vision and guidance and leadership” (as would Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin E. Dempsey).  Panetta described Obama’s involvement thusly: “[T]his has been an unprecedented process, to have the president of the United States participate in discussions involving the development of a defense strategy, and to spend time with our service chiefs and spend time with our combatant commanders to get their views.”

In other words, Obama taking ownership of the rollout of “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” a 16-page document summarizing a review of America’s strategic interests, defense priorities, and military spending.  Its public unveiling was to reflect the steady hand of a commander-in-chief destined to be in charge of American security for years to come.

The president even made a “rare visit” to the Pentagon.  There, he was hailed as the first occupant of the Oval Office ever to make comments, no less present a new “more realistic” strategic guidance document, from its press office.  All of this, in turn, was billed as introducing “major change” into the country’s military stance, leading to (shades of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) a “leaner, meaner” force, slimmed down and recalibrated for economic tough times and a global “moment of transition.”

As political theater, it couldn’t have been smarter.  Read the rest of this entry →

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

Sometimes words outlive their usefulness.  Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us.  “Election,” “presidential election campaign,” and “democracy” all seem like obvious candidates for name-change.

I thought about this recently as President Obama hustled around my hometown, snarling New York traffic in the name of Campaign 2012.  He was, it turned out, “hosting” three back-to-back fundraising events: one at the tony Gotham Bar and Grill for 45 supporters at $35,800 a head (the menu: roasted beet salad, steak and onion rings, with apple strudel, chocolate pecan pie, and cinnamon ice cream — a meal meant to “shine a little light” on American farms); one for 30 Jewish supporters at the home of Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, for at least $10,000 a pop; and one at the Sheraton Hotel, evidently for the plebes of the contribution world, that cost a mere $1,000 a head. (Maybe the menu there was rubber chicken.)

In the course of his several meals, the president pledged his support for Israel (in the face of Republican charges that he is eternally soft on the subject), talked about “taxes and the economy” to his undoubtedly under-taxed listeners, and made this stirringly meaningless but rousing comment: “No matter who we are, no matter where we come from, we’re one nation.  We’re one people. And that’s what’s at stake in this election.”

Outside his final event, Occupy Wall Street protesters saw something else at stake, dubbing him the “1% president.”  The end result from a night’s heavy lifting: $2.4 million for his election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nowhere close to 1% of what they will need for the next year.

These were the 67th, 68th, and 69th fundraisers attended by Obama so far in 2011, or the 71st, 72nd, and 73rd.  (It depended on who was counting.) In either case, we’re talking about approximately one fundraiser every five days, a total of 6% of the events in which Obama took part in this non-election year.

Think about that.  You vote for the president to spend some part of 20% of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy.  Or put another way, the Washington Post now estimates that if you add in the non-fundraising, election-oriented events that involve him — 63 so far in 2011 — perhaps 12% of his time is taken up with campaign efforts of one sort or another; and this is what he’s been doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen. Read the rest of this entry →

Stop! (Photo: perspective, flickr)

This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

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What’s the biggest story of the last several weeks?  Rick Perry’s moment of silence, all 53 seconds’ worth?  The Penn State riots after revered coach JoePa went down in a child sex abuse scandal? The Kardashian wedding/divorce?  The European debt crisis that could throw the world economy into a tailspin?  The Cain sexual harassment charges?  The trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor?

The answer should be none of the above, even though as a group they’ve dominated the October/November headlines.  In fact, the piece of the week, month, and arguably year should have been one that slipped by so quietly, so off front-pages nationwide and out of news leads everywhere that you undoubtedly didn’t even notice.  And yet it’s the story that could turn your life and that of your children and grandchildren inside out and upside down.

On the face of it, it wasn’t anything to shout about — just more stats in a world drowning in numbers.  These happen to have been put out by the U.S. Department of Energy and they reflected, as an Associated Press headline put it, the “biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases.”  In other words, in 2010, humanity (with a special bow to China, the United States, and onrushing India) managed to pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than at any time since the industrial revolution began — 564 million more tons than in 2009, which represents an increase of 6%.

According to AP’s Seth Borenstein, that’s “higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.” He’s talking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which is, if anything, considered “conservative” in its projections of future catastrophe by many climate scientists.  Put another way, we’re talking more greenhouse gases than have entered the Earth’s atmosphere in tens of millions of years.

Consider as well the prediction offered by Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency: without an effective international agreement to staunch greenhouse gases within five years, the door will close on preventing a potentially disastrous rise in the planet’s temperature.  You’re talking, that is, about the kind of freaky weather that will make October’s bizarre snowstorm in the Northeast look like a walk in the park.  (That storm had all the signs of a climate-change-induced bit of extreme weather: New York City hadn’t recorded an October snowfall like it since the Civil War and it managed to hit the region in a period of ongoing warmth when the trees hadn’t yet had the decency to lose their leaves, producing a chaos of downed electrical wires.)  And don’t get me started on what this would mean in terms of future planetary hot spells or sea-level rise. Read the rest of this entry →