Recently, sorting through a pile of
old children’s books, I came across a volume, That Makes Me Mad!, which
brought back memories. Written by Steve Kroll, a long-dead friend, it focused
on the eternally frustrating everyday adventures of Nina, a little girl whose
life regularly meets commonplace roadblocks, at which point she always says...
well, you can guess from the title! Vivid parental memories of another
age instantly flooded back -- of my daughter (now reading such books to her own
son) sitting beside me at age five and hitting that repeated line with such
mind-blowing, ear-crushing gusto that you knew it spoke to the everyday
frustrations of her life, to what made her mad.
Three decades later, in an almost
unimaginably different America, on picking up that book I suddenly realized
that, whenever I follow the news online, on TV, or -- and forgive me for this
but I’m 72 and still trapped in another era -- on paper, I have a similarly
Nina-esque urge. Only the line I’ve come up with for it is (with a tip of
the hat to Steve Kroll) “You must be kidding!”
Here are a few recent examples from
the world of American-style war and peace. Consider these as random
illustrations, given that, in the age of Trump, just about everything that
happens is out-of-this-world absurd and would serve perfectly well. If
you’re in the mood, feel free to shout out that line with me as we go.
Nuking the Planet: I’m sure you remember Barack Obama, the guy who
entered the Oval Office pledging to work toward “a nuclear-free world.” You know, the
president who traveled to Prague in 2009 to say stirringly: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction
America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear
weapons... To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of
nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the
same.” That same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize largely for what he might
still do, particularly in the nuclear realm. Of course, that was all so
2009!
Almost two terms in the Oval Office
later, our peace president, the only one who has ever called for nuclear
“abolition” -- and whose administration has retired fewer weapons in our nuclear arsenal than any other in the
post-Cold War era -- is now presiding over the early stages of a trillion-dollar modernization of that very arsenal. (And
that trillion-dollar price tag comes, of course, before the inevitable cost overruns even begin.) It includes full-scale work on the creation of a “precision-guided” nuclear
weapon with a “dial-back” lower yield option. Such a weapon would
potentially bring nukes to the battlefield in a first-use way, something the
U.S. is proudly pioneering.
And that brings me to the September
6th front-page story in the New York Times that caught my
eye. Think of it as the icing on the Obama era nuclear cake. Its headline: “Obama Unlikely to Vow No First Use of Nuclear
Weapons.” Admittedly, if made, such a vow could be reversed by any future
president. Still, reportedly for fear that a pledge not to initiate a
nuclear war would “undermine allies and embolden Russia and China... while
Russia is running practice bombing runs over Europe and China is expanding its
reach in the South China Sea,” the president has backed down on issuing such a
vow. In translation: the only country that has ever used such weaponry
will remain on the record as ready and willing to do so again without nuclear
provocation, an act that, it is now believed in Washington, would create a
calmer planet.
You must be kidding!
Plain Old Bombing: Recall that in October 2001, when the Bush
administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. was bombing no
other largely Islamic country. In fact, it was bombing no other country
at all. Afghanistan was quickly “liberated,” the Taliban crushed,
al-Qaeda put to flight, and that was that, or so it then seemed.
On September 8th, almost 15 years
later, the Washington Post reported that, over a single weekend and in a “flurry” of
activity, the U.S. had dropped bombs on, or fired missiles at, six largely
Islamic countries: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia.
(And it might have been seven if the CIA hadn’t grown a little rusty when it
comes to the drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands that it's
launched repeatedly throughout these years.) In the same spirit, the
president who swore he would end the U.S. war in Iraq and, by the time he left
office, do the same in Afghanistan, is now overseeing American bombing
campaigns in Iraq and Syria which are loosing close to 25,000 weapons a year on those countries. Only recently,
in order to facilitate the further prosecution of the longest war in our
history, the president who announced that his country had ended its “combat mission”
in Afghanistan in 2014, has once again deployed the
U.S. military in a combat role and has done the same with the U.S. Air Force. For that, B-52s (of Vietnam infamy) were returned to action
there, as well as in Iraq and Syria, after a decade of retirement. In the Pentagon,
military figures are now talking about “generational” war in Afghanistan -- well into the 2020s.
Meanwhile, President Obama has
personally helped pioneer a new form of warfare that will not long remain a
largely American possession. It involves missile-armed drones, high-tech
weapons that promise a world of no-casualty-conflict (for the American military
and the CIA), and adds up to a permanent global killing machine for taking out
terror leaders, “lieutenants,” and “militants.” Well beyond official
American war zones, U.S. drones regularly cross borders, infringing on national
sovereignty throughout the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, to
assassinate anyone the president and his colleagues decide needs to die, American
citizen or otherwise
(plus, of course, anyone who happens to be in the
vicinity). With its White House “kill list” and its “terror Tuesday” meetings,
the drone program, promising “surgical” hunting-and-killing action, has blurred the line between war and
peace, while being normalized in these years. A president is now not just
commander-in-chief but assassin-in-chief, a role that no imaginable future president is likely
to reject. Assassination, previously an illegal act, has become the heart
and soul of Washington’s way of life and of a way of war that only seems to
spread conflict further.
You must be kidding!
The Well-Oiled Machinery of
Privatized War: And
speaking of drones, as the New York Times reported on September 5th, the U.S. drone program does
have one problem: a lack of pilots. It has ramped up quickly in these
years and, in the process, the pressures on its pilots and other personnel have
only grown, including post-traumatic stress over killing civilians thousands of miles away
via computer screen. As a result, the Air Force has been losing those
pilots fast. Fortunately, a solution is on the horizon. That
service has begun filling its pilot gap by going the route of the rest of the
military in these years -- turning to private contractors for help. Such
pilots and other personnel are, however, paid higher salaries and cost more
money. The contractors, in turn, have been hiring the only available
personnel around, the ones trained by... yep, you guessed it, the Air Force.
The result may be an even greater drain on Air Force drone pilots eager
for increased pay for grim work and... well, I think you can see just how the
well-oiled machinery of privatized war is likely to work here and who’s going
to pay for it.
You must be kidding!
Selling Arms As If There Were No
Tomorrow: In a
recent report for the Center for International Policy, arms expert William
Hartung offered a stunning
figure on U.S. arms
sales to Saudi Arabia. “Since taking office in January 2009,"
he wrote, "the Obama administration has offered over $115
billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia in 42 separate deals, more than any
U.S. administration in the history of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The
majority of this equipment is still in the pipeline, and could tie the United
States to the Saudi military for years to come.” Think about that for a
moment: $115 billion for everything from small arms to tanks, combat aircraft, cluster bombs, and air-to-ground missiles (weaponry now being used
to slaughter
civilians in neighboring
Yemen).
Of course, how else
can the U.S. keep its near monopoly on theglobal arms
trade and ensure
that two sets of products -- Hollywood movies and U.S. weaponry -- will
dominate the world’s business in things that go boom in the night? It’s a
record to be proud of, especially since putting every advanced weapon
imaginable in the hands of the Saudis will obviously help bring peace to a
roiled region of the planet. (And if you arm the Saudis, you better do no
less for the Israelis, hence the mind-boggling $38 billion in military aid the Obama administration
recently signed on to for the next decade, the most Washington has ever offered
any country, ensuring that arms will be flying into the Middle East, literally
and figuratively, for years to come.)
Blessed indeed are the peacemakers --
and of course you know that by “peacemaker” I mean the classic revolver that “won the West.”
Put another way...
You must be kidding!
The Race for the Generals: I mean, who's got the biggest...
...list of retired generals and
admirals? Does it surprise you that there are at least 198 retired
commanders floating around in their golden
parachutes, many
undoubtedly still embedded in the military-industrial complex on corporate
boards and the like,
eager to enroll in the Trump and Clinton campaigns? Trump went first, releasing an “open letter” signed by 88 generals and admirals who were bravely
standing up to reverse the “hollowing out of our military” and to “secure our
borders, to defeat our Islamic supremacist adversaries, and restore law and
order domestically.” (Partial translation: pour yet more money into our
military as The Donald has promised to do.) They included such household names
as Major General Joe Arbuckle, Rear Admiral James H. Flatley III, and Brigadier
General Mark D. Scraba -- or, hey!, one guy you might even remember: Lieutenant
General William (“Jerry”) Boykin, theevangelical
crusader who made the
news in 2003 by claiming of a former Somali opponent, “I knew that
my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an
idol."
Somehow, those 88 Trumpian military
types assumedly crawled out of “the rubble” under which, as The Donald informed us recently, the Obama administration has left the
American high command. His crew, however, is undoubtedly not the
“embarrassment” he refers to when talking about American generalship in these
years.
Meanwhile, the Clintonites struck back with a list of 95, “including a number of 4-star generals,” many
directly from under that rubble, and within the week had added 15 more to hit 110. Meanwhile, members of the intelligence
community and the rest of the national security state, former presidential advisers
and other officials, drum-beating neocons, and strategists of every sort from
America’s disastrous wars of the last 15 years hustled to line up behind Hillary or The Donald.
If nothing else, all of it was a
reminder of the bloated size and ever-increasing centrality of the post-9/11
national security state and the military-industrial complex that goes with it.
The question is: Does it inspire you with confidence in our candidates, or
leave you saying...
You
must be kidding!
Conflicts of Interest and Access to
the Oval Office: Let’s put
aside a possible preemptive$25,000 bribe to Florida’s attorney general from the Donald J.
Trump Foundation to prevent an investigation of a scam operation, Trump
"University."
If that “donation” to a political action committee does turn out to have been a
bribe, no one should be surprised, given that The Donald has long been a
walking Ponzi scheme. Thanks to a recent superb
investigative report by
Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek, consider instead what it might mean
for him to enter the Oval Office when it comes to conflicts of interest and the
“national security” of the country. Eichenwald concludes that Trump would
be “the most conflicted president in American history,” since the Trump Organization
has “deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians, and even criminals”
in both allied and enemy countries. Almost any foreign policy decision he
might make could hurt or enrich his own businesses. There would, in
essence, be no way to divest himself and his family from the international
Trump branding machine. (Think Trump U. writ large.) And you hardly
need ask yourself whether The Donald would “act in the interests of the United
States or his wallet,” given his prior single-minded pursuit of
self-enrichment.
So much for conflicts of interest,
what about access? That, of course, brings up the Clintons, who, between
2001 and the moment Hillary announced her candidacy for president, managed to
take in $153 million
dollars (yes, that is
not a misprint) for a combined 729 speeches at an average fee of
$210,795. That includes Hillary’s 20-minute
speech to eBay's
Women's Initiative Network Summit in March 2015 for a reported $315,000 just a month before she made her
announcement. It’s obviously not Hillary’s (or Bill’s) golden words that
corporate executives truly care about and are willing to pay the big bucks for,
but the hope of accessibility to both a past and a possible future
president. After all, in the world of business, no one ever thinks
they’re paying good money for nothing.
Do I need to say more than...
You must be kidding!
Of course, I could go on. I
could bring up a Congress seemingly
incapable of passing a
bill to fund a government effort to prevent the Zika virus from spreading
wildly in parts of this country. (You must be kidding!) I
could discuss how the media fell face first into an SUV --NBC Nightly News,
which I watch, used the video of Hillary Clinton stumbling and almost falling
into that van, by my rough count, 15 times over four nights -- and what it
tells us about news “coverage” these days. (You must be kidding!)
I could start in on the constant polls that flood our lives by confessing that
I’m an addict and plan on joining Pollers Anonymous on November 9th, and then
consider what it means to have such polls, and pollsof polls, inundate us daily, teaching us about favorable/unfavorable splits, and offering endlessly varying snapshots
of how we might or might not vote and which of us might or might not do it day
so long before we ever hit a voting booth. (You must be kidding!)
Or I could bring up the way, after five years of assiduous “research,” Donald
Trump grudgingly acknowledged that Barack Obama was born in the United States
and then essentially blamedthe birther movement on Hillary Clinton. (You
must be kidding!)
I could, in other words, continue
welcoming you into an increasingly bizarre American landscape of war and peace
(without a Tolstoy in sight).
Still, enough is enough, don’t you
think? So let me stop here and, just for the hell of it, join me one last
time in chanting: You must be kidding!
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history
of the Cold War, The End of
Victory Culture. He is
a fellow of the Nation
Institute and
runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow
Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick
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They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow
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Copyright
2016 Tom Engelhardt
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