Tomgram: Engelhardt, Through the Gates of Hell
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 6:39pm, November 12, 2016.
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The one thing you could say about empires is that, at
or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well
as domination. So here’s the confounding thing about the American version
of empire in the years when this country was often referred to as “the sole
superpower,” when it was putting more money into its military than the
next 10 nations combined: it’s been an empire of chaos.
Back in September 2002, Amr Moussa, then head of the
Arab League, offered a warning I’ve never forgotten. The Bush
administration’s intention to invade Iraq and topple its ruler, Saddam Hussein,
was already obvious. Were they to take such a step, Moussa insisted, it would “open the gates of hell.” His
prediction turned out to be anything but hyperbole -- and those gates have
never again closed.
The Wars Come Home
From the moment of the invasion of Afghanistan in
October 2001, in fact, everything the U.S. military touched in these years has
turned to dust. Nations across the Greater Middle East and Africa collapsed under the weight of American interventions or
those of its allies, and terror movements, one grimmer than the next, spread in
a remarkably unchecked fashion. Afghanistan is now a disaster zone;
Yemen, wracked by civil war, a brutal U.S.-backed Saudi air campaign, and
various ascendant terror groups, is essentially no more; Iraq, at best, is a
riven sectarian nation; Syria barely exists; Libya, too, is hardly a state
these days; and Somalia is a set of fiefdoms and terror movements. All in
all, it’s quite a record for the mightiest power on the planet, which, in a
distinctly un-imperial fashion, has been unable to impose its military will or
order of any sort on any state or even group, no matter where it chose to act
in these years. It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for this.
Meanwhile, from the shattered lands of the empire of
chaos stream refugees by the millions,numbers not seen since vast swaths of the globe were
left in rubble at the end of World War II. Startling percentages of the
populations of various failed and failing states, including stunning numbers
of children, have been driven into internal exile or sent fleeing
across borders and, fromAfghanistan to North Africa to Europe, they are shaking up
the planet in unsettling ways (as theirfantasy
versions shook up the
election here in the U.S.).
It’s something of a cliché to say that, sooner or
later, the frontier wars of empires come home to haunt the imperial heartland
in curious ways. Certainly, such has been the case for our wars on the
peripheries. In various forms -- from the militarization of the police to the loosing of spy drones in American skies and of surveillance
technology tested
on distant battlefields -- it’s obvious that America’s post-9/11 conflicts have
returned to "the homeland," even if, most of the time, we have paid
remarkably little attention to this phenomena.
And that, I suspect, is the least significant way in
which our wars have been repatriated. What Election 2016 made clear was
that the empire of chaos has not remained a phenomenon of the planet's
backlands. It’s with us in the United States, right here, right
now. And it’s come home in a fashion that no one has yet truly tried to
make sense of. Can’t you feel the deep and spreading sense of disorder
that lay at the heart of the bizarre election campaign that roiled this country,
brought the most extreme kinds of racism and xenophobia back into the
mainstream, and with Donald Trump's election, may never really end? Using
the term of tradecraft that Chalmers Johnson borrowed from the CIA and
popularized, think of this as, in some strange fashion, the ultimate in
imperial blowback.
There’s a history to be written of how such disorder
came home, of how it warped the American system and our democratic form of
governance, of how a process that began decades ago not in the stew of defeat
or disaster but in a moment of unparalleled imperial triumph undermined so much.
If I had to choose a date to begin that history, I think I would start in 1979
in Afghanistan, a country that, if you were an American but not a hippie
backpacker, you
might then have had trouble locating on a map. And if someone had told
you at the time that, over the next nearly four decades, your country would be
involved in at least a quarter-century of wars there, you would undoubtedly have
considered him mad.
Thought of a certain way, the empire of chaos began in
a victory so stunning, so complete, so imperial that it essentially helped
drive the other superpower, that “Evil Empire” the Soviet Union, to
implode. It began, in fact, with the desire of Jimmy Carter’s national
security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, to
give the Soviets a bloody nose, or to be more precise, a taste of America’s Vietnam experience, to trap the Red
Army in an Afghan quagmire. In that light, the CIA would run a massive,
decade-long covert program to fund, arm, and train fundamentalist opponents of
the leftwing Afghan government in Kabul and of the occupying Red Army. To
do so, it fatefully buddied up with two unsavory “allies”: the Saudis, who were
ready to sink their oil money into support for Afghan mujahedeen fighters
of the most extreme sort, and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI,
which was intent on controlling events in that land, no matter the nature of
the cast of characters it found available.
In the fashion of Vietnam for the Americans,
Afghanistan would prove to be what Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called "the bleeding wound” for the Russians.
A decade later, the Red Army would limp home in defeat and within two years a
hollowed-out Soviet Union, never as strong as Washington imagined, would
implode, a triumph so stunning that the American political elite initially
couldn’t take it in. After almost half a century, the Cold War was over;
one of the two remaining “superpowers” had left the global stage in defeat; and
for the first time since Europeans set out on wooden ships to conquer distant
parts of the globe, only a single great power was left standing on the planet.
Given the history of
those centuries past, the dreams of Bush-Cheney & Co. about how the U.S.
would dominate the world as no power, not even the Romans or the British, had
ever done seemed to make a certain sense. But in that triumph of 1989 lay
the seeds as well of future chaos. To take down the Soviets, the CIA, in
tandem with the Saudis and the Pakistanis, had armed and built up groups of
extreme Islamists, who, it turned out, had no intention of going away once the
Soviets were driven from Afghanistan. It won’t exactly shock you if I add
that, in those decisions, in that triumphant moment, lay the genesis of the
future 9/11 attacks and in some curious fashion, even perhaps the future rise
of a presidential candidate, and now president-elect, so bizarre that, despite
the billions of words expended on him, he remains a phenomenon beyond
understanding.
As our first
declinist candidate for
president, Donald J. Trump did at least express something new and true about
the nature of our country. In the phrase that he tried to trademark in 2012 and with which he launched his presidential campaign in 2015 -- “Make America
Great Again"
-- he caught a deeply felt sense among millions of Americans that the empire of
chaos had indeed arrived on our shores and that, like the
Soviet Union a
quarter-century ago, the U.S. might ever so slowly be heading into an era in
which (minus him, naturally) “greatness” was a goner.
Imperial Overreach and the Rise of the National
Security State
In the end, those seeds, first planted in Afghan and
Pakistani soil in 1979, led to the attacks of September 11, 2001. That
day was the very definition of chaos brought to the imperial heartland, and
spurred the emergence of a new, post-Constitutional governing structure, through the expansion of
the national security state to monumental proportions and a staggering version of imperial
overreach. On the basis of the supposed need to keep Americans safe from
terrorism (and essentially nothing else), the national security state would
balloon into a dominant -- and dominantly funded -- set of institutions at the
heart of American political life (without which, rest assured, FBI Director
James Comey’s public interventions in an American election would have been
inconceivable). In these years, that state-within-a-state became the
unofficial fourth branch of government, at a moment when two of the
others -- Congress and the courts, or at least the Supreme Court -- were
faltering.
The 9/11 attacks also unleashed the Bush
administration’s stunningly ambitious, ultimately disastrous Global War on
Terror, and over-the-top fantasies about establishing a military-enforced Pax
Americana, first in the Middle East and then perhaps globally. They
also unleashed its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. drone
assassination program
across significant parts of the planet, the building of an unprecedented global surveillance state,
the spread of a kind of secrecy so all-encompassing that much of government activity
became unknowable to “the People,” and a kind of imperial overreach that sent
literally trillions of
dollars (often via warrior
corporations)
tumbling into the abyss. All of these were chaos-creating factors.
At the same time, the basic needs of many Americans
went increasingly unattended, of those at least who weren’t part of a Gilded Age 1% sucking up American wealth in an
extraordinary fashion. The one-percenters then repurposed some of those
trickle-up funds for the buying and selling of politicians, again in an
atmosphere of remarkable secrecy. (It was often impossible to know who
had given money to whom for what.) In turn, that stream of Supreme
Court-approved funds changed the nature of, and perhaps the very idea of, what
an election was.
Meanwhile, parts of the heartland were being hollowed
out, while -- even as the military continued to produce trillion-dollar boondoggle weapons systems -- the country's inadequately
funded infrastructure began to crumble in a way that once would have
been inconceivable. Similarly, the non-security-state part of the
government -- Congress in particular -- began to falter and wither.
Meanwhile, one of the country’s two great political parties launched a
scorched-earth campaign against governing representatives of the other and
against the very idea of governing in a reasonably democratic fashion or
getting much of anything done at all. At the same time, that party
shattered into disorderly, competing factions that grew ever more extreme and
produced what is likely to become a unique celebrity presidency of
chaos.
The United States with all its wealth and power is, of
course, hardly an Afghanistan or a Libya or a Yemen or a Somalia. It
still remains a genuinely great power, and one with remarkable resources to
wield and fall back on. Nonetheless, the recent election offered striking
evidence that the empire of chaos had indeed made the trip homeward. It’s
now with us big time, all the time. Get used to it.
Count on it to be an essential part of the Trump
presidency. Domestically, for instance, if you thought the definition of
American political dysfunction was a Congress that would essentially pass
nothing, just wait until a fully Republican-controlled Congress actually begins
to pass bills in 2017. Abroad, Trump's unexpected success will only encourage the rise of right-wing nationalist movements and
the further fragmention of this planet of increasing disorder. Meanwhile, the
American military (promised a vast further
infusion of funds by
The Donald during the election campaign) will still be trying to impose its
version of order in distant lands and, so many years later, you know perfectly
well what that will mean. All of this should shock no one in our new
post-November 8th world.
Here, however, is a potentially shocking question that
has to be asked: With Donald Trump's election, has the American “experiment”
run its course?
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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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
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