Middle Paragraphs for a Missing American Century
* It's been almost 13 years since the 9/11 attacks and there's still no learning curve in Washington. Just about every step of the way in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's only gotten worse. Yet from that history, from repeated military interventions, surges, and Hail Marys in each of those countries, Washington has learned...? Yep, you guessed it: that, in a crisis, it's up to us to plunge in again, as in Iraq today where the Obama administration is sending back troops, drones, and helicopters, plotting to support certain government figures, deep-six others, and somehow fragment various Sunni insurgent and extremist groups. And don't forget the endless advice administration officials have on offer, the bureaucratic assessments of the situation they continue to generate, and the weaponry they are eager to dispatch to a thoroughly destabilized land -- even as they rush to "broker" a destabilizing Afghan election, a situation in which the long-term results once again aren't likely to be positive for Washington. Consider this curious conundrum: the future is largely a mystery, except when it comes to Washington's actions and their predictably dismal outcomes.
* Doesn't it amaze you how little Washington gets it? Fierce as the internal disagreements in that capital city may be, seldom has a ruling group collectively been quite so incapable of putting itself in the shoes of anyone else or so tone deaf when it comes to the effects of its own acts. Take Germany where, starting with Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, the public response to reports of massive American surveillance of the communications of ordinary Germans and their leaders wasn't exactly greeted with enthusiasm. Now it turns out that the NSA wasn't the only U.S. "intelligence" agency at work in that country. The CIA and possibly other agencies were recruiting spies inside German intelligence and its defense ministry. Polls show that public opinion there has been turning against the U.S. in striking ways, but Washington just can't take it in. A little noted truth of this level of spying and surveillance is: it's addictive. Washington can't imagine not doing it, no matter the damage. If you keep an eye on this situation, you'll see how the U.S. national security system has become a self-inflicted-wound machine.
* Here's a question for our American moment: Why, in its foreign policy, can't the Obama administration get a break? You'd think that, just by pure, dumb luck, there would be a few small victories somewhere for the greatest power on the planet, but no such thing. So for the post-American Century news jockeys among you, here's a tip: to follow the waning fortunes of that century in real time, just keep an eye on Secretary of State John Kerry's endless travels. He's the Jonah of the Obama administration. Wherever he goes, disaster, large or small, trails behind him, even when, as in Afghanistan recently, his intervention is initially billed as some sort of modest triumph. Consider him the waning American Century personified.
* Think of the drone as a barometer of the American Century in decline. It's the latest "perfect weapon" to arrive on the global scene with five-star reviews and promises of victory. Like the A-bomb before it, by the time its claims proved false advertising, it was already lodged deeply in our world and replicating. The drone is the John Kerry of advanced weaponry. Everywhere it goes, it brings a kind of robotic precision to killing, the problem being that its distant human trigger fingers rely on the usual improbable information about what's actually on the ground to be killed. This means that the innocent are dying along with all those proclaimed "militants," "high-value targets," and al-Qaeda(-ish) leaders and "lieutenants." Wherever the drone goes, it has been the equivalent of a recruiting poster for Islamic militants and terror groups. It brings instability and disaster in its wake. It constantly kills bad guys -- and constantly creates more of them. And even as the negative reports about it come in, an addicted Washington can't stop using it.
Last Paragraphs on Turning 70 (a Requiem for the American Century)
* The true legacy of the foreshortened American Century, those years when Washington as top dog actually organized much of the world, may prove apocalyptic. Nuclear weapons ushered that century in with the news that humanity could now annihilate itself. Global warming is ushering it out with the news that nature may instead be the weapon of choice. In 1990, when the Soviet system collapsed and disappeared, along with its sclerotic state-run economy, capitalism and liberal democracy were hailed in a triumphalist fashion and the moment proclaimed "the end of history." In the 1990s, that seemed like a flattering description. Now, with 1% elections, an unmitigated drive for profits amid growing inequality, and constant global temperature records, the end of history might turn out to have a grimmer meaning.
* Global warming (like nuclear war and nuclear winter) is history's deal-breaker. Otherwise, the worst humanity can do, it's done in some fashion before. Empires rise and fall. They always have. People are desperately oppressed. It's an old story. Humans bravely protest the conditions of their lives. Rebellions and revolutions follow and the unexpected or disappointing is often the result. You know the tale. Hope and despair, the worst and the best -- it's us. But global warming, the potential destruction of the habitat that's made everything possible for us, that's something new under the sun. Yes, it's happened before, thanks to natural causes ranging from vast volcanic eruptions to plummeting asteroids, but there's something unique about us torpedoing our own environment. This, above all, looks to be the event the American Century has overseen and that the drive for fossil-fuel profits has made a reality. Don't fool yourself, though; we're not destroying the planet. Give it 10 million years and it'll regenerate just fine. But us? Honestly, who knows what we can pull out of a hat on this score.
* Let me put my cards on the table. I'm the guy who started two of his book titles with the phrases "the end of" and "the last days of," so think of me as apocalyptic by nature. I don't believe in God or gods, or for that matter an afterlife. In all these years, I've never discovered a spiritual bone in my body. Still, I do care in some way that I can't begin to understand what happens to us after I'm dead, what in particular happens to my children and my grandson, and his children and theirs, too. Go figure.
* My father's closest friend, the last person of his generation who knew him intimately, died recently at 99. To my regret, I was no longer in touch. It nonetheless felt like an archive closing. The fog of the past now envelops much of his life. There is nobody left to tell me what I don't know about all those years before my birth. Not a soul. And yet I can at least recognize some of the people in his old photos and tell stories about them. My mother's childhood album is another matter. Her brother aside, there's no one I recognize, not a single soul, or a single story I can tell. It's all fog. We don't like to think of ourselves that way; we don't like to imagine that we, in the present, will disappear into that fog with all our stories, all our experiences, all our memories.
* Here's a question that, in a globally warming world, comes to mind: Are we a failed experiment? I know I'm not the first to ask, and to answer I'd have to be capable of peering into a future that I can't see. So all I can say on turning 70 is: Who wouldn't want to stick around and find out?
* Here's the upbeat takeaway from this requiem for a foreshortened American Century: history is undoubtedly filled with seers, Cassandras, and gurus of every sort exactly because the future is such a mystery to us. Mystery, however, means surprise, which is an eternal part of every tomorrow. And surprise means, even under the worst conditions, a kind of hope. Who knows just what July 20, 2015, or 2025, or 2035 will usher on stage? And who knows when I won't be there to find out. Not I.
* By the way, I have the urge to offer you five predictions about the world of 2050, but what's the point? I'd just have to advise you to ignore them all.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, to be published in September, is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World (Haymarket Books).
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Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt
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