Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The end of a subprime administration
By Tom Engelhardt
They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers,
and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling
was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen - if you're talking
about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte,
or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and
biological weaponry let loose over the US, or Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds
rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to
our taste, or simply eternal global dominance.
When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief"
of a "wartime" country and his top officials
were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the
"war on terror", but on the theater that mattered most to them - the "home
front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people
a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in
September 2002, White House chief of staff Andrew Card infamously explained:
"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
Indeed.
From a White House where "victory strategies" meant purely for domestic
consumption poured out, to the Pentagon where bevies of generals, admirals and
other high officers were constantly being mustered, not to lead armies but to
lead public opinion, their selling focus was total. They were always releasing
a "new product".
And don't forget their own set of soaring inside-the-Beltway fantasies. After
all, if a salesman is going to sell you some defective product, it always helps
if he can sell himself on it first. And on this score, they were world champs.
Because events made it look so foolish, the phrase "shock and awe" that went
with the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003 has now passed out of official
language and (together with "mission accomplished") into the annals of irony.
Back then, though, as bombs and missiles blew up parts of Baghdad - to fabulous
visual effect in that other "theater" of war, television - the phrase was
constantly on official lips and in media reports everywhere. It went
hand-in-glove with another curious political phrase: regime change.
Given the supposed unique technological proficiency of the US military and its
array of "precision" weapons, the warriors of Bushworld convinced themselves
that a new era in military affairs had truly dawned. An enemy "regime" could
now be taken out - quite literally and with surgical precision, in its
bedrooms, conference rooms and offices, thanks to those precision weapons
delivered long-distance from ship or plane - without taking out a country.
Poof! You only had to say the word and an oppressive regime would be, as it was
termed, "decapitated". Its people would then welcome with open arms relatively
small numbers of American troops as liberators.
It all sounded so good, and high tech, and relatively simple, and casualty
averse, and clean as a whistle. Even better, once there had been such a
demonstration, a guaranteed "cakewalk" - as, say, in Iraq - who would ever dare
stand up to American power again? Not only would one hated enemy dictator be
dispatched to the dustbin of history, but evildoers everywhere, fearing the
Bush equivalent of the wrath of Khan, would be shock-and-awed into submission
or quickly dispatched in their own right.
In reality (ah, "reality" - what a nasty word!), the shock-and-awe attacks used
on Iraq got not a single leader of the Saddamist regime, not one of that pack
of 52 cards (including of course the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein, found in
his "spiderhole" so many months later). Iraqi civilians were the ones killed in
that precise and shocking moment, while Iraqi society was set on the road to
destruction, and the world was not awed.
Strangely enough, though, the phrase, once reversed, proved applicable to the
Bush administration's seven-year post-9/11 history. They were, in a sense, the
awe-and-shock administration. Initially, they were awed by the supposedly
singular power of the American military to dominate and transform the planet;
then, they were continually shocked and disbelieving when that same military,
despite its massive destructive power, turned out to be incapable of doing so,
or even of handling two ragtag insurgencies in two weakened countries, one of
which, Afghanistan, was among the poorest and least technologically advanced on
the planet.
The theater of war
In remarkably short order, historically speaking, the administration's soaring
imperial fantasies turned into planetary nightmares. After 9/11, of course,
George W and crew promised Americans the global equivalent - and Republicans
the domestic equivalent - of a 36,000 stock market and we know just where the
stock market is today: only about 27,000 points short of that irreality.
Once upon a time, they really did think that, via the US armed forces, or, as
Bush once so breathlessly put it, "The greatest force for human liberation the
world has ever known," they could dominate the planet without significant help
from allies or international institutions of any sort. Who else had a shot at
it? In the post-Soviet world, who but a leadership backed by the full force of
the US military could possibly be a contender for the leading role in this epic
movie? Who else could even turn out for a casting call? Impoverished Russia?
China, still rebuilding its military and back then considered to have a host of
potential problems? A bunch of terrorists? I mean ... come on!
As they saw it, the situation was pretty basic. In fact, it gave the phrase
"power politics" real meaning. After all, they had in their hands the reins
attached to the sole superpower on this small orb. And wasn't everyone - at
least, everyone they cared to listen to, at least Charles Krauthammer and the
editorial page of the Washington Post - saying no less?
I mean, what else would you do, if you suddenly, almost miraculously (after an
election improbably settled by the Supreme Court), found yourself in sole
command of the globe's only "hyperpower", the only sheriff on planet Earth, the
New Rome. To make matters more delicious, in terms of getting just what you
wanted, those hands were on those reins right after "the Pearl Harbor of the 21
century", when Americans were shocked and awed and terrified enough that
anything-goes seemed a reasonable response?
It might have gone to anyone's head in imperial Washington at that moment, but
it went to their heads in such a striking way. After all, theirs' was a plan -
labeled in 2002 the Bush Doctrine - of global domination conceptually so
un-American that, in my childhood, the only place you would have heard it was
in the mouths of the most evil, snickering imperial Japanese, Nazi or Soviet
on-screen villains. And yet, in their moment of moments, it just rolled right
out of their heads and off their tongues - and they were proud of it.
Here's a question for 2009 you don't have to answer: What should the former
"new Rome" be called now? That will, of course, be someone else's problem.
The cast of characters
And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the president
and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock
markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a
smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained,
overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars
gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in
the crown" of Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices
that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse,
kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated
only with South America dictatorships and military juntas).
They headed a government that couldn't shoot straight or plan ahead or do
anything halfway effectively, an administration that emphasized "defense" - or
"homeland security" as it came to be called in their years - above all else;
yet they were always readying themselves for the last battle, and so were
caught utterly, embarrassingly unready for 19 terrorists with box cutters, a
hurricane named Katrina and an arcane set of Wall Street derivatives heading
south.
As the supposed party of small government, they succeeded mainly in strangling
civilian services, privatizing government operations into the hands of crony
corporations, and bulking up state power in a massive way - making an already
vast intelligence apparatus yet larger and more labyrinthine, expanding spying
and surveillance of every kind, raising secrecy to a first principle,
establishing a new US military command for North America, endorsing a massive
Pentagon buildup, establishing a second Defense Department labeled the
Department of Homeland Security with its own mini-homeland-security-industrial
complex, evading checks and powers in the constitution whenever possible, and
claiming new powers for a "unitary executive" commander-in-chief presidency.
No summary can quite do justice to what the administration "accomplished" in
these years. If there was, however, a single
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