Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
The dictionary of empire-speak
By Tom Engelhardt
This qualifies as an anti-imperial joke. The "leftist" president of Ecuador was
doing no more than tweaking the nose of Goliath. An Ecuadorian base in Miami?
Absurd. No one on the planet could take such a suggestion seriously.
On the other hand, when it comes to the US having a major base in Kyrgyzstan, a
Central Asian land that not one in a million Americans has ever heard of,
that's no laughing matter. After all, Washington has been paying $20 million a
year in direct rent for the use of that country's Manas Air Base (and, as
indirect rent, another $80 million has gone to various Kyrgyzstani programs).
As late as last October, the Pentagon was planning to sink
another $100 million into construction at Manas "to expand aircraft parking
areas at the base and provide a 'hot cargo pad' - an area safe enough to load
and unload hazardous and explosive cargo - to be located away from inhabited
facilities". That, however, was when things started to go wrong. Now,
Kyrgyzstan's parliament has voted to expel the US from Manas within six months,
a serious blow to our resupply efforts for the Afghan War. More outrageous yet
to Washington, the Kyrgyzstanis seem to have done this at the bidding of
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has the nerve to want to
re-establish a Russian sphere of influence in what used to be the borderlands
of the old Soviet Union.
Put in a nutshell, despite the crumbling US economic situation and the rising
costs of the Afghan war, we still act as if we live on a one-way planet. Some
country demanding a base in the US? That's a joke or an insult, while the US
potentially gaining or losing a base almost anywhere on the planet may be an
insult, but it's never a laughing matter.
Imperial thought: Recently, to justify those missile attacks in
Pakistan, US officials have been leaking details on the program's "successes"
to reporters. Anonymous officials have offered the "possibly wishful estimate"
that the CIA "covert war" has led to the death (or capture) of 11 of al-Qaeda's
top 20 commanders, including, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report,
"Abu Layth al-Libi, whom US officials described as 'a rising star' in the
group."
"Rising star" is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror
hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with
empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents
imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it's not
surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their
enemies as a warped version of themselves - hierarchical, overly reliant on
leaders, and top heavy.
In the Vietnam era, for instance, American officials spent a remarkable amount
of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border
sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called
Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist
enemy, aka "the bamboo Pentagon". Of course, it wasn't there to be found,
except in Washington's imperial imagination.
In the Afghanistan and Pakistan "theater", we may be seeing a similar
phenomenon. Underpinning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that the key
to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the Taliban) is destroying its leadership
one-by-one. As key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the missile
attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures
(as well as whoever was in their vicinity), are distinctly counterproductive.
The deaths of those figures in no way compensates for the outrage, the
destabilization, the radicalization that the attacks engender in the region.
They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening each of those movements.
What it's hard for Washington to grasp is this: "decapitation", to use another
American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a
decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless
guerrilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless
Washington would be.
Only recently, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported
that, while top US officials were exhibiting optimism about the effectiveness
of the missile strikes, Pakistani officials were pointing to "ominous signs of
al-Qaeda's resilience" and suggesting "that al-Qaeda was replenishing killed
fighters and midlevel leaders with less experienced but more hard-core
militants, who are considered more dangerous because they have fewer
allegiances to local Pakistani tribes ... The Pakistani intelligence assessment
found that al-Qaeda had adapted to the blows to its command structure by
shifting 'to conduct decentralized operations under small but well-organized
regional groups' within Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Imperial dreams and nightmares: Americans have rarely liked to
think of themselves as "imperial", so what is it about Rome in these last
years? First, the neo-conservatives, in the flush of seeming victory in
2002-2003 began to imagine the US as a "new Rome" (or new British Empire), or
as Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as February 2001 in Time Magazine,
"America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the
world, more dominant than any since Rome."
All roads on this planet, they were then convinced, led ineluctably to
Washington. Now, of course, they visibly don't, and the imperial bragging about
surpassing the Roman or British empires has long since faded away. When it
comes to the Afghan war, in fact, those (resupply) "roads" seem to lead,
embarrassingly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and
Iran. But the comparison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the brain.
When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen wrote an op-ed for the
Washington Post recently, drumming up support for the revised, age-of-Obama
American mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn't help starting off with an
inspiring tale about the Romans and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that
they conquered. As he tells it, the ruler the Romans installed in Locri, a
rapacious fellow named Pleminius, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen
assures us, the Locrians so believed in "the reputation for equanimity and
fairness that Rome had built" that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate,
knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded restitution; and indeed, the
tyrant was removed.
Admittedly, this seems a far-fetched analogy to the US in Afghanistan (and
don't for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with Afghan President Hamid
Karzai, even though the Obama-ites evidently now believe him corrupt and
replaceable). Still, as Mullen sees it, the point is: "We don't always get it
right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We
strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference."
Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, in his
somewhat overheated brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just)
"early" Romans - before, of course, the fatal rot set in.
And then there's the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks, a superb reporter who, in
his latest book, gives voice to the views of Centcom Commander David Petraeus.
Reflecting on Iraq, where he (like the general) believes we could still be
fighting in "2015", Ricks begins a recent Post piece this way:
In
October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the
Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of
the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the
Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East ... The structures
brought home a sad realization: It's simply unrealistic to believe that the US
military will be able to pull out of the Middle East … It was a week when US
forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan - a
string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean -
following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British.
With the waning of British power, Ricks continues, it "has been the United
States' turn to take the lead there". And our turn, as it happens, just isn't
over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from our imperial capital and
from our military viceroys out on the peripheries.
Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys. They seem to channel the imperial
unconscious. Take David Petraeus. For him, too, the duties and dangers of
empire evidently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of key figures,
civilian and military, he has lately begun to issue warnings about
Afghanistan's dangers. As the Washington Post reported, "[Petraeus] suggested
that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have
historically met with defeat in Afghanistan. 'Afghanistan has been known over
the years as the graveyard of empires,' he said. 'We cannot take that history
lightly'."
Of course, he's worrying about the graveyard aspect of this, but what I find
curious - exactly because no one thinks it odd enough to comment on here - is
the functional admission in the use of this old adage about Afghanistan that we
fall into the category of empires, whether or not in search of a graveyard in
which to die.
And he's not alone in this. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put the matter
similarly recently: "Without the support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the
US would simply 'go the way of every other foreign army that's ever been in
Afghanistan.'"
Imperial blindness: Think of the above as just a few prospective
entries in The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak that will, of course, never
be compiled. We're so used to such language, so inured to it and to the
thinking behind it, so used, in fact, to living on a one-way planet in which
all roads lead to and from Washington, that it doesn't seem like a language at
all. It's just part of the unexamined warp and woof of everyday life in a
country that still believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly fight
wars halfway across the globe, find triumph or tragedy in the gain or loss of
an air base in a country few Americans could locate on a map, and produce
military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the way a do-it-yourself
furniture maker would produce instructions for constructing a cabinet from a
kit.
We don't find it strange to have 16 intelligence agencies, some devoted to
listening in on, and spying on, the planet, or capable of running "covert wars"
in tribal borderlands thousands of miles distant, or of flying unmanned drones
over those same borderlands destroying those who come into camera view. We're
inured to the bizarreness of it all and of the language (and pretensions) that
go with it.
If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak were ever produced, who here would
buy it? Who would feel the need to check out what seems like the only
reasonable and self-evident language for describing the world? How else, after
all, would we operate? How else would any American in a position of authority
talk in Washington or Baghdad or Islamabad or Rome?
So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too. And we know what finally happened
to their empire and the language that went with it. Such a language plays its
role in normalizing the running of an empire. It allows officials (and in our
case the media as well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the smooth
functioning of such an enormous undertaking. Embedded in its words and phrases
is a fierce way of thinking (even if we don't see it that way), as well as
plausible deniability. And in the good times, its uses are obvious.
On the other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease to function well, that
same language can suddenly work to blind the imperial custodians - which is,
after all, what the foreign policy "team" of the Obama era is - to necessary
realities. At a moment when it might be important to grasp what the "American
face" in the mirror actually looks like, you can't see it.
And sometimes what you can't bring yourself to see can, as now, hurt you.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He
also edited
The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire(Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative
history of the mad Bush years.
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