49. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, November 24, 2021
Contents
Tom Engelhardt’s sketch of recent US history: The
World We Made, The Enemy We Need. POSTED
ON NOVEMBER 2, 2021
TEXT
Welcome to the
American Century: Even If It Is a Hell on Earth BY TOM
ENGELHARDT.
. . . .As
it turned out, however, to “exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence,” one other thing was necessary and, fortunately, at hand: an enemy.
From then on, America’s global stature and power would, in fact, be eternally
based on facing down enemies. Fortunately, in 1945, there was that other
potential, if war-ravaged, powerhouse, the Soviet Union. That future
“superpower” had been an ally in World War II, but no longer. It would
thereafter be the necessary enemy in a “cold war” that sometimes threatened to
turn all too hot. And
it would, of course, ensure that what later came to be known as the
military-industrial complex (and a nuclear arsenal capable of
destroying many planets like this one) would be funded in a way once
historically inconceivable in what might still have passed for peacetime.
In 1991, however, after a disastrous war in
Afghanistan, the Soviet empire finally collapsed in economic ruin. As it went
down, hosannas of triumph rang out in a surprised Washington. Henry Luce, by
then dead almost a quarter of a century, would undoubtedly have been thrilled.
The Indispensable
Superpower
In the meantime, in those cold-verging-on-hot-war years, the
U.S. ruled the roost in what came to be known as “the free world,” while its
corporations came to economically dominate much of the planet. Though it would
be a true global imperial power with hundreds of
military bases scattered across every continent but
Antarctica, there would prove to be significant limits to that power — and I’m
not just thinking of the Soviet Union or its communist ally (later opponent),
Mao Zedong’s China.
At the edges of what was then called “the
Third World” — whether in Southeast Asia during and after the disastrous
Vietnam War or in Iran after
1979 — American power often enough came a cropper in memorable
ways. Still, in those years, on a planet some 25,000 miles in
circumference, Washington certainly had a remarkable reach and, in 1991, when
the Soviet Union disappeared, it seemed as if Luce had been a prophet of the
first order. After all, the United States as the ultimate imperial power
had — or so, at least, it appeared at that moment — been left without even a
major power, no less another superpower, as an enemy on a planet that looked,
at least to those in Washington, like it was ours for the taking. And indeed,
take it we soon enough would try to do.
No wonder, in those years, American
politicians and key officials filled the airwaves with self-congratulation and
self-praise for what they liked to think of as the most “exceptional,” “indispensable,”
“greatest” power on the planet and sure to remain so forever and a day.
In another sense, however, problems loomed
instantly. Things were so desperate for the military-industrial complex in a
country promised a cut in “defense” spending, then known as a “peace dividend,”
thanks to the triumph over the Soviets, that enemies had to be created out of
whole cloth. They were, it turned out, fundamental to the organization of
American global power. A world without them was essentially inconceivable or,
at least, inconvenient beyond imagining. Hence, the usefulness of Iraqi
autocrat Saddam Hussein who would be not-quite-taken-down in the first Gulf War
of 1991.
Perhaps the classic example of the desperate
need to create enemies, however, would occur early in the next century.
Remember the “Axis of Evil” announced (and denounced) by President George
W. Bush in his January 2002 State of the Union address? He called out three
states — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — that then had not the slightest way of
injuring the U.S. (“States like these, and their terrorist allies,”
insisted the president, “constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the
peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose
a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving
them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt
to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of
indifference would be catastrophic.”) Of course, this was, in part, based on
the claim that Iraq might have just such weapons of mass destruction (it
didn’t!) and that it would, in turn, be willing to give them to terror groups
to attack the U.S. That lie would become part of the basis for the
invasion of that country the next year.
Think of all this as the strangest kind of
imperial desperation from a superpower that seemed to have it all. And the
result, of course, after Osama bin Laden launched his air force and
those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers against New York and Washington on September
11, 2001, was the Global War on Terror, which would soon prove a self-imposed,
self-created disaster.
Or think of it another way, when considering
the imperial fate of America and this planet: the crew who ran Washington (and
the U.S. military) then proved — as would be true throughout the first two
decades of the twenty-first century — incapable of learning even the most basic
lessons history had to offer. After all, only a decade after the Soviet Union
collapsed, thanks in significant part to what its leader called its “bleeding wound,” a
disastrous war in Afghanistan in which the Red Army became endlessly mired, the
Bush administration would launch its own disastrous war in Afghanistan in which
it would become — yep, endlessly mired. It was as if this country, in its
moment of triumph, couldn’t help but take the Soviet path into the future, the
one heading for the exits. MORE https://tomdispatch.com/welcome-to-the-american-century/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=35f5806d39-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-35f5806d39-309346777#more
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