[Note to TomDispatch Readers: The next posting will be on Monday morning November 30th. Have a good Thanksgiving. Keep in mind that we’re hard at work on perfecting the newest version of this site, now up and rolling. It can only get better and better. Tom]
We’ve just passed through a media celebration of the media’s own role in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, hilariously parodied on The Daily Show recently; and yet, to this day, few in our world grasp that, while walls were tumbling in the Soviet Empire two decades ago, they were also cracking in the American one. Our “wall” finally began to crumble in the seasonally appropriate fall of 2008, when our economic system went over a cliff. (You can watch a version of this, or at least a measure of the human pain it caused, via these mapped U.S. unemployment figures, month by month, from January 2004 to September 2009, knowing that the latest numbers are worse yet.)
There were, of course, no celebrations, no cheering crowds, no cries of freedom then, and 20 years from now reporters will probably not be proudly or nostalgically recounting just where they were and what they were doing in that grim season when our “wall” fell. Still, it is far clearer today that the Cold War, that decades-long nuclear stand-off between two mighty imperial powers and their minions, militaries, and assorted spooks, had no winner, only losers. The other loser of the Cold War, so much stronger than the Soviet Union, remains, as in Afghanistan, intensely reluctant to leave the superpower stage. Nonetheless, you only have to note the anxiety in this country over Obama’s “bow” in Japan or the anxious, critical reporting of his trip to China to see the intensity of the conflict here between denial of, and acknowledgement of, a new American reality in the world.
TomDispatch regular and author of the remarkable A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit is both an early warning system for, and a chronicler of, the sort of change that goes astonishingly unnoticed until it suddenly startles everyone. Looking forward to the 192-nation Copenhagen climate change conference, due to open on December 7th, where possibilities seem to be receding, even as global warming speeds up, and back at the unexpected upheavals of the last two decades, she offers a typically surprising view of our world and its possibilities. (Keep in mind, by the way, that while Congress may be dragging its feet on global warming action, the U.S. Navy is already deep into preparations for an “ice-free Arctic” and the conflicts that might arise as soon as ships can float on those increasingly ice-packless waters.) Tom
Learning How to Count to 350
Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989
By Rebecca Solnit
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As you undoubtedly have noticed, the TomDispatch website is in the process of being updated. We're aware that it's a work in progress. There will be glitches and we'll be correcting, adding, and filling in over the next couple of weeks. Please be patient.
Last Tuesday, this site ran an article by Pratap Chatterjee on the endemic nature of corruption and nepotism in Afghanistan, "Paying Off the Warlords." A related piece by Chatterjee -- a fascinating case study of what a mess American reconstruction efforts are in that country -- has just appeared at the Corpwatch website. Check it out, and while you're at it, take a look at a striking new Corpwatch feature, its "Spies for Hire" database on the private security firms that do for-profit dirty work for the U.S. Intelligence Community. Tom]
So here's the mystery. You have a country that only recently had upwards of 300 military bases, monster to micro, in a single war-torn land, Iraq. It probably now has something like 300 bases combined in Iraq and Afghanistan (where base-building is on the rise). Outside of those war zones, it has perhaps 800 more "facilities" (as they're called) around the globe and thousands more at home. Some of them are absolutely enormous, the equivalent of small American towns with all the amenities of home.
Without a doubt, this represents an accomplishment of some sort. Historically speaking, it's news of the first order. No other great power, from the Han Chinese and the Romans to the British Empire, has ever built so many military outposts in such far-flung places.
So is this empire of bases a matter of pride at home? Hardly. It's rarely thought about. It's not a matter for general discussion or mainstream debate, nor is it news, except on the rarest of occasions (usually when the government threatens to shut down domestic bases and job losses loom). Changes in Pentagon global basing policy are for Washington policy wonks, not ordinary Americans, and certainly not American reporters. From the mainstream media, you get at best a kind of shrug on the subject. Yes, from time to time, you can find a decent piece on an American military base abroad, but normally they are places where American TV reporters can safely set up their cameras and discuss other matters entirely. News about U.S. military bases being built or upgraded in distant lands is usually left to websites like TomDispatch to keep track of.
When it comes to the Middle East, the building of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem or the West Bank, or of secret nuclear facilities in Iran are major news subjects, but the building up of U.S. base infrastructure in the region? Not so much. If, for the first time in its history, the U.S. Navy sets up a permanent strike force based in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, Expeditionary Strike Group 5, remember to check the National, the English-language paper in the United Arab Emirates, for it, not your local rag or the Washington Post, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal. Mind you, we're talking about the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf, the unsettled oil and natural gas heartland of the planet, yet not a peep.
A basic principle taught to any young reporter is: "follow the money." A similar principle should apply to U.S. foreign policy reporting: follow the bases. As striking facts-on-the-ground, such bases tell us much about bedrock U.S. policy, whatever the policy debates in Washington. If the mainstream media ignores such bases, TomDispatch has long made it a policy of keeping an eye on them. Recently, Nick Turse, this site's associate editor and the award-winning author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, reported on a story only modestly and partially covered here: the way the Pentagon has been pouring money into building up its base infrastructure in Afghanistan.
Now, he turns to the Persian Gulf region where the news is focused on a future U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. It turns out, however, that we're withdrawing into something -- that, in fact, there's been a massive, if hardly noticed, Pentagon build-up in this region, too. You'd think it might be news. Now, at TomDispatch, thanks to Turse, it is. Tom
The Pentagon Garrisons the Gulf
As Washington Talks Iraq Withdrawal, the Pentagon Builds Up Bases in the Region
By Nick TurseDespite recent large-scale insurgent suicide bombings that have killed scores of civilians and the fact that well over 100,000 U.S. troops are still deployed in that country, coverage of the U.S. war in Iraq has been largely replaced in the mainstream press by the (previously) "forgotten war" in Afghanistan. A major reason for this is the plan, developed at the end of the Bush years and confirmed by President Obama, to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq to 50,000 by August 2010 and withdraw most of the remaining forces by December 2011.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: On Friday evening, TomDispatch will be switching to an updated version of this site. It's possible that you might not be able to reach TD for some hours. If so, we expect to be back up on Saturday morning. Tom]
The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give
(But Won't)
By Tom Engelhardt
Sure, the quote in the over-title is only my fantasy. No one in Washington -- no less President Obama -- ever said, "This administration ended, rather than extended, two wars," and right now, it looks as if no one in an official capacity is likely to do so any time soon. It's common knowledge that a president -- but above all a Democratic president -- who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat.
It's now a commonplace of the Afghan War. Western leaders in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington, as well as on flying visits to Kabul or even Kandahar, excoriate Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the "corruption" of his government. In return for their ongoing support, they repeatedly demand that he take significant action to "step up efforts to root out crime and corruption," that he, in fact, "arrest and prosecute corrupt officials."
Can there be any question that there is a plethora of corrupt officials to arrest? The president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, reportedly on the CIA payroll, is also, as it's politely put in the press, a "suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade." Ahmad Rateb Popal, the president's cousin and another figure long linked to the drug trade, runs a local security company protecting American supply convoys that, according to Aram Roston of the Nation magazine, is involved in an industry-wide protection scam, using American Army money to pay off the Taliban not to attack. In addition, American arms and ammunition are clearly ending up in Taliban hands. The recent presidential election was a spectacle of fraud; the Afghan Army, despite years of training, may hardly exist (as Ann Jones reported for this site in September); the ill-paid, ill-trained Afghan police are known to operate on the principle of corruption; and a surprisingly small percentage of foreign reconstruction funds actually makes it out of the pockets of big private contractors and western specialists, as well as security firms, and into Afghan hands.
And then, of course, there's Kabul's "Obama market." (In the period when the Soviets ruled Kabul, it was the "Brezhnev market" in honor of the Russian leader, and decades later the "Bush market.") This "notorious bazaar" is "full of chow and supplies bought or stolen from the vast U.S. military bases," according to Jay Price of the McClatchy newspapers, who calls the name "a modest counterweight to [Obama's] Nobel Peace Prize." His description includes the following: "One shop offered an expensive military-issue sleeping bag, tactical goggles like those used by U.S. troops and a stack of plastic footlockers, including one stenciled 'Campbell G Co. 10th Mtn Div.' Another had a sophisticated 'red-dot' optical rifle sight of a kind often used by soldiers and contractors."
In other words, from the American, European, and Japanese reconstruction boondoggle to the presidential palace, from the U.S. and Afghan military to street-level, the country is a klepto-state. As number 179, it misses by only one place taking the rock-bottom spot in Transparency International's latest global corruption index. Of course, what else could be expected in a situation in which the nation's main source of funds is either narcotics -- the country now accounts for a staggering 92% of global opium production -- or foreign aid? To demand that President Karzai takes "steps" to "root out crime and corruption" is, under the circumstances, an absurdity, no matter how many special task forces to investigate graft he forms under Western pressure. It's like asking him -- to mix metaphors -- either to put a gun to his head or drink the sea. Consider it a measure of Afghan realities today that you can hardly read a piece about the country in the Western press without the word "corruption" lurking somewhere in it, and yet the reporting on how that system of corruption actually works has generally been thin indeed.
Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee, just back from Kabul and author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War, offers a rare, eye-opening inside look at how the system of nepotism and corruption -- involving the country's old "warlords" from the days of the post-Soviet civil war and its new corporate "reconstruction" raiders -- actually works. Make no mistake, this is not a system amenable to "reform." Tom
Paying Off the Warlords
Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption
By Pratap ChatterjeeKabul, Afghanistan -- Every morning, dozens of trucks laden with diesel from Turkmenistan lumber out of the northern Afghan border town of Hairaton on a two-day trek across the Hindu Kush down to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Among the dozens of businesses dispatching these trucks are two extremely well connected companies -- Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid -- that helped to swell the election coffers of President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the country's new vice president, warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim.
It can't get better than this, can it? A first printing of 1.5 million copies sent out into an otherwise dead book market. Possibly as much as $7 million dollars going to the author, who already has interviews lined up with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. A bus tour of the "real America" that manages to avoid such Sodom and Gomorrah-like Democratic hotspots as Los Angeles and New York. Even a collection of critical essays about the author appearing at the same moment -- with her photo on a similarly designed cover, and just two letters in the title reversed, clearly meant to confuse her fans. Then, there's even the parody coloring book. It's a "perfect storm for publishers," says the book editor for the Christian Science Monitor -- and if that's the last time the phrase "perfect storm" is used for this media extravaganza, TomDispatch will eat its baseball cap.
Yes, of course, what else could I be talking about but Going Rogue, Sarah Palin's as-told-to "memoir" -- and its critical doppelganger, Going Rouge (put together by two Nation magazine editors). I wonder, by the way, if, in the uproar to follow, anyone will comment on the strangeness of Palin's book title. True, late last October, with the presidential election fast approaching, an unnamed aide to candidate McCain accused his vice-presidential partner of "going rogue." At the time, an "associate" of hers responded to the charge by claiming she was "simply trying to 'bust free' of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged [campaign] roll-out." A year later, however, she's evidently ready to make that angry intra-campaign charge proudly her own.
Still, here's the thing that's so odd: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the word "rogue," as in "rogue state," has been associated with only one thing in the U.S.: enemy nations supposedly eager to enter the nuclear proliferation sweepstakes -- in particular, the crew that our previous president lumped together as the "axis of evil." We're talking about Iran, North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- and now, evidently, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Maybe Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, the blistering, bestselling exposé of just how the Republican Party ate itself for lunch, is right. Maybe Palin is intent on going nuclear in American politics. Unfortunately, when the fun's all over, we have no idea who is going to clean up the mess. (To catch a TomDispatch audio interview with Blumenthal on Palin, "the queen of fly-over country," and her book, click here.) Tom
The Palin Effect
How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party
By Max BlumenthalSarah Palin's heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)
