TomDispatch

Tomgram: Nick Turse, In Afghanistan, the Pentagon Digs in

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-11-05T11:08:25-05:00

In our day, the American way of war, especially against lightly armed guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists, has proved remarkably heavy. Elephantine might be the appropriate word. The Pentagon likes to talk about its "footprint" on the geopolitical landscape. In terms of the infrastructure it's built in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps "crater" would be a more reasonable image.

American wars are now gargantuan undertakings. The prospective withdrawal of significant numbers/most/all American forces from Iraq, for instance, will -- in terms of time and effort -- make the 2003 invasion look like the vaunted "cakewalk" it was supposed to be. According to Pentagon estimates, more than 1.5 million (yes, that is "million") pieces of U.S. equipment need to be removed from the country. Just stop and take that in for a second.

Of course, it's a less surprising figure when you realize that the Pentagon managed to build, furnish, and supply almost 300 bases, macro to micro, in Iraq alone in the war years. And some of those bases were -- and still are -- the size of small American towns with tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, and others, as well as massive perimeters, multiple bus routes, full-scale PX's, fast-food outlets, movie theaters, and the like.

In many ways, Iraq-style war has now become the gargantuan template for the Afghan War build-up that Nick Turse describes below. (His is the sort of summary picture of a less-than-adequately-covered situation that TomDispatch specializes in, based in part on investigative Internet reporting and the mining of Pentagon contracts, government and corporate websites, and military publications.) In fact, some percentage of those 1.5 million pieces of equipment will undoubtedly simply be sent Afghanistan-wards. As the Bush administration built the world's largest -- and shoddiest -- embassy in Baghdad, our own mother ship, mission control center for the region, and modern ziggurat, so now, the Obama administration is about to do the same (at approximately the same startling cost) in Islamabad, Pakistan, as a monstrous mission control center for the Af/Pak theater of operations.

In Iraq, structures like Balad Air Base or the ill-named Camp Victory just on the edge of Baghdad are so massive, so permanent-looking -- so clearly built for long-term occupation -- that it's still hard to imagine how the Pentagon will abandon them to the Iraqis.

Now, as Turse reports, the U.S. military seems intent on beefing up another network of bases for another surging war, involving another heavy presence in another distant land -- and these bases, too, the Pentagon will undoubtedly be loath to turn over or evacuate. Every army carries a version of its society on its back into battle. We emphasize poundage. Like our culture, our wars are spendthrift and consumption-oriented. If continued, they will someday bust us. Tom

2014 or Bust The Pentagon's Building Boom in Afghanistan Indicates a Long War Ahead
By Nick Turse

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, Why Your Child May Not Get a Swine Flu Shot Soon

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-11-03T16:27:36-05:00

This week, the Obama White House released a very partial record of those who had visited since January 20, 2009. This it hailed as "transparency like you've never seen it before" and as the beginning of a new White House visitor transparency policy. Unfortunately, the policy applies mainly to post-September 15th visitors and has a caveat that, in time, could prove large enough to drive a Humvee through. As the White House website puts it, all names of visitors will be released after a lag of 90-120 days, "aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of national security imperatives or their necessarily confidential nature (such as a visit by a possible Supreme Court nominee)."

The version of the story that hit TV screens and most newspapers had to do with William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Moore, and Michael Jordan, who were on the list, but weren't actually William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Moore, and Michael Jordan. Not the ones who come to your mind, anyway.

The secondary story was that Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Bill Gates were exactly the Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Bill Gates you'd imagine, and that in the last eight months a reasonable amount of star power had indeed passed through those well-guarded gates. Then there was labor leader Andrew Stern, fingered by the Wall Street Journal for his 22 visits.

And, oh yes, there were the others, too, even if they didn't really cause much of a stir. On this already limited list of visitors, for instance, Wall Street was hardly missing-in-action, nor was big oil. Visiting "the people's house" were Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who met a mere two times with the President and once with economic advisor Lawrence Summers; James Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., who made it in but six times, as well as Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit; Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil Corp; David O'Reilly, CEO of Chevron; Maurice Greenberg, former head of AIG; and so on, including a striking crew of lobbyists. In other words, no big deal.

Now, me, I wouldn't mind knowing whether on the unreleased visitors' lists for these last months lurked Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, or Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella (or their lobbyists), not to speak of other Big Pharma types. Did they make it to the White House, and if so, how many times? I'm curious because Barbara Ehrenreich identifies their companies as the ones screwing up the production of the swine flu vaccine, and somehow they did manage to get a modest infusion of $2 billion from the Obama administration to do a less than magnificent job of this. I wonder just what deals might have been broached with them in the people's name.

In the spirit of Ehrenreich's remarkable new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America -- which I've recommended before -- I'd like to exhibit a little positive thinking and hope that some enterprising reporter digs up this info for the rest of us, and soon. In the meantime, do check out Ehrenreich's book (as well as the audio interview she did for TomDispatch to go with today's piece). It admittedly won't make you more optimistic, or even healthier, just a lot wiser and far more irritated. Tom

The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up Optimism as a Public Health Problem
By Barbara Ehrenreich

Tomgram: Afghanistan as a Bailout State

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-11-01T17:12:27-05:00

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Last week, at an event in Santa Fe sponsored by the Lannan Foundation, I interviewed TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit. You can catch the audio by clicking here. The event was, in part, in honor of her superb new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, a tiny version of which can be found in her most recent TomDispatch post. Of course, I also have a special fondness for her earlier book Hope in the Dark, developed from the first piece she ever wrote for TD and which, as I said in my Lannan introduction, changed the way I look at the world. (No small thing for a guy my age.) My latest Solnit discovery: her amazing little book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. If you haven't ever read one of her books, then you have a treat coming. I offer this guarantee: you won't get lost! Tom]

Too Big to Fail? Why All the President's Afghan Options Are Bad Ones
By Tom Engelhardt

In the worst of times, my father always used to say, "A good gambler cuts his losses." It's a formulation imprinted on my brain forever. That no-nonsense piece of advice still seems reasonable to me, but it doesn't apply to American war policy. Our leaders evidently never saw a war to which the word "more" didn't apply. Hence the Afghan War, where impending disaster is just an invitation to fuel the flames of an already roaring fire.

Here's a partial rundown of news from that devolving conflict: In the last week, Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases. Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama's special envoy to the region, termed "an American success story"), the Taliban is largely in control. It is, according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, now "one of the most dangerous provinces" in the country. Similarly, the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south, has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is considering a strategy that involves pulling back from the countryside and focusing on protecting more heavily populated areas (which might be called, with the first U.S. Afghan War of the 1980s in mind, the Soviet strategy). The underpopulated parts of the countryside would then undoubtedly be left to Hellfire missile-armed American drone aircraft. In the last week, three U.S. helicopters -- the only practical way to get around a mountainous country with a crude, heavily mined system of roads -- went down under questionable circumstances (another potential sign of an impending Soviet-style disaster). Across the country, Taliban attacks are up; deadly roadside bombs or IEDs are fast on the rise (a 350% jump since 2007); U.S. deaths are at a record high and the numbers of wounded are rising rapidly; European allies are ever less willing to send more troops; and Taliban raids in the capital, Kabul, are on the increase. All this despite a theoretical 12-1 edge U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops have over the Taliban insurgents and their allies.

In addition, our nation-building "partner," the hopeless Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- known in better times as "the mayor of Kabul" for his government's lack of reach -- was the "winner" in an election in which, it seemed, more ballot boxes were stuffed than voters arrived at the polls. In its wake, and in the name of having an effective "democratic" partner in Afghanistan, the foreigners stepped in: Senator John Kerry, Richard Holbrooke, and other envoys appeared in Kabul or made telephone calls to whisper sweet somethings in ears and twist arms. The result was a second round of voting slated for November 7th and likely only to compound the initial injury. No matter the result -- and Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's opponent, has already withdrawn in protest from the runoff -- the winner will, once again, be the Taliban. (And let's not forget the recent New York Times revelation that the President's alleged drug-kingpin brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, whom American officials regularly and piously denounce, is, in fact, a long-term paid agent of the CIA and its literal landlord in the southern city of Kandahar. If you were a Taliban propagandist, you couldn't make this stuff up.)

With the second round of elections already a preemptive disaster, and foreigners visibly involved in the process, all of this is a Taliban bonanza. The words "occupation," "puppet government," and the like undoubtedly ring ever truer in Afghan ears. You don't have to be a propaganda genius to exploit this sort of thing.

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Is Obama's Iran Policy Doomed to Fail?

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-10-29T10:55:10-05:00

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Recently, I launched one of this website's little campaigns to get more subscribers. Thanks to so many of you who, in response to my pleas, urged others to sign up for the email notice that goes out every time TD posts a piece, we got hundreds of new subscribers. Others clicked on a book link at this site and bought something at Amazon (we get a tiny percentage of the sale), or sent in a contribution. All of this was, of course, greatly appreciated. If you meant to do any of the above, but haven't yet, now's a perfect moment. What a difference support from you makes! Tom]

There's an old joke that goes something like this: A self-absorbed fellow, meeting a friend, launches into an endless soliloquy about himself, then abruptly stops and says, "Well, enough about me. Now, tell me what you think of me." Sometimes Washington has a similar quality to it. A week ago, TomDispatch had three pieces focused on war, American-style; this week is proving no less thematic; it's focused on how the world is changing just beyond the view of the "sole superpower."

Today, Dilip Hiro, TomDispatch regular and author of Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, focuses on how, despite some genuine changes, Washington's Iran policy is, in crucial ways, stuck in the past. He emphasizes, as few in the U.S. do, how a new constellation of forces involving China and Russia is coalescing around that energy-rich country. In fact, just beyond our normal American sightlines, much is happening in the world.

As a small example of a sort that largely escapes mainstream American reporting, and that you're only likely to notice if you visit a website like the War in Context, Turkey, too, is moving closer to Iran and energy is again at the heart of the matter. Among other things, Turkey is now negotiating for a huge expansion of Iranian natural gas supplies flowing from its enormous South Pars field to, and through, Turkey, while its prime minister has just visited Tehran. Tom

Why Obama's Iran Policy Will Fail Stuck in Bush Mode in a Changed World
By Dilip Hiro

While the tone of the Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W. Bush, at their core both administrations subscribe to the same doctrine: Whatever the White House perceives as a threat -- whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles -- must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.

In addition, by the evidence available, Barack Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor's failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic. Here, a lesson is readily available, if only the Obama White House were willing to consider Iran's recent history. It is unrealistic to expect that a regime which fought Saddam Hussein's Iraq (then backed by the United States) to a standstill in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s, unaided by any foreign power, and has for 30 years withstood the consequences of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions will be alarmed by Washington's fresh threats of "crippling sanctions."

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Great Superpower Meltdown

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-10-26T11:35:17-05:00

Think of us as just having passed through the failed era of "must" in Washington. For almost eight years, George W. Bush made speeches and appearances in which he hectored this or that country, or enemy, or people about what they "must" do. Never, I suspect, has an American president lectured more people out there on their responsibilities to us. Looking back, what's surprising is how few paid much attention. The Iraqis didn't listen, nor did the Afghans, nor the Iranians, nor, it seems, the Pakistanis, nor the Russians, nor the Chinese... and so on. It's been a remarkably ignominious lesson in bluster and bust -- and a reasonable measure of the actual power of a country that, not so many years ago, Washington pundits were happily (and favorably) comparing to the Roman and British empires in its reach and ambition.

In Washington, recently, those "musts" have been on the wane, which is hardly surprising. In the wake of a series of failed wars and a near economic collapse, a lot of "musts" now seem increasingly aimed in Washington's direction. Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, has turned to another unusual but striking measure of waning American power in the world, an official report on the relatively distant future issued by the U.S. Intelligence Community late last year. The distant future was once, of course, the province of utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, even outright nuts, not government intelligence services. Regularly analyzing that future has, however, become almost as much a duty of the 18 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community as doing National Intelligence Estimates on Iran. Consider that a measure of national security sprawl. Maybe, given Klare's analysis below, the IC should leave the future to the screenwriters for Star Trek and stick to our present world. Tom

Welcome to 2025 American Preeminence Is Disappearing Fifteen Years Early
By Michael T. Klare

Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.

Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained."

That, of course, was then; this -- some 11 months into the future -- is now and how things have changed. Futuristic predictions will just have to catch up to the fast-shifting realities of the present moment. Although published after the onset of the global economic meltdown was underway, the report was written before the crisis reached its full proportions and so emphasized that the decline of American power would be gradual, extending over the assessment's 15-year time horizon. But the economic crisis and attendant events have radically upset that timetable. As a result of the mammoth economic losses suffered by the United States over the past year and China's stunning economic recovery, the global power shift the report predicted has accelerated. For all practical purposes, 2025 is here already.

Many of the broad, down-the-road predictions made in Global Trends 2025 have, in fact, already come to pass. Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- collectively known as the BRIC countries -- are already playing far more assertive roles in global economic affairs, as the report predicted would happen in perhaps a decade or so. At the same time, the dominant global role once monopolized by the United States with a helping hand from the major Western industrial powers -- collectively known as the Group of 7 (G-7) -- has already faded away at a remarkable pace. Countries that once looked to the United States for guidance on major international issues are ignoring Washington's counsel and instead creating their own autonomous policy networks. The United States is becoming less inclined to deploy its military forces abroad as rival powers increase their own capabilities and non-state actors rely on "asymmetrical" means of attack to overcome the U.S. advantage in conventional firepower.

Tomgram: Nick Turse, What the U.S. Military Can't Do

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-10-22T09:46:24-05:00

[Note to Tomdispatch Readers: The other day, I appealed to you to consider writing your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and workmates to suggest that they go to the "sign up" window at the upper right of the Tomdispatch main screen, put in their email addresses, and sign on for an notification whenever a post goes up. (Word of mouth is, of course, the only kind of publicity this site can afford.) A number of you did so and TD got a nice new crew of subscribers. So, many thanks indeed! If some of you meant to do this and didn't quite get around to it, now's a perfect time. There's plenty of exciting material on the TomDispatch horizon! Tom]

This past weekend, the New York Times Magazine had a cover story by Dexter Filkins, "Stanley McChrystal's Long War," which ended with Afghan War commander McChrystal's pledge to an Afghan governor that the U.S. military would stay in the country "until our Afghan partners are completely secure." "Even," he continued, "if that means years."

Similarly, Filkins quoted McChrystal's deputy, Michael Flynn, this way: "I believe that it's probably going to take us three years to really turn the insurgency to the point where it's waning instead of waxing... And then I think... we are looking at another two years when the government of Afghanistan and the security forces of Afghanistan begin to take a lot more personal responsibility." And keep in mind -- nowhere in that quote is there the slightest indication that Flynn expects U.S. troops to be departing Afghanistan at the end of that five-year stretch when Afghan forces will just "begin" to be taking more "personal responsibility."

"Long War", or long haul, indeed! Here's the odd thing, though: our military leadership in Afghanistan acts, to judge by Filkins piece, as if winning were a hard but typical thing to do, if only things were done right this time. (By the way, if Filkins had written a piece similar in tone about LeBron James, it would be considered embarrassingly fawning. Why is it that our objective reporters for major newspapers regularly fall in love with their military subjects and cast them as stars? And why is such work never considered embarrassing?)

In any case, back to the issue of the American military winning. It's a premise that TomDispatch associate editor and Vietnam War expert Nick Turse considers remarkably far-fetched based on the last half-century of American war-fighting; in fact, it's a point he's raised for years at this website. The real question is: Can an American general win much of anything, no matter how many years, and how much money, Americans are willing to spend, or how much good press he gets? Tom

Obama's Choice Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?
By Nick Turse

When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide to go the peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really accomplishing something significant. On the other hand, history suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser. As president after president has discovered, especially since World War II, the U.S. military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war.

Tomgram: Jo Comerford, Three Cheers for the War Dividend

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-10-20T07:14:55-05:00

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: I'll be on the road for the next week with limited email access. I may not be answering letters and requests. Be patient. For those of you living in the Santa Fe, New Mexico area, this Wednesday night (October 21st) at 7 pm at the Lensic Performing Arts Center I'll be introducing TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit and chatting with her after she reads from her works. She's a national treasure, so come listen in. Tom]

If you want a picture of how Washington deals with American war-making today, check out a moment from NBC's October 11th "Meet the Press." David Gregory, the show's moderator, is conducting a round-table discussion with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Carl Levin, and retired General Barry McCaffrey (one of those generals who now spends his time on television explaining our wars to us). At one point, Gregory asks: "Can we beat the Taliban?" General McCaffrey's reply starts this way: "Well, I, I think in 10 years of $5 billion a month and with a significant front-end security component, we can leave an Afghan national army and police force and a viable government and roads and universities. But it's a time constraint that we can't change things in 18 to 24 months. So I think we got to lower expectations."

Now, if you were a normal citizen, you might begin frantically calculating: $5 billion a month... 12 months in a year... $60 billion a year... times 10 years... $600 billion dollars. If, in fact, the number of U.S. troops or trainers and advisors rises significantly and the U.S. commitment to the war rises as well, this will surely prove a gross underestimate. But leaving that aside, you, the normal, reasonable human being, might at this point say something like: "Hold on, general, $600 billion more dollars? Ten years? And where's that money coming from? And is that really how you want to invest taxpayer dollars -- in another supposedly too-big-to-fail bailout?" Or, of course, you might just jump up and yell, "Have you lost your senses?"

But of course this is Washington where such numbers for American war-fighting are so ho-hum, so run-of-the-mill, that none of the other participants even thinks to comment on or question them or stops for a second in wonder. In fact, when McCaffrey is done, here's how Gregory begins his response: "Just with, with very little time left, I want to get to two other issues. The president spoke last night at the Human Rights Campaign dinner and spoke about 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'..." And so it goes in "wartime" Washington.

Jo Comerford, a TomDispatch newcomer, runs the National Priorities Project, whose mission is to analyze "complex federal spending data and translate it into easy-to-understand information about how federal tax dollars are spent." Its site even has a "cost of war" counter, constantly twirling as the dollars rise in dizzying fashion. Here, as a numbers cruncher, she makes the most basic point of all: Whoever may be losing in our country, others are cashing in their chips and I'm not just talking about Goldman Sachs. After all, there's also the "war dividend." Tom

Cashing in the War Dividend The Joys of Perpetual War
By Jo Comerford

So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?

Tomgram: Will Today's U.S.-Armed Ally Be Tomorrow's Enemy?

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-10-18T17:29:06-05:00

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: In the past weeks, you could catch original pieces by Barbara Ehrenreich, Arundhati Roy, Pepe Escobar, Michael Klare, Ann Jones, and Rebecca Solnit, among others, at this website. It's the sort of line-up you might otherwise find at a top-notch magazine. Every piece posted here is -- we hope -- original, well written, well edited, thoughtful, informative, and provocative.

Those of you who get email notices whenever a new piece is posted, as well as the tens of thousands who bookmark TomDispatch or read its pieces reposted elsewhere, can help get word out about the work we do by encouraging new readers to sign on. TD spreads mainly by word of mouth, a formidable force in the on-line world. For those of you already hooked, I want to suggest, as I do every few months, that you lend the site just a few minutes of your time and a little more of that word-of-mouth power. I hope you'll consider putting together a modest list of friends, colleagues, relatives, or, for that matter, people you like to argue with who might benefit from getting TomDispatch regularly. You should urge them to go to the "sign up" window at the upper right of the main screen, put in an e-mail address, answer the confirmation letter that will quickly arrive in their email boxes (or, fair warning, spam folders), and join the TD crew.

By the way, I'm most thankful for a recent spate of contributions to the site. To all of you who have availed yourselves of the "Resist Empire. Support TomDispatch" icon, also to the right of the main screen, many thanks, and the same to those of you who have clicked on a book link at the site, gone to Amazon, and made a purchase of any sort (of which, no matter what it is, we get a tiny cut). Every bit of support helps, believe me -- and we're appreciative. Tom]

Who's Next? Lessons from the Long War and a Blowback World
By Tom Engelhardt

Is it too early -- or already too late -- to begin drawing lessons from "the Long War"? That phrase, coined in 2002 and, by 2005, being championed by Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, was meant to be a catchier name for George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." That was back in the days when inside-the-Beltway types were still dreaming about a global Pax Americana and its domestic partner, a Pax Republicana, and imagining that both, once firmly established, might last forever.

"The Long War" merely exchanged the shock-'n'-awe geographical breadth of the President Bush's chosen moniker ("global") for a shock-'n'-awe time span. Our all-out, no-holds-barred struggle against evil-doers would be nothing short of generational as well as planetary. From Abizaid's point of view, perhaps a little in-office surgical operation on the nomenclature of Bush's war was, in any case, in order at a time when the Iraq War was going disastrously badly and the Afghan one was starting to look more than a little peaked as well. It was like saying: Forget that "mission accomplished" sprint to victory in 2003 and keep your eyes on the prize. We're in it for the long slog.

When Bush officials and Pentagon brass used "the long war" -- a phrase that never gained much traction outside administration circles and admiring think tanks -- they were (being Americans) predicting the future, not commenting on the past. In their view, the fight against the Islamist terrorists and assorted bad guys who wanted to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and truly bloody the American nose would be decades long.

Tomgram: David Swanson, The Imperial Presidency 2.0

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-10-15T11:09:22-05:00

October 7th marked the eighth anniversary of the Bush administration's invasion of Afghanistan and so of the... well, can we really call it a war?... that won't end, that American commanders there now predict could last for another decade or more. And yet, here's the weird thing: because Congress no longer actually declares war, we officially must be fighting something else entirely. Put another way, we are now heading for the longest undeclared war in U.S. history (depending on how you count up the Vietnam years).

The Obama administration, having doubled down on Afghanistan in March, sending another 21,000 or more U.S. troops as well as extra contingents of civilians, deciding to put a billion dollars into a new embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and build new or expanded embassy and consular facilities, roads, bases, and prisons in Afghanistan, is now considering yet another expansion of the [you fill in the blank], including up to 40,000 -- some reports now say 80,000 -- U.S. troops, more drone air strikes, and more training of Afghan forces. And yet, the U.S. is still operating on the pallid "authorization for use of military force" passed by Congress on September 18, 2001 at the behest of the Bush administration. It only authorizes the president "to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States." No more. War itself -- despite all the fighting, the death, and the money spent -- has never been declared, and in our present era of ever expanding presidential power, it never will be.

In other words, we are at war without being at war. As in every war since World War II ended, we find ourselves once again in a presidential conflict backed by Congress. Although Senator John Kerry's Foreign Relations Committee has held hearings on "how the nation should declare war" (a subject that you might think the Constitution had definitively settled), don't count on the Obama administration to return to Congress for an actual declaration of war as it moves forward in the Af-Pak theater of operations.

George W. Bush is gone, but as David Swanson, TomDispatch regular and author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, makes clear, our increasingly engorged presidency remains essentially untouched, despite the new occupant in the White House. Tom

Presidential Power Grows Will You Love Every Future President?
By David Swanson

Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Some of the new powers that those two stole from Congress, the courts, the states, and us the people are being abused less severely in this new age of Obama; others, more so; but far more crucially, in a pattern followed by recent presidencies, all are being maintained, if not expanded, and thus more firmly cemented into place for future presidents to use. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you are likely to strongly oppose some major decisions of some future presidents. So it shouldn't be hard to envision some pretty undesirable consequences that might flow from presidential power that increasingly approaches the absolute.

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, Do Women Have the Blues?

Tom Engelhardt — 2009-10-13T16:41:00-05:00

Hardly less startling than finding herself with breast cancer was Barbara Ehrenreich's discovery of the "pink ribbon culture," of, that is, the enforced cheerfulness and positive thinking that accompanied it (and the teddy bears and "cornucopia of pink-ribbon-themed breast cancer products" which went with that). Back in 2001, she wrote a fierce, wonderful piece for Harper's Magazine, "Welcome to Cancerland," about her experience, and what to do with anger when it's equated with "negativity," and so ill health. (A fine accompaniment for Ehrenreich on this subject would be Ordinary Life, Kathlyn Conway's memoir of surviving cancer with plenty of anger and not the slightest belief in that disease's transformative possibilities.)

Ehrenreich's work is invariably bracing, to say the least -- in part because she's a superb writer, in part because, as in her bestselling book Nickeled and Dimed and other works like Fear of Falling, she has a way of nailing the essential insecurity of life in a corporate/work world that has no pity to offer (but oodles of "positive thinking"). She's always had a wicked tendency to enter worlds, turn them upside down, and report back, as she did recently for the New York Times in a four-part series on poverty in post-meltdown America.

The rites of positive-thinking and the extravagant promises of better health and well-being which are inseparable from them, she soon discovered, were hardly confined to the world of cancer patients. In the ensuing years, she stumbled upon a multitude of worlds central to our lives -- from megachurches to mega-corporations -- in which an ideology of positive thinking ruled the roost. Of course, until the fall of 2008, we were also living through a gusher of positive thinking about an economy that -- so it was firmly believed -- could never go south.

As this piece is posted, Ehrenreich's newest book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is just being published. A full-scale report on the cult of positive thinking in America, its anti-Calvinist roots and present "successes," it represents Ehrenreich at her best. It's hard to read without wondering whether this country isn't, in many ways, just a giant con game run by spielmeisters, touters, and flim-flam artists. Tom

Are Women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?
By Barbara Ehrenreich

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate's DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: "[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach... [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."