Judgment
Day for the National Security State
The Coronavirus and the Real Threats to American
Safety and Freedom
By Andrew Bacevich
March 28, 2020
"Information
Clearing House"
- Americans are facing “A Spring Unlike Any
Before.” So warned a front-page headline in the
March 13th New York Times.
That
headline, however hyperbolic, was all too apt. The
coming of spring has always promised relief from the
discomforts of winter. Yet, far too often, it also
brings its own calamities and afflictions.
According to
the poet T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month.”
Yet while April has certainly delivered its share of
cataclysms,
March and
May haven’t lagged
far behind. In fact, cruelty has seldom been a
respecter of seasons. The infamous
influenza epidemic of 1918,
frequently cited as a possible
analogue to our
current crisis, began in the spring of that year,
but lasted well into 1919.
That
said, something about the coronavirus pandemic does
seem to set this particular spring apart. At one
level, that something is the collective panic now
sweeping virtually the entire country. President
Trump’s grotesque ineptitude and tone-deafness have
only fed that panic. And in their eagerness to hold
Trump himself responsible for the pandemic, as if he
were the bat
that first transmitted the disease to a human being,
his critics magnify further a growing sense of
events spinning out of control.
Yet to heap
the blame for this crisis on Trump alone (though he
certainly deserves plenty of blame) is to miss its
deeper significance. Deferred for far too long,
Judgment Day may at long last have arrived for the
national security state.
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Origins of
a Colossus
That state
within a state’s origins date from the early days of
the Cold War. Its ostensible purpose has been to
keep Americans safe and so, by extension, to
guarantee our freedoms. From the 1950s through the
1980s, keeping us safe provided a seemingly adequate
justification for maintaining a sprawling military
establishment along with a panoply of “intelligence”
agencies -- the CIA, the DIA, the NRO, the NSA --
all engaged in secret activities hidden from public
view. From time to time, the scope, prerogatives,
and actions of that conglomeration of agencies
attracted brief critical attention -- the Cuban Bay
of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Vietnam War of the 1960s
and early 1970s, and the Iran-Contra affair during
the presidency of Ronald Reagan being prime
examples. Yet at no time did such failures come
anywhere close to jeopardizing its existence.
Indeed,
even when the implosion of the Soviet Union and the
end of the Cold War removed the original
justification for its creation, the entire apparatus
persisted. With the Soviet Empire gone, Russia in a
state of disarray, and communism having lost its
appeal as an alternative to democratic capitalism,
the managers of the national security state wasted
no time in identifying new threats and new missions.
The new
threats included autocrats like Panama’s Manuel
Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, once deemed
valuable American assets, but now, their usefulness
gone, classified as dangers to be eliminated.
Prominent among the new missions was a sudden urge
to repair broken places like the Balkans, Haiti, and
Somalia, with American power deployed under the
aegis of “humanitarian intervention” and pursuant to
a “responsibility to protect.” In this way, in the
first decade of the post-Cold War era, the national
security state kept itself busy. While the results
achieved, to put it politely, were mixed at best,
the costs incurred appeared tolerable. In sum, the
entire apparatus remained impervious to serious
scrutiny.
During that decade, however, both the organs of
national security and the American public began
taking increased notice of what was called
“anti-American terrorism” -- and not without reason.
In 1993, Islamic fundamentalists detonated a bomb in
a parking garage of New York’s World
Trade Center. In
1996, terrorists
obliterated an
apartment building used to house U.S. military
personnel in Saudi Arabia. Two years later, the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown
up and, in 2000,
suicide bombers nearly sank the
USS Cole, a Navy destroyer making a port
call in Aden at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. To
each of these increasingly brazen attacks, all
occurring during the administration of President
Bill Clinton, the national security state responded ineffectually.
Then, of
course, came September 11, 2001. Orchestrated by
Osama bin Laden and carried out by 19 suicidal
al-Qaeda operatives, this act of mass murder
inflicted incalculable harm on the United States. In
its wake, it became common to say that “9/11 changed
everything.”
In
fact, however, remarkably little changed. Despite
its 17 intelligence agencies, the national security
state failed utterly to anticipate and thwart that
devastating attack on the nation’s political and
financial capitals. Yet apart from minor adjustments
-- primarily expanding surveillance efforts at home
and abroad -- those outfits mostly kept doing what
they had been doing, even as their leaders evaded
accountability. After Pearl Harbor, at least, one
admiral and one general were fired.
After 9/11, no one lost his or her job. At the upper
echelons of the national security state, the wagons
were circled and a consensus quickly formed: no one
had screwed up.
Once
President George W. Bush identified an “Axis
of Evil” (Iraq,
Iran, and North Korea), three nations that had had
nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, as
the primary target for his administration’s “Global
War on Terrorism,” it became clear that no wholesale
reevaluation of national security policy was going
to occur. The Pentagon and the Intelligence
Community, along with their sprawling support
network of profit-minded contractors, could breathe
easy. All of them would get ever more money. That
went without saying. Meanwhile, the underlying
premise of U.S. policy since the immediate aftermath
of World War II -- that projecting hard power
globally would keep Americans safe -- remained
sacrosanct.
Viewed from
this perspective, the sequence of events that
followed was probably overdetermined. In late 2001,
U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan, overthrew the
Taliban regime, and set out to install a political
order more agreeable to Washington. In early 2003,
with the mission in Afghanistan still anything but
complete, U.S. forces set out to do the same in
Iraq. Both of those undertakings have dragged on, in
one fashion or another, without coming remotely
close to success. Today, the military undertaking
launched in 2001 continues, even if it no longer has
a name or an agreed-upon purpose.
Nonetheless, at the upper echelons of the national
security state, the consensus forged after 9/11
remains firmly in place: no one screws up. In
Washington, the conviction that projecting hard
power keeps Americans safe likewise remains
sacrosanct.
In
the nearly two decades since 9/11, willingness to
challenge this paradigm has rarely extended beyond
non-conforming publications like TomDispatch.
Until Donald Trump came along, rare was the
ambitious politician of either political party who
dared say aloud what Trump himself has repeatedly
said -- that, as he calls them, the “ridiculous
endless wars”
launched in response to 9/11 represent the height of
folly.
Astonishingly enough, within the political
establishment that point has still not sunk in. So,
in 2020, as in 2016, the likely Democratic nominee
for president will be someone who
vigorously supported the
2003 invasion of Iraq. Imagine, if you will,
Democrats in 1880 nominating not
a former union general (as they did) but a former
confederate who, 20 years before, had advocated
secession. Back then, some sins were unforgivable.
Today, politicians of both parties practice
self-absolution and get away with it.
The
Real Threat
Note,
however, the parallel narrative that has unfolded
alongside those post-9/11 wars. Taken seriously,
that narrative exposes the utter irrelevance of the
national security state as currently
constituted. The coronavirus pandemic will doubtless
prove to be a significant learning experience. Here
is one lesson that Americans cannot afford to
overlook.
Presidents now routinely request and Congress
routinely appropriates more
than a trillion dollars annually
to satisfy the national security state’s supposed
needs. Even so, Americans today do not feel safe
and, to a degree without precedent, they are being
denied the exercise of basic everyday freedoms.
Judged by this standard, the apparatus created to
keep them safe and free has failed. In the face of a
pandemic, nature’s version of an act of true terror,
that failure, the consequences of which Americans
will suffer through for months to come, should be
seen as definitive.
But wait,
some will object: Don’t we find ourselves in
uncharted waters? Is this really the moment to rush
to judgment? In fact, judgment is long overdue.
While
the menace posed by the coronavirus may differ in
scope, it does not differ substantively from the
myriad other perils that Americans have endured
since the national security state wandered off on
its quixotic quest to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq
and purge the planet of terrorists. Since 9/11, a partial
roster of those
perils would include: Hurricane Katrina (2005),
Hurricane Sandy (2012), Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and
Maria (2017), and massive wildfires that have
devastated vast stretches of the West Coast on
virtually an annual basis. The cumulative cost of
such events exceeds a half-trillion dollars.
Together, they have taken the lives of several
thousand more people than were lost in the 2001
attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Earlier generations might have written all of these
off as acts of God. Today, we know better. As with
blaming Trump, blaming God won’t do. Human
activities, ranging from the hubristic
reengineering of
rivers like the Mississippi to the effects of
climate change stemming from the use of fossil
fuels, have substantially exacerbated such “natural”
catastrophes.
And unlike
faraway autocrats or terrorist organizations, such
phenomena, from extreme-weather events to pandemics,
directly and immediately threaten the safety and
wellbeing of the American people. Don’t tell the
Central Intelligence Agency or the Joint Chiefs of
Staff but the principal threats to our collective
wellbeing are right here where we live.
Apart
from modest belated
efforts at
mitigation, the existing national security state is
about as pertinent to addressing such threats as
President Trump’s cheery
expectations that
the coronavirus will simply evaporate once warmer
weather appears. Terror has indeed arrived on our
shores and it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or
ISIS or Iranian-backed militias. Americans are
terrorized because it has now become apparent that
our government, whether out of negligence or
stupidity, has left them exposed to dangers that
truly put life and liberty at risk. As it happens,
all these years in which the national security state
has been preoccupied with projecting hard power
abroad have left us naked and vulnerable right here
at home.
Protecting
Americans where they live ought to be the
national security priority of our time. The existing
national security state is incapable of fulfilling
that imperative, while its leaders, fixated on
waging distant wars, have yet to even accept that
they have a responsibility to do so.
Worst of
all, even in this election year, no one on the
national political scene appears to recognize the
danger now fully at hand.
Andrew
Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular,
is president of the Quincy
Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
His new book is The
Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold
War Victory.
Follow
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the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new
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Frostlands,
Beverly Gologorsky's novel
Every Body Has a Story,
and Tom Engelhardt's
A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and
Decline of U.S. Global Power
and John Dower's
The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II.
Copyright
2020 Andrew Bacevich
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