Three Exceptional Facts About The USA
It’s Safe to Be Paranoid in the U.S.
By Tom Engelhardt
September 29, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "TomDispatch"-
Given the cluttered landscape of the last 14
years, can you even faintly remember the moment when the Berlin Wall
came down, the Cold War ended in a stunned silence of shock and
triumph in Washington, Eastern Europe was freed, Germany unified,
and the Soviet Union vanished from the face of the Earth? At that
epochal moment, six centuries of imperial rivalries ended. Only one
mighty power was left.
There hadn’t been a moment like it in historical
memory: a single “hyperpower” with a military force beyond compare
looming over a planet without rivals. Under the circumstances, what
couldn’t Washington hope for? The eternal domination of the Middle
East and all that oil? A planetary Pax Americana for
generations to come? Why not? After all,
not even the Romans and the British at the height of their
empires had experienced a world quite like this one.
Now, leap a quarter of a century to the present
and note the rising tide of paranoia in this country and the litany
of predictions of doom and disaster. Consider the extremity of fear
and gloom in the party of Ronald “It’s
Morning Again in America” Reagan in what are called “debates”
among its presidential candidates, and it’s hard not to imagine that
we aren't at the precipice of the decline and fall of just about
everything. The American Century? So much sawdust on the floor of
history.
If, however, you look at the country that its top
politicians can now hardly mention without defensively wielding the
words “exceptional” or “indispensable,” the truly exceptional thing
is this: as a great power, the United States still stands alone on
planet Earth and Americans can exhibit all the paranoia they want in
remarkable safety and security.
Here, then, are three exceptional facts of our
moment.
Exceptional Fact #1: Failure Is Success,
or the U.S. Remains the Sole Superpower
If you were to isolate the single most striking,
if little discussed, aspect of American foreign policy in the first
15 years of this century, it might be that Washington’s inability to
apply its power successfully just about anywhere confirms that very
power; in other words, failure is a marker of success. Let me
explain.
In the post-9/11 years, American power in various
highly militarized forms has been let loose repeatedly across a vast
swath of the planet from the Chinese border to deep in Africa -- and
nowhere in those 14 years, despite dreams of glory and global
dominion, has the U.S. succeeded in any of its strategic goals.
That should qualify as exceptional in itself. After all, what are
the odds that, in all that time, nothing should turn out as planned
or positively by Washington’s standards? It could not win its war
in Afghanistan; nor its two wars, one ongoing, in Iraq; nor has it
had success in its present one in Syria; it failed to cow Iran; its
intervention in Libya proved catastrophic; its various special ops
and drone campaigns in Yemen have led to chaos in that country; and
so, as novelist Kurt Vonnegut used to say, it goes.
Though there was much talk in the early years of
this century of “nation building” abroad, American power has been
able to build nothing. Its effect everywhere has been purely
disintegrative (unless you count the creation of a terror
“caliphate” in parts of collapsed Syria and Iraq as a
non-disintegrative act). Under the pressure of American power,
there have been
no victories, nor even in any traditional sense successes, while
whole countries have collapsed,
populations have been
uprooted, and peoples put
into flight by the millions. No matter how you measure it,
American power has, in other words, been a tempest of failure.
Where, then, does success lie? The answer:
despite 15 years bouncing from one militaristic disaster to another,
can there be any question that, signs of decline or not, the United
States remains the uncontested sole superpower of planet Earth?
Consider that a testimony to the wealth and strength of the
country. In many ways -- certainly, in military terms (despite the
hue and cry at the recent Republican debates) -- there is no power
that could or would contest it.
If you
listen to the Republicans, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin,
now seems to stand in almost alone for the former Soviet Union. He
and his country are, so Republicans, neocons, and top
military figures agree, hands down the country’s greatest enemy,
a genuine “existential
threat” to the U.S. But looked at in a clear-eyed fashion, this
monstrous (yet strangely familiar) enemy is in many ways a house of
cards. Or put another way, Putin as a leader has managed to do a
remarkable amount (much of it grim indeed, from Ukraine to Syria)
with remarkably little. To compare him, no less his country, to the
former Soviet Union in its heyday is, however, simply a bad joke
(except perhaps when it comes to its still
superpower-sized nuclear arsenal). He is, in fact, the head of
a rickety, embattled energy state at a time when the
price of oil seems to be headed for the sub-basement.
As for China, always assumed to be the coming
superpower of the later twenty-first century,
don’t count on it. As
recent economic
events there have reminded us, it’s a country on the edge.
Despite more than four “to
get rich is glorious” decades and remarkable economic growth, it
remains a relatively poor land whose leadership doesn’t know what
might happen if, as in any capitalist economy, bubbles were to
burst, things went south, and the economy began to tank. Yes, its
military budget, though still modest by Pentagon standards, is
rising and it’s growing
increasingly aggressive in the neighborhood, but its leaders
still show no sign of wanting to garrison the planet or become a
true military competitor to the U.S. in anything but the most local
terms.
And China aside, a quarter-century after the
Soviet Union imploded, there are still no other potential rivals
anywhere on Earth, just strapped regional powers of various sorts
and, of course, a set of interlinked extremist terror outfits,
constantly morphing and growing under the pressure of U.S. bombing
runs, special ops raids, and drone assassination campaigns.
No question about it, if you’re a big fan of
Washington’s exceptional superpowerdom, the news isn’t exactly
cheery. Nothing works the way it did, say, in Iran in 1953 when the
CIA-instigated a coup that overthrew a democratically elected
government and put its own man on the “Peacock Throne.” There, it
took 26 years for blowback to occur and the Shah to flee. In 2015,
it seems to take only 26 days or maybe 26 minutes.
Still, the good news is that, however crippled
U.S. power may be in practice, like the cheese of nursery rhyme
fame, it still stands alone. How exceptional is that?
Exceptional Fact #2: Americans Are
Actually Safe and Secure
Think of exceptional fact two as the
don’t-believe-your-ears one. In the post-9/11 era, a national
security and
global surveillance state of historic proportions has been built
and funded on one proposition: that without its
17 intelligence agencies, the Homeland Security Department, and
the military, as well as a spreading penumbra of secrecy and
classification (that is, its ability not to let citizens know
much of anything about what’s being done in their name), the
American people would be in almost unimaginable danger from a single
phenomenon, “terrorism” (with the adjective “Muslim” or “Islamic”
implied if not tacked on).
With its talk over the years of sleeper cells,
lone wolves, and plots to kill Americans, this message has been a
constant of our world. As the
handcuffing and arrest of a ninth grader in Irving, Texas, for
bringing a clock he cobbled together to school shows, it’s now in
the American bloodstream. It’s also provided the largely
unquestioned rationale for the growth of secretive agencies of every
sort, for the careers of a vast range of top officials, for the
extraordinary powers granted to what is increasingly a
secretive state within a state (as the U.S. military now has a
secret military of ever expanding proportions in its midst).
Were it to be put in doubt, that state and much else might be put in
doubt, too. A great deal depends on news of and alarms about endless
possible terror plots, which often turn out to have been promoted or
instigated by
FBI informants.
The message manifests itself in a kind of hysteria
over possible future plots, claims (largely
unsubstantiated or
untrue) of past ones that were broken up by agencies of the
national security state, and endless stories about how the Islamic
State is using the Internet to rouse individuals in this country to
commit mayhem here.
And yet -- exceptional fact two -- despite 9/11,
the record clearly indicates that Americans are in next to no
danger. If you’re living in Baghdad, the possibility of terror
attacks couldn’t be more real or horrific. If you’re living in
Irving, Texas, Toledo, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or even New
York City, they are close to nil. A country bounded by two oceans
and friendly neighbors remains a formula for security, with no
credit whatsoever to the national security state. In few places on
the planet is anyone likelier to be safer when it comes to Islamic
terror attacks than this one. It is, of course, quite true that the
U.S. has helped spread insecurity and fear in significant areas of
the world. It is also true that even Europe is no longer untouched
by that insecurity and by violence. In this way, too, it could be
said that the United States stands alone (not that you would know it
living inside the American
terrordome).
Let me, then, offer anyone reading this a
practical guarantee. You will not be killed in the
continental United States by an Islamic terrorist or someone in
sympathy with the Islamic State -- or rather your chances of that
happening are infinitesimally small. The odds of almost anything
else disastrous happening to you, no matter how obscure, is at least
as great, and in almost every case staggeringly greater, including
being
crushed beneath falling furniture,
shot by a tot who has found a stray loaded weapon, murdered in a
mass killing incident (not by a terrorist), struck by
lightning (or done in by
weather events of almost any sort), knocked off by food
poisoning, or killed in
your own car.
As has always been true -- the British burning of
Washington in 1814, Pearl Harbor in 1941, and 9/11 being the
exceptions -- the United States has been a remarkably protected
place (except, of course, when it came to internal strife of various
sorts). That sense of invulnerability explains why the 9/11 attacks
had an impact beyond compare, and why it was so easy to build a vast
structure meant to oversee the “homeland” in all sorts of
historically intrusive ways.
The other side of this -- consider it exceptional
fact two-and-a-half -- is that, at this point, American taxpayers
have invested
trillions of dollars in what can only be called a scam.
Exceptional Fact #3: A Culture of
Victimhood Is Developing Among the Inhabitants of the Planet’s Sole
Superpower
Given exceptional facts one and two, what could be
more exceptional than significant numbers of Americans living in a
fear-based culture of victimhood laced with paranoia and extremism
that seems to have captured one of the two major political parties?
In it, Americans are always at the mercy of the
evil doers everywhere, including those distinctly in our midst with
mayhem in mind. Our
military is an
underfinanced wreck, our Navy practically a set of dinghies, a
Muslim is even in the White House, a malign climate-change movement
is eager to destroy capitalism as we know it, women’s bodies are
enough of a danger to shut the government down, immigrants are
potential
terrorists or
rapists, and so on and so forth through a litany of strangely
woven fantasies and factoids.
This mood was
highlighted in the media recently after a man at a Donald Trump
rally in New Hampshire in the wake of the second Republican debate
rose in a question period and said, “We have a problem in this
country, it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one
-- you know he’s not even an American. But anyway, we have training
camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question, when
can we get rid of them?” Media coverage generally focused on the
presidential or “birther” part of the man’s statement, ignoring
those fantasy “training camps” for terrorists assumedly here in the
USA. Largely ignored as well were the two other audience members
called on by Trump who were no less bizarre. The first, a man,
said, “I applaud the gentleman who stood and said Obama is a Muslim
born abroad and about the military camps, everyone knows that.”
(“Right,” Trump responded and moved on.)
The second, a woman, according to the Hill,
“told him that there is a ‘new holocaust’ in New Hampshire and that
people are being loaded into boxcars and beheaded by members of the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ‘I just wanted you to know that.’”
Consider it a small, off-center measure of the
sense of
fear, persecution, and fantasy now embedded in what’s often
referred to as the Republican “base.” Such paranoia is, of course,
nothing new in this country, particularly in moments of economic
stress. Still, given the years of fear mongering since 9/11 and the
building up of a right-wing media universe that’s both echo chamber
and megaphone, this is dangerous stuff. And we’re not talking about
just a weird set of fringe lunatics here. After all, as the
Washington Post
reported recently, “54 percent of Trump supporters and some 43
percent of Republicans believe that Obama is a Muslim.”
In this context, while the U.S. military pursues
its failing wars, interventions, and raids abroad, while the
national security state develops ever more mechanisms for snooping,
surveilling, and controlling populaces at home (as in the recent
essentially unprecedented security lockdowns of major American
cities “for” the Pope), many of the country’s citizens are
increasingly living inside a fact-challenged fantasy of a country, a
victimized superpower. Boogiemen lurk around every corner, as do
high crimes and dark conspiracies, and any sense of responsibility
for what the U.S. has done in the world in these last years is
missing in action.
In the meantime, we live on an increasingly
disturbed planet in which the basics of
drought,
fire and
flood,
melting and freezing, are gaining new meaning, in which power
seems not to be expressing or displaying itself in the normal,
reasonably predictable ways. The sun may be setting, albeit slowly
indeed, on American imperial power, but perhaps it is also setting
on imperial power as we’ve known it. And if so, that would truly be
exceptional.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The
United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War,
The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation
Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security
State in a Single-Superpower World.
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Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt