Hey everybody, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, so our next guest on the show today is the great Tom Englehart, aka Tom Dispatch.
Find his website at tomdispatch.com.
Of course we feature almost everything he writes at original.antiwar.com slash Englehart.
And what he often does is, I'm sure many of you are aware, he'll write a great little introduction to another article that one of his regular writers has come up with that makes a great introduction, sort of a two-part thing, so we keep all different article archives under his name there at original.antiwar.com slash Englehart.
And now he's got a new book, and I think it's hitting the shelves this week.
It's called The American Way of War, How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, and it's a hell of a triumph here.
Great work, Tom, and welcome back to the show.
Thanks so much, Scott.
I'm really happy to have you on here, and geez, there's so much in this book to go over, I'm not even quite sure where to begin, but I guess, well, I want to start with something, and pardon me, audience members, for being a little bit redundant here, but this is something that you really touch on in the book a lot, and it's something I was just complaining about in the last segment there, is that America has really kind of grown into this character of world's policeman.
That's our legacy to the world right now, is armed SWAT, you know, ATF agent or something, rather than the Statue of Liberty and the light and the shining city on the hill and all those things that supposedly was our legacy.
You know, this is completely true, and true as well, is the fact that, you know, most Americans really don't know it.
You know, that is the full impact of how we are in the world escapes most Americans.
I mean, I would say that we're, and I've written about this before, we're in a state of American denial.
Now, obviously, if somebody in your family, or you are in the military, or you're a military family, that tiny percentage of professionals who are out there, you're traveling the bases that we have all over the world, and you know about it.
But if you're living in the United States, for instance, just on the issue of bases, which is part of the American way of war, we garrison the world in a way that no one in history ever has.
I think the British had, I don't remember exactly, but maybe 40 bases around the world.
The Romans, at the height of the Roman Empire, 37 or 38, but that was a lot.
I mean, you know, reasonable bases.
We have hundreds of bases all over the world.
Historically, there's never been anything like it.
And yet, unless, it hardly makes news in the United States, bases make news if your local base, if the Pentagon threatens to close down your local base, then people go crazy.
But otherwise, we have very little sense of the kind of, the way we occupy the world, what we put into our military, where we are, and what we're doing.
I mean, really.
All right, now, pardon me, before we continue with that, set me straight on the date of publication on this brand new book of yours.
The book, it's available at Amazon right now, and it should be in bookstores this week.
Okay, great.
Yeah, so it's, I saw it was on pre-order the other day, but so today's the day, right?
You can order it today.
It's totally orderable.
Absolutely.
Great.
And everyone, please go check that out.
It's The American Way of War, How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.
If you're in the chat room, I think they put up a link to the Amazon.com site there.
Of course, we'll have a link to it in the summary at antiwar.com slash radio for the podcast, the archive of this interview later on.
But yeah, you say in the book here, how to garrison the planet and not even notice.
How exactly does that happen?
How can it be that the American people don't realize how many bases we have around the world?
The fact that the whole, you know, dominant unipolar moment and all that, no near peer competitors and these things, seems like some of this would have seeped through, right?
You would think so.
And obviously, some of it has.
But you know, this week, I'm going to be writing about our newest form, our newest wonder weapon, which is the drone, the pilotless aircraft that we use, particularly in the Pakistani borderlands.
We were with the CIA's waging a constant war with them.
And what's striking, when I was thinking about that and writing about it, I was thinking, you know, one of the striking things about drone warfare is one side of war has now been removed from the battlefield.
I mean, that is, our so-called pilots are really sitting seven or eight thousand miles away, say, in Creech Air Base outside north of Las Vegas or elsewhere in the United States.
And it's a rather striking form of war in which only one side is on the battlefield, so to speak.
The other side is the drone, controlled from elsewhere.
But I was thinking how similar that was symbolically in some ways to, you know, at a larger level, to the way Americans fight war now, which is in a funny way, we send this professional army out.
It's heavily privatized, that's happened during the Bush years, you know, so there's an aspect of it that's really a for-profit mercenary military.
That is, when you get on the Afghan battlefield, I think there's at least one and maybe two, you know, private contractors for every soldier that's out there.
And Americans, there being no draft, no citizen's army, nothing like that, Americans basically almost as if, you know, like the drone pilot, you know, they basically go about their business.
We're unbelievably detached from that world.
Now, out there, most, you know, in the world, most people have a much stronger sense of exactly what we're doing.
But here, we're kind of, it's kind of absent.
And with it, we have very little sense of how much of our wealth we poured into the Pentagon, weaponry, and so on and so forth.
I mean, it's startling.
You know, when you think about it, I mean, we're now fighting, you know, they usually say that the Afghan and Iraq wars have now cost about a trillion dollars.
And that's just, that's a very minimal estimate, because it doesn't include future costs.
It doesn't include costs of taking care of the wounded, of vets, or anything else, doesn't include any of the debt that we've incurred over it, etc.
But we may end up, before we're done, in Iraq and Afghanistan with $2 trillion wars.
Now, just imagine what that money might have meant here.
Yeah.
Well, of course, Joe Stiglitz, which he won a Nobel Prize for his economics, so that might mean he doesn't have any idea what he's talking about.
Right, right, right.
He said it was nearing $5 trillion, this operation, in long-term costs.
He said, sooner or later, we would, it would be in the $45 trillion range, our wars.
And, of course, the striking thing that goes with it, Scott, is they, in essence, never end.
Unlike wars of the past, all sense of victory, in fact, I think, I almost think at this point that a victory, if there were ever a victory, it would kind of get in the way of the American style of warfare.
I mean, but basically, our wars no longer result in victory, they just go on and on and on.
It's funny, because George Orwell's book, 1984, has a very profound legacy in this society.
You hear the term Orwellian and Big Brother and all these things all the time, and I remember seeing a thing years ago that said, after the Fellowship of the Ring, it's the second most popular British published book in American history.
It's the kind of thing that virtually everybody reads in high school or right around that age or something.
It seems like everybody forgets that the whole scam in 1984 is that the world is divided in three and it's constantly at war.
And there's the scene when O'Brien, the torturer, is letting Winston Smith in on the scam and gives him Goldstein's book about how it really works before he tortures him.
And in there, he says, well, see, the whole purpose of the war is to take all the excess wealth of the people and either make a floating fortress out of it, that is, sink it into the sea, or make rockets out of it, that is, blast their excess wealth off into space, to keep them from having the ability to better themselves and never challenge the authority of the party.
That was the name of the whole game in that book, Tom, and here we are, we're just living it out like it's our game plan, instead of what to never let happen.
What makes it even more interesting is there aren't even the three giant states, there's just one.
Versus everyone else.
I was just thinking about this because one of the strange things of the post-Cold War era is, for more than a hundred years before then, there was an ongoing arms race, which kind of drove war development.
I mean, it started with the dreadnoughts, and the weird thing is, after the Cold War, there weren't two powers or three powers in an arms race anymore, there was just us.
But the arms race didn't end.
Yeah, well, Goldstein certainly lives on, only now he's a Muslim.
All right, everybody, hang tight, we're talking with Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com on anti-war radio.
The book is called The American Way of War.
Go to Amazon.com today.
Right now, it's available.
You can interact with other LRN listeners on our message board at forum.lrn.fm.
That's forum.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.fm, and we're talking with Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com and original.antiwar.com.
His brand new book is called The American Way of War, How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, and a major piece of this book is about garrisoning the planet and America's empire of bases, somewhere around 1,000 bases.
I guess it depends on how you count them, all over the planet Earth.
As we were just discussing, there is no Eurasia and East Asia major powers to compete with.
It's just us versus Goldstein, and we got the run of the whole rest of the planet, I guess, Tom.
Now, I want to ask you this.
In David Vine's book, Island of Shame, about Diego Garcia, he has a great section about American empire in there.
It should be at the second to the top of everybody's list here.
One of the things he talks about in there is how the Pentagon realizes that the cost of occupying everybody's local county can be catastrophic for the American people.
What they would rather do, or at least they're looking to a future when they might close down all the lily pad bases all throughout the Caspian region and Africa and Eurasia, and just stick to threatening the whole world from Guam and Diego Garcia.
We can run the world from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, they say.
I don't see that happening by 2015, actually, particularly since ...
I mean, they are like little aircraft carriers.
You would have to add into this, if we stay there, Okinawa, which has, what, 36 or 37 American ...
That tiny Japanese island has 36 or 37 American bases on it.
It's like a little American Raj.
But right now, I mean, if you just take Afghanistan, Nick Turse, who writes for Tom Dispatch, did some research on Afghanistan and found out that in the wake of the Obama surge, which followed the Bush surge, basically, in Afghanistan, we now have upwards of 400 bases or sites from micro-combat sites to Bagram Air Base, to these huge, and Kandahar Airfield, these huge bases.
I mean, this is 400 things that we've constructed in this distant country over endlessly long supply lines, bringing in almost everything we need to construct the bases.
I mean, it's a rather extraordinary ...
I mean, if you looked at it just as a feat, it's a rather extraordinary feat.
But on the other hand, and we did the same thing in Iraq, although those bases, some of them, we're now divesting ourselves of, but we had 300 bases, small to large, in Iraq, and we still, of course, have all the large ones.
And since I think ...
I mean, if you look at what the Pentagon's thinking about, they clearly are thinking of 30,000 troops in Iraq in 2013, 2014, something like that.
You know, 2015, I don't see us simply back on Diego Garcia.
I mean, maybe someday, because we know that the sun sets on every empire, so every empire has to retreat sooner or later.
But 2015, I think Vine is a very interesting guy as an optimist.
Well, you know, it's funny, you talk about in the book, and this is the kind of thing, you know, I'm a libertarian, I'm kind of a Ron Paul-ian on economics and all that, and I think his view is that this empire's end that you're talking about, perhaps a lot like the end of the Soviet Union is coming sooner rather than later.
But it reminds me of the part in your book where you talk about the American embassy in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and you reprint the poem of Ozymandias, ruler of all that I survey, and all that.
Tell them that story, Tom, I love it.
Well, you know, they really shouldn't be called embassies.
The thing we built in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone is a fortified, basically a fortified citadel of an American mall.
It's on 104 acres.
I mean, we're talking about two-thirds of the Washington Mall in size, or they often say it's the size of Vatican City, 21 buildings.
It now has a staff, it has 1,800 private guards at this point, it has a staff of 1,000 plus.
I mean, this is not by any, it's the largest embassy in the world, and it shouldn't be called an embassy.
I mean, Jonathan Friedland, a British writer, called it a base.
I call it the mothership that just landed in the region.
It's kind of a regional, a vast regional command post for one part of the oil heartlands of the planet, and the interesting thing is, this was done by the Bush people.
I mean, they built it, and I must admit, at the time, when I saw it going up, I thought it was a particular sign of a certain kind of madness of the Bush administration.
And by the way, everybody, it was Tom that broke the story and went and found the pictures of the proposals from the contractors for the place, with all its swimming pools and electric fences and everything else, and we published it at antiwar.com.
I was actually cleaning up my files on my home computer last night and found your folder of embassy photos.
That was you, Tom.
It was actually drawings by the architect, the Kansas City architect of this thing, and it was declared by the State Department a security breach.
When I, I mean, they had them on their website, so I just sent people to the website to take a look.
It was declared a security breach, they had to pull them down, I mean, it was kind of a funny little thing.
Did I say they were on my home computer?
I meant they're on antiwar.com servers, protected by lawyers.
Thank God antiwar.com still has them, I know.
But the interesting thing is, in the Obama period, the Obama administration has decided to build the equivalent of the Baghdad embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Another close to billion-dollar structure, you know, three-quarters of a billion-dollar structure, another vast command post at the other side of those oil lands, and, you know, I think it's just, these are strikingly gargantuan things.
What are the embassies to?
I mean, obviously they're not.
They're spy and military bases, basically.
Hey, Tom, what do you think is the current influence of Bill Kristol and the neoconservative crew?
I'm not sure if you saw this one in the Weekly Standard the other day that said, we gotta bomb Iran right now, but don't worry, they wouldn't dare fight back.
But if we don't bomb them, they'll fight us.
If we do bomb them, they won't.
Actually, I, you know, on the bombing of Iran, I tend to think, you know, this is a bug of error of both the left and the right, and I mean, you get these constant alarms about it.
I don't, I personally don't think it's gonna happen.
I mean, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came into office, in his confirmation hearings, he laid out a nightmare scenario.
It wouldn't, like, maybe be the scenario we'd lay out, but it was a nightmare scenario of what it would mean to attack Iran.
I think, in fact, that given, with two wars going on, they are so overstretched, I think there's no possibility, personally, that the United States is gonna actually attack Iran, despite the fact that we edge up to it and threaten this constantly.
Now, the Israelis are another story, and that's a complicated story in itself, but I don't expect that, and I actually don't think that, you know, they're a factor in Washington, and I think the Obama administration thinks about pressure from various places, but I don't think they actually are a major factor in the Obama administration.
And I don't think we're gonna take Iran, no.
Not even by air, nuclear.
Well, I sure hope that's right.
I remember Zbigniew Brzezinski telling the Senate that, look, if you do this, you'll be occupying all the land between Israel and India here at some point.
I mean, this is too much, and really, I guess the arc of crisis is supposed to kind of arc, that's why it's an arc, right?
It goes, all the land we're supposed to occupy is that Caspian Basin region and over into Afghanistan north of Iran.
We're just supposed to have a puppet Shah there, not a war there.
I actually think that the Obama administration is in a state of disarray in its wars, and particularly in Afghanistan.
I think they have more than they can deal with.
And unlike the Bush people, I think that they don't have a strong sense of what they're doing.
I mean, the Bush people, they were visionaries in a sense.
They were mad visionaries in the sense that they were really wrong, but they had a geostrategic vision of the world, how energy flowed, et cetera, et cetera.
They had a deep belief in what the U.S. military could do above all else.
They were military fundamentalists in that way.
And I mean, they were wrong, but this is the way they looked at the world.
This administration, I don't think, has a vision like this.
I think they're managers of a set of wars and military developments that have a kind of momentum of their own.
And I don't think, I think if anything, they are in a state of strategic confusion, particularly in the area around Afghanistan.
I mean, counterinsurgency is a tactic, it's not a strategy.
And strategically, I think, I think they're a mess.
I don't think, I think one of their problems with Iran is that they don't actually have that cudgel, and the Iranians know it.
Now, when the empire does fall apart, and which will be the result really of the failure of the currency, probably, when that does happen, how likely do you think it's going to be that Americans are going to blame the failure on that stab in the back?
Ah, jeez, now we gotta go.
We gotta go.
I think it's really a possibility.
It certainly worries me, and it's been great being here, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, we'll do it again soon.
Any old time.
Sorry, I'm terrible about these skews, y'all.
I'm trying.
Antiwar Radio, we'll be back.
This is Tom Angler, TomDispatch.com.
The American Way of War.
