How the Pentagon Counts Washington Coups
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008) . This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it.? You know, the irresistible bit that doesn't fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.?
So it was, undoubtedly, with?New York Times?reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he?stumbled?through a challenge-filled,?error-prone?two-day trip to Pakistan.? Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole?pointed out, managed to signal "that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out."
In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller's parting January 23rd piece on the trip:?
All three concerned nuclear politics, "oops" moments, and Washington.? The second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by nuking New York City.? It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight (though it's worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11).?
The third was the Secretary of Defense's top pick, Seven Days in May, which came with this tagline: "You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome seven days in your life!"? In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d'?tat against a dovish president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union.? The plot is uncovered and defused by a Marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas.? ("I'm suggesting, Mr. President, there's a military plot to take over the government, and it may occur sometime this coming Sunday...")
These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time.? Now, one of the films is iconic and the other two clunky hoots.? All three would make a perfect film festival for a Secretary of Defense with 14 hours to spare.? Just the sort of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you were headed for a "homeland" where no one had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you.? After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is entertainingly outr? exactly because, in the Washington of 2010, such a thought is ludicrous.? After all, every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.?
Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.?
After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark.? He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen.? He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.? ??
Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest "budget outlook" indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight.? Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn't even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).
Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count.? Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington.? Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.
To put just the president's domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: ?If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes.? The president's team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years.? On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion.? (And keep in mind that that figure doesn't include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.)? That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending.? American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country's citizens with "safety."? That's what seven days in January really means.
Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police.? Forget, for a moment, all the obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it's ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) or other mercenary private contracting companies.? Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever.?
Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the Secretary of Defense's movie tastes:? do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May from Netflix.? Unlike Star Trek, James Bond, Bewitched, and other sixties "classics," Seven Days isn't likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the Marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there's little left to save -- and every week is the Pentagon's week in Washington.
By Tom Engelhardt:
Reprinted with permission fromTomDispatch.
Copyright 2010 CBS. All rights reserved. Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it.? You know, the irresistible bit that doesn't fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.?
So it was, undoubtedly, with?New York Times?reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he?stumbled?through a challenge-filled,?error-prone?two-day trip to Pakistan.? Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole?pointed out, managed to signal "that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out."
In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller's parting January 23rd piece on the trip:?
Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country's 'trust deficit' with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.
His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching 'Seven Days in May,' the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States."
Just in case you've forgotten, three major cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after the Cuban Missile crisis -- of which only Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's classic vision of the end of the world, American-style, is much remembered today.? ("I don't say we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed.")?
All three concerned nuclear politics, "oops" moments, and Washington.? The second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by nuking New York City.? It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight (though it's worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11).?
The third was the Secretary of Defense's top pick, Seven Days in May, which came with this tagline: "You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome seven days in your life!"? In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d'?tat against a dovish president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union.? The plot is uncovered and defused by a Marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas.? ("I'm suggesting, Mr. President, there's a military plot to take over the government, and it may occur sometime this coming Sunday...")
These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time.? Now, one of the films is iconic and the other two clunky hoots.? All three would make a perfect film festival for a Secretary of Defense with 14 hours to spare.? Just the sort of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you were headed for a "homeland" where no one had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you.? After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is entertainingly outr? exactly because, in the Washington of 2010, such a thought is ludicrous.? After all, every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.?
Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.?
After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark.? He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen.? He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.? ??
Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest "budget outlook" indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight.? Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn't even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).
Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count.? Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington.? Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.
To put just the president's domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: ?If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes.? The president's team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years.? On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion.? (And keep in mind that that figure doesn't include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.)? That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending.? American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country's citizens with "safety."? That's what seven days in January really means.
Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police.? Forget, for a moment, all the obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it's ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) or other mercenary private contracting companies.? Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever.?
Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the Secretary of Defense's movie tastes:? do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May from Netflix.? Unlike Star Trek, James Bond, Bewitched, and other sixties "classics," Seven Days isn't likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the Marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there's little left to save -- and every week is the Pentagon's week in Washington.
By Tom Engelhardt:
Reprinted with permission from
There's not much hope....
Looking back to Obama?s most dramatic moment in his SOTU address, his supposed ?calling out? of the Supreme Court decision that he characterized to Americans thusly:
?With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests ?- including foreign corporations ?- to spend without limit in our elections. (Applause.) I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.? (Applause.) [From the NYT]
Only two conclusions can be made about Obama?s understanding and message regarding the domination by corporatist Empire of our faded democracy:
1. That Obama does not understand, even to the extent that JFK did 48 years ago, Ike did 50 years ago, and FDR did over 75 years ago, that a hidden ruling-elite (?royalist?) corporate/financial/militarist Empire cabal was attempting to circumvent his democratic authority and malevolently control the United States and its political-economic and military power, in an extrajudicial an anti-democratically guileful manner for its own purposes.
2. That Obama well understood the above ?Secret Teams?? actions and not only did NOT focus his ire at the actual Empire attacking the Constituional democracy he had sworn to defend, but that he was a willing propagandist of such Global Empire in seeding crude, xenophobic, and militant ?nationalism? and deflecting the angst of the American public at the false flag/ false target of only ?foreign corporations? and ?powerful foreign entities?.
Assuming the second ---- that Obama is not na?ve ---- one is left wondering, for what reason would Obama underplay, and almost ignore, the far more pervasive impact of a homeland based ruling-elite cabal and corporate/financial/militarist Empire that had amassed a 75 year history of dirty tricks, circumvention of democracy, oppression of liberties, and violently pre-emptive military attacks on the world stage (which had been clearly recognized and ?called out? by at least four former U.S. presidents), and instead turn this obvious basis for compelling criticism, fascist overreach, and arrogant imperialism instead upon the countries and oil territories upon which this 20th century American Empire had been exerting its crimes for the last half century?
The only reason that I can think of is that Obama is serving as a convenient and effective handmaiden to the evolving Global corporate/financial/militarist Empire which aims to use the last efforts of its American captive state to attack portions of the world not under its current control, and if America (and its people) are mortally damaged by such misdirected economic, financial, and military actions to merely transfer the accumulated wealth and power of the Empire to a broader Global stage.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
That was the mid-20th century boffo movie which played out from the time of getting JFK out of the way, and in which film, the leading stars were; corporations, banks, MSM, the MIC, the CIA, the "Secret Team", the 'shadow government', the "Power-elite", and the two-party 'Vichy' sham of democracy, all of which were highly efficient in bringing about the guileful gutting of any approximation to a democratic Republic, and replacing it with a neo-fascist American Empire.
But that was only the late 20th century hit movie --- and now is the time of moving beyond the theatrical success of Luce's 'American Century' and the blockbuster film "American Empire" --- now the next Hollywood block-buster in production is "Global Empire".
Now in the 21st century the sequel to the previously unmentioned hit, ?American Empire?, is the new, more exciting, more dramatic, block-buster with fantastic special effects (and secret tricks) the star-studded ?Global Empire? ---- brought to you be the same corporate/financial/militarist Empire, but now with an expanded cast that includes all the global corporations, financial institutions, and multi-national militarist forces working together, but still pretending to be patriotic and loyal to the old ?fashioned nation-state carcasses that the new Global Empire will soon be discarding like old costumes.
When the Global Empire?s pre-selected faux ?Emperor-President?, Obama, takes the stage he brings something that the dated fascist models like Hitler and Bush jr. could never offer this new Global Empire ---- ?global guile? with a smile.
This 21st century extravaganza goes far beyond and ?Seven Days in May?, it provides a new wide-screen version of the ?Manchurian Candidate?.
The only real hidden faction that would benefit from insinuate someone like an Obama 'Manchurian Candidate' into the White House would be the Global Empire --- that already controls America, and is eating its way, like a cancerous tumor, around the world.
The 'American Empire' of the late 20th century, which Luce more politely referred to as the 'American Century', and of which no presidents since Eisenhower and JFK ever whispered the word 'Empire' while it actually existed, was already body-snatched by the time anyone other than Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson impolitely called it by its real name.
Now, in the 21st century, that the Global ruling-elite corporate/financial/military Empire has quietly and fully displaced their previously seldom-talked-about 'American Empire', it is safe and even helpful for every two-bit media shill, like ABC's "This Week? to employ the term 'American Empire' to rally Americans with fears of "Empire Lost' and that the economic benefits of 'their empire' are at risk ---- without, of course ever revealing that any benefits of that, now transformed empire, were invested by those who actually benefit from empire into their new 21st century model.
"The old nationalist Empire is dead. Long live the new (better-hidden and distributed) global Empire"
It is surprising, in the 21st century, how few, regardless of geographic location in the world of passing nation-states, are truly benefited by the newer global Empire --- and how many, in all geographies, religions, cultures, and ideologies are ravaged by it.
What better post-racial, post-partisan, post-nationalist, and post-ethnic ?Emperor-President? [Andrew Bacevich?s term] could this evolving 21st century Global Empire have as its founding figure-head than someone like Obama, who can work smoothly (oh soooo smoothly) with militarists like Gates, with financial con-artists like Summers, and with corporatists like all the transnational CEOs and global banksters around the world during this propitious ?shock-doctrine? crisis of global economic, political, and military stress ---- to insure that this ?perfect storm? of a ?crisis is not wasted?, as the saying goes?
Now let?s take a look at the type of use that a newly evolving Global Empire might want to make of the international political, economic, financial, and militarist ?crisis? that just happens to present itself today to be potentially molded and used for some broader goal. And let?s look also, in a possibly related sense, at the kind of messages and actions that such an evolving Global Empire might want to project through a global figure during this propitious ?crisis?.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine