Whistling Past the Afghan Graveyard, Where Empires Go To Die

[leftchick]

Published on Thursday, February 5, 2009 by TomDispatch.com
The Empire v. The Graveyard

http://www.commondreams.org/print/37780


by Tom Engelhardt

It is now a commonplace -- as a lead article <1> in the New York Times's Week in Review pointed out recently -- that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires." Given Barack Obama's call <2> for a greater focus on the Afghan War ("we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq..."), and given indications that a "surge" of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole <3> at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss <4> at the Nation, and John Robertson <5> at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's War."

In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good reason for that -- at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries <6> about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.

In truth, to give "empire" its due you would have to start with a reassessment of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washington's politicians, the Soviet Union, that "evil empire," that colossus of repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened nuclear MADness -- as in "mutually assured destruction" -- simply evaporated, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than U.S. troops stationed <7> in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)

In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-participants still on its feet.

The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its "near abroad," to replace it; ergo, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the planet's "sole superpower." Huzzah!

<snip>

For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the Obama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.

[Taverner]

1. It really depends on how Obama goes about it

If he tries to nation build, he's fucked

If he goes into Afghanistan, gathers intelligence, eliminates OBL (if he is even alive) and leaves, its a job well done

[sarge43]

2. That place has destroyed more armies than

typhus, booze and stupid command decisions combined. It does a pretty good job on empires, too.

[Greyhound]

3. Why is he doing this? He surely knows the truth of the title here.

http://www.gocomics.com/stateoftheunion/2009/02/05/

[arcadian]

4. Afghanistn = Empire eater

That's what happens when you introduce high mountains into the combat environment. It's nearly impossible to maintain territory if you are the agressor. Ask Switzerland. Ask India and Pakistan, they have been been fighting a war to a stalemate since 1947.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Reading a grand historical overview like this makes me think back even further

than the Reaganite delusions about 'winning' the "Cold War," to when I was young, and the U.S. still had the opportunity not to blow it, in the post-WWII world.

We were, without question, the "masters of the universe"--the most powerful nation on earth, prosperous (unparalleled in human history), generous (the Marshall Plan, totally rebuilding Europe; aid to, and benign and temporary rule over, Japan), idealistic, innovative and inclusive in our thinking (creation of the United Nations with the goals of world peace and the international rule of law; creation of the Geneva Conventions--standards of behavior for human rights, etc.), and living in the glow of the "New Deal"--basic decency in our economic policy; good socialist ideas working out well--and in the glow of victory over Nazi Germany (which had attacked Europe and England) and Imperial Japan (which had attacked us). Soon to come was the civil rights movement--and the end of that stain upon our nation's soul, slavery and segregation--and also, an expansive view of human nature, that education and prosperity would, and could, heal our social wounds, and create a better future for all people.

I was a youngster in California during that period--late 1950s, early 1960s--and a young Kennedyite during JFK's one and only campaign for president, in 1960. I could not, then, have imagined what would become of our common institutions, four decades later--our public universities (where tuition was FREE to all eligible students); our public libraries (then, always open; now, often closed and drastically underfunded); our Social Security fund (now heavily borrowed against, and endangered--for unjust war, and for tax cuts for the super-rich); our public school system (then, blooming with educational hopes and dreams; now in tatters even in the "golden state"); our road system--the envy of the world--disintegrating; NASA, our beacon to the stars and the great universe, underfunded, mismanaged; science itself under heavy assault from knuckledraggers and whacko rightwing so-called Christians, and on and on and on.

Everything worked, back in those days: all our public institutions, our common initiatives (for instance, preserving the California coast), the news media (diverse, informative, with standards of objectivity and public service), government regulations, anti-corruption laws, the tax code (fair, progressive), strong labor unions. And, whenever some good new idea bubbled up from the ferment of democracy--banning DDT, requiring seatbelts--corporate lobbyists lost the argument, and the new idea was enacted. (It was not always easy, but good ideas had a real fighting chance.)

For all the mistakes, and even horrors, of our government, which I would soon learn about in school, or from my own reading and interactions with others, for all the insane, McCarthyite, anti-communism, from which we were just emerging, and all the militaristic slaughters and injustices we were about to enter into, there really was a moment, there, when it all could have gone a better way, in the unprecedented direction of a fabulously rich and powerful country not choosing empire, and instead, remaining true to its highest ideals of democracy, freedom and fairness.

What went wrong?

Please understand that I have just read James Douglass' new book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: why he died and why it matters"--quite possibly the most important book of this era, and, most certainly, one of the most important political, spiritual and historical books I have ever read--and a catharsis for me, who lived through those events, and was deeply traumatized by them. Douglass seems to say it all--with meticulous documentation, and amazing analysis: that what youngsters like me projected into Kennedy, all our hopes for a peaceful and just world, derived from the best of our teachers, and from the best of our culture, was actually there, for real. JFK felt it, too. He wanted peace. He wanted to END the "Cold War," so that the rival economic systems in the world, capitalist and communist, could compete without competing to wipe each other's entire populations off the planet; he wanted to free both sides from the huge burden of nuclear weapons and other armaments, and from the proxy wars that had already begun. He wanted to stop it before it went further--to catastrophe (nuclear war) or other ruin. He opened backchannels to Krushchev and to Castro, to bring this about. And that is why the CIA killed him, on behalf of our "military-industrial complex," and five years later killed his brother, Bobby, as well (who shared his goals), and, in the same year, Martin Luther King (who had joined the anti-Vietnam War movement, and had tremendous charisma and moral force to help bring it to an end).

So, that is what went wrong: Our war machine, so built up and empowered by WWII, decided, if it couldn't get a nuclear war (which the generals thought they could 'win'), that it would manufacture other wars, to keep the military boondoggle going forever. And they killed a president, a presidential candidate* and our greatest civil rights leader*, all within the space of five years, to cut off their efforts to turn this country into the country it could have been--a just and peaceful country--had they lived.

We were not yet an "empire" in the late 1950s/early 1960s. We were still a democracy, with the potential to go either way. The very war machine that put us into a victorious position, after WWII--that gave us a choice--began to eat us alive.

I agree with Tom Engelhardt's article, that we are entering Act V of the great, and the tragic, and the very short-lived American empire. Do we still have a choice? Damn right, we do. It will be much harder now, to become peaceful again. It can't be achieved overnight. But I have no doubt whatsoever that we are capable of it. That is the difference between us and every previous empire. Our democratic tradition is so strong that it lives in our souls, and is infused into our children's souls. It is unkillable. Peace and justice are what the vast majority of Americans want. We are capable of American Revolution II. That is what democracy is--the ability to envision change, and the flexibility of mind to achieve it, whatever the obstacles.

So, do we wallow in our tragedy? Or pick ourselves up, and restore the dream of a peaceful, just and democratic country?

------


*(Douglass meticulously documents not only JFK's turn toward peace, but also his death at the hands of the CIA, in "JFK and the Unspeakable." The book is part of a trilogy. Book II will be about RFK. Book III about MLK and Malcom X. I presume that his thesis will continue--they were all killed by our own government, for the sake of the war profiteers. He is very convincing on JFK.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. This country is becoming adept at losing colonial wars. K&R

Pakistan next?

[NNN0LHI]

7. Recommended