Tomdispatch.com: Power Drain Mysteries of the Twenty-First Century in a Helter-Skelter

From: Berhane Habtemariam <Berhane.Habtemariam_at_gmx.de_at_dehai.org>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 23:11:28 +0200

Power Drain Mysteries of the Twenty-First Century in a Helter-Skelter World
By <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/tom> Tom Engelhardt

September 16, 2014.

It’s possible I’ve lived most of my life on the wrong planet -- and if that
sounds like the first sentence of a sci-fi novel maybe, in its own way, it
is. I thought I knew where I was, of course, but looking back from our
helter-skelter world of 2014, I wonder.

For most of the last several hundred years, the story in view might be
called the Great Concentration and it focused on an imperial struggle for
power on planet Earth. That rivalry took place among a kaleidoscopic
succession of European “great powers,” one global empire (Great Britain),
Russia, a single Asian state (Japan), and the United States. After two world
wars that devastated the Eurasian continent, there emerged only two
“superpowers,” the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They were so stunningly mighty
and over-armed -- great inland empires -- that, unlike previous powers, they
could not even imagine how to wage war directly upon each other, not without
obliterating much of civilization. The full planet nonetheless became their
battlefield in what was known as the Cold War only because hot ones were
banished to “the peripheries” and the conflict took place, in part, in “the
shadows” (a situation novelist John Le Carré caught with particular
incisiveness).

Those two superpowers divided much of the planet into mighty blocs, as the
“free world” faced off against the “communist” one. What was left, often
called the Third World, became a game board and sometimes battlefield for
influence and dominance. From Havana to Saigon, Berlin to Jakarta, whatever
happened, however local, always seemed to have a superpower tinge to it.

This was the world as it was presented to me in the years of my youth and
for decades thereafter. And then, unexpectedly, there was only one
superpower. In 1991, something like the ultimate step in the concentration
of power seemed to occur. The weaker and less wealthy of the two rivals, its
economy grown sclerotic even as its nuclear arsenal bulged, its vaunted
military bogged down in an unwinnable war with Islamic fundamentalists in
Afghanistan (
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175336/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_war_is_a_drug
/> backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan), suddenly
vanished from the planet. It left behind a dismantled wall in Berlin, a
unified Germany, a liberated Eastern Europe, a series of former SSRs in
Central Asia fending for themselves, and its bloc partner (and
sometimes-rival-cum-enemy) China, still run by a “communist” party, gunning
the automobile of state onto the capitalist highway under slogans like “to
get rich is glorious.”

Full Spectrum Dominance on a Unipolar Planet

As with the famous <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer_in_the_Dell>
cheese of children’s rhyme, the United States now stood alone. Never before
had a single power of such stature, wealth, and military clout been left so
triumphantly solitary, without the hint of a serious challenger anywhere.
Economically, the only other system imaginable for a century had been
banished to the history books. There was just one power and one economic
system left in a moment of triumph the likes of which even the leaders of
that winning state had neither imagined nor predicted.

Initially, Washington was stunned. It took the powers-that-be almost a
decade to fully absorb and react to what had happened. After all, as one
observer then so famously put it, “the end of history” had been reached --
and there, amid the rubble of other systems and powers, lay an imperial
version of liberal democracy and a capitalist system freed of even the
thought of global competitors and constraints. Or so it seemed.

For almost a decade, we were told in no uncertain terms that we were, no
bones about it, in the era of “the Washington consensus” and
“globalization.” The Earth was flat and we were all One, swimming in a sea
of giant swooshes, golden arches, action movies, and Disney princesses.
What a moment to dream -- and though it took a decade, you’ll remember the
dreamers well. Having prepared the way as a kind of
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175336/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_war_is_a_drug
/> shadow government, in 2000 they took over the White House (with a helping
hand from the Supreme Court). After a single devastating terrorist attack
(the “
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/118775/9_11_an_explosion_out_of_the_towerin
g_inferno_> Pearl Harbor” of the twenty-first century), they were soon
dreaming on a global scale as befit their new vision of power. They
imagined a “wartime” that would last for generations -- some of them even
called it
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2293/john_brown_why_world_war_IV> World War
IV -- during which they would establish a full-scale military protectorate,
including
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/engelhardt_korean%20model> monster
bases, in the oil heartlands of the Middle East and a Pax Americana globally
aimed at preventing any other great nation or bloc of nations from
<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2320.htm> arising to
challenge the United States -- ever.

And that should have surprised no one. It seemed like such an obvious
concluding passage to the Great Concentration. What else was there to dream
about when “The End” had come up onscreen and the logic of history was
theirs to do with what they would? After all, they had at their beck and
call a military the likes of which no other 10 nations could match and a
national security state, including surveillance and intelligence outfits,
whose post-9/11 reach was to be
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_you_are_our_s
ecret/> unparalleled among countries or in history. They sat atop a vast
and wealthy state then regularly referred to as the planet’s “sole
superpower” or even its “hyperpower,” and no less regularly called its
“sheriff.”

Where great powers had once been, only a few rickety “rogue states”
remained: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And with the help of a
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil#David_Frum> clever speechwriter,
George W. Bush was soon to pump those three countries up into a convenient
“Axis of Evil,” a phrase meant to combine the fearsomeness of World War II’s
Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and Ronald Reagan’s famous Star
Wars-style moniker for the Soviet Union, “the Evil Empire.” No matter that
two of the three powers in question had been at each other’s throats for a
decade and the third, a half-nation with a population regularly on a
starvation diet, was quite unrelated.

Beyond that, when it came to enemies, there were relatively small numbers of
jihadi bands, mostly scattered in the tribal backlands of the planet, and a
few poorly armed minority insurgencies. A “unipolar” planet? You bet,
hands down (or rather, as the Bush administration then saw it, hands up in
the classic gesture of surrender that it quickly expected from Iraq, Iran,
and Syria, among other places). The future, according to the prevailing
script, couldn’t have been more obvious. Could there be any question that
<http://contraryperspective.com/2014/09/10/obamas-speech-on-isis-more-of-the
-same-as-in-military-action/> dominance, or even as the U.S. military liked
to put it, “ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_dominance>
full-spectrum dominance,” was the obvious, uncontested, and only possible
result?

A Jihadist Paradise on Earth

As the present chaos across large swathes of our world indicates, however,
it didn’t turn out to be so. The planet was telling quite a different
story, one focused not on the concentration of power but on a radical form
of power drain. In that story, the one for which the evidence kept piling
up regularly in the post-9/11 years,
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_a_record_of_u
nparalleled_failure/> no application of power seemed to work for Washington.
No enemy, no matter how minor, weak, ill armed, or unpopular could be
defeated. No jihadist group wiped out.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-weakens-al-qaeda-g
roups-around-the-world-but-hasnt-wiped-any-out/2014/09/11/3c28d626-39bb-11e4
-8601-97ba88884ffd_story.html?hpid=z1> Not one.

Jump 13 years and they are all still there: the original al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen), and a whole befuddling new range of
jihadist groups, most of them bigger than ever, with one now
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175888/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_escalat
ion_follies/> proclaiming a “caliphate” in the heart of the Middle East; in
Afghanistan, the Taliban is
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750656/Three-Afghan-towns-British-
troops-fought-died-control-look-set-fall-Taliban-days.html> resurgent (and a
growing new Taliban movement is destabilizing Pakistan); the Shia militias
the U.S. couldn’t take down in Iraq during its occupation of the country are
now fighting the followers of the
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/world/middleeast/us-actions-in-iraq-fuele
d-rise-of-a-rebel.html> Sunni military men whose army Washington demobilized
in 2003. The fundamentalists in Iran, despite endless years of threat and
pressure, are still in power, their regional influence enhanced. Libya,
which should have been a nation-building miracle, has instead become an
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/world/africa/libyan-unrest.html>
extremist battleground, while (like Syria) losing a
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/world/africa/libya-refugees-tunisia-tripo
li.html> significant percentage of its population; Africa is increasingly
destabilized, and Nigeria in particular faces one of the
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29155529> more bizarre insurgencies in
modern history; and so on.

Nowhere is there a hint of Washington’s Pax Americana in the Greater Middle
East, no less globally. In fact, across a vast and growing swath of the
planet, stretching from South Asia to Africa, from Iraq to Ukraine, the main
force at work seems not to be the concentration of power, but its
fragmentation, its disintegration, before which Washington has proven
remarkably helpless.

Thirteen years later, on the eve of another 9/11 anniversary, the president
found himself, however reluctantly, on television addressing the American
people on the launching of another hapless Iraq war, the third since 1991 --
and the first in which those announcing it visibly no longer had any
expectation of victory or could even imagine what the endpoint of all this
might be. In fact, before Barack Obama appeared on our home screens, word
was already leaking out from official precincts in Washington that this new
war would last not a decisive few weeks or even months, but years. At least
“
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/world/middleeast/destroying-isis-may-take
-3-years-white-house-says.html> 36 months” was the figure being bandied
about.

In other words, as he launched Iraq 3.0, the president was already
essentially conceding a kind of defeat by willing it to his successor in the
Oval Office. Not getting out of Iraq, as he had promised in his 2008
presidential campaign, but getting in yet again would now be his “legacy.”
If that doesn’t tell you what you need to know about the deep-sixing of the
dream of global domination, what does?

 <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> Nor was
the new enemy some ghostly jihadist group with small numbers of followers
scattered in the backlands of the planet. It was something new under the
sun: a mini-state-building, war-fighting, revenue-generating,
atrocity-producing machine (and yet
<http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/isis-pr-machine> anything but the former
“Evil Empire”). Against it, the drones and bombers had already been called
in and Washington was now to lead -- the phrase, almost a quarter-century
old, was making a reappearance in the general babble of reporting about, and
punditry on, the new conflict -- a “
<http://swampland.time.com/2013/08/26/obama-seeks-a-coalition-of-the-willing
-on-syria/> coalition of the willing.” In the first such coalition, in
1991, <http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot1_032803.html> 35
nations were gathered under the American wing to crush Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
(which, of course, didn’t quite happen). And the Saudis, the Japanese, and
the Germans agreeably
<http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/world/meast/gulf-war-fast-facts/> anted up
$52 billion of the cost of that $61 billion conflict, making it a near
freebie of a (briefly) triumphant war for Washington.

This time, however, as befit the moment, the new “coalition” was to consist
of a crew so recalcitrant,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/arabs-give-tepid-support
-to-us-fight-against-isis.html> unwilling, and ill-matched as to practically
<http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/syria-and-iraq-why-us-policy-is-fraught-with-d
anger/> spell out disaster-in-the-making. Inside Iraq, a unification
government was already being formed and it looked
<http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iraq-new-government-20140910-
story.html#page=1> remarkably like previous not-so-unification-minded
governments. The Kurds were playing it cagy on the question of support;
Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric whose militias had once fought the
Americans and were now fighting the forces of the new Islamic State (IS),
was
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/10/us-iraq-crisis-sadr-idUSKBN0H511C
20140910> warning against cooperation of any sort with the former
“occupier”; and as for the Sunnis, well, don’t hold your breath.

And don’t even start in on the
<http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-kerry-turkish-government-2014
0912-story.html> Turks, the
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/world/middleeast/kerry-visits-egypt-seeki
ng-aid-in-isis-fight.html> Egyptians, and
<http://news.antiwar.com/2014/09/14/40-nations-in-americas-anti-isis-coaliti
on-but-few-to-do-anything/> others in the region. In the meantime,
Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Iraq and
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kerry-in-iraq-to-congratulate-new-premi
er-build-alliance-against-islamic-state/2014/09/10/dcfd8c2c-38ad-11e4-8601-9
7ba88884ffd_story.html> promised that the U.S. would ante up $48 million to
stand up a new Iraqi “national guard.” It was assumedly meant as a home for
disaffected Sunni fighters to bolster the American-financed, -armed, and
-trained Iraqi army that had
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/mosul-isis-gunmen-middle-east-
states> collapsed in a heap when the warriors of the Islamic State descended
on them led by former officers from Saddam Hussein’s disbanded army. And oh
yes, with the help of the Saudis (who had previously funneled money to far
more extreme groups of rebels in Syria), the U.S. was now planning to
<http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/09/how-us-will-conduct-the-syrian
-rebel-training-program/> arm and train the
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/us-pins-hope-on-syrian-r
ebels-with-loyalties-all-over-the-map.html> barely existent “moderate”
rebels of that country. If that isn’t a description of a coalition of the
shaky, what is?

Is American Leadership “the One Constant in an Uncertain World”?

>From that “new” Iraqi military force to the usual set of op-eds, comments,
and critiques calling for yet more military action by the usual crowd of
neocons and Republicans in Washington, it’s felt distinctly like déjà vu all
over again. This time, however, it seems as if we’re watching familiar
events through some funhouse mirror, everything half-recognizable, yet
creepy as hell. Ever more of the world seems this way, as for instance in
the “new Cold War” that’s played out in recent months in Ukraine.

And yet it’s worth noting that some things are missing from that mirror's
distorted view. When was the last time, for instance, that you heard the
phrase “sole superpower” or the word “unipolar”? Not for years, I suspect.
Yet the talk of “multi-polarity” has, like the
<http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28982555> Brazilian economy, faded, too,
and for good reason.

On the face of it, the United States remains the unipolar power on planet
Earth, or as the president put it in his
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2014/sep/11/obama-speech-isis-
analysis> TV address, speaking of American leadership, “the one constant in
an uncertain world.” Its military remains uncontested in any normal sense,
with something approaching that long-desired goal of full-spectrum
dominance. No other concentration of power on the planet comes close to
matching it. In fact, even for the European Union, once imagined as a
future power bloc of immense possibility,
<http://fpif.org/divorce-european-style/> fragmentation of
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/europe/with-eye-on-scotland-catalon
ia-hails-its-secession-bid.html> various sorts now seem to
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/10015593/Euro-may-only-l
ast-five-years-says-senior-German-government-advisor.html> hover in the air.


Admittedly, two regional powers have begun flexing their military muscles
along their borders (and sea lanes). Vladimir Putin, the autocratic ruler
of what is essentially a hollowed out energy state, has been meddling in
Ukraine, as he did previously with Georgia, in situations where he’s felt
the pressure of the U.S. and NATO pushing against his country’s former
borderlands. In the process, he has effectively brought power drain and
fragmentation to the heartlands of Eurasia in a way that may prove far less
amenable to his control than he now imagines.

Meanwhile, in the South China Sea and nearby waters, China, the world’s
rising economic juggernaut and increasingly a regional military power, has
been pushing its neighbors’ buttons as it grabs for undersea energy rights
and generally tries to reverse a long history of what it considers
“humiliation,” while taking its place as a regional hegemon. As in Ukraine
with NATO, so here, in its announced “pivot” to Asia, the U.S. has played
its own part in this process. Once again, division and fragmentation of
various sorts shimmer on the horizon. And yet these challenges to America’s
status as the globe’s hegemon remain local and limited in nature. The
likelihood that either of them will develop into some version of the great
power struggles of the nineteenth century or of the Cold War era seems
remote.

Still, the conundrum for Washington remains. For the last 13 years, it’s
had access to unparalleled powers of every kind, concentrated in all sorts
of ways, and yet in what has to be considered a mystery of the twenty-first
century, everywhere, even at home, fragmentation and gridlock, not decisive,
effective action are evident, while the draining (or paralysis) of power
seems to be the order of the day.

Nowhere, at home or abroad, does the obvious might of the United States
translate into expected results, or much of anything else except a kind of
roiling chaos. On much of the planet, Latin America (but not Central
America) excepted, power vacuums, power breakdowns, power drains, and
fragmentation are increasingly part of everyday life. And one thing is
remarkably clear: each and every application of American military power
globally since 9/11 has furthered the fragmentation process, destabilizing
whole regions.

In the twenty-first century, the U.S. military has been neither a nation-
nor an army-builder, nor has it found victory, no matter how hard it’s
searched. It has instead been the equivalent of the whirlwind in
international affairs, and so, however the most recent Iraq war works out,
one thing seems predictable: the region will be further destabilized and in
worse shape when it’s over.

The Greatest Concentration of Literal Power in History

Since World War II, we’ve generally been focused on the Great Concentration,
while another story was developing in the shadows. Its focus: the
de-concentration of power in what the Bush administration used to call the
Greater Middle East, as well as
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/nick_turse_blowback_central> in
Africa, and even Europe. Just how exactly this developed will have to await
a better historian than I and perhaps the passage of time. But for the sake
of discussion, let’s call it the Great Fragmentation.

Perhaps it started in the twentieth century with the decolonization
movements that swept across so much of the globe and took down a series of
already weakening European empires. One of its latest manifestations might
have been the Arab Spring and the chaos and disintegration that seemed to
follow from it. The undermining or neutralizing of imperial power and the
systems of alliance and dependency it builds seems at its heart. With it
has gone the inability of militaries anywhere to achieve the sorts of
victories against even the least impressive of enemies that were once the
meat and potatoes of imperial power.

The Great Fragmentation has accelerated in seemingly disastrous ways in our
own time under perhaps some further disintegrative pressure. One
possibility: yet another development in the shadows that, in some bizarre
fashion, combines both the concentration of power and its fragmentation in
devastating ways. I’m thinking here of the story of how the apocalypse
became human property -- the discovery, that is, of how to fully exploit two
energy sources, the splitting of the atom and the extraction of fossil fuels
for burning from ever more difficult places, that could leave human life on
this planet in ruins.

Think of them as, quite literally, the two greatest concentrations of power
in history. One is now embedded in the globe’s nuclear arsenals, capable of
destroying numerous Earth-sized planets. The other is to be found in a vast
array of oil and natural gas wells and coal mines, as well as in a
relatively small number of Big Energy companies and energy states like Saudi
Arabia, Russia, and increasingly these days, the
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175889/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_oil_rush
_in_america/> United States. It, we now know, is capable of essentially
burning civilization off the planet.

>From this dual concentration of power comes the potential for the kinds of
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175811/tomgram%3A_ira_chernus,_what_ever_ha
ppened_to_plain_old_apocalypse/> apocalyptic fragmentation it was once
thought only the gods or God might be capable of. We’re talking about
potential exit ramps from history. The pressure of this story -- which has
been in play in our world since at least August 6, 1945, and now in its dual
forms suffuses all our lives in hard to define ways -- on the other two and
on the increasing fragmentation of human affairs, while impossible to
calibrate, is undoubtedly all too real.

This is why, now in my eighth decade, I can’t help but wonder just what
planet I’m really on and what its story will really turn out to be.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the
<http://www.americanempireproject.com/> American Empire Project and author
of <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608461548/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> The
United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War,
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> The End
of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
latest book, to be published in October, is
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> Shadow
Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single Superpower World (Haymarket Books).

 
Received on Tue Sep 16 2014 - 17:11:41 EDT