In an increasingly phantasmagorical world, here’s my present fantasy of choice: someone from
General Keith Alexander’s outfit, the National Security Agency, tracks down H.G. Wells’s
time machine in the attic of an old house in London. Britain’s
subservient Government
Communications Headquarters, its version of the NSA, is paid off and
the contraption is flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, where it’s put back in
working order. Alexander then revs it up and heads not into the future
like Wells to see how our world ends, but into the past to offer a
warning to Americans about what’s to come.
He arrives in Washington on October 23, 1962, in the middle of the
Cuban Missile Crisis, a day after President Kennedy has addressed the American people on national television to
tell them
that this planet might not be theirs -- or anyone else’s -- for long.
("We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide
nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our
mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be
faced.") Greeted with amazement by the Washington elite, Alexander,
too, goes on television and informs the same public that, in 2013, the
major enemy of the United States will no longer be the Soviet Union, but
an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that the
headquarters of our country’s preeminent foe will be found somewhere in
the
rural backlands of... Yemen.
Yes, Yemen, a place most Americans, then and now, would be challenged
to find on a world map. I guarantee you one thing: had such an
announcement actually been made that day, most Americans would
undoubtedly have dropped to their knees and thanked God for His
blessings on the American nation. Though even then a nonbeliever, I
would undoubtedly have been among them. After all, the 18-year-old Tom
Engelhardt, on hearing Kennedy’s address, genuinely feared that he and
the few pathetic dreams of a future he had been able to conjure up were
toast.
Had Alexander added that, in the face of AQAP and similar minor
jihadist enemies scattered in the backlands of parts of the planet, the
U.S. had
built up
its military, intelligence, and surveillance powers beyond anything
ever conceived of in the Cold War or possibly in the history of the
planet, Americans of that time would undoubtedly have considered him
delusional and committed him to an asylum.
Such, however, is our world more than two decades after Eastern
Europe was liberated, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War
definitively ended, and the Soviet Union disappeared.
Why Orwell Was Wrong
Now, let me mention another fantasy connected to the two-superpower
Cold War era: George Orwell’s 1948 vision of the world of 1984 (or
thereabouts, since the inhabitants of his novel of that title were
unsure just what year they were living in). When the
revelations of NSA contractor Edward Snowden began to hit the news and we suddenly found ourselves knee-deep in stories about
Prism,
XKeyscore,
and other Big Brother-ish programs that make up the massive global
surveillance network the National Security Agency has been building, I
had a brilliant idea -- reread
1984.
At a moment when Americans were growing uncomfortably
aware
of the way their government was staring at them and storing what they
had previously imagined as their private data, consider my soaring sense
of my own originality a delusion of my later life. It lasted only
until I read an
essay by NSA expert James Bamford in which he mentioned that, “[w]ithin days of Snowden’s documents appearing in the
Guardian and the
Washington Post..., bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel
1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the ‘Movers & Shakers’ list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day.”
Nonetheless, amid a jostling crowd of worried Americans, I did keep
reading that novel and found it at least as touching, disturbing, and
riveting as I had when I first came across it sometime before Kennedy
went on TV in 1962. Even today, it’s hard not to marvel at the vision
of a man living at the beginning of the television age who sensed how a
whole society could be viewed, tracked, controlled, and surveiled.
But for all his foresight, Orwell had no more power to peer into the
future than the rest of us. So it’s no fault of his that, almost three
decades after his year of choice, more than six decades after his death,
the shape of our world has played havoc with his vision. Like so many
others in his time and after, he couldn’t imagine the disappearance of
the Soviet Union or at least of Soviet-like totalitarian states. More
than anything else, he couldn’t imagine one fact of our world that, in
1948, wasn’t in the human playbook.
"Dreams of omnipotence and omniscience cannot
help but generate resistance and blowback in a perfectly real world
that, whatever Washington thinks, maintains a grasp on perfectly real
power, even without another imperial state on any horizon."
In
1984, Orwell imagined a future from what he knew of the
Soviet and American (as well as Nazi, Japanese, and British) imperial
systems. In imagining three equally powerful, equally baleful
superpowers -- Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia -- balanced for an
eternity in an unwinnable global struggle, he conjured up a logical
extension of what had been developing on this planet for hundreds of
years. His future was a version of the world humanity had lived with
since the first European power mounted cannons on a wooden ship and set
sail, like so many Mongols of the sea, to assault and conquer foreign
realms, coastlines first.
From that moment on, the imperial powers of this planet -- super,
great, prospectively great, and near great -- came in contending or
warring pairs, if not triplets or quadruplets. Portugal, Spain, and
Holland; England, France, and Imperial Russia; the United States,
Germany, Japan, and Italy (as well as Great Britain and France), and
after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union. Five
centuries in which one thing had never occurred, the thing that even
George Orwell, with his prodigious political imagination, couldn’t
conceive of, the thing that makes
1984 a dated work and his
future a past that never was: a one-superpower world. To give birth to
such a creature on such a planet -- as indeed occurred in 1991 -- was to
be at the end of history, at least as it had long been known.
The Decade of the Stunned Superpower
Only in Hollywood fantasies about evil super-enemies was “world
domination” by a single power imaginable. No wonder that, more than two
decades into our one-superpower present, we still find it hard to take
in this new reality and what it means.
At least two aspects of such a world seem, however, to be coming into
focus. The evidence of the last decades suggests that the ability of
even the greatest of imperial powers to shape global events may always
have been somewhat exaggerated. The reason: power itself may never have
been as centrally located in imperial or national entities as was once
imagined. Certainly, with all rivals removed, the frustration of
Washington at its inability to control events in the Greater Middle East
and elsewhere could hardly be more evident. Still, Washington has
proven incapable of grasping the idea that there might be forms of
power, and so of resistance to American desires, not embodied in
competitive states.
Evidence also seems to indicate that the leaders of a superpower,
when not countered by another major power, when lacking an arms race to
run or territory and influence to contest, may be particularly
susceptible to the growth of delusional thinking, and in particular to
fantasies of omnipotence.
Though Great Britain far outstripped any competitor or potential
enemy at the height of its imperial glory, as did the United States at
the height of the Cold War (the Soviet Union was always a junior
superpower), there were at least rivals around to keep the leading power
“honest” in its thinking. From December 1991, when the Soviet Union
declared itself no more, there were none and, despite the
dubious assumption
by many in Washington that a rising China will someday be a major
competitor, there remain none. Even if economic power has become more
“multipolar,” no actual state contests the American role on the planet
in a serious way.
Just as still water is a breeding ground for mosquitos, so
single-superpowerdom seems to be a breeding ground for delusion. This
is a phenomenon about which we have to be cautious, since we know little
enough about it and are, of course, in its midst. But so far, there
seem to have been three stages to the development of whatever delusional
process is underway.
Stage one stretched from
December 1991
through September 10, 2001. Think of it as the decade of the stunned
superpower. After all, the collapse of the Soviet Union went
unpredicted
in Washington and when it happened, the George H. W. Bush
administration seemed almost incapable of taking it in. In the years
that followed, there was the equivalent of a stunned silence in the
corridors of power.
After a brief flurry of debate about a post-Cold War “
peace dividend,”
that subject dropped into the void, while, for example, U.S. nuclear
forces, lacking their major enemy of the previous several decades,
remained more or less in place, strategically disoriented but ready for
action. In those years, Washington launched modest and halting
discussions of the dangers of “rogue states” (think “
Axis of Evil”
in the post-9/11 era), but the U.S. military had a hard time finding a
suitable enemy other than its former ally in the Persian Gulf, Iraq’s
Saddam Hussein. Its ventures into the world of war in Somalia and the
former Yugoslavia were modest and not exactly greeted with rounds of
patriotic fervor at home. Even the brief glow of popularity the elder
Bush gained from his 1990-1991 war against Saddam evaporated so quickly
that, by the time he geared up for his reelection campaign barely a year
later, it was gone.
In the shadows, however, a government-to-be
was forming
under the guise of a think tank. It was filled with figures like
future Vice President Dick Cheney, future Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, future U.N.
Ambassador John Bolten, and future ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay
Khalilzad, all of whom firmly believed that the United States, with its
staggering military advantage and lack of enemies, now had an
unparalleled opportunity to control and reorganize the planet. In
January 2001, they came to power under the presidency of George W. Bush,
anxious for the opportunity to turn the U.S. into the kind of
global dominator that would put the British and even Roman empires to shame.
Pax Americana Dreams
Stage two in the march into single-superpower delusion began on
September 11, 2001, only five hours after hijacked American Airlines
Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. It was then that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, already convinced that al-Qaeda was behind the
attacks, nonetheless began dreaming about completing the First Gulf War
by taking out Saddam Hussein. Of Iraq, he
instructed an aide to “go massive... Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
And go massive he and his colleagues did, beginning the process that
led to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, itself considered only a
precursor to transforming the Greater Middle East into an American
protectorate. From the fertile soil of 9/11 -- itself something of a
phantasmagoric event in which Osama bin Laden and his relatively feeble
organization spent a piddling
$400,000-$500,000 to create the look of an apocalyptic moment -- sprang full-blown a sense of American global omnipotence.
It had taken a decade to mature. Now, within days of the toppling of
those towers in lower Manhattan, the Bush administration was
already talking about
launching a “war on terror,” soon to become the “Global War on Terror”
(no exaggeration intended). The CIA would label it no less grandiosly a
“
Worldwide Attack Matrix.”
And none of them were kidding. Finding “terror” groups of various
sorts in up to 80 countries, they were planning, in the phrase of the
moment, to “
drain the swamp” --
everywhere.
In the early Bush years,
dreams of domination
bred like rabbits in the hothouse of single-superpower Washington.
Such grandiose thinking quickly invaded administration and Pentagon
planning documents
as the Bush administration prepared to prevent potentially oppositional
powers or blocs of powers from arising in the foreseeable future. No
one, as its top officials and their neocon supporters saw it, could
stand in the way of their planetary
Pax Americana.
Nor, as they invaded Afghanistan, did they have any doubt that they
would soon take down Iraq. It was all going to be so easy. Such an
invasion, as one supporter wrote in the
Washington Post, would
be a “cakewalk.” By the time American troops entered Iraq, the Pentagon
already had plans on the drawing board to build a series of permanent
bases -- they preferred to call them "enduring camps" -- and
garrison that assumedly grateful country at the center of the planet’s oil lands for generations to come.
Nobody in Washington was thinking about the possibility that an
American invasion might create chaos in Iraq and surrounding lands,
sparking a set of Sunni-Shiite religious wars across the region. They
assumed that Iran and Syria would be forced to bend their national knees
to American power or that we would simply impose submission on them.
(As a neoconservative
quip
of the moment had it, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want
to go to Tehran.”) And that, of course would only be the beginning.
Soon enough, no one would challenge American power. Nowhere. Never.
Such soaring dreams of -- quite literally -- world domination met no
significant opposition in mainstream Washington. After all, how could
they fail? Who on Earth could possibly oppose them or the U.S.
military? The answer seemed too obvious to need to be stated -- not
until, at least, their all-conquering armies bogged down in Iraq and
Afghanistan and the greatest power on the planet faced the possibility
of defeat at the hands of... well, whom?
The Dark Matter of Global Power
Until things went sour in Iraq, theirs would be a vision of the
Goliath tale in which David (or various ragtag Sunni, Shiite, and
Pashtun versions of the same) didn’t even have a walk-on role. All
other Goliaths were gone and the thought that a set of minor Davids
might pose problems for the planet’s giant was beyond imagining, despite
what the previous century’s history of decolonization and resistance
might have taught them. Above all, the idea that, at this juncture in
history, power might not be located overwhelmingly and decisively in the
most obvious place -- in, that is, “the finest fighting force that the
world has ever known,” as American presidents of this era
came to call it -- seemed illogical in the extreme.
Who in the Washington of that moment could have imagined that other
kinds of power might, like so much dark matter in the universe, be
mysteriously distributed elsewhere on the planet? Such was their sense
of American omnipotence, such was the level of delusional thinking
inside the Washington bubble.
Despite two
treasury-draining disasters in
Afghanistan and
Iraq
that should have been sobering when it came to the hidden sources of
global power, especially the power to resist American wishes, such
thinking showed only minimal signs of diminishing even as the Bush
administration pulled back from the Iraq War, and a few years later,
after a set of misbegotten “
surges,” the Obama administration decided to do the same in Afghanistan.
Instead, Washington entered stage three of delusional life in a
single-superpower world. Its main symptom: the belief in the
possibility of controlling the planet not just through staggering
military might but also through informational and surveillance
omniscience and omnipotence. In these years, the urge to
declare a global war on communications,
create a force
capable of
launching wars
in cyberspace, and storm the e-beaches of the Internet and the global
information system proved overwhelming. The idea was to make it
impossible for anyone to write, say, or do anything to which Washington
might not be privy.
For most Americans, the Edward Snowden revelations would pull back
the curtain on the way the National Security Agency, in particular, has
been building a global network for surveillance of a kind never before
imagined, not even by the totalitarian regimes of the previous century.
From
domestic phone calls to
international emails, from the bugging of
U.N. headquarters and
the European Union to
80 embassies around the world, from
enemies to
frenemies to
allies,
the system by 2013 was already remarkably all-encompassing. It had, in
fact, the same aura of grandiosity about it, of overblown self-regard,
that went with the launching of the Global War on Terror -- the feeling
that if Washington did it or built it, they would come.
I’m 69 years old and, in technological terms, I’ve barely emerged
from the twentieth century. In a conversation with NSA Director Keith
Alexander, known somewhat derisively in the trade as “
Alexander the Geek,”
I have no doubt that I’d be lost. In truth, I can barely grasp the
difference between what the NSA's Prism and XKeyscore programs do. So
call me technologically senseless, but I can still recognize a deeper
senselessness when I see it. And I can see that Washington is building
something conceptually quite monstrous that will change our country for
the worse, and the world as well, and is -- perhaps worst of all --
essentially nonsensical.
So let me offer those in Washington a guarantee: I have no idea what
the equivalents of the Afghan and Iraq wars will be in the surveillance
world, but continue to build such a global system, ignoring the
anger of allies
and enemies alike, and “they” indeed will come. Such delusional
grandiosity, such dreams of omnipotence and omniscience cannot help but
generate resistance and blowback in a perfectly real world that,
whatever Washington thinks, maintains a grasp on perfectly real power,
even without another imperial state on any horizon.
2014
Today, almost 12 years after 9/11, the U.S. position in the world
seems even more singular. Militarily speaking, the Global War on Terror
continues, however
namelessly,
in the Obama era in places as distant as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The U.S. military remains heavily deployed in the Greater Middle East,
though it has
pulled out
of Iraq and is drawing down in Afghanistan. In recent years, U.S.
power has, in an exceedingly public manner, been “pivoting” to Asia,
where the
building of new bases, as well as the deployment of new troops and
weaponry, to “
contain” that imagined future superpower China has been proceeding apace.
At the same time, the U.S. military has been ever-so-quietly pivoting to Africa where, as TomDispatch’s Nick Turse
reports, its presence is
spreading continent-wide. American military bases still dot the planet in remarkable profusion, numbering perhaps
1,000 at a moment when no other nation on Earth has more than a handful outside its territory.
The reach of Washington’s surveillance and intelligence networks is
unique in the history of the planet. The ability of its drone air fleet to
assassinate
enemies almost anywhere is unparalleled. Europe and Japan remain so
deeply integrated into the American global system as to be essentially a
part of its power-projection capabilities.
This should be the dream formula for a world dominator and yet no one
can look at Planet Earth today and not see that the single superpower,
while capable of creating instability and chaos, is limited indeed in
its ability to control developments. Its president can't even form a
"coalition of the willing" to launch a limited series of missile attacks
on the military facilities of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.
From Latin America to the Greater Middle East, the American system is
visibly weakening, while at home, inequality and poverty are on the
rise, infrastructure crumbles, and national politics is in a state of
permanent “gridlock.”
Such a world should be fantastical enough for the wildest sort of dystopian fiction, for perhaps a novel titled
2014.
What, after all, are we to make of a planet with a single superpower
that lacks genuine enemies of any significance and that, to all
appearances, has nonetheless been fighting a permanent global war
with... well, itself -- and appears to be losing?
© 2013 TomDispatch.com
