Attorney General William Barr’s campaign to expand the powers of the presidency to unprecedented imperial levels has been misinterpreted as an attempt to raise Donald Trump to the level of his strongman heroes like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Jair Bolsonaro. Fake news! It’s really been an attempt to boost him into the same league with the strongman heroes of far too many American men: the head coaches of our major sports, especially football. As a gang of anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, authoritarian bullies dedicated to winning at any cost, they have paved the way for Donald Trump and his “base.”

If the American political class were interested in electing a decent president, perhaps even one with moral courage, personal dignity, and an inspirational vision, they would be concentrating on the character, philosophy, and background of the candidates, right? But since those in the political arena, at least brand Republican, are mostly concerned with donor dollars, expanding that base, and the charisma of their macho leader, many of them are all too ready to follow a big, loud, glad-handing figure eager to lead us deep into crises that he — and yes, it is a “he” — will claim only he can bulldoze through.

We’re talking, in other words, about the presidential version of a football head coach, as sports leads the way into… maybe not just the end zone, but The End. Examples of such men are abundantly in the news right now, since the college football season has ended and pro football has reached its orgiastic holy day, the Super Bowl, this Sunday. College and pro teams are scrambling to hire new head coaches, predominantly white men, of course, who score high (as does Donald Trump) in the five main criteria for the job.

1. The Head Coach must offer purpose and meaning to people who feel powerless by offering them membership in something bigger than themselves: the tribe of a team that will be “great again.” To wear the orange or crimson or purple, to be part of a crowd screaming for the Tigers or Raiders or Redskins (or The Donald), is to dream that tomorrow will be so much better because the new head coach, manager, skipper, top dog can deliver. The aura that he brings is invariably short-lived, but it can linger as hope, before it dwindles into immortal nostalgia.

In football, there have been plenty of incredible shrinking coaches. In politics, think John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama, all of whom still make their fans breathless with possibilities unrealized.

The prototype head coach was undoubtedly the Norwegian-born Knute Rockne, who actually delivered on many of the possibilities he promised. A showman as well as a football savant — he popularized the forward pass in the 1920s — he leveraged publicity from winning games to turn Notre Dame into a nationally recognized university with a cultish following. In the process, he became rich and famous before dying in 1931, at age 43, in a plane crash en route to Hollywood to appear as himself in a movie.

Among the myths he invented along the way was winning “one for the Gipper” — George Gipp, one of his young stars who died of pneumonia in his senior year in college. In 1940, actor Ronald Reagan played the Gipper onscreen, creating the basis for his own future head-coach presidency.

The most iconic National Football League head coach was Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, who came to fame in the early days of the pro football boom. He’s best known for the quote, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Lombardi was too smart to have said that and too smart to deny it once it burnished his legend. Too bad, since that sentiment is so often the defense of bad behavior in political life — from future president Lyndon Johnson stealing his first election to the Senate to President Trump betraying the Kurds, among other crimes and misdemeanors.

What Lombardi probably said was something more like: “Winning isn’t everything. Trying to win is.” That’s the kind of self-help motto that fits a classic head coach’s larger message to both his players and the fans: Follow me. Do what I say. Only I know the way. 

2. The Head Coach, college variety, must sell “the program,” the preferred term for the corporate-style athletic department of this era. He does it with a shape-shifting charm that can seduce both small-town working-class families and global financial wolves. In that way, the head coach should remind us of presidential hopefuls who can work both everyday Midwestern diners and waterfront East Hampton fund-raisers for the corporate elite.

In a living room with a talented teenager, he can convincingly promise mom and dad that he will act in loco parentis, not only by keeping junior out of trouble, but by giving him enough playing time to assure him either a pro career or a Wall Street job via successful alumni. At the least, he will make a man out of him.

In a banquet hall filled with those alumni with deep pockets, all the booster whales, he can convincingly promise winning seasons that will include them personally. As an irresistible perk in return for donations to the program (and perhaps a few no-show off-season jobs for athletes), there’s always the chance for donors to mingle in the locker room and to breakfast with the coach, to engage in team scuttlebutt and manly jock talk, not to mention all those photo ops. It’s like lunch at Mar-a-Lago with the president and some cabinet members. (Think: assistant coaches.)

That kind of salesmanship is critical because the salaries of head coaches are obscenely high and have to be justified. In most states, the head football coaches at public universities are also the highest-paid public employees. At the top of the heap right now is Clemson University’s hard-driving, God-promoting coach Dabo Swinney who has promised, for a mere $93 million over the next decade, to keep the Tigers great.

Indeed, his team did win the national championship the year before, but recently lost this year’s title game to Louisiana State University‘s Ed Orgeron whose salary is only 30th on the college coach list (at a paltry $4 million annually). President Trump earns one-tenth of that as president, a salary that he gives away. Little wonder that he needs to bolster his income with emoluments galore and constantly pump up his presidential powers. How else will he keep up with the jock elite?

3. The Head Coach is dedicated to winning by any means necessary. Cutting corners, bad behavior, even cheating is proof that he has true fire in his belly.

While his wealth, power, prestige, and the frequency of recruiting scandals have made the college football head coach a frequent target of media indignation, the leaders of other top sports are probably as culpable when it comes to cheating. As a group, they make a good case for the dark side of all our games as breeding grounds for Trumpism.

And that phenomenon, in turn, seems to have lowered our outrage about everything else in our American lives, including sports. Think of it as a kind of boomerang effect. Cheating has been normalized and, most of the time, we just shrug. Take, for example, the current Houston Astro sign-stealing scandal that helped win that team a World Series in 2017. Despite a few coach departures, compared to other scandals in major league baseball’s Hall of Shame, including the 1919 Black Sox attempt to fix an earlier world series, spitball use, and steroids, it’s made remarkably small waves.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s record of dishonor, it’s been hard to crank up anger over cheating to win at mere games. No wonder the New England Patriots’ Bill Belichick, despite the many accusations of wrongdoing lodged against him, is considered the greatest pro coach of all time based on his record six Super Bowl victories (in nine appearances) and a lifetime 304-137 record.

In short, every year it seems all the more as if the end zone justifies the means.

4. Alpha male that he is, the Head Coach has absolute control over the brutes. After all, in the locker-room and on the sidelines of the game, he’s the commander-in-chief, the beast-master of the raw young power he sends into battle.

For so many American men, there seems to be something thrilling in the head coach’s utter, unquestioned authority over the bodies and fates of the young players on his team. The fantasy of such dominance — for most, available only in video games — affects not only the fans, but the coaches themselves. They tend to believe in the righteousness of their power over those strong young men pledged to help them win, no matter what kind of bad actors they may prove to be in their lives out of uniform. (Similarly, by the way, our head coach of a president puts his faith in his control over his administration team, his legal team in those impeachment hearings, and those roaring fans at his rallies.)

Coaches, in fact, tend to love the dark wildness of bad boys, especially if they think that they alone have command over their pit-bull jocks. They love their bad boys so much that they’ll turn a blind eye when they act up and bail them out when they get in trouble for anything from being a bully in the hallway to assault with a deadly weapon or rape.

Among the most famous and successful of such beast-master coaches was Tom Osborne who headed the University of Nebraska’s football team for 25 years, overseeing stars like the psychopathic Lawrence Phillips who should have been in jail rather than lionized as a college hero.

Twenty-five years ago, at an awards banquet at which he was honored, I asked Osborne how he could justify any of this. He answered coldly and cynically, “Would you rather they were on my team or loose in your neighborhood?”

Later, as a three-term congressman, he received a lifetime rating of 83 from the American Conservative Union. Coming to feel that politics offered him so much less, however, he returned to Nebraska’s football team, his eternal place of power and glory.

Osborne’s example, hardly unique, offers insight into President Trump’s intervention in the case of disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, an out-of-control killer in Afghanistan where fellow Seals accused him of murdering civilians, among other crimes.

As Trump’s version of Lawrence Phillips, Chief Petty Officer Gallagher gave the president that head-coach patina of macho supremacy. He could handle the tough guys! Trump even invited him to Mar-a-Lago.

5. The Head Coach who can check off those first four criteria will be qualified to check off this one, too: ascension to the top ranks of million-dollar-plus power leaders. He will then be perceived as a Strong Man, sport’s version of the top dogs of global politics.

So how does the president match up with, say, three of the most famous and revered head coaches of his own lifetime?

There was Bear Bryant of the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide, known for his harsh discipline and almost religious passion for “his” school. “If you want to walk the heavenly streets of gold, you gotta know the password, ‘Roll, Tide, Roll.'”

There was Woody Hayes of Ohio State who attacked an opposing player during a game and was fired the next day. A military history professor as well as a coach, he’s been quoted as saying that the soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre, a 1968 American slaughter of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, killed men who deserved to die “and I wouldn’t be so sure those women were innocent. The children are obviously innocent — if they are less than five.”

Finally, there was Joe Paterno of Penn State, a much beloved philanthropist and father figure known as JoePa, whose legend was tarnished by the proven pederasty of one of his assistant coaches. Paterno had known enough, early enough, to stop the man and prevent further abuse. He was fired soon after his 409th victory, a record, and died several months later. His statue on campus was carted away.

And the current crop of top coaches has yet to prove itself any better. This is important because head coaches clearly serve as father figures, cult leaders, models of masculinity — perhaps particularly to the disaffected millions who see in Trump the strong man who can guide them, speak for them, protect them from everything that seems to be going wrong in their lives.

For those of us who don’t quite view him that way, perhaps the only saving grace of the head-coach connection at this moment of the 54th Super Bowl is how easily college and pro teams are willing to dump their coaches when they don’t fulfill expectations.

Alas, it doesn’t seem to work that way with presidential head coaches. So far.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2020 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 January 2020
Word Count: 2,153
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“YES!” he yelled, thrusting his fist in the air. “We get to live in the mayor’s house!” My son’s reaction when I told his two sisters and him that I was running for mayor of our town became the laugh line of my campaign. But in real time, I had to burst his bubble. “Oh Seamus,” I said, smiling, “the mayor just lives in his own house. There is no ‘mayor’s house.’ If we win, we’ll keep living in our house and it will become the mayor’s house.”

Seamus’ reaction was indicative of his boundless confidence in his mother and his seven-year-old’s ignorance of how the world actually works. But I held his reaction close when I was feeling less than sure of myself, when I was headed to my third campaign event of any day as the Green Party candidate and found myself eating popcorn for dinner at 9:30 at night, listening to my kids breathe in their sleep instead of reading them bedtime stories.

I’ll cut to the chase: I lost. I am not the mayor of New London, Connecticut.

On Tuesday, November 7th, when the polls opened at six in the morning, it was cold and clear. It rained hard through the middle of the day. When those polls closed at eight that night, it was warmer and humid, but no longer raining. I was outside all day, rain or (not quite) shine, moving between the three polling stations with my friends and our signs and our cards that explained how to “Write In Frida for Mayor.”

That’s right: I wasn’t just running as a third-party candidate in a Democratic town, but as one not even on the ballot. The state had lost my paperwork. The Green Party hired a lawyer and sued, but the judge ruled against us and declined to order the secretary of state to put my name on the ballot. That setback made an uphill campaign into an Everest. I embraced the climb. Being a pacifist and an activist means that lost causes are par for the course for me and, as a Catholic, I believe hard work is its own reward.

The campaign season started in earnest (for me, anyway) after Labor Day, as I tried to balance work, family, and this new experience, this job-and-a-half running for mayor. Oh, yeah, and there was my mother, the peace activist Elizabeth McAlister. She was then in pre-trial detention for a Plowshares action at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in coastal Georgia.

Throughout the campaign, I asked New Londoners the same questions over and over: What do you love about New London? What frustrates you about our town? What’s the one concrete change that would improve your life? The answers were varied and often inspiring.

Unexpectedly, I found myself back in school on a crash course, discovering what’s wonderful (and not so wonderful) about my chosen hometown in the age of climate change and Donald Trump! I even learned a few things along the way. What follows is just a partial list.

Celebrity matters, even though it shouldn’t While I was in Georgia for one of my mom’s hearings, I spent time with the actor and peace activist Martin Sheen. Standing near the church where supporters of my mom were ladling out dinner, we shot a low-tech political ad. It promptly went low-key viral and signaled to the pols in New London that something different might be happening. I know Martin Sheen is famous and I love him as an actor and a person, but I wasn’t prepared for how excited people would be about a 45-second clip of the two of us. As far as I can tell, it didn’t get more people to vote for me, but boy was it a conversation starter!

Cultivate a constituency The political scene in New London is more than well established. It’s written in concrete: Go Democrat or go home! In our town of 27,000, set along the confluence of the Thames River and Long Island Sound, only about 16,000 of us are registered to vote and only 3,000 to 4,000 of us turn out for off-year local elections. Before this election, there were about 70 Greens. Our party’s strategy was to bring out new voters, a great thought, but I had no idea how hard that would prove to be.

I felt strongly that environmental and climate-change issues should be reframed as relevant to the poor and working class of New London. So when, for instance, I talked about creating a more walkable city, I was careful to emphasize not just that such a goal would be an environmental plus, but that it would aid the working poor, too. After all, they walk out of necessity, so safer sidewalks and a city infrastructure that takes walkers into account — including people in wheelchairs or with limited sight and hearing — would be a good investment for all.

The same was true when it came to planting more trees. A better urban canopy wouldn’t just make our local world look better or absorb more carbon dioxide, but slow street traffic and make life better for otherwise unwilling pedestrians.

I had hoped we would increase the local Green Party membership from 70 to 100, which didn’t happen, but we did add a handful of new members and reengaged some older ones. Call it the most modest of successes.

Be nice and make your points We ran an issue-focused campaign. I’m going to live in New London for a long time and so are my opponents. I generally avoided taking pot shots at them, cultivating instead what I thought of as a spirit of gentle disruption. Here’s an example: most of the town government department heads the current mayor hired live outside New London (something that goes against the city’s charter). The incumbent claimed he did so “to get the best,” which sounded as if he felt there was no one in town good enough to run our departments.

At debates and forums, I pushed back hard on that issue, insisting that I would hire locally, not just because the charter says we should, but because not doing so sends a message to our kids that we aren’t good enough. Such hiring practices also weaken our tax base, since some of the highest-paying jobs in our community go to people who don’t even pay property taxes here. It took time to learn how to be critical without being cranky and offer creative solutions to decades of short-sighted, reactive decision-making by a relatively unaccountable leadership.

I also wanted to demonstrate that someone who wasn’t a middle-aged white man could make a splash by running for mayor in our town. At 45, I’m no longer a young person. I even have a head full of white hair. But my two opponents were 20 years older, had grown up just blocks apart in the same New London neighborhood, and went to high school together. Long time friends and rivals, they could argue over who said what at a city council meeting a decade ago (and they did).

They took shots at each other over a past they shared. In one debate, the Republican even condemned the Democrat for driving a Tahoe while he drove a Prius. Never mind that the Tahoe was the official city-owned mayor’s car. “I walked here,” I said, “and I’m driving home with the three members of my family in a 2002 Honda Odyssey. We’re happy to give you a ride to further decrease our carbon footprint.” Everyone laughed and no one took us up on the offer.

Do what you can In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore out her shoes as she campaigned to be the youngest member of the House of Representatives. She even tweeted photos of the bottoms of those shoes with the line, “I knocked on doors until the rainwater came through my soles. Respect the hustle.”

I didn’t wear out my shoes, but I do respect the hustle, AOC, I do!  Still, I did what I could. When invited to run by the local chapter of the Green Party, I said I would do so to promote issues and amplify voices that weren’t getting a reasonable hearing, but that I couldn’t run a 24/7 campaign, not with a job and young kids to take care of. I held as fast as I could to that commitment, but thinking back on the — by conservative count — 14 public meetings, eight house parties, four television appearances (three of them hour-long), three public debates with the other mayoral candidates, and daily check-ins with my campaign manager, party chair, and fellow Green Party candidates, I still feel exhausted.

What I can’t document is just what it meant to continually make myself visible in my community and connect with my neighbors. That, without a doubt, was the most rewarding and beautiful part of the experience. Handing out candy to trick or treaters, I ended up chatting with four high school football players who remembered my visit to their school earlier that week and told me their moms were voting for me. I was so happy, I dumped the rest of our candy in their bags.

I was walking to work one morning, balancing a birthday cake in one hand and trying to text with the other when a garbage truck pulled up next to me and the driver called out, “I hope you win! Nobody cares about sanitation!” We chatted for a few minutes as I assured him that I knew the funds for his department had been cut in recent years and that the Green Party platform supported more money for public works, while emphasizing recycling and composting. He cheered, toot-tooted his horn, and we both continued with our day.

And by the way, no one told me how much fun it would be to knock on doors and chat with strangers, each conversation offering me a yet more complex map of my community.

Peace begins at home I’m glad I threw my hat in the political ring in 2019. The whole process felt like a personal balm in a national political landscape that was pitted, mired, and aflame. My stump speech — yes, I had one! — began with these lines: “At a time when the national news is almost uniformly, massively bad, the New London Green Party is collecting, conveying, and amplifying your good ideas, hopes, and visions for our small and dynamic, diverse and youthful, historic and struggling city!”

And honestly we did just that.

I can look at the dates of each of the debates and recall that while we were talking about immigration, the climate crisis and economic development, representation and equity, and how systemic racism plays out in local power struggles, the nation as a whole was mired in a kind of political hell.

Our first debate was held in an elementary school gym. I was nervous, overprepared, and my microphone gave me trouble. My kids were playing in the hallway, while more than 150 people crowded the auditorium. I answered one question in Spanish, said I would reject the $124,000 mayoral salary because one-third of the people in our community were living below the poverty line, and insisted that the police should not cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, in apprehending people in our community without documents.

In the last 18 years, war has seldom been out of the headlines. That very day in the New York Times, for instance, one headline was: “U.S. Disputes Finding That Airstrikes on Afghan Drug Labs Killed 30 Civilians.” And war wasn’t far from our community either. During the debate, moderated by the publisher of our local newspaper, I was asked with a gotcha edge, “Are you a pacifist and how will that impact your relationship with Electric Boat?” (Electric Boat, part of General Dynamics, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, makes submarines for the Navy in New London.)

I responded calmly: “I am a pacifist. I believe war is a failure of the imagination, that it is never necessary.” I then went on to talk about what a bad civic neighbor General Dynamics is. The saying goes, I commented, that “Boeing makes planes, Raytheon makes missiles, General Dynamics makes money” — and I reminded the audience that New London sees very little of that money, in part because the company is too busy paying its top execs so much of it. It also receives millions of dollars in federal and state subsidies for workforce training and infrastructure, even when orchestrating stock buybacks to enrich its shareholders. Generally, I championed a future New London divested from militarism.

“Don’t go against General Dynamics,” a man cautioned me after one of the debates, “they are all we got.” This is the game that corporations play against communities like New London and the military-industrial complex is even better at it than the Amazons and the Ubers.

They are all we’ve got? Really? How sad is that? What do we want as a community? How do we want to be known? We used to be known as the Whaling City, a brutal, dirty business if ever there was one. Now, our town struggles. So many of our kids qualify for reduced lunch that the district offers free lunch to all schoolchildren. But here’s another reality: the majority of those with good-paying jobs at General Dynamics in New London don’t live here. So if that’s all we got, we got problems!

The second debate was held in the basement conference room of our library and in that one (I was less nervous) we were asked about climate change. I responded that, as a mother of three kids who deserve a decent future on this planet of ours, climate change was what kept me up at night. As the mayor of a coastal town, I added, my strategy would be to build for a resilient future.

Under my administration, there would be more planning and less zoning. As a town on the water at a time when sea levels are already rising, we won’t be able to pump and dump our way out of even the five-inch rise in water levels predicted to occur in the next 15 years, which means every new pebble of development needs to be organized through a climate-change lens. Parking lots — in other words, stretches of land covered in asphalt? Not when we need to absorb runoff, rather than have it cascading down Garfield Avenue or flooding Broad Street.

Worldwide, climate change hits poor people harder and New London will be no exception. While the poor here tend to live further from the water’s edge, the dollar-chasing, asphalt-covered businesses along some of our key commercial streets create ideal sites for increasingly regular inland flooding. The elderly living in high rises are vulnerable to extended power outages when that happens and, as a food-importing community, our food supply is vulnerable, too. All of this hits poor people harder. With that in mind, I added that, as mayor, I would work to make New London greener, more resilient, and smarter about climate change. There’s no techno-fix for the predicament our fossil-fuelized global system has left us in, but we have to deal.

One irony struck me that night, as my opponents labored through their climate-change answers: our debate happened the day after an Ohio Democratic presidential debate during which not a single question was asked about climate change. And that night it rained so hard that a restaurant three blocks from the river’s edge had water pouring in the back door and out the front one.

The third debate, held at a senior center, was less formal than the other two and moderated by an attorney who gave us each 20 minutes to use as we wanted. That night, I pointed out that, of the dozen or so departments in the city’s governing structure, only two were run by women, but that I was excited and impressed by how many women were competing for the board of education and city council. (Thirteen women, myself included, ran for public office that election season.)

Asked (as I often was) about my inexperience in politics, I talked about the toolbox of skills I had amassed in an active life (as well as a life as an activist), including community organizing, consensus building, and deep listening, not to speak of a sense of deep accountability I feel for my community. You don’t have to be a lawyer or have a master’s in business administration (my two opponents) to work effectively with New London’s communities. In fact, professional expertise and ego can sometimes get in the way of representing community interests and truly grasping, no less meeting, community needs.

In the end, on that rainy election day in November, 394 people voted for me. It may not sound like much after all those months of effort, but that was more than 10% of the vote. As a write-in candidate, people had to know me, truly want to vote for me, remember the writing-in process, and then do it correctly. So each of those 394 votes felt hard won indeed.

People keep asking me if I’m going to run again. Who knows? The next election isn’t for four years, which feels like a lifetime from now and, believe me (given our world), I have plenty to do in the meantime.

Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. She writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and writes the “Little Insurrections” column for WagingNonviolence.Org. She has three children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer.

Copyright ©2020 Frida Berrigan — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 January 2020
Word Count: 2,908
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In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”

I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfired in wildly counterproductive ways, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.

Chaos, it seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to resurrect Twain’s comment — only today maybe those stars on our flag should be replaced with the universal symbol for chaos.

After all, our present administration, however unhinged, hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and repugnant decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations in the region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And the very manner — I’m loathe to call it a “process” — by which it’s happened just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark but logical conclusion.

The Goldilocks method Any military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the decider,” an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule, actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems, present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs off on a particular course of action.

Though they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer, you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance, and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a “decision briefing” convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of decision-making.

In 2009, as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you “under the hood” for some inside baseball. I — and just about every new staff officer — was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him to choose).

Confident in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks method. You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky option, and a “just-right” course of action. It nearly always worked.

I did this under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods, tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just enough initial guidance — far more than most commanders — to set his staff going in a reasonably focused fashion.

Unfortunately, that consummate professional moved on to bigger things and his replacement was a sociopath who gave vague, often conflicting guidance, oozed insecurity in briefings, and had a disturbing penchant for choosing the most radical (read: foolhardy) option around. Sound familiar? It should!

Still, military professionals are coached to adapt and improvise and so we did. As a staff we worked to limit his range of options by reverse–ordering the choices we presented him or even lying about nonexistent logistical limitations to stop him from doing the truly horrific.

And as recent events remind us, such exercises play out remarkably similarly, no matter whether you’re dealing at a battalion level (perhaps 400 to 700 troops) or that of this country’s commander-in-chief (more than two million uniformed service personnel). The behind-the-scenes war-gaming of the boss, the entire calculus, remains the same, whether the options are ultimately presented by a captain (me, then) or — as in the recent decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Suleimani — Mark Milley, the four-star general at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Soon after President Trump’s egregious, a-strategic, dubiously legal, unilateral execution of a uniformed leader of a sovereign country, reports surfaced describing his convoluted decision-making process. Perhaps predictably, it appears that The Donald took his military staff by surprise and chose the most extreme measure they presented him with — assassinating a foreign military figure. Honestly, that this president did so should have surprised no one. That, according to a report in the New York Times, his generals were indeed surprised strikes me as basic dereliction of duty (especially given that, seven months earlier, Trump had essentially given the green light to such a future assassination — the deepest desire, by the way, of both his secretary of state and his then-national security advisor, John Bolton).

At this point in their careers, having played out such processes at every possible level for at least 30 years, his generals ought to have known their boss better, toiled valiantly to temper his worst instincts, assumed he might choose the most extreme measure offered and, when he did so, publicly resigned before potentially relegating their soldiers to a hopeless new conflict. That they didn’t, particularly that the lead briefer Milley didn’t, is just further proof that, 18-plus years after our latest round of wars began, such senior leaders lack both competence and integrity.

Bush, Obama, and the chaos machine’s tragic foundations The current commander-in-chief could never have expanded America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (contra his campaign promises) or unilaterally drone-assassinated a foreign leader, without the militaristic foundations laid down for him by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it’s vital to review, however briefly, the chaotic precedents to the rule of Donald Trump.

Guided by a coterie of neoconservative zealots, Bush the Younger committed the nation to the “original sin” of expansive, largely unsanctioned wars as his chosen response to the 9/11 attacks. It was his team that would write the playbook on selling an ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence and false pretenses. He also escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of war by including the Islamic Republic in an imaginary “axis of evil” (with Iraq and North Korea) after invading first one of its neighbors, Afghanistan, and then the other, Iraq, while imposing sanctions, which froze the assets of Iranians allegedly connected to that country’s nuclear program. He ushered in the use of torture, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, illegal domestic mass surveillance, and drone attacks over the sovereign airspace of other countries — then lied about it all. That neither Congress, nor the courts, nor his successor held him (or anyone else) accountable for such decisions set a dangerous new standard for foreign policy.

Barack Obama promised “hope and change,” a refreshing (if vague) alternative to the sins of the Bush years. The very abstraction of that slogan, however, allowed his supporters to project their own wants, needs, and preferred policies onto the future Obama experiment. So perhaps none of us ought to have been as surprised as many of us were when, despite slowly pulling troops out of Iraq, he only escalated the Afghan War, continued the forever wars in general (even returning to Iraq in 2014), and set his own perilous precedents along the way.

It was, after all, Obama who, as an alternative to large-scale military occupations, took Bush’s drone program and ran with it. He would be the first president to truly earn the sobriquet “assassin-in-chief.” He made selecting individuals for assassination in “Terror Tuesday” meetings at the White House banal and put his stamp of approval on the drone campaigns across significant parts of the planet that followed — even killing American citizens without due process. Encouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he also launched a new regime-change war in Libya, turning that land into a failed state filled with terror groups, a decision which, he later admitted, added up to a “shit show.” After vacillating for a couple years, he also mired the U.S., however indirectly, in the Syrian civil war, empowering Islamist factions there and worsening that already staggering humanitarian catastrophe.

In response to the sudden explosion of the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda offshoot first catalyzed by the Bush invasion of Iraq and actually formed in an American prison in that country — its taking of key Iraqi cities and smashing of the American-trained Iraqi army, Obama loosed U.S. air power on them and sent American troops back into that country. He also greatly expanded his predecessor’s nascent military interventions across the African continent. There, too, the results were largely tragic and counterproductive as ethnic militias and Islamic terror groups have spread widely and civil warfare has exploded.

Finally, it was Obama who first sanctioned, supported, and enabled the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen, which, even now, remains perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. So it is that, from Mali to Libya, Syria to Afghanistan, every one of Bush’s and Obama’s military forays has sowed further chaos, startling body counts, and increased rates of terrorism. It’s those policies, those results, and the military toolbox that went with them that Donald J. Trump inherited in January 2017.

The Trumpian perfect storm During the climax to the American phase of a 30-year war in Vietnam, newly elected President Richard Nixon, a well-established Republican cold warrior, developed what he dubbed the “madman theory” for bringing the intractable U.S. intervention there to a face-saving conclusion. The president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recalled Nixon telling him:

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

It didn’t work, of course. Nixon escalated and expanded the war. He briefly invaded neighboring Cambodia and Laos, secretly (and illegally) bombed both countries, and ramped up air strikes on North Vietnam. Apart from slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, however, none of this had a notable effect on the ultimate outcome. The North Vietnamese called his bluff, extending the war long enough to force an outright American withdrawal less than four years later. Washington lost in Southeast Asia, just as today it’s losing in the Greater Middle East.

So it was, with the necessary foundations of militarism and hyper-interventionism in place, that Donald Trump entered the White House, at times seemingly intent on testing out his own personal “fire and fury” version of the madman theory. Indeed, his more irrational and provocative foreign policy incitements, including pulling out of the Paris climate accords, spiking a working nuclear deal with Iran, existentially threatening North Korea, seizing Syrian oil fields, sending yet more military personnel into the Persian Gulf region, and most recently assassinating a foreign leader seem right out of some madman instruction manual. And just like Nixon’s stillborn escalations, Trump’s most absurd moves also seem bound to fail.

Take the Suleimani execution as a case in point. An outright regional war has (so far) been avoided, thanks not to the “deal-making” skills of that self-styled “stable genius” in the White House but to Iran’s long history of restraint. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently put it: “The leadership in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington.”

In fact, Trump’s unprecedented assassination order backfired at every level. He even managed briefly to unite a divided Iranian nation, caused the Iraqi government to demand a full U.S. troop withdrawal from that country, convinced Iran to end its commitment to restrain its enrichment of uranium, and undoubtedly incentivized both Tehran and Pyongyang not to commit to, or abide by, any future nuclear deals with Washington.

If George W. Bush and Barack Obama sowed the seeds of the American chaos machine, Donald Trump represents the first true madman at the wheel of state, thanks to his volatile temperament, profound ignorance, and crippling insecurity.

The Rapture as foreign policy All of which raises another disturbing question: What if this administration’s chaos-sowing proves an end in itself, one that coheres with the millenarian fantasies of sections of the Republican Christian Right? After all, several key figures on the Trump team — notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence — explicitly view the Middle East as evangelical Christians. Like a disturbing 73% of evangelicals (or 20% of the U.S. population), Pompeo and Pence believe that the Rapture (that is, the prophesied Christian end of the world) is likely to unfold in this generation and that a contemporary conflict in Israel and an impending war with Iran might actually be trigger events ushering in just such an apocalypse.  

Donald Trump is, by all indications, far too self-serving, self-absorbed, and cynical to adhere to the eschatological blind-faith of the two Mikes. He clearly believes only in Donald Trump. And yet what a terrible irony it would be if, due to his perfect-storm disposition, he unwittingly ends up playing the role of the very Antichrist those evangelicals believe necessary to usher in end-times.

Given the foundations set in place for Trump by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and his capacity to throw caution to the wind, it’s hard to imagine a better candidate to play that role.

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vets Chris Henriksen and Keegan Ryan Miller. 

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 January 2020
Word Count: 2,465
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A new Wild West has taken root not far from Tombstone, Arizona, known to many for its faux-historical reenactments of the old West. We’re talking about a long, skinny territory — a geographic gerrymander — that stretches east across New Mexico and down the Texan Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. It also runs west across hundreds of miles of desert to California and the Pacific Ocean. Like the old Wild West, this one is lawless, save for the law of the gun. But that old West was lawless for want of government. This one is lawless because of it.

The Department of Homeland Security, under authority conferred by Congress, has declared more than 50 federal laws inoperable along sections of the U.S. boundary with Mexico, the better to build the border wall that Donald Trump has promised his “base.” Innumerable state laws and local ordinances have also been swept aside. Predictably, the Endangered Species Act is among the fallen. So are the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wilderness Act, laws restricting air and water pollution, and measures protecting wildlife, landscapes, Native American sacred sites, and even caves and fossils.

The new Wild West of the border wall is an authoritarian dreamscape where the boss man faces no limits and no obligations. It’s as though Marshall Wyatt Earp, reborn as an orange-haired easterner with no knowledge of the actual West, were back in charge, deciding who’s in and who’s out, what goes and what stays.

Prominent on the list of suspended laws is the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which, until recently, was the nation’s look-before-you-leap conscience. The environmental analyses and impact statements NEPA requires might not force the government to evaluate whether a palisade of 30-foot-high metal posts — bollards in border wall terminology — were really a better way to control drug smuggling than upgrading inspection facilities at ports of entry, where, by all accounts, the vast majority of illegal substances enter the country. They would, however, require those wall builders to figure out in advance a slew of other gnarly questions like: How will wildlife be affected by a barrier that nothing larger than a kangaroo rat can get through? And how much will pumping scarce local water to make concrete draw down shallow desert aquifers?

The questions get big, fast. One that might look easy but isn’t concerns the flashfloods that stream down desert washes. The uprights of the border wall are to be spaced only four inches apart, which means they’ll catch flood debris the way a colander catches spaghetti.

Let’s get specific. The San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge abuts the border in the far southeastern corner of Arizona. Black Draw, a gulch running through the middle of the refuge, is normally as dry as a hot sidewalk. When thunderstorms burst over the vast San Bernardino Valley, however, the floodwaters can surge more than 20 feet high.  Imagine a wall of chocolate water sweeping up tree trunks, uprooted bushes, the occasional dead cow, and fence posts snarled in wire. Imagine what happens when that torrent meets a barrier built like a strainer. The junk catches and creates a dam. Water backs up, and pressure builds. If the wall were built like the Hoover Dam, it might hold, but it won’t be and it won’t.

In 2014, a flood in Black Draw swept vehicle barriers aside, scattering pieces downstream. Local ranchers have shown me the pictures. You could say the desert was making a point about how wet it could be. In fact, there’s no mystery about what will happen when such a flood hits a top-heavy palisade. If a NEPA document were to evaluate the border wall, the passage discussing this eventuality might require its writer to invent a term for what a wall becomes when it lies flat on the ground.

On the other hand, if you leave gaps for floods to pass through, then smugglers and — for Donald Trump and his base — people of unacceptably dark skin color might come the other way. Not that they necessarily would. As local residents I talked to attest, active patrols, remote sensing, and improved coordination among law enforcement agencies have reduced illegal crossings in the San Bernardino Valley almost to zero, something current government officials don’t point out but a NEPA document would.

With NEPA out of the picture, the responsible parties only have to claim that they’ll figure out a solution later and, when “later” comes, maybe they’ll have conveniently moved on to other jobs.

Pittsburgh on the border Meanwhile, there’s another question that won’t have to be dealt with: How much water will the wall’s construction require? The answer matters in an area where water’s scarce. Again, the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge offers a useful vantage point for considering the question.

To get to the refuge, you drive east from the town of Douglas along the Geronimo Trail, an unpaved two-lane country road that earns its name honestly.  Nineteenth-century Apache leader Geronimo surrendered to the U.S. military in the mountains on the horizon just ahead of you. Shortly before you reach the refuge, you top a low rise overlooking what the local assessor initially mistook for a new industrial park.  It was as if a section of Pittsburgh or Youngstown had suddenly sprouted from the desert, with enough mesquite and creosote bush scraped away to accommodate a concrete-batching plant, office trailers, and a massive staging area and machinery yard.

Stacks of steel bollards stand taller than houses, covering the space of a neighborhood. A grid of steel rails for laying out those bollards and welding them into pre-fab wall sections occupies another acre or two, beyond which stacks of completed sections cover yet more acres. In front of those stacks, a few scraps of wall stand vertical but disjointed, like shrines to a metal god — probably practice erections, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Scattered through the site are forklifts, graders, loaders, bulldozers, excavators, pickup trucks, flatbeds, and cranes. Generators and floodlights on wheeled rigs are parked at the margins, ready to illuminate round-the-clock shifts. Close to the batching tower, which may rival the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas as the tallest structure in Cochise County, cement trucks cluster like a litter of puppies.

And more steel keeps arriving. An approaching cloud of dust on the Geronimo Trail signals a line of incoming semis loaded with still more bollards. They pass newly posted signs that say: “Be Aware: Equipment Has the Right of Way” and “Risk Takers Are Accident Makers.”

These details, however, are prelude to the main event. If you look toward Mexico, a half-mile of wall already stands in place, undulating with the hills. Think of it as a dark, linear Steelhenge, a monolith screening the shimmering Sonoran mountains to the south. You can see where the next sections will be raised. Construction has already reached the refuge.

Where the deer and the antelope better not play The surface and subsurface flow of water from nearly the entire San Bernardino Valley converges at the refuge, creating an oasis in the heart of the desert. If this were the Sahara, caravansaries would have stopped by its green pools for thousands of years. As it is, Apaches, Yaquis, Tohono O’odham, and their predecessors have used its waters since time out of mind, as did the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans who later strove to take the land from them and from each other. The ponds lie half-hidden amid jungles of reeds.

San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge is modest as refuges go — only 2,369 acres — but it was once part of the sprawling, 73,240-acre Slaughter Ranch, two-thirds of which lay in Mexico. Next to the refuge, the ranch headquarters, now a historic site, has its own big pond. From that pond or any of those on the refuge, a major-league slugger could knock a baseball out of the country.

Contractors building the wall have drilled three wells along the border and leased a fourth. Tanker trucks constantly shuttle between the wells and the concrete plant. Nobody is saying how much water wall construction will consume. The foundation for the wall will be — what? A yard wide and seven-feet deep? Ten-feet deep? Sorry, that’s privileged information, not for public consumption.

Anyway, the foundation just in this area will run for scores of miles, farther than you can see, and consume enough concrete to build a small town — and concrete requires water. Lots of it.

How much will the pumping deplete local aquifers? Nobody knows because, absent NEPA, nobody has had to figure it out. There’s been no modeling, no serious testing, no reliable calculations. Still, local ranchers would like to know the answer. They depend on wells and water tanks scattered through the desert scrub where their cattle drink.

Good luck to them. And good luck, as well, to the critters for which the refuge is supposed to provide… well, refuge.

I could print a list of the unusual fish, frogs, snails, snakes, and other living things that are found here and almost nowhere else on Earth, not to mention the rare plants, the itinerant mammals (some also rare), and the hundreds of species of birds that use this place. In the desert, reliable water is a kind of miracle that attracts and creates other miracles.

San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, you might say, is a cluster of miracles. There are too many to list. And a long list of weird names would take up a lot of space and sound pinheaded. I care a lot about those creatures, but I don’t want to sound like that.

To be honest, I’m almost afraid to learn the names of some of the refuge’s creatures because then it would only hurt all the more if they decline to extinction. The wall will certainly nudge, or maybe shove, many of them in that direction. Nevertheless, I have to mention two of them. Their names suggest a kind of taxonomic poetry, a nature music. They aren’t necessarily the rarest, but they sound the best: Yaqui topminnow. Chiricahua leopard frog. The words fall on the ears like melodies, evoking the mystery of tender life in a harsh land. As members of a species, you and I are as common as coal. In the big biological scheme of things, creatures like these are rubies and sapphires.

Forget policy, follow the metaphor It’s impossible to understand the wall, at least in the San Bernardino Valley, in terms of policy. As one rancher put it to me over coffee at the Gadsden Hotel, “This [wall] may be needed someplace, but it isn’t needed here.”

If Trump’s wall were really about policy, its advantages and disadvantages would be weighed against other strategies requiring different kinds of investment. But this is the new Wild West, where rational judgment, laws, and procedures only get in the way.

The truth of the wall lies in metaphor. If Chiricahua leopard frog conveys a kind of poetic resonance to people like me, then for millions of others chanting “Build the Wall!” is like hitting a big bass drum. Everybody understands wall! Even if the structure doesn’t actually work in physical space, it works in your mind. It stands between you and everything bad you can imagine. The core truth that unites Trump and his supporters is that he hates who we hate — and the border wall stands for keeping out those unwanted people and all they represent.

This is why the wall can’t coexist with NEPA. Impact statements don’t do imagery. If you really want to crack down on drug smuggling, for example, you’d concentrate your efforts at established ports of entry, where billions of dollars of goods and millions of people cross from one country to the other every day. The bulk of the fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, and other hard drugs entering the U.S. is reportedly concealed among legitimate imports in railroad cars and trucks of every description. Or they get stashed in secret compartments in buses, vans, cars, and pickup trucks. (The U.S. mail is another major conduit.) Currently, it’s estimated that more than $4 billion in new scanners, inspection lanes, and the people to staff them are needed. Making that investment would have infinitely more impact on drug flow than using the same money to install bollards where they aren’t needed and won’t last. There are better ways to handle people, too, but let’s not get distracted from the real story.

Expenditures on wall construction in Fiscal Year 2019 ran to approximately $10 billion. Only a third of that amount was actually appropriated by Congress for border security structures. Delivering the rest of the money required masterful circumventions of constitutional intent.

Here’s one of them: each year Congress appropriates so-called 2808 funds to the Department of Defense for construction projects on military bases, including schools, clinics, roads, and other infrastructure. Such expenditures are restricted to military property and the international border with Mexico isn’t — or wasn’t — a military base. For the Trumpistas, however, not a problem.

In 1907, President Teddy Roosevelt reserved a 60-foot easement from the public domain along the southern border to keep it “free from obstruction as a protection against the smuggling of goods between the United States and Mexico.” Since then, the “Roosevelt easement” has been administered by the Bureau of Land Management, but last year the Trump administration transferred the easement to the Department of Defense, which obligingly assigned it as a real-estate asset to Fort Bliss, Texas.

Voila! Now, the Roosevelt Easement is part of a military base and a tendril of Fort Bliss officially extends into Arizona, New Mexico, and California — but not Texas. (The Lone Star State reserved its public land for itself when it entered the union, so no Roosevelt Easement there.) Technically, border wall construction within the easement now constitutes an improvement to Fort Bliss, enhancing military preparedness, yadda, yadda, yadda. There’s more to it than that, including the president’s formal declaration of a national emergency last February, which enabled certain other steps, but you get the idea. Where there’s a will, there’s an imperial way.

As it happens, however, the Pentagon’s money for funding wall construction across the foot of the San Bernardino refuge itself comes from a different pot: “284” funds, intended for counter-narcotics work. Diverting $2.5 billion of these monies to the border wall was, to say the least, a stretch, so a coalition of humanitarian and environmental groups sued. A district court found in their favor and issued an injunction, halting the use of the funds for construction. A rapid series of appeals went to the Supreme Court and the Supremes said, Hmmm, interesting question, which will take time for the lower courts to resolve; meanwhile, the injunction is lifted. And so funding again flowed like a flash flood. If the courts ultimately decide that the transfer of funds is really not okay, the wall may already have been built. Thank you, Supremes.

Dollars and nonsense I forgot to mention something: in addition to suspending more than 50 laws protecting lands, wildlife, and the public interest, the government has also waived many procurement laws and also buried a lot of contract information. This means you and I will have a hard time learning what anything actually costs, even though our tax dollars are paying for it.

Example: the barrier to be built along the edge of the San Bernardino refuge, cutting off its terrestrial wildlife from the Mexican half of its world and quite possibly draining the ponds where some of the planet’s rarest creatures survive, is part of a contract for 63 miles of border wall awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors (SWVC), a subsidiary of Kiewit, a Fortune 500 company with $9 billion in annual sales.

The original May 2019 contract awarded $646 million to SWVC, putting the cost of the refuge wall at $10.25 million per mile, a veritable steal. But you would need to know someone who can log into the relevant government database to discover that the fifth modification of the original contract, signed on August 29th, added another $653 million to the kitty. Now, those 63 miles are going to cost $1.3 billion, or almost $21 million per mile.

And by the way, did I mention that construction will include a power line and floodlights on 60-foot masts to illuminate the wall all night long, every night of the year? I have friends in the San Bernardino Valley who just about weep — and they aren’t weepy people — when they think about the lights on that wall blazing away in what used to be the immense, holy darkness of their formerly unblemished land.

I can get pretty choked up about it myself, but you can be sure that smugglers won’t. Here’s where things get truly weird: believe it or not, darkness is an ally of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Its people have night vision goggles and its drones and other sensors have infrared detectors. They don’t need light. Flood the border with light and, counter-intuitively, the CBP is blinded, losing an advantage. Whose idea was this? Nobody’s saying, but it seems to have come from, ahem, the highest level. Good thing NEPA doesn’t apply.

Let’s turn up the weirdness a little bit further: out in western Arizona, close to the California line, you come to the Barry M. Goldwater Range (BMGR). Here, young Air Force and Marine pilots learn to strafe and bomb. Migrants have been known to cross the international border at the BMGR but, according to court filings, over the past five years migrants have gotten in the way of only 195 of 255,732 air sorties – less than 0.1%.

An already existing pedestrian barrier along much of the range’s border possibly contributes to this low level of trespass — and the bombs and bullets may help, too. But the decisive factor is undoubtedly the range’s spectacular heat and aridity and the mortally long distances a migrant would have to walk to reach any possible pick-up or rendezvous spot. Nevertheless a second wall, backing up the first, is now slated for construction at BMGR, with a road sandwiched between the two walls, down which CBP patrols will race like hamsters on a flattened wheel.

Let’s just agree, as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford, Jr., did in a memorandum to then-acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, that double-walling the BMGR makes no sense in terms of policy. In terms of metaphor, however, double-walling a border where essentially nobody goes is perfectly logical. If the goal is to build miles of wall, costs and benefits be damned, you might as well build them where there’s nobody to get in the way. Build the wall!

And so it is indeed being built, at the cost of violating not just the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, but Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe National Monument, the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, the historic town center of Roma, Texas, and other sublime and exceptional places. One might ask why so much uniqueness and rarity lies along our southern border. The short answer is that the borderlands are the meeting place of biological communities as well as cultures. As Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña puts it, “The border is the juncture, not the edge.”

But an edge is exactly what President Trump’s wall would make it. Wall construction was and remains his foremost campaign pledge: 500 miles of wall by November of 2020, or 450 miles, or whatever the number du jourhappens to be. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Washington Post, and others have tried to deflate the president’s boasts by asserting that he’s actually built no new wall and his promises are empty.

In their calculations, substituting a 30-foot-tall wall for vehicle barriers is only “replacement” and therefore doesn’t constitute “new” construction. That’s like arguing that mooring an aircraft carrier where a rowboat used to be changes nothing because there’s still just one vessel in the harbor. Such semantic jousting only camouflages the pervasive damage already being done both to people and to the land on the border — and there’s no end in sight. The congressional budget agreement hammered out in December 2019 appropriates another $1.375 billion for wall construction for fiscal year 2020, while removing obstacles to yet more transfers of Pentagon funds. And Trump is not being shy about those transfers.  He evidently plans to divert $7.2 billion more from legitimate Pentagon projects to wall building this year.

The international drug cartels should be thanking us. The wall will not curb their principal business of smuggling and the Trump administration’s new immigration policies have turned what was formerly a minor sideline — kidnapping people for ransom — into a growth industry. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers to whom the U.S. has refused entry are now huddled in cardboard slums in Mexico’s border towns, vulnerable to human predators. Their relatives in the United States — the people they were trying to reach — will beg, borrow, or steal to pay the ransoms that the increasingly busy (and brutal) kidnappers in Mexico demand.

That, however, is just collateral damage in the land of the free. Of course, we treat asylum seekers as though they were an inferior variety of human being. They talk funny. They aren’t like us. And we treat the borderlands and its creatures with the same loyalty we showed the Kurds. After all, we are America. Behind our wall, we are great again.

William deBuys writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is the author of nine books, including The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures and A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.

Copyright ©2020 William deBuys — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 January 2020
Word Count: 3,581
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This seems like a strange moment to be writing about “the deep state” with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability. Just as we had gotten used to the fact that the president is, in effect, under congressional indictment, just as we had settled into a more or less stable stalemate over when (and if) the Senate will hold an impeachment trial, the president shook the snow globe again, by ordering the assassination of foreign military officials and threatening the destruction of Iran’s cultural sites. Nothing better than the promise of new war crimes to take the world’s attention away from a little thing like extorting a U.S. ally to help oneself get reelected.

On the other hand, maybe this is exactly the moment to think about the so-called deep state, if by that we mean the little-noticed machinery of governance that keeps dependably churning on in that same snow globe’s pedestal, whatever mayhem may be swirling around above it. Maybe this is even the moment to be grateful for those parts of the government whose inertia keeps the ship of state moving in the same general direction, regardless of who’s on the bridge at any given time.

However, that sometimes benign inertia is not what the people who coined that term meant by deep state.

What is a “deep state”? The expression is actually a translation of the Turkish phrase derin devlet. As historian Ryan Gingeras has explained, it arose as a way of describing “a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” In the Turkish case, those “unacknowledged persons” were, in fact, agents of organized criminal enterprises working within the government.

Gingeras, an expert on organized crime in Turkey, has described how alliances between generals, government officials, and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” allowed the creation and execution of “policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” In the Turkish case, the history of such alliances can be traced to struggles for power in the first decades of the previous century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The interpenetration of the drug cartels and government in Mexico is another example of a deep state at work. The presence of cartel collaborators in official positions and in the police hierarchy at all levels makes it almost impossible for any president, even the upright Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to defeat them.

The term “deep state” has also been used to characterize the role of the military in Egypt. As Sarah Chayes has written in Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, Egypt’s military has long been a state-within-a-state with its own banking and business operations that constitute 25%-40% of the Egyptian economy. It’s the country’s largest landowner and the ultimate maker and breaker of Egyptian presidents. In 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising forced President Hosni Mubarak, who had run the country for 30 years, to resign. The military certainly had something to do with that resignation, since he handed over power to Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

When, however, a nascent democracy brought their longtime opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, to power with the election of Mohamed Morsi, that was too much for the generals. It helped that Morsi made his own missteps, including the repression of peaceful protesters. So there wasn’t much objection when, in 2012, his own minister of defense, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, led a military coup against Morsi. Sisi and the Egyptian military have run the country directly ever since, making the state and the deep state one and the same.

Donald Trump and the “deep state” From his earliest days in the White House, Donald Trump and his officials have inveighed against what the president has regularly labeled the “deep state.” What he’s meant by the term, though, is something different from its more traditional use. Rather than referring to a “shadow or parallel system of government” operating outside official channels, for Trump the deep state is the government — or at least those parts of it that frustrate him in any way.

When, for example, the judicial system throws up barriers to government by fiat, that’s the deep state at work as far as he’s concerned. Want to proclaim “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” but the courts put a hold on your executive order? Blame the deep state.

Did anonymous government officials tell the press that your National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, lied about his contacts with Russian officials? Blame the deep state for the leaks.

As early as March 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged that the administration did indeed believe in the existence of a deep state, a shadow operation that had infiltrated many of the offices and activities of the federal government. A reporter asked him, “Does the government believe that there is such a thing as a ‘deep state’ that is actively working to undermine the president?”

Spicer replied:

“I think that there’s no question when you have eight years of one party in office that there are people who stay in government — affiliated with, joined — and continue to espouse the agenda of the previous administration, so I don’t think it should come to any surprise that there are people that burrowed into government during the eight years of the last administration and may have believed in that agenda and want to continue to seek it.”

In other words, for the Trump administration and its supporters, the deep state is any part of the apparatus of government itself that doesn’t do their absolute bidding.

The Huffington Post has assembled a convenient list of some of Trump’s tweets invoking the “deep state.” Here’s a summary:

•  In November 2017, he blamed unnamed “deep state authorities” for a failure to continue investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, calling those authorities “Rigged and corrupt.”

•  That same month, he tweeted that the FBI and the Justice Department were withholding information about “surveillance of associates of Donald Trump.” This was, he said, “Big stuff. Deep State,” and he demanded that someone “Give this information NOW!”

•  In January 2018, he accused Hillary Clinton’s former aide Huma Abedin of putting “Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents.” Did this mean, he asked, that the “Deep State Justice Dept must finally act”? If it were to “finally act,” he added, it should be “Also on Comey & others.”

•  In May 2018, he accused the “Criminal Deep State” of going after “Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam” and “getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!” Apparently the president was referring to a conspiracy theory of his that the Obama administration had embedded a spy in his campaign operation in order to ensure a Hillary Clinton victory.

•  In July 2018, he was ruminating about a supposedly missing Democratic National Committee computer server that the FBI, he believed, had failed to impound. Was this failure, he wondered, an action of the “Deep State”? (Yes, this is the same nonexistent server he later asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look for in his country as a precondition for releasing U.S. military aid.)

•  In September 2018, he inveighed against the deep state in general, suggesting that it and its allies were upset at his policy achievements. This time he suggested that the deep state does have its extra-governmental allies, “the Left” and “the Fake News Media”: “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy — & they don’t know what to do. The Economy is booming like never before, Jobs are at Historic Highs, soon TWO Supreme Court Justices…”

Trump, in other words, sees the U.S. government as infected by “Unelected, deep state operatives who defy the voters, to push their own secret agendas.” Those “operatives,” he told a rally in 2018, are “truly a threat to democracy itself.”

Does the United States have a deep state? The November House impeachment hearings brought us the testimony of a number of career diplomats and civil servants like Marie Yovanovich, the former ambassador to Ukraine, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council. Their appearance led John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA, to exclaim in a speech at George Mason University, “Thank God for the deep state.”

He meant it as a joke, but he was also pointing out that their dignified testimony might serve as a reminder of the value of government service. “Everyone here has seen this progression of diplomats, and intelligence officers and White House people trooping up to Capitol Hill right now,” he explained. Those who watched that progression, he said, certainly recognized that “these are people who are doing their duty.” McLaughlin told National Public Radio’s Greg Myre and Rachel Treisman that he had received some “blowback” from his joke, and added:

“I think it’s a silly idea. There is no ‘deep state.’ What people think of as the ‘deep state’ is just the American civil service, social security, the people who fix the roads, health and human services, Medicare.”

I’ll give one cheer for that kind of deep state: not a secret, extra-official shadow government, but the actual workings of government itself for the benefit of the people it’s meant to serve. Personally, I’m all for people who devote their lives to making sure our food is as safe as possible, the cars we drive won’t kill us, our planes stay up in the air, and roads and railways are built and maintained to connect us, not to speak of having clean air and water, public schools and universities to educate our young people, and a social security system to provide a safety net for people of my age — all of which, by the way, is in danger from this president, his administration, and the Republican party.

But there’s another way of thinking about the deep state, one that suggests an ongoing threat not to Donald Trump and his pals but to this democracy and the world. I’m thinking, of course, of that vast — if informal, complex, and sometimes internally competitive — consortium composed of the industries and government branches that make up what President Dwight Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex.” This was exactly the “state” that I think President Obama encountered when he decided to shut down the George W. Bush-era CIA torture program and found that the price for compliance was a promise not to prosecute anyone for crimes committed in the so-called war on terror. January 2009 was, as he famously said, a time to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Here is Mike Lofgren, a long-time civil servant and aide to many congressional Republicans, writing in 2014 about that national security machine for BillMoyers.com. In “Anatomy of the Deep State,” he described the power and reach of this apparatus in chilling terms:

“There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol…

“Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

Lofgren was not describing “a secret, conspiratorial cabal.” Rather, he was arguing that “the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.” This has certainly been the experience of those who have, in particular, opposed U.S. military adventures abroad. They discover that many of the lies, deceptions, and crimes of that “state within a state” are openly there for all to see and are being committed in the equivalent of broad daylight with utter impunity.

This, by the way, creates certain obvious problems for those of us who oppose the presidency and the striking new militarism of Donald Trump — if, at least, it means embracing such representatives of Lofgren’s deep state as that old war criminal, John Bolton. He has not become a progressive hero just because he’s suddenly proclaimed himself ready, if subpoenaed, to testify in the Senate impeachment trial of his former boss. If Bolton chooses to do so, you can be sure that he will not be motivated by a devotion to democratic government or the rule of law.

Trump’s own relationship to the national security deep state has been ambivalent at best. It’s clear that many of those officials initially thought he might be a weapon they could aim and shoot at will, but he’s turned out to be far more bizarre and unpredictable than any of them expected. There’s evidence, for example, that the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani was presented to Trump as the most extreme option possible — in a bid to convince him to act against Iran, but in a less drastic way. As the New York Times reported recently, “Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable,” but they don’t expect presidents to choose the decoy. Donald Trump is clearly not one of those presidents.

There is a sense, however, in which the United States under Trump does resemble the original Turkish conception of a deep state, that “kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” That’s a pretty apt description, for instance, of the actions of the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in relation to U.S. policy towards Ukraine, which he’s been coordinating and in some sense directing for some time.

The only difference in this case is that Trump has been fool enough to acknowledge his personal lawyer’s role. May that foolishness get him turned out of office, one way or another. In the meantime, I’ll keep giving my one cheer for the civil servants who keep the wheels turning. I suspect, however, that as the world awaits developments in the Middle East now that Trump has followed 18 years of U.S. state (and deep state) disaster there with his own impetuous intervention, few people will be offering many cheers for the United States of America.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article appeared) and teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 January 2020
Word Count: 2,432
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Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.

Oh, you’re going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you’re right. It’s true enough that the U.S. military can’t win a war anymore. In this century, it’s never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it’s set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it’s also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.

Al-Qaeda, whose 19 suicidal hijackers so devastatingly struck this country on September 11, 2001, was just a modest outfit then (even if its leader dreamt of drawing the U.S. into conflicts across the Islamic world that would promote his group big time). Nineteen years later, its branches have spread from Yemen to West Africa, while the original al-Qaeda still exists. And don’t forget its horrific progeny, the Islamic State, or ISIS (originally al-Qaeda in Iraq). Though the U.S. military has declared it defeated in its “caliphate” (it isn’t, not truly), its branches have multiplied from the Philippines deep into Africa.

And the Afghan War, that original American invasion of this century, remains hell on Earth more than 18 years later. In December, the Washington Post broke a story about interviews on that conflict conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with 400 key insiders, military and civilian, revealing that it was a war of (well-grasped) error. As that paper’s reporter, Craig Whitlock, put it: “Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Many of those generals and other officials who had claimed, year after year, that there was “progress” in Afghanistan, that the U.S. had turned yet another “corner,” admitted to the Inspector General’s interviewers that they had been lying to the rest of us. In truth, so long after the invasion of 2001, this wasn’t exactly news (not if you had been paying attention anyway). And it couldn’t have been more historically familiar. After all, U.S. military commanders and other key officials had, in a similar fashion, regularly hailed “progress” in the Vietnam War years, too. As U.S. war commander General William Westmoreland put it in an address to the National Press Club in 1967, “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view,” a sentiment later boiled down by American officialdom to seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In fact, half a century later, these, too, have proved to be tunnel years for the U.S. military in its global war on terror, which might more accurately be called a global war of error. Take Iraq, the country that, in the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush and crew so triumphantly invaded, claiming a connection between its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda, while citing the dangers of the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly possessed. Both claims were, of course, fantasies propagated by officials dreaming of using that invasion to establish a Pax Americana in the oil-rich Middle East forever and a day. (“Mission accomplished!”)

So many years later, Americans are still dying there; American air and drone strikes are still ongoing; and American troops are still being sent in, as Iraqis continue to die in significant numbers in a country turned into a stew of displacement, poverty, protest, and chaos. Meanwhile, ISIS (formed in an American prison camp in Iraq) threatens to resurge amid the never-ending mess that invasion created — and war with Iran seems to be the order of the day.

And just to continue down a list that’s little short of endless, don’t forget Somalia. The U.S. military has been fighting there, on and off, with strikingly negative consequences since the infamous Blackhawk Down disaster of 1993. Last year, American air strikes rose again to record levels there, while — no surprise — the terror outfit Washington has been fighting in that country since 2006, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot, seems only to be gaining strength.

Hey, even the Russians got a (grim) win in Syria; the U.S., nowhere. Not in Libya, a failed state filled with warring militias and bad guys of every sort in the wake of a U.S.-led overthrow of the local autocrat. Not in Niger, where four American soldiers died at the hands of an ISIS terror group that still thrives; not in Yemen, yet another failed state where a Washington-backed Saudi war follows perfectly in the U.S. military’s footsteps in the region. So, yes, you’re right to challenge me with all of that.

How to run a war of error Nonetheless, I stand by my initial statement. In these years, the American war system has proven to be a remarkable institutional success story. Think of it this way: in the military of the twenty-first century, failure is the new success. In order to grasp this, you have to stop looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of those embattled lands and start looking instead at Washington, D.C. While you’re at it, you need to stop thinking that the gauge of success in war is victory. That’s so mid-twentieth century of you! In fact, almost the opposite may be true when it comes to the American way of war today.

After more than 18 years of what, once upon a time, would have been considered failure, tell me this: Is the Pentagon receiving more money or less? In fact, it’s now being fed record amounts of tax dollars (as is the whole national security state). Admittedly, Congress can’t find money for the building or rebuilding of American infrastructure — China now has up to 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and the U.S. not one — and is riven by party animosities on issue after issue, but funding the Pentagon? No problem. When it comes to that, there’s hardly a question, hardly a dispute at all. Agreement is nearly unanimous.

Failure, in other words, is the new success and that applies as well to the “industrial” part of the military-industrial complex. That reality was caught in a Washington Post headline the day after a CIA drone assassinated General Qassem Suleimani: “Defense stocks spike after airstrike against Iranian commander.” Indeed, the good times clearly lay ahead. In the age of Trump, when the last secretary of defense was a former Boeing executive and the present one a former lobbyist for arms-maker Raytheon, it’s been weapons galore all the way to the bank. Who cares if those weapons really work as advertised or if the wars in which they’re used are winnable, as long as they’re bought at staggering prices (and other countries buy them as well)? If you don’t believe me, just check out Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever (that doesn’t really work). Hey, in 2019, that company got a $2.43 billion contract just for spare parts for the plane!

And this version of a success story applies not just to funding and weaponry but to the military’s leadership as well. Keep in mind that, after almost two decades without a victory in sight, if you check any poll, you’ll find that the U.S. military remains the most admired institution around (or the one Americans have most “confidence” in). And under the circumstances, tell me that isn’t an accomplishment of the first order.

For just about every key figure in the U.S. military, you can now safely say that failure continues to be the order of the day. Consider it the twenty-first-century version of a military insurance policy: keep on keeping on without ever thinking outside the box and you’ll be pushed up the chain of command to ever more impressive positions (and, sooner or later, through Washington’s infamous “revolving door” onto the corporate boards of weapons makers and other defense firms). You’ll be hailed as a great and thoughtful commander, a genuine historian of war, and a strategist beyond compare.  You’ll be admired by one and all.

Americans of another age would have found this strange indeed, but not today. Take, for instance, former Secretary of Defense and Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis who led troops into Afghanistan in 2001 and again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, as commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”

And then, of course, he only rose further, ending up as the head of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (and you know how that went), until he retired in 2013 and joined the corporate board of General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest defense contractor. Then, in 2016, a certain Donald J. Trump took a liking to the very idea of a general nicknamed “mad dog” and appointed him to run the Department of Defense (which should probably be renamed the Department of Offense). There, with full honors, the former four-star general oversaw the very same wars until, in December 2018, deeply admired by Washington journalists among others, he resigned in protest over a presidential decision to withdraw American troops from Syria (and rejoined the board of General Dynamics).

In terms of the system he was in, that may have been his only genuine “error,” his only true “defeat.” Fortunately for the Pentagon, another commander who had risen through the same dead-end wars, four-star Army General Mark Milley, having been appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew just what to whisper in the president’s ear — the magic word “oil,” or rather some version of protect (i.e. take) Syrian oil fields — to get him to send American troops back into that country to continue the local version of our never-ending wars.

By now, Milley’s rise to glory will seem familiar to you. In announcing his appointment as Army chief of staff in 2015, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called him “a warrior and a statesman.” He added, “He not only has plenty of operational and joint experience in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on the Joint Staff, but he also has the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army.” Exactly!

Milley had, in fact, fought in both the Afghan and Iraq wars, serving three tours of duty in Afghanistan alone. In other words, the more you don’t win — the more you are, in a sense, in error — the more likely you are to advance. Or as retired General Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the United States Army and a former chief of staff himself, put it then, Milley’s command experience in war and peace gave him “firsthand knowledge of what the Army can do and of the impact of resource constraints on its capabilities.”

In other words, he was a man ready to command who knew just how to handle this country’s losing wars and keep them (so to speak) on track. Once upon a time, such a crew of commanders would have been considered a military of losers, but no longer. They are now the eternal winners in America’s war of error.

In September 2013, Milley, then an Army three-star general, typically offered this ludicrously rosy assessment of Afghanistan’s American-trained and American-supplied security forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.”

As Tony Karon wrote recently, “Either Milley was dissembling or he was deluded and therefore grotesquely incompetent.” One thing we know, though: when it comes to public military assessments of the Afghan War (and the global war on terror more generally), he was typical. For such commanders, it was invariably “progress” all the way.

Just in case you don’t quite see the pattern yet, after the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan Papers came out last December, offering clear evidence that, whatever they said in public, America’s commanders saw little in the way of “progress” in the Afghan War, Milley promptly stepped up to the plate. He labeled that report’s conclusions “mischaracterizations.” He insisted instead that the endlessly optimistic public comments of generals like him had been “honest assessments… never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people.”

Oh, and here’s a final footnote (as reported in the New York Times last year) on how Milley (and top commanders like him) operated — and not just in Afghanistan either:

As Army chief of staff, General Milley has come under criticism from some in the Special Operations community for his involvement in the investigation into the 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead. He persuaded Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting defense secretary, to curtail a broader review, and also protected the career of an officer who some blamed for the ambush. General Milley’s backers said he prevented the officer from leading another combat unit.

Whatever you do, in other words, don’t give up the ghost (of error). Think of this as the formula for “success” in that most admired of institutions, the U.S. military. After all, Milley and Mattis are just typical of the commanders who rose (and are still rising) to ever more prestigious positions on the basis of losing (or at least not winning) an endless series of conflicts. Those failed wars were their tickets to success. Go figure.

Where Defeat Culture Leads In other words, the men who fought the twenty-first-century equivalents of Vietnam — though against right-wing Islamists, not left-wing nationalists and communists — the men who never for a second figured out how to win “hearts and minds” any better than General William Westmorland had half a century earlier, are now triumphantly running the show in Washington. Add in the corporate types who endlessly arm them for battle and lobby for more of the same while raking in the dough and you have a system that no one involved would want to change. It’s a formula for success that works like a dream (even if someday that dream is sure to end up looking like a nightmare).

Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I traced how a deeply embedded American culture of triumph evaporated in the Vietnam War years, “its graveyard for all to see,” as “the answers of 1945 dissolved so quickly into the questions of 1965.” Speaking of the impact of that war on American culture, I added: “There was no narrative form that could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a nonwhite people in a frontier war in which the statistics of American victory seemed everywhere evident.”

Little did I know then how deeply a version of what might be called “defeat culture” would embed itself in American life. After all, Donald Trump couldn’t have been elected to “make America great again” without it. From the evidence of these years, nowhere was that culture more deeply absorbed (however unconsciously) than in the military itself, which has, in our time, managed to turn it into a version of the ultimate success story.

Afghanistan has, of course, long been known as “the graveyard of empires.” The Soviet Union fought Islamic militants (backed by the Saudis and the United States) for nine years there before, in 1989, the Red Army limped home in defeat to watch a drained empire implode two years later.  That left the U.S. as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth and its military as the uncontested greatest one of all.

And it took that military just a decade to head for that same graveyard. In this century, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in the never-ending wars Washington has conducted across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, wars that represent an eternal reign (rain?) of error. I’ve long suspected that the Soviet Union wasn’t the only superpower with problems in 1991. Though it was anything but obvious at the time, I’ve since written: “It will undoubtedly be clear enough… that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power’s power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism.”

The question is: When will the far more powerful of the two superpowers of the Cold War era finally leave that graveyard of empires (now spread across a significant swath of the planet)? Still commanded by the losers of those very wars, will it, like the Red Army, limp home one day to watch its country implode? Will it leave a world of war, of the dead, of countless refugees and rubblized cities, and finally return to see its own society disintegrate in some fashion?

Who knows? But keep your eyes peeled in 2020 and beyond. Someday, the U.S. military’s war of error will come to an end and one thing seems certain: it won’t be pretty.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 January 2020
Word Count: 2,946
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Thirty years ago this month, President George H.W. Bush appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver his first State of the Union Address, the first post-Cold War observance of this annual ritual. Just weeks before, the Berlin Wall had fallen. That event, the president declared, “marks the beginning of a new era in the world’s affairs.” The Cold War, that “long twilight struggle” (as President John F. Kennedy so famously described it), had just come to an abrupt end. A new day was dawning. President Bush seized the opportunity to explain just what that dawning signified.

“There are singular moments in history, dates that divide all that goes before from all that comes after,” the president said. The end of World War II had been just such a moment. In the decades that followed, 1945 provided “the common frame of reference, the compass points of the postwar era we’ve relied upon to understand ourselves.” Yet the hopeful developments of the year just concluded — Bush referred to them collectively as “the Revolution of ’89” — had initiated “a new era in the world’s affairs.”

While many things were certain to change, the president felt sure that one element of continuity would persist: the United States would determine history’s onward course. “America, not just the nation but an idea,” he emphasized, is and was sure to remain “alive in the minds of people everywhere.”

“As this new world takes shape, America stands at the center of a widening circle of freedom — today, tomorrow, and into the next century. Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores and the millions still struggling to be free. This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world — our new world.”

Bush had never shown himself to be a particularly original or imaginative thinker. Even so, during a long career in public service, he had at least mastered the art of packaging sentiments deemed appropriate for just about any occasion. The imagery he employed in this instance — America occupying the center of freedom’s widening circle — did not stake out a new claim devised for fresh circumstances. That history centered on what Americans professed or did expressed a hallowed proposition, one with which his listeners were both familiar and comfortable. Indeed, Bush’s description of America as a perpetually self-renewing enterprise engaged in perfecting freedom summarized the essence of the nation’s self-assigned purpose.

In his remarks to Congress, the president was asserting a prerogative that his predecessors had long ago appropriated: interpreting the zeitgeist in such a way as to merge past, present, and future into a seamless, self-congratulatory, and reassuring narrative of American power. He was describing history precisely as Americans — or at least privileged Americans — wished to see it. He was, in other words, speaking a language in which he was fluent: the idiom of the ruling class.

As the year 1990 began, duty — destiny, even — was summoning members of that ruling class to lead not just this country, but the planet itself and not just for a decade or two, or even for an “era,” but forever and a day. In January 1990, the way ahead for the last superpower on planet Earth — the Soviet Union would officially implode in 1991 but its fate already seemed obvious enough — was clear indeed.

So, how’d we do? Thirty years later, perhaps it’s time to assess just how well the United States has fulfilled the expectations President Bush articulated in 1990. Personally, I would rate the results somewhere between deeply disappointing and flat-out abysmal.

Bush’s “circle of freedom” invoked a planet divided between the free and the unfree. During the Cold War, this distinction had proven useful even if it was never particularly accurate. Today, it retains no value whatsoever as a description of the actually existing world, even though in Washington it persists, as does the conviction that the U.S. has a unique responsibility to expand that circle.

Encouraged by ambitious politicians and ideologically driven commentators, many (though not all) Americans bought into a militarized, Manichean, vastly oversimplified conception of the Cold War. Having misconstrued its meaning, they misconstrued the implications of its passing, leaving them ill-prepared to see through the claptrap in President Bush’s 1990 State of the Union Address.

Bush depicted the “Revolution of ‘89” as a transformative moment in world history. In fact, the legacy of that moment has proven far more modest than he imagined. As a turning point in the history of the modern world, the end of the Cold War ranks slightly above the invention of the machine gun (1884), but well below the fall of Russia’s Romanov dynasty (1917) or the discovery of penicillin (1928). Among the factors shaping the world in which we now live, the outcome of the Cold War barely registers.

Fairness obliges me to acknowledge two exceptions to that broad claim, one pertaining to Europe and the other to the United States.

First, the end of the Cold War led almost immediately to a Europe made “whole and free” thanks to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Yet while Poles, Lithuanians, the former citizens of the German Democratic Republic, and other Eastern Europeans are certainly better off today than they were under the Kremlin’s boot, Europe itself plays a significantly diminished role in world affairs. In healing its divisions, it shrank, losing political clout. Meanwhile, in very short order, new cleavages erupted in the Balkans, Spain, and even the United Kingdom, with the emergence of a populist right calling into question Europe’s assumed commitment to multicultural liberalism.

In many respects, the Cold War began as an argument over who would determine Europe’s destiny. In 1989, our side won that argument. Yet, by then, the payoff to which the United States laid claim had largely been depleted. Europe’s traditional great powers were no longer especially great. After several centuries in which global politics had centered on that continent, Europe had suddenly slipped to the periphery. In practice, “whole and free” turned out to mean “preoccupied and anemic,” with Europeans now engaging in their own acts of folly. Three decades after the “Revolution of ’89,” Europe remains an attractive tourist destination. Yet, from a geopolitical perspective, the action has long since moved elsewhere.

The second exception to the Cold War’s less than momentous results relates to U.S. attitudes toward military power. For the first time in its history, the onset of the Cold War had prompted the United States to create and maintain a powerful peacetime military establishment. The principal mission of that military was to defend, deter, and contain. While it would fight bitter wars in Korea and Vietnam, its advertised aim was to avert armed conflicts or, at least, keep them from getting out of hand. In that spirit, the billboard at the entrance to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, the Pentagon’s principal Cold War nuclear strike force (which possessed the means to extinguish humankind), reassuringly announced that “peace is our profession.”

When the Cold War ended, however, despite the absence of any real threats to U.S. security, Washington policymakers decided to maintain the mightiest armed forces on the planet in perpetuity. Negligible debate preceded this decision, which even today remains minimally controversial. That the United States should retain military capabilities far greater than those of any other nation or even combination of numerous other nations seemed eminently sensible.

In appearance or configuration, the post-Cold War military differed little from what it had looked like between the 1950s and 1989. Yet the armed forces of the United States now took on a radically different, far more ambitious mission: to impose order and spread American values globally, while eliminating obstacles deemed to impede those efforts. During the Cold War, policymakers had placed a premium on holding U.S. forces in readiness. Now, the idea was to put “the troops” to work. Power projection became the name of the game.

Just a month prior to his State of the Union Address, President Bush himself had given this approach a test run, ordering U.S. forces to intervene in Panama, overthrow the existing government there, and install in its place one expected to be more compliant. The president now neatly summarized the outcome of that action in three crisp sentences. “One year ago,” he announced, “the people of Panama lived in fear, under the thumb of a dictator. Today democracy is restored; Panama is free. Operation Just Cause has achieved its objective.”

Mission accomplished: end of story. Here, it seemed, was a template for further application globally.

As it happened, however, Operation Just Cause proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Intervention in Panama did inaugurate a period of unprecedented American military activism. In the years that followed, U.S. forces invaded, occupied, bombed, or raided an astonishing array of countries. Rarely, however, was the outcome as tidy as it had been in Panama, where the fighting lasted a mere five days. Untidy and protracted conflicts proved more typical of the post-Cold War U.S. experience, with the Afghanistan War, a futile undertaking now in its 19th year, a notable example. The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places.

Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. From a military perspective — except perhaps in the eyes of the military-industrial complex — the legacy of the “Revolution of ‘89” turned out to be almost entirely negative.

A broken compass So, contrary to President Bush’s prediction, the fall of the Berlin Wall did not inaugurate a “new era in world affairs” governed by “this idea called America.” It did, however, accelerate Europe’s drift toward geopolitical insignificance and induced in Washington a sharp turn toward reckless militarism — neither of which qualifies as cause for celebration.

Yet today, 30 years after Bush’s 1990 State of the Union, a “new era of world affairs” is indeed upon us, even if it bears scant resemblance to the order Bush expected to emerge. If his “idea called America” did not shape the contours of this new age, then what has?

Answer: all the things post-Cold War Washington policy elites misunderstood or relegated to the status of afterthought. Here are three examples of key factors that actually shaped the present era. Notably, each had its point of origin prior to the end of the Cold War. Each came to maturity while U.S. policymakers, hypnotized by the “Revolution of ’89,” were busily trying to reap the benefits they fancied to be this country’s for the taking. Each far surpasses in significance the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The “Rise” of China: The China that we know today emerged from reforms instituted by Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, which transformed the People’s Republic into an economic powerhouse. No nation in history, including the United States, has ever come close to matching China’s spectacular ascent. In just three decades, its per capita gross domestic product skyrocketed from $156 in 1978 to $9,771 in 2017.

The post-Cold War assumption common among American elites that economic development would necessarily prompt political liberalization turned out to be wishful thinking. In Beijing today, the Communist Party remains firmly in control. Meanwhile, as illustrated by its “Belt and Road” initiative, China has begun to assert itself globally, while simultaneously enhancing the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army. In all of this, the United States — apart from borrowing from China to pay for an abundance of its imported products (now well over a half-trillion dollars of them annually) — has figured as little more than a bystander. As China radically alters the balance of power in twenty-first-century East Asia, the outcome of the Cold War has no more relevance than does Napoleon’s late-eighteenth-century expedition to Egypt.

A Resurgence of Religious Extremism: Like the poor, religious fanatics will always be with us. They come in all stripes: Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims. Yet implicit in the American idea that lay at the heart of Bush’s State of the Union Address was an expectation of modernity removing religion from politics. That the global advance of secularization would lead to the privatization of faith was accepted as a given in elite circles. After all, the end of the Cold War ostensibly left little to fight about. With the collapse of communism and the triumph of democratic capitalism, all the really big questions had been settled. That religiously inspired political violence would become a crucial factor in global politics therefore seemed inconceivable.

Yet a full decade before the “Revolution of ’89,” events were already shredding that expectation. In November 1979, radical Islamists shocked the House of Saud by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Although local security forces regained control after a bloody gun battle, the Saudi royal family resolved to prevent any recurrence of such a disaster by demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt its own fealty to the teachings of Allah. It did so by expending staggering sums throughout the Ummah to promote a puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhabism.

In effect, Saudi Arabia became the principal underwriter of what would morph into Islamist terror. For Osama bin Laden and his militant followers, the American idea to which President Bush paid tribute that January in 1990 was blasphemous, intolerable, and a justification for war. Lulled by a belief that the end of the Cold War had yielded a definitive victory, the entire U.S. national security apparatus would be caught unawares in September 2001 when religious warriors assaulted New York and Washington. Nor was the political establishment prepared for the appearance of violence perpetrated by domestic religious extremists. During the Cold War, it had become fashionable to declare God dead. That verdict turned out to be premature.

The Assault on Nature: From its inception, the American idea so lavishly praised by President Bush in 1990 had allowed, even fostered, the exploitation of the natural world based on a belief in Planet Earth’s infinite capacity to absorb punishment. During the Cold War, critics like Rachel Carson, author of the pioneering environmental book Silent Spring, had warned against just such an assumption. While their warnings received respectful hearings, they elicited only modest corrective action.

Then, in 1988, a year prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, in testimony before Congress, NASA scientist James Hansen issued a far more alarming warning: human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, was inducing profound changes in the global climate with potentially catastrophic consequences. (Of course, a prestigious scientific advisory committee had offered just such a warning to President Lyndon Johnson more than two decades earlier, predicting the early twenty-first-century effects of climate change, to no effect whatsoever.)

To put it mildly, President Bush and other members of the political establishment did not welcome Hansen’s analysis. After all, to take him seriously meant admitting to the necessity of modifying a way of life centered on self-indulgence, rather than self-restraint. At some level, perpetuating the American penchant for material consumption and personal mobility had described the ultimate purpose of the Cold War. Bush could no more tell Americans to settle for less than he could imagine a world order in which the United States no longer occupied “the center of a widening circle of freedom.”

Some things were sacrosanct. As he put it on another occasion, “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.”

So while President Bush was not an outright climate-change denier, he temporized. Talk took precedence over action. He thereby set a pattern to which his successors would adhere, at least until the Trump years. To thwart communism during the Cold War, Americans might have been willing to “pay any price, bear any burden.” Not so when it came to climate change. The Cold War itself had seemingly exhausted the nation’s capacity for collective sacrifice. So, on several fronts, the assault on nature continues and is even gaining greater momentum.

In sum, from our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Restoring the American compass to working order won’t occur until we recognize those illusions for what they are. Step one might be to revise what “this idea called America” truly signifies.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute of Responsible Statecraft. His new book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory has just been published.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bracevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 January 2020
Word Count: 2,813
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Here’s the question at hand — and I guarantee you that you’ll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he has to be one or the other.

Let me explain, and while I do, keep this in mind: as 2019 ends, thanks to Brexit and the victory of Boris Johnson in Britain’s recent election, the greatest previous imperial power on this planet is clearly headed for the sub-basement of history. Meanwhile, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, now Russia, remains a well-sauced Putinesca shadow of its former self. And then, of course, there’s the country that, not so long ago, every major American politician but Donald Trump proclaimed the most exceptional, indispensable nation ever.

As it happens, the United States — if you didn’t catch the reference above — has been looking a bit peaked lately itself. You can’t say that it’s the end of the road for a land of such wealth and staggering military power, enough to finish off several Earth-sized planets. However, it’s clearly a country in decline on a planet in the same condition and its present leader, Tariff Man, however uniquely orange-faced he may be, is just the symptom of the long path to hell in a handbasket its leadership embarked on almost three decades ago as the Cold War ended.

Admittedly, President Trump has proved to be the symptom from hell. To give him full credit, he’s now remarkably hard-at-tweet dismantling the various alliances, agreements, and organizations that U.S. leaders had assembled, since 1945, to make this country the Great Britain (and beyond) of the second half of the twentieth century and that’s an accomplishment of the first order.

And keep in mind the context for so much of this: it’s happening in a country that may be experiencing an unprecedented kind of inequality. It’s producing billionaires at a staggering clip with just three men already possessing wealth equivalent to that of half the rest of the population; this, mind you, at a moment when the globe’s 26 richest people reportedly are worth as much as half of everyone else, or 3.8 billion people. And this in a world in which, as the income of that poorest half of humanity continues to decline, the wealth of billionaires increases by $2.5 billion a day and a new billionaire is minted every two days.

Had all of this not already been so and had a sense of decline not been in the air, it’s inconceivable that those heartland white Americans who had come to feel themselves on the losing end of developments in this country would have sent a charlatan billionaire into the White House to represent them (or at least to give the finger to the Washington establishment). And all this on a planet that itself, in climate terms, appears to be in unprecedented decline.

Think of the above as part of what’s come down, metaphorically speaking, since those towers in New York fell more than 18 years ago.

Looking back on 9/11 It’s in this context that we should all look back on what truly did come down that Tuesday morning in September 2001, an all-American day of the grimmest sort. That was, of course, the day when this country was attacked by 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudi, using American commercial jets as their four-plane air force. They, in turn, were inspired by a man, Osama bin Laden, and his organization, al-Qaeda, part of a crew of radical Islamists that Washington had backed years earlier in an Afghan War against the Soviet Union. In response to the events of that day — though it seems unimaginable now — we could have joined a world already in pain, one that had experienced horrors largely unimaginable in this country until that moment, in a kind of global solidarity.

Instead, responding to the destruction of those towers in Manhattan and part of the Pentagon, the Bush administration essentially launched a war against much of the planet. They soon dubbed it a “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, and key officials almost instantly claimed it would have more than 60 countries (or terror groups in them) in its sights. Eighteen years later, the U.S. is still at war across a vast swath of the globe, involved in conflict after conflict from the Philippines to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to northern Africa and beyond. In the process, that GWOT has produced failed state after failed state and terror group after terror group, enough to make the original al-Qaeda (still going) look like nothing at all. And of course, in all these years, the U.S. military, hailed here as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (and similar formulations), lacks a single decisive (or even modest) victory. Meanwhile, everywhere, yet more towers, real or metaphorical, continue to fall; in fact, whole cities in the Middle East now lie in rubble.

The top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration would, at the time, mistake 9/11 for a kind of upside-down stroke of luck, the perfect excuse for launching military operations, including invasions, geared to the ultimate domination of the planet (and its key oil supplies). Via drones armed with missiles and bombs, they would turn any president into an assassin-in-chief. They would, in the end, help spread terror groups in a fashion beyond imagining on September 12, 2001, while their never-ending wars would displace vast numbers of innocent people, creating a refugee crisis of a kind not seen since the end of World War II when significant parts of the planet stood in ruins. And all of that, in turn, would help spark, on a global scale, what came to be known as the “populist right,” in part thanks to the very refugees created by that GWOT. The response to what came down on 9/11, in other words, would create its own hell on Earth.

Who knew back then? Not me, that’s for sure. Not when I started what became TomDispatch 18 years ago, feeling, in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, that something was truly wrong with our world, that something more than the World Trade Center might be in the process of coming down around all our ears. I can still remember the feeling in those weeks, as I saw the mainstream media’s focus narrow drastically amid nationwide self-congratulatory celebrations of this country as the greatest survivor, dominator, and victim on the planet. I watched with trepidation as we began to close down to the world, while essentially attempting to take all the roles in the global drama for ourselves except greatest evil doer, which was, of course, left to Osama bin Laden.

I still remember thinking then that the Vietnam years had been the worst and most embattled in my lifetime, but that somehow this — whatever it turned out to be — would be so much worse. And yet whatever I was sensing, whatever I was imagining, wouldn’t prove to be the half of it, not the quarter of it.

If you had told me then that we were heading for Donald Trump’s version of American decline and a corrupt global gilded age of unprecedented proportions, one in which showmanship, scam, and self-serving corruption would become the essence of everything, while god knows what kinds of nightmares — like those subprime mortgages of the 2007 economic meltdown — were quietly piling up somewhere just beyond our view, I would have thought you mad.

The second 9/11 All these years later, it’s strange to feel something like that moment recurring. Of course, in this elongated Trumpian version of it, no obvious equivalent to those towers in New York has come down. And yet, over the three years of The Donald’s presidency, can’t you just feel that something has indeed been coming down, even as the media’s coverage once again narrowed, this time not to a single self-congratulatory story of greatness and sadness, but to one strange man and his doings.

If you think about it, I suspect you can feel it, too. Looking back to 2016, mightn’t you agree that Donald Trump rather literally embodied a second 9/11? He certainly was, after a fashion, the hijacker-in-chief of that moment, not sent by al-Qaeda, of course, but… well, by whom? That is, indeed, the question, isn’t it? Whom exactly did he represent? Not his famed “base,” those red-hatted MAGA enthusiasts at his endless rallies who felt they had gotten lost in the shuffle of wealth and politics and corruption in this country. Perhaps, of course, the al-Qaeda of that moment was actually another kind of terrorist crew entirely, the one-percenters who had mistaken this country’s wealth for their own and preferred a billionaire of any sort in the White House for the first time in history. Or maybe, as a presidential hijacker first class, Donald Trump simply represented himself and no one else at all. Perhaps he was ready to bring a whole system to its knees (just as he had once bankrupted those five casinos of his in Atlantic City), as long as he could jump ship in the nick of time with the loot.

On that first 9/11, those towers came down. The second time around, the only thing that came down, at least in the literal sense, was, of course, The Donald himself.  He famously descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, promoting a “great wall” (still unbuilt years later and now, like everything The Donald touches, a cesspool of corruption) and getting rid of Mexican “rapists.”

From that moment on, Donald Trump essentially hijacked our world. I mean, try to tell me that, in the years since, he hasn’t provided living evidence that the greatest power in human history, the one capable of destroying the planet six different ways, has no brain, no real coordination at all. It’s fogged in by a mushroom cloud of largely senseless media coverage and, though still the leading force on the planet, in some rather literal fashion has lost its mind.

No wonder it’s almost impossible to tell what we’re actually living through. Certainly, in a slo-mo version of 9/11, Donald Trump has been taking down the nation as we’ve known it. Admittedly, unlike Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other such places on this increasingly unsettled planet of ours, true civil strife has (yet) to break out here (though individual mass shootings certainly have). Still, the president and some of his supporters have begun talking about, even threatening, “civil war” for our unsettled future.

On the first 9/11, the greatest power in history struck out at the planet. The second time around, it seems to be preparing to strike out at itself.

Was 11/9 the original 9/11? Perhaps this is the time to bring up the possibility that September 11, 2001, might not really have been the first 9/11 and that Donald Trump might actually be the third, not the second 9/11.

In a sense, the first 9/11 might really have been 11/9. I’m thinking, of course, of November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall, that symbol of the Cold War, a divided Europe, and a deeply divided world, suddenly began to be torn down by East and West Germans. Believe me, in our nation’s capital, it was an event no less unexpected or shocking than September 11, 2001. Until that moment, Washington’s political class and the crew who ran the national security state had continued to imagine a future dominated by a never-ending Cold War with the Soviet Union. The shock of that moment is still hard to grasp.

Looked at a certain way, that November the people had hijacked history and Washington’s response to it would be no less monumentally misplaced than to the 2001 moment. Once the key officials of George H.W. Bush’s administration had taken in what happened, they essentially declared ultimate victory. Over everything. For all time.

With the U.S., the last standing superpower, ultimately victorious in a way never before imagined, history itself seemed to be at an end. The future was ours, forever, and we had every right to grab it for ourselves. The world in which so many of us had grown up was declared over and done with in a wave of self-congratulatory backslapping in Washington. The planet, it seemed, was now our oyster and ours alone. (And if you want to know how that turned out, just think of Donald Trump in the White House and then read Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.)

It’s in this context that Trump’s could be considered the third hijacking of our era. Given his sense of self, his might even be thought of not as the 1% hijacking moment, but as the .000000001% moment.

And be prepared: the next version of 9/11, however defined, is guaranteed to make Osama bin Laden and his 19 hijackers look like so many pikers. Depending on what tipping points are reached and what happens after that on our rapidly warming planet, so much could come down around humanity’s ears. And if so, that moment in 2015 when Donald Trump rode an escalator down into the presidential contest to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” will look very different — because it will be far clearer than it is even now that he was carrying a blowtorch with him.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

Copyright ©2019 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 December 2019
Word Count: 2,245
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Because everything is so Trumpian these days, there’s less air or space for the only other mass entertainment that promotes tribalism and toxic masculinity while keeping violence in vogue: football.

In the age of The Donald, it’s hard to remember that football was once the nation’s greatest television reality show. Because real people actually got really hurt in real time, you could be sure it wasn’t fake news. Now, football is just another runner-up to President Trump, whose policies actually get people killed.

And yet football is still here, in plain sight, waiting to resume its cultural dominance once Trump is gone.

To avoid any further erosion of its base, it is cosmetically modifying itself at every level with “reforms” focused on the image of increased safety. From small rural high schools to the Fifth Avenue offices of the National Football League (NFL), plans are being generated to protect America’s most popular and prosperous sport from the two things that could destroy it — the players’ mortal fear of having their brains scrambled and the fans’ moral fear of awakening to their complicity in such a process.

The players, mostly black and conditioned to believe football is their best ticket out of modern Jim Crow, have not yet fully awakened. But fans, despite being conditioned to believe that supporting your local team is little short of a civic responsibility, have more options. They are, after all, mostly white and not as likely to need to sacrifice their health for their short-term livelihood. There’s hope that, in the end, those fans will come to understand, for example, that watching the Super Bowl is casting a vote for the values that have helped bring us the show most dangerous to our survival as a civilization, the Trump administration.

Football’s playbook As a voter’s guide, here are the six ways in which football groomed us for Trumpball and is still trying to keep us in its grasp:

1. Inflame Racial Divisions: Helping to spread America’s primary disease, racism, is Trump 101, but the NFL got there first. Seventy per cent of its players are African-American. At the start of this season, only four head coaches and two general managers of the 32 teams were men of color. Only two owners were not white men: the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Pakistani-American Shahid Khan and the Buffalo Bills’ Korean-American Kim Pegula (a woman).

So, who would have thought that the same year — this one! — would mark not only the 100th anniversary of the NFL but the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the soil of what became the United States of America? Somehow, neither milestone has been celebrated all that much this year — and never together. In his indispensable book on race and sports, Forty Million Dollar Slaves, former New York Times columnist William Rhoden maintains that, by cutting off black athletes from their history and communities, the sports industry has managed to control them. “The power relationship that had been established on the plantation,” he wrote, “has not changed even if the circumstances around it have.”

To make sure the NFL owners would stand firm against players kneeling during the national anthem, President Trump called Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to say, according to a sworn deposition given by Jones and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

No wonder that these days, whole teams or many members of them refuse invitations to the White House.

2. Crush Dissent: The CliffsNotes saga of former San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick is pretty straightforward — a star (though not a superstar) refuses to stand for the pre-game national anthem as a protest against racism, particularly of the white-police variety. His act is spun as disrespect to the nation and its flag. Thereafter, no team will hire him because he would be a “distraction.” That was three years ago and, ever since, Kaepernick has kept himself in playing shape, becoming a martyr to some, a loser to others, and one of the genuine heroes of this generation of racial activists. He has collected millions of dollars (and given away more than a million of them) from both a Nike campaign and a settlement with the NFL in return for withdrawing a collusion case he had brought against the league. More recently, a league-sanctioned open workout, hastily organized for him to audition for a new quarterback job, collapsed amid bad intentions and confusion.

Perhaps most interesting is the striking lack of support Kaepernick has received from many of his fellow players. Are they against his demonstration or fearful of antagonizing their owners and endangering their own jobs (which only last, on average, slightly more than three years)? After all, at a 2017 rally, Trump told those same owners (a striking number of them donors of his) that they should respond to protesting players by saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired. He’s fired!”

He really didn’t have to tell them. They understood that holding the line against the Kaepernicks of this world means keeping the progressive barbarians at bay, something already baked into the game. The canceling of the Other, of anyone not on the team (so to speak), be they rivals, uncooperative college faculty, or most women who aren’t moms, cheerleaders, or girlfriends who understand that the team comes first, remains the norm.

3. Normalize Brutality: Football was born in brutality. In 1909, the year 26 football players died, former Confederate colonel John Mosby reportedly called the sport a “barbarous amusement” that “develops the brute dormant in man’s nature and puts the player on a level with… a polar bear.” This from a cavalry raider once known as the “Gray Ghost.”

Although the game has since been made safer, it’s always been a contest battled out man-to-man and based on the violent aggrandizement of territory. Attempts to create rules to avoid, say, crippling blocks and tackles have generally been met by howls of anguish from chickenhawk fans who cried out: don’t sissify football.

Particularly in the warfare between offensive and defensive lines, football is a game of domination by bullies. The most notorious of contemporary bullies (and yes, he’s a Trump supporter) is Richie Incognito. As an all-star offensive lineman at Nebraska, he picked fights that probably would have ended his career at most other universities. But he was such a good player that Nebraska sent him to the Menninger Clinic for anger-management counseling. This, however, proved no cure for the six-foot-three-inch, 300-pounder and Incognito eventually was kicked off the team. While some pro teams refused to draft him on the basis of “character” issues, the St. Louis Rams did so in 2005. He played well (and with bad character). He was routinely picked for all-pro teams, while, in 2009, being voted the “dirtiest player in the league.” In 2013, he bullied a fellow 300-pound Dolphin, Jonathan Martin, off the team and eventually out of football.

Not surprisingly, the NFL is as practiced when it comes to reaching out to bad boys as the present administration is. (Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, one of three SEALs tried for war crimes, whom President Trump intervened repeatedly to protect, has been referred to as the Richie Incognito of the SEALS.) Incognito, who continues to pile up a police record, played this season with the Oakland Raiders while Martin, a Stanford graduate, still struggles with his depression.

4. Sustain Inequality: Recent legislation in California allowing college athletes to share in any profits from the sale of their images has been both hailed and attacked as revolutionary. It’s the beginning of a fair new deal in the saga of the “unpaid professionals” and the end of amateur sports as we knew it. There was always a very good reason for keeping jocks on an unguaranteed dole called “scholarships”: control. But an even better reason was keeping all the profits for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the colleges, the apparel companies, and the retailers.

The crushing economic inequality in college athletics (especially in football and basketball, the so-called revenue sports) has been justified by the “free” education that “student-athletes” — a term concocted by former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers — receive, if indeed they go to class and graduate. If indeed they even have time.

The ripping-off of college athletes has been carefully ignored by legislators, universities, and fans. Later in life, Byers would aptly call the NCAA “a nationwide money-laundering scheme,” but this phenomenon runs through all of sports. The 32 NFL teams collect more than $13 billion in revenue annually and protect themselves with elaborate “salary caps,” so that no team can start spending too wildly on players or launch the football equivalent of an arms race. Of course, by the time you turn pro, the least you can make is $495,000 (this year’s rookie minimum) with millions more for first-round draft picks.

As Colonel Mosby pointed out so long ago, the real problem still begins in college. As he put it, “It is notorious that football teams are largely composed of professional mercenaries who are hired to advertise colleges. Gate money is the valuable consideration.”

5. Apply the Lie: In the deadly tradition forged by Big Tobacco and climate deniers, the NFL relentlessly insisted that there was no relation between brain trauma and the game, even as middle-aged former players slipped into early dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), and Parkinson’s disease. For years, the league was dismissive and stonewalled on the issue. In all of this, the media and a cult of faux masculinity were accomplices. Those head-banging hits you’ve been wincing at on TV? Just dingers a real man should be able to shake off.

It took a young New York Times reporter, Alan Schwarz, a young pathologist, Bennett Omalu, and the brothers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru-Wada, with the help of a PBS Frontline documentary, “League of Denial,” to finally get the story out in full. And it would prove a particularly hard sell for fans invested in the game. They generally didn’t want to give up their viewing pleasures, however guilty, and tried to justify them by claiming that the players were well aware of the risks and well compensated for them, even if the settlements crafted by NFL lawyers have never seemed adequate to the damage done.

As Americans learned that the damage was usually caused by thousands of hits to the head — from pee-wee football through high school and college — youth football participation started to drop. Even successful pros began to say that they wouldn’t allow their sons to play football.

More troubling yet to the NFL have been decisions by stars like Andrew Luck, a 29-year-old quarterback who quit while he could still walk and think.

6. Control the Media: Covering football from high school to the pros can be a walk in the park or a slog through hell, depending on whether the reporter is considered part of the booster squad or a “ripper,” out to score his or her own points in opposition to the team’s brand image. Admittedly, even in this heightened moment for sports journalists, few reporters have been physically attacked by coaches or athletes, although intimidation, micro-aggressions, and attempts at shunning have always been common. Lately, real-time access to key players has been harder to come by and has led to more speculative coverage, which, in turn, often results in adversarial writing, sometimes in defiance of media employers.

Not surprisingly, then, leading a recent “stick to sports” campaign have been football’s media partners, not its players or fans. Anything that seems remotely political, even if posted on private social-media platforms, has been subject to being shut down. Jemele Hill, an ESPN star now writing for the Atlantic, may be the most striking example so far of a good journalist ousted in this way, but many have also been lost to devastating lay-offs at ESPN, Deadspin, and other sports sites where real coverage has been giving way to cheaper, uncontroversial puff pieces.

Ultimately, in such a climate, political figures, too, may feel ever more comfortable expressing themselves aggressively to journalists on critical coverage. Here, as David French described it, is a possible harbinger of such a future:

“In 2017, the congressional candidate Greg Gianforte ‘body-slammed’ the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs after Jacobs tried to ask him questions about health-care policy. It was a cowardly, criminal act. Not long after, Trump praised him. At a campaign rally, the president of the United States said of Gianforte, ‘Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy.’”

“My guy,” by the way, went on to win his Montana seat in the House of Representatives.

For those who remain unconvinced that an unqualified vote for football is a vote for Trump, the Jock Culture Department of TomDispatch suggests you follow Richie Incognito to the Menninger Clinic. For those who promise to at least remain open on such subjects, however, we’re prepared to look the other way while you watch the Super Bowl in a SportsWorld made ever more toxic by the racism, sexism, classism, and violence encouraged, or perhaps more accurately, marketed by Donald Trump. And while you’re watching the festivities (and the head-banging to follow), hang on to the possibility that this will be the president’s last Super Bowl as national head coach.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2019 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 December 2019
Word Count: 2,236
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On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast, Carl Bernstein. It was Bernstein, with fellow Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting broke open the story of how the Committee to Re-elect the President burglarized Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C.  That reporting and the impeachment hearings that followed eventually forced President Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace in 1974. Bharara wanted to hear about what differences Bernstein sees between the Nixon impeachment proceedings and Donald Trump’s today.

That was the week when the New York Times reported that viewership of those “boring” hearings was proving to be “as big as Monday Night Football.” That was the week when the world heard from, among others, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman on Donald Trump’s July 25th “perfect” phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky; from ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland on how “everyone was in the loop” when it came to the Ukrainian quid pro quo (not to speak of his “Zelensky loves your ass” exchange with the president); and from the steely former Trump adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, on how that country promulgated the fiction that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 American election.

That should have been enough to convince anyone paying attention that the president had indeed attempted to trade a Zelensky White House visit and U.S. military aid for an announcement that Ukraine was investigating its own (fictitious) interference in that election and the (equally fictitious) corruption of Joe Biden via his son Hunter. Clearly, however, the Republicans in Congress were anything but convinced.

Bharara reminded Bernstein that, when Richard Nixon was at risk of impeachment, key Republican congressional figures, including two senators (at a moment when, as now, Republicans had a majority in that body) encouraged the president to resign rather than be impeached and be convicted in a trial there. Why, Bharara asked, is today’s Republican Party more loyal to the president than the Constitution and the rule of law?

Bernstein replied that, in his view, the divisions in the U.S. today are no longer simply a matter of ideological differences — disagreements about what constitutes a good society and how to achieve it. The whole country, he suggested, is already embroiled in a “cold civil war” that’s vividly reflected in Congress. If so, then it’s a complex war indeed, involving at least four allied but also diverging forces in today’s Republican Party:

*  Those motivated by white anxiety and resentment, some of whom also tend to be isolationists opposing U.S. military adventures abroad;

•  Those dedicated to maintaining U.S. military expansion around the world, some of whom genuinely believe in the ultimate superiority of a white, Christian United States and some of whom care only about the projection of force;

•  Right-wing evangelicals, many sharing white resentment and also ready to make common cause with the forces of imperial expansion, especially when it comes to support for Israel;

•  Those dedicated to increasing the wealth of the wealthiest elites, who are quite willing to harness white fear of losing privilege, as well as nationalist military desires, to advance their own agenda of reducing taxes and rolling back regulatory constraints on corporate power.

The roots of much of the turmoil in the current Republican Party are, however, centuries old. They go back, in fact, to the twin crimes that have helped shape this country from its very beginning: slavery and imperial expansion.

Slavery This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival in the British colonies that would become the United States of America of the first enslaved Africans. The New York Times has gathered some of the best recent scholarship on the nature and history of American slavery in an excellent series: “The 1619 Project.”

Many white people in this country think of slavery as a “problem” of the distant past. They are mistaken. African Americans live with its effects today (as do the rest of us in different ways) in legacies like mass incarceration and the existential threat of police violence. In 2015, the Guardian reported that “young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.” In that year, police killed 1,134 people. The Washington Post now keeps a running annual tally of such police-caused deaths. As of November 25th, the number for this year was 829.

The line that can be drawn from slavery to convict leasing to lynching to torture in police stations to police shootings of African Americans is all too direct. It’s impossible, in fact, to overstate the importance of slavery to the economic, legal, and social development of this country. The 1789 Constitution was in many ways a document meant to appease southern slave states and keep them in the union. This included the “three-fifths” compromise, which counted any enslaved resident as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning members of the House of Representatives to each state. Similarly, the creation of an upper house, the Senate, where each state has two representatives, regardless of population, and the invention of the Electoral College were meant, in part, to enhance the power of southern states. And to this day, those two institutions continue to allow southern and, more generally, rural states to exercise an undemocratic power, disproportionate to their population size. In a very real sense, compromises made in 1789 helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.

The first income-generating crop in the southern colonies was tobacco, initially planted, tended, picked, and packed by semi-free indentured servants from England who worked for a fixed period (usually seven to 10 years) and then were free to start farming on their own. Enslaved Africans, however, soon offered a number of advantages over such contract workers. As a start, their “contracts” never ran out. Indeed, their children and children’s children would also be enslaved workers. They would prove crucial to the way those planters built their wealth (and significant parts of the wealth of the colonies and that of the United States as a whole), both as profit-generating laborers and as capital-building assets against whom money could be borrowed. This history is well-described in a number of books, including Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, and Andres Resendez’s The Other Slavery (about the little-studied enslavement of native peoples in what would become the American Southwest), as well as in the autobiographies and collected oral testimonies of hundreds of formerly enslaved people.

In Virginia and the Carolinas, however, those tobacco farmers faced a serious problem. Unlike indentured servants who could look forward to their eventual freedom, newly enslaved Africans had no incentive to work; none, that is, except physical pain. As a result, torture — real mind- and body-destroying torture — was part of the American experience from the first moments the slave system was established, with effects that have lasted to this day.

After the revolution and the invention in 1793 of Eli Whitney’s seed-stripping cotton gin, southern farmers turned to another, far more lucrative export crop: cotton. First in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, but soon in the lowlands that would become Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas, cheap raw cotton would feed England’s fast-industrializing textile industry and so, for the next two centuries, help make that country’s economy the world’s preeminent one. It also fed the nascent textile mills in the North after Samuel Slater, an early industrial spy, crossed the Atlantic to New England, carrying in his memory plans (embargoed by Great Britain) for a water-powered textile factory.

As slavery expanded, so did the systematic use of torture. Enslavers on the new plantations organized “gangs” of laborers, their long lines easily visible to overseers who followed them with cowhide whips. From dawn to dark, through the endless workday, that whip flew at supersonic speed (the source of its “crack”), tearing flesh till the blood ran. It waited for workers in camp at night, as each day’s output was weighed, and those who failed to make their quotas were punished.

A new form of torture-enforced labor began after the Civil War and the brief interim period of Reconstruction when black people in the South found themselves, through the legal conceit of convict leasing, essentially enslaved all over again. Arrested on minor charges or none at all, prisoners — almost all of them African-American men — found themselves leased out by county and state authorities to private cotton growers and to the developing coal and steel industries of Tennessee and Alabama. Once again, the whip came along for the ride. Convict leasing lasted into the 1920s when Southern states chose to employ their convicts directly in chain gangs to build the region’s railroads and highways.  Legal segregation, also begun at the end of Reconstruction, did not end until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Nor did state-sanctioned torture of African Americans end with emancipation or the eventual diminution of those convict-leasing programs. Lynching (a label Donald Trump recently had the nerve to apply to the impeachment proceedings) continued from the end of the Civil War well into the twentieth century, peaking between 1880 and 1920. In addition to its culminating murder by hanging or burning, lynching often involved whipping and the castration of male victims prior to death. In the context of Jim Crow segregation, these institutionalized rituals of torture and murder served to secure the power of white authorities over black populations. In many places, lynchings were also treated as popular entertainment, encouraged by local officials who often participated themselves. The practice even produced a form of popular art: photographs of lynchings decorated many postcards in the early part of the twentieth century.

Every society that adopts institutionalized torture as a method of social control identifies certain groups of people as legitimate targets for it. From the very beginning of this country, one group was so identified: enslaved Africans (and their emancipated descendants). Even today, in police stations, prisons, and public schools, black Americans are at risk of socially sanctioned physical abuse, even torture.

President Trump’s open embrace of a white supremacy born of slavery and nurtured by convict-leasing, segregation, and lynching has powerfully emboldened its modern proponents, encouraging economically and socially anxious whites to focus their resentment on blacks and, of course, immigrants from anywhere but northern Europe.

Imperial expansion As much as American history is a story of slavery and its legacy, it’s also a tale of steady geographical expansion and imperial domination, often enabled by military force. That history, too, has a twenty-first-century legacy: America’s forever wars across a significant part of the planet.

It’s a tale that began early. The newly independent United States quickly acquired a lot more of itself, starting with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France. That deal effectively doubled the country’s territory, annexing lands that would eventually become parts or all of 10 new states. Of course, France didn’t actually control most of that land, apart from the port city of New Orleans and its immediate environs. What the U.S. government really bought was the “right” to take the rest of that vast area from the native peoples who lived there, using treaties, population transfers, and wars of conquest and extermination.

Such acquisitions continued with Florida in 1819 (from Spain) and the annexation of Texas (by war) from Mexico in 1845. All of this new territory contained land that was, as Sven Beckert says in Empire of Cotton, “superbly suited to cotton agriculture.”

So, conquest, slavery, and (when it came to native peoples) displacement and genocide combined as cotton growers expanded their holdings. A frequent first step in securing new territory for cotton planting was to remove the people already occupying it. That process began in Georgia in the early 1800s, as the Creek nation was driven west. Soon, as Beckert writes, “the Creeks suffered further defeats and were forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, ceding 23 million acres of land in what is today Alabama and Georgia.” In a process that today would likely be called ethnic cleansing, cotton’s empire continued to expand at the expense of indigenous peoples:

“In the years after 1814, the federal government signed further treaties with the Creeks, Chickasaw, and Choctaws, gaining control over millions of acres of land in the South, including Andrew Jackson’s 1818 treaty with the Chickasaw nation that opened western Tennessee to cotton cultivation and the 1819 treaty with the Choctaw nation that gave 5 million acres of land in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta to the United States in exchange for vastly inferior lands in Oklahoma and Arkansas.”

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, designed to do exactly what its name implied by requiring Indian nations in the southeastern United States to “exchange” prime cotton-growing acreage for vastly inferior land in present-day Oklahoma. As the National Park Service’s website on the subject recounts, after the Choctaws, Muscogee Creeks, Seminoles, and Chickasaws had for some time “fiercely resisted” such relocation, they finally “agreed” to be moved to the newly designated Indian Territories.

Perhaps the best-known population transfer of this period was the one that took place along the Trail of Tears. Beginning in May 1838, the U.S. Army, together with various state militias, began the forcible removal of more than 16,000 Cherokee people from North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to Oklahoma. The job was completed by the following year. The journey proved a tragic one (more than 1,000 people died along the way) and the destination unsatisfactory, but the Park Service wants to assure visitors that the story has a happy ending:

“The Cherokee, in the years that followed, struggled to reassert themselves in the new, unfamiliar land. Today, they are a proud, independent tribe, and its members recognize that despite the adversity they have endured, they are resilient and invest in their future.”

U.S. expansion continued across the rest of the continent, decimating Indian nations and consigning survivors to reservations. In 1893, it reached Hawaii where U.S. Marines supported a coup against Queen Lili’uokalani. In 1898, the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, the country’s first full-scale imperial conflict abroad, gave the United States Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. After World War II, the United Nations awarded the U.S. what would become the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, including the island of Saipan, which remains in U.S. “trusteeship” to this day.

The U.S. shadow also fell across Latin America, as it occupied Nicaragua from 1909 to 1933, installing the autocrats of the Somoza dynasty in power there in 1936. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the government of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz to prevent him from instituting a land reform program. Support for coups continued into the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Rather than make these Latin American countries actual colonies, a policy of global neocolonialism (backed by the unprecedented military garrisoning of the planet) allowed the United States to fuel a postwar economic boom with cheap raw materials from around the world.

Today, the United States maintains about 800 military bases in more than 80 countries and has forces stationed on every continent except Antarctica. We remain by far the world’s preeminent military force and continue to fight (unsuccessful wars) across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Uneasy bedfellows The Trump Republican Party has inherited, and continues to make use of, the legacies of this nation’s twin evils: slavery and imperial expansion. We see in its white supremacist strand a commitment to maintaining systems of white superiority that have persisted from slavery through Jim Crow segregation to ever-present threats of violence today. Many white evangelical Christians maintain an enthusiasm for racial separation (as the histories of their flagship universities reveal). They see in Trump a leader who will advocate for white supremacy so they don’t have to.

The power of the Republican militarist wing may appear to have diminished in the face of Trump’s vocal isolationism and threats to bring U.S. troops home from this country’s various twenty-first-century wars, but in truth, the military and intelligence sectors of the government have managed to do almost everything they’ve wanted to, even while seeming to agree with the president. (No surprise, then, that there are now more U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East than there were when Donald Trump took office.) In addition, he has certainly made sure that the Pentagon has all the money it could possibly want, even if he sometimes decries excessive military budgets.

The history of U.S. territorial and military expansion has long been accompanied by a commitment to American exceptionalism, a belief that this country is different from and better than the rest of the world’s nations. That sense of superiority is usually described as an embodiment of national values like democracy and equality, but bubbling beneath the surface there has always been the belief that the U.S. succeeded in all but eliminating the native peoples on this continent and in defeating others around the world because of a natural superiority born of a European heritage. This confidence remains strong today, despite the fact that (apart from invading the tiny nations of Grenada and Panama) the U.S. hasn’t won a war since World World II, including the never-ending conflicts it has launched over large stretches of the planet after 9/11.

And what of the economic elites, the top tenth of the top one percent? Their commitment, however they may choose to wrap it in libertarian anti-tax rhetoric, remains only to themselves and to maintaining and expanding their own vast wealth. To the extent that any of the party’s other three strands contribute to that goal, they are happy to contribute to the party.

Today’s Republicans are very different from those of the Nixon era. His was a party with an ideological commitment to anticommunism, law and order, and opposition to organized labor. In Trump, the party seems to be committed not to principles, but to a man who defies the rule of law and is disorder personified. However, like their president who shamelessly turns on his friends when it suits him, his party will likely turn on him the moment he appears to threaten, rather than enhance, their election prospects. In the meantime, they are in every sense a historic crime in the making.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2019 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 December 2019
Word Count: 3,061
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