[Note for TomDispatch readers: If you have a moment, check out my latest piece, "Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement: It's Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or." It appeared Tuesday at Juan Cole’s invaluable Informed Comment website as part of my minuscule campaign to get word out about my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. You can check out the first reviews of the book by clicking here. The next TomDispatch piece will be posted Monday on a slightly slower summer schedule.]
Consider a strange aspect of our wars since October 2001: they have yet to establish a bona fide American hero, a national household name. Two were actually “nominated” early by the Bush administration -- Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old private and clerk captured by the Iraqis in the early days of the American invasion and later “rescued” by Army Rangers and Navy Seals, and Pat Tillman, the former NFL safety who volunteered for service in the Army Rangers eight months after 9/11 and died under “enemy” gunfire in Afghanistan.
Both stories were later revealed to be put-up jobs, pure Bush-era propaganda and deceit. In Lynch’s case, almost every element in the instant patriotic myth about her rescue proved either phony or highly exaggerated; in Tillman’s, it turned out that he had been killed by friendly fire, but -- thanks to a military cover-up (that involved General Stanley McChrystal, later to become Afghan war commander) -- was still given a Silver Star and a posthumous promotion. Members of his unit were even ordered by the military to lie at his funeral, and he was made into a convenient “hero” and recruitment poster boy for the Afghan War. Both were shameful episodes, involving administration manipulation and media gullibility. Since then, as TomDispatch regular and retired lieutenant colonel William Astore points out, U.S. troops as a whole have been labeled “our heroes,” but individual heroes have been in vanishingly short supply.
In fact, the only specific figures who get the heroic treatment these days are our military commanders. They tend to be written about like so many demi-gods (until they fall). General McChrystal, before his ignominious nosedive, was presented in the press (with the Tillman incident all but forgotten) as a cross between a Spartan ascetic and a strategic genius (with the brain of a military Stephen Hawking). Present war commander General David Petraeus regularly receives even more fawning media treatment and seems to be worshipped in Washington these days as if he were not only “an American hero,” but a genuine military god (as well as a future presidential candidate). Yet, in the way they’ve been treated, both of these figures seem closer to celebrities than heroes in any traditional sense.
Perhaps this catches something essential about America’s unending wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and also what used to be called the Global War on Terror but now has no name. Like the drone pilots who sit at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, killing peasants and terrorists 7,000 miles away and to whom new standards of “valor” are now being applied, most Americans are remarkably detached from the wars our “all volunteer” military force (and its vast contingent of for-profit mercenary warriors) fight in distant lands. Our forces have become generically heroic, but no one cares to look too closely at the specifics of these bloody, dirty wars that will never end in victory, not close enough to end up with actual heroes. Our “heroic” troops have no real names, any more than the wars they fight, and so individual heroics are perhaps beside the point. (Check out the latest TomCast audio interview in which William Astore discusses heroism and the military by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, here.) Tom
“Our American Heroes”
Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism
By William J. AstoreWhen I was a kid in the 1970s, I loved reading accounts of American heroism from World War II. I remember being riveted by a book about the staunch Marine defenders of Wake Island and inspired by John F. Kennedy’s exploits saving the sailors he commanded on PT-109. Closer to home, I had an uncle -- like so many vets of that war, relatively silent on his own experiences -- who had been at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, and then fought them in a brutal campaign on Guadalcanal, where he earned a Bronze Star. Such men seemed like heroes to me, so it came as something of a shock when, in 1980, I first heard Yoda’s summary of war in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke Skywalker, if you remember, tells the wizened Jedi master that he seeks “a great warrior.” “Wars not make one great,” Yoda replies.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: If you haven’t gotten around to picking up my new book,The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, here’s your chance to get an increasingly rare copy of the first printing. (The book is already back on press for a second go-round.) In the meantime, I’ve embarked on what, for me, is something like a mini-radio blitz in the coming weeks -- my first stop being with historian and radio host Jon Weiner, always a wonderful experience. You can catch that encounter (at the 40-minute mark) by clicking here, or watch me talk about the book on Timothy MacBain’s first TomCast video here, or listen to me on a new TomCast audio interview here. Remember that if you buy the book (or anything else) at Amazon.com via a TD link, we get a little cut of the proceeds at no cost to you. Tuesday, by the way, I’ll turn 66. In honor of that moment, TD will take a brief breather. Expect the next post Thursday. Tom]
I don’t know about you, but when I see a headline like this one (from the July 11th Washington Post), “White House Confident Latest BP Effort Will Work,” my heart immediately sinks. Of course, there’s a first time for everything, but amid the ever worsening news from the Gulf of Mexico’s waters about astonishingly high methane concentrations, dangerous levels of arsenic, the lack of testing of seafood for absorption of toxic compounds from the dispersant BP has been massively pumping out, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “hoarding” of raw scientific data about the disaster, and both BP's and the government's “stranglehold on media access” in the Gulf, that oily undercurrent of a positive narrative has been relentless (even as press coverage slowly begins to drop off). At the end of the storm lies hope and a rainbow. Or at least a permanently sealed well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
Of course, three days after that confident headline, the same government showed something less than confidence in BP. It suddenly moved to freeze that company’s work on closing the new version of “top hat,” the massive "3 ram capping stack" meant to seal off the well, until further testing could be done. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu and his experts feared that closing the cap’s valves might actually cause even more harm to a possibly already damaged well bore. In the meantime, the oil, essentially cap-less, continued to gush forth, as it had for days, even as work on the first relief well, the supposed permanent solution to the problem, was halted for fear of further problems while the testing went on.
Late Wednesday, the test of the cap finally began, only to be briefly interrupted by the discovery of a leak on a line attached to one of its valves. Everything was again halted briefly before those valves were finally closed and the oil did stop for the first time in 87 days; and yes, in the next few days, for all we know, that seal may hold, or maybe this nightmare won’t really end until the dog days of late July or mid-August, all dates repeatedly promised for the completion of the relief well. Or maybe not then either. The positive story line has been offered up and deep-sixed so many times already that, as with warnings on a cigarette pack, even with good news coming in, caution is still advised. Worse yet, if the happy ending does come, we already have a reasonable hint about how this story works out. As with the Exxon Valdez spill, big oil may prefer to learn remarkably few lessons from this disaster, as it prepares to head into far rougher waters in search of ever tougher oil to extract. After all, the big oil companies have preferred to learn next to nothing, as Ellen Cantarow makes clear, from a 50-year history of disastrous spills in Nigeria and a decades-long version of the same in the Amazon.
And of course, in these last weeks when the Northeast has been sizzling under record temperatures (with more to come), and researchers at the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center have concluded that the first five months of 2010 were the second hottest in human history (runner-up only to 1998) -- and this decade the warmest on record for the planet -- the worst disaster may prove to be not the gusher in the Gulf, but the gas in our tanks. (To catch Ellen Cantarow discussing what led her to this piece, listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here, or to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Big Oil Makes War on the Earth
The Gulf Coast Joins an Oil-Soiled Planet
By Ellen CantarowIf you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil -- and just know that you’re not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades.
As early as this week, engineers could seal BP’s oil leak, fastening a new cap on the mile-deep well belching crude into the Gulf of Mexico. And if they do, and a relief well follows equally successfully, sooner or later news coverage of BP’s catastrophe will begin to wane (indeed it is already), as will the public’s interest, all of it receding (like the earthquake in Haiti) into background chatter and periodic anniversary pieces. Except, that is, for residents of the Gulf coast region, who will be living with the spill’s aftermath for decades to come. Because even if BP and the government’s legion of experts do finally install that cap and then the relief well successfully, shut down their response units, and leave the south behind, the spill’s impact, especially from a public health perspective, will remain.
Consider major oil spills of the past like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989 or the Prestige spill off Spain’s northwestern coast in 2002. In the Spanish case, serious respiratory problems plagued cleanup workers for years afterward, and DNA testing revealed that the chemical exposure they suffered could cause hormone alterations or even cancer. Today, Gulf cleanup workers face these same risks. At the moment, the federal government doesn’t even require workers to wear respirators, and according to BP’s own data, 20% of workers have already been exposed to a chemical known to cause kidney and liver problems. A new report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) details one striking aspect of the Alaskan and Spanish catastrophes: the utter lack of any systematic public health response, despite the fact that workers had been exposed to startling amounts of toxic chemicals and oil.
These previous spills and an abundance of scientific evidence suggest the need for a top-down, coherent public-health response to the BP spill. The CAP report, however, finds -- and you undoubtedly won’t be surprised by this -- that the federal government has no such plan in place. Instead, it is relying on a jumble of agencies loosely overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) when instead, CAP argues, a top HHS official should take charge of the government’s response and roll out a comprehensive public health safety plan.
As prize-winning author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, John Barry points out, this lack of preparation characterizes another public-health emergency on the horizon: the next influenza outbreak. Written for the summer issue of a quarterly magazine we greatly admire, World Policy Journal, Barry’s piece is being posted here thanks to the kindness of that magazine’s editors. WPJ’s latest themed issue -- “Global Health: Protect and Cure” -- goes on sale July 20. (You can, by the way, subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.) Andy
How Prepared Are We for the Next Great Flu Breakout?
Why We’re Losing the War Against Influenza
By John M. Barry[This report appears in the Summer 2010 issue of World Policy Journal and is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]
It is the nature of the influenza virus to cause pandemics. There have been at least 11 in the last 300 years, and there will certainly be another one, and one after that, and another after that. And it is impossible to predict whether a pandemic will be mild or lethal.
One striking aspect of the Vietnam years -- and the antiwar movement of that era -- was the degree to which you could see images of Vietnamese civilian suffering here in the United States. Among the iconic images of that war, for instance, was Nick Ut’s photo of a young girl, burned by napalm from an air strike, running down a road screaming. And among war images, it was by no means alone. There were, of course, the horrific shots Army photographer Ron Haeberle took of what became known as the My Lai massacre as it was happening. After a long and tortuous journey, those photos finally appeared as a ten-page centerfold-from-hell in LIFE magazine (even if an African antelope was on its cover). Along with the piles of bodies of slaughtered women, children, and old men, the “eyewitness” text was little short of startling: “One body, an old man, had a ‘C’ carved on his chest”; “A GI grabbed the girl and with the help of others started stripping her... ‘VC boom-boom,’ another said, telling the 13-year-old that she was a whore for the Vietcong,” and so on.
I wouldn’t want to exaggerate the degree of American compassion for the suffering of Vietnamese civilians, but it existed, along with those images. And because, at least in the precincts of the antiwar movement, such imagery was regularly before American eyes -- some eyes anyway -- and on minds, the suffering and destruction our soldiers were bringing to ordinary civilians in a distant, disastrous war was far clearer then.
Strangely enough, though, in the American screen war that followed the real war by some years, Vietnamese suffering largely disappeared. Left screen center was usually the American platoon, a kind of “lost patrol” in an alien land, part of what, even during the war, was regularly referred to as an American -- but not a Vietnamese -- “tragedy.” From Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, Vietnamese suffering became, at best, a distant backdrop for American suffering, and the war’s conflicts essentially took place among Americans within that platoon. (A rare exception was Good Morning, Vietnam, but you would never again, in all those post-war years, see a scene like the first one in Peter Davis’s Oscar-winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, which opens on a Vietnamese village, quiet and peaceful, before you notice the silhouettes of soldiers entering -- intruding on an emerald green land, really -- from the edge of the screen.)
Even more strangely, as Nick Turse points out in his discussion of Sebastian Junger’s new film Restrepo, our Afghan War is now generally being recorded in real time in the fashion made familiar to Americans on screen in the post-Vietnam years -- that is, largely without Afghan suffering. Not surprisingly, Americans now pay remarkably little attention to the civilians whose lives have been destroyed in our invasions and prolonged occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Turse, who won a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction for his Nation magazine piece, “A My Lai a Month,” on suppressed information about a series of mass killings by U.S. forces in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, has never reported from a war zone. But over these last years, he’s traveled much of Vietnam, and more recently Cambodia, interviewing those (especially Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians) who were under fire. Tom
Death on Your Doorstep
What Sebastian Junger and Restrepo Won’t Tell You About War
By Nick TurseI’ve never heard a shot fired in anger. But I might know a little bit more about war than Sebastian Junger.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist and author of the bestselling Constantine’s Sword, wrote the following about my new book (which is already going into a second printing) and TomDispatch at the Daily Beast: “On 9 /11 the well-regarded writer and editor Tom Engelhardt was drafted. Ever since he has been a conscript in the campaign against America’s knee-jerk wars. His weapon has been his eloquence. For nearly a decade, he has written passionate criticism and shrewd analysis on his website TomDispatch.com. Now a collection of his dissections of U.S. military policy has been published as a book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. This is an invaluable catalog of the Pentagon-driven mistakes, myths, self-deceptions, and crimes that have wreaked havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the American wars are proving to be as fruitless now as they were then unnecessary keeps them from rising to the level of actual tragedy, even as the lives of countless individuals have been tragically cut short. This book is a permanent record of the TomDispatch website’s ongoing but more ephemeral masterpiece-in-progress.” To order The American Way of War at Amazon.com just click here (and remember that whenever you buy at Amazon off a TomDispatch link, book or otherwise, TD gets a little contribution, cost-free to you). To catch me discussing "Why Afghanistan" question in the latest Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview, click here, or to download it to your iPod, here. Tom]
Why Are We in Afghanistan?
As Petraeus Takes Over, Could Success Be Worse Than Failure?
By Tom Engelhardt
July 12, 2011, Washington, D.C. -- In triumphant testimony before a joint committee of Congress in which he was greeted on both sides of the aisle as a conquering hero, Gen. David Petraeus announced the withdrawal this month of the first 1,000 American troops from Afghanistan. “This is the beginning of the pledge the president made to the American people to draw down the surge troops sent in since 2009,” he said, adding, “and yet let me emphasize, as I did when I took this job, that our commitment to the Afghan government and people is an enduring one.”
Last July, when Gen. Petraeus replaced the discredited Gen. Stanley McChrystal as Afghan war commander, he was hailed as an “American hero” by Senator John McCain, as “the most talented officer of his generation” by the New Yorker’s George Packer, and as “the nation's premier warrior-diplomat” by Karen DeYoung and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post -- typical of the comments of both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives at the time. Petraeus then promised that the United States was in Afghanistan “to win.”
In the year since, the Taliban insurgency has been blunted and “a tipping point has been reached,” says a senior U.S. military official with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, who could speak only on the condition of anonymity, in keeping with the policy of his organization. By every available measure -- IEDs or roadside bombs, suicide attacks, Taliban assassinations of local officials, allied casualties, and Afghan civilian casualties -- the intensity of the insurgency has weakened significantly. The Afghan military and police, though not capable of taking the lead in the fighting in their own country, have been noticeably strengthened by American and NATO training missions. President Hamid Karzai’s government, still considered weak and corrupt, has succeeded in putting an Afghan face on the war.
Democratic critics of Gen. Petraeus, and of President Obama’s surge strategy, were notably quiet this week as the general toured the capital’s power hotspots from John Podesta’s Center for American Progress to the American Enterprise Institute, while being feted as the hero of the moment and a potential presidential candidate in 2016. As in 2007, when he was appointed to oversee George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq after the critics said it couldn’t be done, the impressive charts the general brought to his congressional testimony once again vividly indicated otherwise. The situation in Afghanistan has undergone an Iraq-like change since the nadir of July 2010 when critics and proponents alike agreed that the nine-year-old war was foundering, the counterinsurgency strategy failing, and polling in the U.S. highlighted the war’s increasing unpopularity.
“What a difference a year makes,” said a jubilant senior official at the Pentagon. In just 12 months, as Gen. Petraeus likes to describe it, he managed to synchronize the Afghan and Washington “clocks” and, in the process, as he had done in Iraq, took the news out of the war and the war out of the news. The latest Gallup poll indicates that up to 63% of Americans are now “supportive” of the general’s approach to the Afghan War...
What Success Would Mean in Afghanistan
Okay, it hasn’t happened yet -- and the odds are it never will. But for a moment, just imagine stories like that leading the news nationwide as our most political general in generations comes home to a grateful Washington.
