|
15 Numbers That Add Up to an Age of Insecurity
by Tom Engelhardt
Once upon a time, I studied the Chinese martial art of Tai Chi -- until, that is, I realized I would never locate my "chi." At that point, I threw in the towel and took up Western exercise.
Still, the principle behind Tai Chi stayed with me -- that you could multiply the force of an act by giving way before the force of others; that a smaller person could use the strength of a bigger one against him.
Now, jump to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath -- and you know the Tai Chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke -- that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but.
Tomgram: Welcome to the Age of Homeland Insecurity
The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely
self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet
used its own force to disable itself.
Before that fateful day, the Bush administration had considered
terrorism, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda subjects for suckers and
wusses. What they were intent on was pouring money into developing an
elaborate boondoggle of a missile defense system against future nuclear
attacks by rogue states. Those Cold War high frontiersmen (and women)
couldn't get enough of the idea of missiling up. That, after all, was
where the money and the fun seemed to be. Nuclear was where the big
boys -- the nation states -- played. "Bin Laden determined to strike in
U.S.…," the CIA told the President that August. Yawn.
After
9/11, of course, George W. Bush and his top advisors almost instantly
launched their crusade against Islam and then their various wars, all
under the rubric of the Global War on Terror. (As Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld pungently put the matter that September, "We have a
choice -- either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or
to change the way that they live; and we chose the latter.") By then,
they were already heading out to "drain the swamp" of evil doers, 60
countries worth of them, if necessary. Meanwhile, they moved quickly to
fight the last battle at home, the one just over, by squandering vast
sums on an American Maginot Line of security. The porous new Department
of Homeland Security, the NSA, the FBI, and other acronymic agencies
were to lock down, surveil, and listen in on America. All this to
prevent "the next 9/11."
In the process, they would treat bin
Laden's scattered al-Qaeda network as if it were the Nazi or Soviet war
machine (even comically dubbing his followers "Islamofascists"). In the
blinking of an eye, and in the rubble of two enormous buildings in
downtown Manhattan, bin Laden and his cronies had morphed from nobodies
into supermen, a veritable Legion of Doom. (There was a curious
parallel to this transformation in World War II. Before Pearl Harbor,
American experts had considered the Japanese -- as historian John Dower
so vividly documented in his book War Without Mercy -- bucktoothed,
near-sighted military incompetents whose war planes were barely capable
of flight. On December 8, 1941, they suddenly became a race of
invincible supermen without, in the American imagination, ever passing
through a human incarnation.)
When, in October 2001, Congress
passed the Patriot Act, and an Office of Homeland Security (which, in
2002, became a "department") was established, it was welcome to the era
of homeland insecurity. From then on, every major building, landmark,
amusement park, petting zoo, flea market, popcorn stand, and toll booth
anywhere in the country would be touted as a potential target for
terrorists and in need of protection. Every police department from
Arkansas to Ohio would be in desperate need of anti-terror funding. And
why not, when the terrorists loomed so monstrously large, were so
apocalyptically capable, and wanted so very badly to destroy our way of
life? No wonder that, in the 2006 National Asset Database, compiled by
the Department of Homeland Security, the state of Indiana, "with 8,591
potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New
York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking
the state the most target-rich place in the nation."
In the
administration's imagination (and the American one), they were now
capable of anything. From their camps in the backlands of Afghanistan
(or was it the suburbs of Hamburg?), as well as in the murky global
underworld of the arms black market, al-Qaeda's minions were toiling
feverishly to lay their hands on the most fiendish of plagues and
pestilences -- smallpox, botulism, anthrax, you name it. They were
preparing to fill suitcases with nuclear weapons for deposit in
downtown Manhattan. They were gathering nuclear refuse for dirty bombs.
Nothing was too mad or destructive for them. Every faint but strange
odor -- the sweet smell of maple syrup floating across a city -- was a
potential bio-attack. And everywhere, even in rural areas, politicians
were strapping on their armor and preparing to run imminent-danger,
anti-terror campaigns, while urging their constituents to run for
cover. Meanwhile, that former Sodom of the New World, New York City,
had somehow been transformed into an I-heart-NY T-shirt-and-cap combo.
So,
thank you, Osama bin Laden for expediting the Department of Homeland
Security, glutting an already bloated Pentagon with even more money,
ensuring that all those "expeditionary forces" would sally forth to
cause havoc and not find victory in two hopeless wars, enabling the
establishment of a vast offshore prison network (and the torture
techniques to go with it), and creating a whole new global "security"
industry to "thwart terrorists" that was, by 2006, generating $60
billion a year in business and whose domestic wing was devoted to
locking down America.
When the history of this era is finally
written, based on the Tai Chi Principle, Osama bin Laden and his
scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist
leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so --
not to put a fine point on it -- stupidly and profligately as to send
the planet's "sole superpower" into decline. Above all, bin Laden and
his crew of fanatics will have ensured one thing: that the real
security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too
late in favor of mad dreams and dark phantoms. In this lies a bleak but
epic tale of folly worthy of a great American novelist (wherever she
is).
In the meantime, consider the following little list -- 15
numbers that offer an indication of just what the Tai Chi Principle
meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and
did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than
we were in January 2001, when George W. Bush entered the Oval Office:
536,000,000,000:
the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military
budget. This represents an increase of almost 70% over the Pentagon's
2001 budget of $316 billion -- and that's without factoring in
"supplementary" requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as
well as the President's Global War on Terror. Add in those soaring sums
and military spending has more than doubled in the Bush era. According
to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since 2001, funding for
"defense and related programs... has jumped at an annual average rate
of 8%... -- four times faster than the average rate of growth for
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (2%), and 27 times faster than
the average rate for growth for domestic discretionary programs
(0.3%)."
1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over
the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts. They also
predict that, by the end of 2012, 12.7% of all residential borrowers
may be out of their homes as part of a housing crisis that caught the
Bush administration totally off-guard.
1,000,000: the number
of "missions" or "sorties" the U.S. Air Force proudly claims to have
flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, more than one-third of
them (about 353,000) in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi
Freedom. This is a good measure of where American energies (and oil
purchases) have gone these last years.
509,000: the number of
names found in 2007 on a "terrorist watch list" compiled by the FBI. No
longer, in George Bush's America, is a 10 Most Wanted list adequate.
According to ABC News, "U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been
detained because their names were on the watch list" and Saddam Hussein
was on the list even when in U.S. custody. By February 2008, according
to the American Civil Liberties Union, the names on the same FBI list
had ballooned to 900,000.
300,000: the number of American
troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress,
according to a recent RAND study. This represents almost one out of
every five soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Even more --
approximately 320,000 -- "report possible brain injuries from
explosions or other head wounds." This, RAND reports, represents a
barely dealt with "major health crisis." The depression and PTSD alone
will, the study reported, "cost the nation as much as $6.2 billion in
the two years following deployment."
51,000: the number of
post-surge Iraqi prisoners held in American and Iraqi jails at the end
of 2007. In that country, the U.S. now runs "perhaps the world's
largest extrajudicial internment camp," Camp Bucca, whose holding
capacity is, even now, being expanded from 20,000 to 30,000 prisoners.
Then there's Camp Cropper, with at least 4,000 prisoners, including
"hundreds of juveniles." Many of these prisoners were simply swept up
in surge raids and have been held without charges or access to lawyers
or courts ever since. Add in prisoners (in unknown numbers) in our
sizeable network of prisons in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and in our
various offshore and borrowed prisons; add in, as well, the widespread
mistreatment of prisoners at American hands; and you have the machinery
for the manufacture of vast numbers of angry potential enemies, some
undoubtedly willing to commit almost any act of revenge. Though there
is no way to tabulate the numbers, hundreds of thousands of prisoners
have certainly cycled through the Bush administration's various prisons
in these last seven years, many emerging embittered. (And don't forget
their embittered families.) Think of all this as an enormous dystopian
experiment in "social networking," the Facebook from Hell without the
Internet.
5,700: the number of trailers in New Orleans --
issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing
after Hurricane Katrina -- still occupied by people who lost their
homes in the storm almost three years ago. Such trailers have also been
found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes. Katrina ("Brownie,
you're doing a heck of a job") was but one of many security disasters
for the Bush administration.
658: the number of suicide
bombings worldwide last year, including 542 in Afghanistan and Iraq,
"more than double the number in any of the past 25 years." Of all the
suicide bombings in the past quarter century, more than 86% have
occurred since 2001, according to U.S. government experts. At least one
of those bombers -- who died in a recent coordinated wave of suicide
bombings in the Iraqi city of Mosul -- was a Kuwaiti, Abdallah Salih
al-Ajmi, who had spent years locked up in Guantanamo.
511: the
number of applicants convicted of felony crimes, including burglary,
grand larceny, and aggravated assault, who were accepted into the U.S.
Army in 2007, more than double the 249 accepted in 2006. According to
the New York Times, between 2006 and 2007, those enrolled with
convictions for wrongful possession of drugs (not including marijuana)
almost doubled, for burglaries almost tripled, for grand
larceny/larceny more than doubled, for robbery more than tripled, for
aggravated assault went up by 30%, and for "terroristic threats
including bomb threats" doubled (from one to two). Feel more secure
yet?
126: the number of dollars it took to buy a barrel of
crude oil on the international market this week. Meanwhile, the average
price of a gallon of regular gas at the pump in the U.S. hit $3.72,
while the price of gas jumped almost 20 cents in Michigan in a week, 36
cents in Utah in a month, and busted the $4 ceiling in Westchester, New
York, a rise of 65 cents in the last year. Just after the 9/11 attacks,
a barrel of crude oil was still in the $20 range; at the time of the
invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it was at about $30. In other words,
since 9/11, a barrel of crude has risen more than $100 without the Bush
administration taking any serious steps to promote energy conservation,
cut down on the U.S. oil "addiction," or develop alternative energy
strategies (beyond a dubious program to produce more ethanol).
82:
the percentage of Americans who think "things in this country… have
gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track," according to the most
recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. This is the gloomiest Americans
have been about the "direction" of the country in the last 15 years of
such polling.
40: the percentage loss ("on a trade-weighted
basis") in the value of the dollar since 2001. The dollar's share of
total world foreign exchange reserves has also dropped from 73% to 64%
in that same period. According to the Center for American Progress, "By
early May 2008, a dollar bought 42.9% fewer euros, 35.7% fewer Canadian
dollars, 37.7% fewer British pounds, and 17.3% fewer Japanese yen than
in March 2001."
37: the number of countries that have
experienced food protests or riots in recent months due to soaring food
prices, a global crisis of insecurity that caught the Bush
administration completely unprepared. In the last year, the price of
wheat has risen by 130%, of rice by 74%, of soya by 87%, and of corn by
31%.
0: the number of terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda or similar groups inside the United States since September 11, 2001.
So consider "the homeland" secure. Mission accomplished.
And
if you doubt that, here's one last figure, representative of the
ultimate insecurity that, by conscious omission as well as commission,
the Bush administration has left a harried future to deal with: That
number is 387: Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii just
released new information on carbon dioxide -- the major greenhouse gas
-- in the atmosphere, and it's at a record high of 387 parts per
million, "up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest
for at least the last 650,000 years." Its rate of increase is on the
rise as well. Behind all these figures lurks a potential world of
insecurity with which this country has not yet come to grips.
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory
Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a
newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn
sequel in Iraq.
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt
 |
Writings 
Subscribe to this comment's feed