Free The United States of Fear by Tom Engelhardt Page A

resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.
    Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t.
    If you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the United States, you should.
    In Washington, the Bush administration—G. H. W.’s, not G. W.’s—declared victory and then left the much ballyhooed “peace dividend” in the nearest ditch. Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington’s consensus policy makers drew no meaningful lessons from it, just as they had drawn few that mattered from their Vietnam defeat sixteen years earlier.
    Quite the opposite: successive administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to global power was still the care and feeding of the U.S. military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet.
    This urge, delusional in retrospect, seemed to reach its ultimate expression in the second Bush administration, whose infamous “unilateralism” rested on a belief that no country or even bloc of countries should ever again be allowed to come close to matching United States military power. (As its National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter—and it couldn’t have been blunter on the subject—the United States was to “build and maintain” its military power “beyond challenge.”) Bush’s military fundamentalists firmly believed that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force around, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of U.S. power, and friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel. After all, as the president said in front of a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”
    In this way, far more than the Soviets, the top officials of the Bush administration mistook military power for power, a gargantuan misreading of the economic position of the United States in the world.
Boundless Military Ambitions
    The attacks of September 11, 2001, that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” clinched the deal. In the space the Soviet Union had deserted, which had been occupied for years by minor outlaw states like North Korea, there was now a new shape-shifting enemy, al-Qaeda (also known as Islamic extremism or the new “totalitarianism”), which could be just as big as you wanted to make it. Suddenly, we were in what the Bush administration dubbed “the Global War on Terror”—and this time there would be nothing “cold” about it.
    Bush administration officials promptly suggested that they were prepared to use a newly agile American military to “drain the swamp” of global terrorism. (“While we’ll try to find every snake in the swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp,” insisted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz two weeks after 9/11.) They were prepared, they made clear, to undertake these draining operations against Islamic “terrorist networks” in no less than sixty countries around the planet.
    Their military ambitions, in other words, knew no