American Empire Project

"We killed her… that will be with me the rest of my life"

Lawrence Wilkerson's Lessons of War and Truth
By Nick Turse

Nations in flux are nations in need. A new president will soon take office, facing hard choices not only about two long-running wars and an ever-deepening economic crisis, but about a government that has long been morally adrift. Torture-as-policy, kidnappings, ghost prisons, domestic surveillance, creeping militarism, illegal war-making, and official lies have been the order of the day. Moments like this call for truth-tellers. For Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. For witnesses willing to come forward. For brave souls ready to expose hidden and forbidden realities to the light of day.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson is such a man. He came to national prominence in October 2005 when -- having left his post as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier in the year -- he laid bare some of the secrets of the Bush White House as he had experienced them. He had been inside the halls of power as the invasion and occupation of Iraq took shape. In Bush's second term, on the outside, he found that he had had enough. The American people, he thought, had a right to know just how their government was really working, and so he offered them this vision of the Bush administration in action: "[S]ome of the most important decisions about U.S. national security -- including vital decisions about postwar Iraq -- were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

In the years since, Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, has not been reticent, especially when it came to "the militarization of America's foreign policy" and the practice of extraordinary rendition (the kidnapping of terror suspects and their deliverance into the hands of regimes ready and willing to torture them).

Nor, earlier this year, did he shy away from testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about how, in 2004, while still at the State Department, he had compiled "a dossier of classified, sensitive, and open source information" on American interrogation and imprisonment practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that yielded, he said, "overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture."

"We have damaged our reputation in the world and thus reduced our power," he told the panel in closing. "We were once seen as the paragon of law; we are now in many corners of the globe the laughing stock of the law."

Wilkerson has spent most of his adult life in the service of the United States government as a soldier for 31 years, including military service in Vietnam; as a special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; as the Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College; and finally, from 2002 to 2005, as chief of staff to Powell at the State Department. His most vital service to his country, however, has arguably been in the years since.

Wilkerson has become a blunt truth-teller, and of all the truths he has told, there is one that's especially personal and painful; one that, after so many years, he could have kept to himself, but decided not to. It's a story, now decades old, of truth, consequences, and a dead little girl. It is no less timely for that, offering essential lessons, especially to U.S. troops engaged in seemingly interminable wars that have left countless civilians, little girls included, dead.

"I fault myself for it to this day"

Testifying before that congressional subcommittee in June, Wilkerson stated:

"In Vietnam, as a first lieutenant and a captain of Infantry, on several occasions I had to restrain my soldiers, even one or two of my officers. When higher authorities took such actions as declaring free fire zones -- meaning that anything that moved in that zone could be killed -- and you came upon a 12-year old girl on a jungle path in that zone, it was clear you were not going to follow orders. But some situations were not so black and white and you had to be always on guard against your soldiers slipping over the edge.

"As their leader, it was incumbent upon me to set the example -- and that meant sometimes reprimanding or punishing a soldier who broke the rules. In all cases, it meant that I personally followed the rules and not just by 'breaking' the so-called rules of engagement, as in the designated free fire zone, but by following the rules that had been ingrained in me by my parents, by my schools, by my church, and by the U.S. Army in classes about the Geneva Conventions and what we called the law of land warfare. I had been taught and I firmly believed when I took the oath of an officer and swore to support and defend the Constitution, that American soldiers were different and that much of their fighting strength and spirit came from that difference and that much of that difference was wrapped up in our humaneness and our respect for the rights of all."

Almost two years earlier, fellow reporter Deborah Nelson and I met with Wilkerson at a Starbucks outside of Washington, D.C. We hunkered down in the back of the coffeehouse, while, amid the din of barista-speak and the whir of coffee machines, Wilkerson told us about his service in Vietnam: How he flew low and slow -- often under the tree-tops -- as a scout pilot for the infantry, in a OH-6A "Loach" Light Observation Helicopter, operating in the III Corps region well north of Saigon. During his 13 months in Vietnam, Wilkerson logged more than 1,000 combat hours, without ever being wounded or getting shot down. His troops -- he oversaw 300 men by the end of his tour -- used to call him "the Teflon guy" for good reason.

But two moments during his time in Vietnam did, by his own account, stick with him. They are, in fact, indelibly ingrained in his memory.

One occurred when, as a young lieutenant, he got into verbal battle with an infantry battalion commander -- a lieutenant colonel -- on the ground in Tay Ninh Province. He was in the air leading his platoon when the ground commander came in over the radio, declaring the area his helicopter was over a free fire zone.

Ubiquitous during the war, free fire zones gave American troops the authorization to unleash unrestrained firepower, no matter who was still living in an area, in contravention of the laws of war. The policy allowed artillery barrages, for example, to be directed at populated rural areas, Cobra helicopter gunships to open fire on Vietnamese peasants just because they were running in fear below, or grunts on the ground to take pot shots at children out fishing and farmers working in their fields. "Cobra pilots and some of my colleagues in the Loach platoon treated that as a license to shoot anything that moved: wild boar, tigers, elephants, people. It didn't matter," Wilkerson told us.

On this occasion, the battalion commander ordered Wilkerson and his unit to engage in "recon by fire" -- basically firing from their helicopters into brushy areas, tree lines, hootches (as Vietnamese peasant homes were known) or other structures, in an attempt to draw enemy fire and initiate contact. Knowing that, too many times, this led to innocent civilians being wounded or killed, Wilkerson told the ground commander that his troops would only fire on armed combatants. "To hell with your free fire zone," he said.

A "trigger-happy" Cobra pilot under his command then entered the verbal fray on the radio, siding with the battalion commander. With that, as Wilkerson described it that day, he maneuvered his own helicopter between the Cobra gunship and the free fire zone below. "You shoot, you're gonna hit me," he said over his radio. "And if you hit me, buddy, I'm gonna turn my guns up and shoot you."

The verbal battle continued until, as Wilkerson recounted it, he caught sight of movement below. "There was nothing there but a hootch with a man, probably about seventy [years old], an old lady, probably about the same age, and two young children." When he informed the battalion commander and the Cobra pilot, Wilkerson recalled, "that calmed everybody down, 'cause they realized that, had they shot rockets into that house, they probably would have killed all those people."

A similar situation played itself out with much grimmer consequences in a "semi-jungle, rice paddy area" in Binh Duong province. Once again, a ground commander declared the area a free fire zone, and this time Wilkerson didn't immediately tell his crew to disregard the order. "I fault myself for this to this day," he told us.

About 15 minutes later, as his helicopter broke from the jungle over a road, an ox cart they had spotted earlier came into view. "Before I said anything, my crew chief let off a burst of machine gun ammunition. And he was a very good shot. It went right into the wagon." By the time Wilkerson ordered him to cease fire, it was too late. "The long and short of it was there was a little girl in the wagon and we killed her. And that will be with me the rest of my life."

Even without direct clearance from Wilkerson, the helicopter crew chief was just carrying out U.S. policy as it was laid down at the command level -- a point Wilkerson emphasized as he discussed his Vietnam War experience with the congressional subcommittee in June. In doing so, he also offered one of the essential truths of the Vietnam War: that following the U.S. military's "rules of engagement" could mean violating the laws of war and the basic tenets of humanity.

"Where the skeletons are buried…"

In a recent follow-up interview by email, Wilkerson reflected on the quality of moral outrage and on the value of the willingness to confront authority -- in Vietnam and, decades later, in Washington.

"I was always sort of a maverick in that sense, bucking authority when I thought that authority was mistaken, particularly if it were an ethical mistake," he wrote. "I believe that one of the reasons Powell kept me around for 11 years of directly working for him was that unlike most people around him I would tell him what I thought in a nano-second -- even if it went counter to what I believed he thought."

While Vietnam may have contributed to Wilkerson's urge to speak out, the primary impetus for his public comments and writings since 2005 has been the Bush administration itself. "I felt the incompetence, the deceit, and certain actions of the administration were actually hurting the nation, diminishing our real power in the world at a time when we needed all we could get."

Wilkerson acknowledges that those who spoke out against the Bush administration did so at their peril. "People have families to consider, positions, salaries, livelihoods. So these are not easy matters -- particularly when increasingly in our republic we have stacked the deck ever higher in favor of those in power." As a kind of whistleblower (even out of power and out of the government), Wilkerson certainly exposed himself to potential retaliation. Unlike former CIA official Valerie Plame, among others, however, he sees no evidence that he was targeted.

Wilkerson self-deprecatingly suggests that he was spared because "I'm a small potato in the greater scheme of things and therefore few people listen to or heed my ramblings." But he notes another possible reason as well. "Those in power likely believe that I'm still close to Powell -- and they very much do fear him as he knows where many of the skeletons are buried."

Truth-Telling

Since Wilkerson came forward in 2005, whistleblowers of all stripes have surfaced -- from veterans who testified on Capitol Hill in May about violence perpetrated against Iraqi civilians, to high-level insiders willing, in the closing days of a lame-duck term, to go on record about internal battles over domestic spying.

Wilkerson doesn't consider his recent disclosure of his role in the death of a Vietnamese girl analogous to his later acts as a Bush administration truth-teller, but he acknowledges the value of making her killing public.

"It wasn't truth-telling in the sense that it wasn't known before. The battalion commander on the ground knew it, the troops knew it, my crew knew it -- indeed, it went into intel [intelligence] reports as far as I know. But in the larger sense, yes, it adds to the wealth of literature and information that is in the public [realm] now… In short, there is ample evidence available to the public of the hell that war is, of the carnage, destruction, ruined souls, and devastation."

Revealing such experiences, Wilkerson hopes, will be especially useful for today's troops. "I believe young GIs should read as much as possible about what others have done in previous wars, particularly 'to keep our honor clean,' as the Marine hymn goes."

In speaking out about his Vietnam experience, Wilkerson has, indeed, added to the long record of civilian suffering as a result of America's wars abroad -- offering a stark lesson for U.S. troops yet to be deployed overseas. And for troops who have already served in America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has set an example of the ways in which they can continue to serve the United States by speaking out about all aspects of their service, even the dark portions that Americans often don't want to hear.

The only question is: Will they have the courage to follow in his footsteps?

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of TomDispatch.com. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website is Nick Turse.com.

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

Stuff Happens

The Pentagon's Argument of Last Resort on Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt

It's the ultimate argument, the final bastion against withdrawal, and over these last years, the Bush administration has made sure it would have plenty of heft. Ironically, its strength lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes of Iraqi politics, the relative power of Shiites or Sunnis, the influence of Iran, or even the riptides of war. It really doesn't matter what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or oppositional cleric Muqtada al-Sadr think about it. In fact, it's an argument that has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with us, with the American way of war (and life), which makes it almost unassailable.

And this week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen -- the man President-elect Obama plans to call into the Oval Office as soon as he arrives -- wheeled it into place and launched it like a missile aimed at the heart of Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan for U.S. combat troops in Iraq. It may not sound like much, but believe me, it is. The Chairman simply said, "We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that's there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions… Clearly, we'd want to be able to do it safely." Getting it all out safely, he estimated, would take at least "two to three years."

For those who needed further clarification, the Wall Street Journal's Yochi J. Dreazen spelled it out: "In recent interviews, two high-ranking officers stated flatly that it would be logistically impossible to dismantle dozens of large U.S. bases there and withdraw the 150,000 troops now in Iraq so quickly. The officers said it would take close to three years for a full withdrawal and could take longer if the fighting resumed as American forces left the country."

As for the Obama plan, if the military top brass have anything to say about it, sayonara. It's "physically impossible," says "a top officer involved in briefing the President-elect on U.S. operations in Iraq," according to Time Magazine. The Washington Post reports that, should Obama continue to push for his two brigades a month draw-down, a civilian-military "conflict is inevitable," and might, as the Nation's Robert Dreyfuss suggests, even lead to an Obama "showdown" with the military high command in his first weeks in office.

In a nutshell, the Pentagon's argument couldn't be simpler or more red-bloodedly American: We have too much stuff to leave Iraq any time soon. In war, as in peace, we're trapped by our own profligacy. We are the Neiman Marcus and the Wal-Mart of combat. Where we go, our "stuff" goes with us -- in such prodigious quantities that removing it is going to prove more daunting than invading in the first place. After all, it took less than a year to put in place the 130,000-plus invasion force, and all its equipment and support outfits from bases all around the world, as well as the air power and naval power to match.

Some have estimated, however, that simply getting each of the 14 combat brigades still stationed in Iraq on January 20, 2009, out with all their equipment might take up to 75 days per brigade. (If you do the math, that's 36 months, and even that wouldn't suffice if you wanted to remove everything else we now have in that California-sized country.)

Getting out? Don't dream of it.

Going to War with the Society You Have

Back in December 2004, when a soldier at a base in Kuwait asked about the lack of armor on his unit's Humvees, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have…"

Rumsfeld was then still focused on his much-ballyhooed "transformation" in warfare. He was intent on creating a Military Lite -- the most pared down, totally agile, completely networked, highest of all high-tech forces that was going to make the U.S. the dominant power on the planet for eons. As it turned out, that force was a mirage. In reality, the U.S. military in Iraq proved to be a Military Heavy. In retrospect, Rumsfeld might have more accurately responded: You have to go to war with the society you have.

In fact, the Bush administration did just that -- with a passion. After the attacks of 9/11, the President famously pleaded with the American public to return to normal life by shopping, flying, and visiting Disney World. ("Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.") The administration and the Pentagon led the way. As the Pentagon's budget soared, its civilians and the high command went on an imperial spending spree the likes of which may never have been seen on this planet.

For them, Iraq has been war as cornucopia, war as a consumer's paradise. Arguably, on a per-soldier basis, no military has ever occupied a country with a bigger baggage train. On taking Iraq, they promptly began constructing a series of gigantic military bases, American ziggurats meant to outlast them. These were full-scale "American towns," well guarded, 15-20 miles around, with multiple PXes, fitness clubs, brand fast-food outlets, traffic lights, the works. (This, in a country where, for years after the invasion, nothing worked.)

To the tune of multi-billions of dollars, they continued to build these bases up, and then, in Baghdad, put the icing on the Iraqi cake by constructing an almost three-quarter-billion dollar embassy of embassies, a veritable citadel in the heart of the capital's American-controlled Green Zone, meant for 1,000 "diplomats" with its own pool, tennis courts, recreation center, post exchange/community center, commissary, retail and shopping areas, and restaurants -- again, the works.

In other words, abroad, we weren't the Spartans, we were the Athenians on steroids. And then, of course, there was the "equipment" that Mullen referred to, the most expensive and extensive collection you could find. As the Washington Times's Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote back in October 2007: "Watching them drive by at 30 miles per hour, would take 75 days. Bumper-to-bumper, they would stretch from New York City to Denver. That's how U.S. Air Force logistical expert Lenny Richoux described the number of vehicles that would have to be shipped back from Iraq when the current deployment is over. These include, among others, 10,000 flatbed trucks, 1,000 tanks and 20,000 Humvees." And don't forget "the 300,000 'heavy' items that would have to be shipped back, such as ice-cream machines that churn out different flavors upon request at a dozen bases…"

As Dr. Seuss might have put it: and that is not all, oh no, that is not all. In July 2007, for instance, the Associated Press's Charles Hanley described U.S. bases holding "more than the thousands of tanks, other armored vehicles, artillery pieces and Humvees assigned to combat units. They're also home to airfields laden with high-tech gear, complexes of offices filled with computers, furniture and air conditioners, systems of generators and water plants, PXs full of merchandise, gyms packed with equipment, big prefab latrines and ranks of small portable toilets, even Burger Kings and Subway sandwich shops."

And it doesn't stop there. In mid-2007, when the issue of our "stuff" first became part of the withdrawal news, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out: "You're talking about not just U.S. soldiers, but millions of tons of contractor equipment that belongs to the United States government, and a variety of other things… This is a massive logistical undertaking whenever it takes place." So, one might ask, what about those many tens of thousands of private contractors in Iraq and all their materiel? Presumably, some of them, too, would have to withdraw, mainly through the bottleneck of Kuwait and its overburdened ports. This would, as the military now portrays it, be an American Dunkirk stretching on for years.

The Argument of Last Resort

Now, back in the days when we had less experience fighting losing wars, Americans in retreat simply shoved those extra helicopters off the decks of aircraft carriers in chaos, burned free-floating cash in tin drums, and left tons of expensive equipment and massive bases behind for the enemy to turn into future industrial parks. At the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in April 1975, while everything in sight was being burned or destroyed including precious advanced electronic equipment, money actually rained down from the Embassy incinerator on the roof upon amazed Vietnamese allies huddled below, waiting for a promised airlift to safety that, for most, never came.

Withdrawal then was unsightly, unseemly, and environmentally unsound. But, as we know, the lessons of Vietnam were subsequently learned.

Today, the Pentagon and the military top command plan to be far more responsible consumers and far better environmentalists, however long it takes, and the Department of Agriculture's "stringent requirements" for the "power-washing" -- this, in the desert, of course -- of every object to be returned to the U.S. will help ensure that this is so. "Ever since U.S. authorities found plague-infected rats in cargo returning from the Vietnam War," the AP's Hanley has written, "the decontamination process has been demanding: water blasting of equipment, treatment with insecticide and rodenticide, inspections, certifications."

And don't forget the shrink-wrapping of those helicopters -- who knows how many -- for that long, salt-free sea voyage home.

Think of this as a version of the Pottery Barn Rule that Secretary of State Colin Powell supposedly cited in warning President Bush on the dangers of invading Iraq: "You break it, you own it." For the departure from Iraq, this might be rewritten as: You bring it, you own it.

You might say that, in the end, Bush's secret plan for never withdrawing from Iraq was but an extension of his shop-till-you-drop response to 9/11. The idea was to put so much stuff in the country that we'd have to stay.

And now, as the mission threatens to wind down, the top brass are evidently claiming that an Obama timeline for withdrawal would violate our property rights and squander a vast array of expensive equipment. You'll hear no apologies from the military for traveling heavy, despite the fact that they are now arguing against a reasonable withdrawal timetable based on the need to enact a kind of 12-step program for armed consumer sobriety.

Ever since the President's surge strategy was launched in January 2007, this argument has been a background hum in the withdrawal debate. Now, it's evidently about to come front and center.

A new president will be taking office. His withdrawal plan -- he spoke of it more accurately on CBS's 60 Minutes as "a plan that draws down our troops" -- is a modest one. After those American "combat brigades" are out, it's still possible, as one of his key security advisers, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, told National Public Radio last summer, that as many as 55,000 U.S. troops might remain in an advisory capacity or as residual forces. And yet, with the Iraqis urging us on, so many of the arguments against withdrawal have fallen away, which is why, when Barack Obama sits down in the Oval Office with his top commanders, he's going to hear about all that "stuff." For those who want to drag their feet on leaving Iraq, this is the argument of last resort.

As Donald Rumsfeld so classically said, in reference to the looting of Baghdad in April 2003 after American troops entered the city, "stuff happens." How true that turns out to be. When it comes to withdrawal, the most militarily profligate administration in memory has seemingly ensured that the highest military priority in 2009 will be frugality -- that is, saving all American "stuff" in Iraq.

Irony hardly covers this one. The Bush administration may have succeeded in little else, but it did embed the U.S. so deeply in that country that leaving can now be portrayed as the profligate thing to do.

By the way, in case anyone thinks that the soon-to-be-Bush-less Pentagon has drawn the obvious lessons from its experience in Iraq, think again. It still seems eager to visit Disney World.

According to Wired Magazine's reliable Danger Room blog, military officials are now suggesting to the Obama transition team that the next Pentagon budget should come in at $581 billion, a staggering $67 billion more than the previous one (and that's without almost all the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars being included).

But like Rumsfeld's Military Lite, the Pentagon's Military Heavy plans are likely to prove a mirage in the economic future that awaits us. Perhaps the U.S. should indeed salvage every bit of its equipment in Iraq. After all, one thing seems certain: Washington may continue in some fashion to garrison an economically desperate world, but it will never again have the money to occupy a country in the style of Iraq -- largely because the Bush administration managed to squander the American imperial legacy in eight short years.

Someday, Iraq and all those massive bases, all that high-tech equipment, all those ice-cream machines and portajohns, will seem like part of an American dream life. Money may never again rain from the sky.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. To listen to a podcast of Engelhardt discussing how and why he decided to write this essay on military resistance to withdrawal from Iraq, click here.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Why Obama's Futurama Can Wait

Schools and Hospitals Should Come First in Any Stimulus Package
By Mike Davis

America's "Futurama" is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World's Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century's equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain's high-speed rail network will become the world's largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: "For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America." Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His "Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class" vows to "create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we'll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges."

Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

Rolling Out the Dozers

Since the Paulson bailout plan has become so much expensive spit in the wind, and with bond spreads now premised on the possibility of double-digit unemployment over the next 18 months, massive new federal spending has become a matter of sheer economic survival. As innumerable influentials -- from New York Times columnist David Brooks to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- have argued, a crash program of infrastructure repair and construction, likely to include some investment in the new power grids required to bring more solar and wind energy online, is the "win-win" approach that will garner the quickest bipartisan support.

It has also been portrayed as the only lifeboat in the water for the ordinary steerage passengers in our sinking economy. The emergent Washington consensus seems to be that those five million green jobs can actually come later (after we save GM's shareholders), but that infrastructure spending -- if resolutely pushed through the lame-duck Congress or adopted in Obama's first 100 days -- can begin to pump money into the crucial construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy before the end of next winter.

Unlike Comrade Bush's "socialist" efforts to save Wall Street, a public-works strategy for national recovery has had broad ideological respectability from the days of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. If Democrats can brag about the proud heritage of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration from the era of the Great Depression (ah, those magnificent post offices and parkways), there are still a few Republicans who remember the Golden Age of interstate highway construction that commenced in the 1950s with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed since the national shame of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have become outspokenly nostalgic about competent federal governments and magnificent public achievements.

If one accepts the reasonable principle of supporting the new president whenever he makes policy from the left or addresses basic social needs, shouldn't progressives be cheering the White House as it rolls out the dozers, Cats, and big cranes? Aren't high-speed mass transit and clean energy the kind of noble priorities that best reconcile big-bang stimulus with long-term public value?

The answer is: no, not at this stage of our national emergency. I'm not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Inexorably, the budgets of schools, cities, and states are sinking into insolvency on a scale comparable to the early 1930s. The public-sector fiscal crisis -- a vicious chain reaction of falling property values, incomes, and sales -- has been magnified by the unexpectedly large exposure of local governments and transit agencies to the Wall Street meltdown via complex capital lease-back arrangements. Meanwhile on the demand side, the need for public services explodes as even prudent burghers face foreclosure, not to speak of the loss of pensions and medical coverage. Although the public mega-deficits of California and New York may dominate headlines, the essence of the crisis -- from the suburbs of Anchorage to the neighborhoods of West Philly -- is its potential universality.

Certainly, in such a rich country, wind farms and schools should never become a Sophie's choice, but the criminal negligence of Congress over the past months should alert us to the likelihood that such a choice will be made -- with disastrous results for both human services and economic recovery.

Saving Schools and Hospitals

Congress naturally loves infrastructure because it rewards manufacturers, shippers, and contractors who give large campaign contributions, and because construction sites can be handsomely bill-boarded with the names of proud sponsors. Powerful business lobbies like the National Industrial Transportation League and the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Corridors stand ready to grease the wheels of their political allies. In addition, if the past century of congressional pork-barrel methods is any precedent, infrastructural spending typically resists coherent national planning or larger cost-benefit analyses.

Yet saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.

For example, $50 million in federal aid during the Clinton administration allowed Michigan schools to hire nearly 1,300 new teachers. It is also the current operating budget of a Tennessee school district made up of eight elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.

On the other hand, $50 million on the order book of a niche public transit manufacturer generates only 200 jobs (plus, of course, capital costs and profits). Road construction and bridge repair, also very capital intensive, produce about the same modest, direct employment effect.

One of the most likely targets for a Congressional stimulus plan is light-rail construction. Street-car systems are enormously popular with local governments, redevelopment agencies, and middle-class commuters, but generally they operate less efficiently (per dollar per passenger) than bus systems, and at least 40% of the capital investment leaks overseas to German streetcar builders and Korean steel companies.

Personally, I would love to commute via a sleek Euro-style bullet train from my home in San Diego to my job in Riverside, 100 grueling freeway miles away, but I'll take gridlock if the cost of rationing federal expenditure is tolerating the closure of my kids' school or increasing the wait in the local emergency room from two to ten hours.

Obama, unlike his predecessor, has a bold vision, shared with his powerful supporters in high-tech industries, of catching up with the Spanish and Japanese, while redeeming America as the synonym for modernity. Lots of new infrastructure will, however, become so many bridges to nowhere (especially for our children) unless he and Congress first save human-needs budgets and public-sector jobs.

A good start for progressive agitation on Obama's left flank would be to demand that his health-care reform and aid-to-education proposals be brought front and center as preferential vehicles for immediate macro-economic stimulus. Democrats should not forget that the most brilliant and enduring accomplishment of the Kennedy-Johnson era was Head Start, not the Apollo Program.

If, after saving kindergartens and county hospitals, we someday hope to ride the fast train, then we need to rebuild the antiwar movement on broader foundations. The president-elect's original proposal for funding domestic social investment through downsizing the empire offers a brilliant starting point for basing economic growth on an economic bill of rights (as advocated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944) instead of imperial over-reach and Pharaonic levels of military waste.

Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

Copyright 2008 Mike Davis

Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart

Why Americans Shouldn't Go Home
By Tom Engelhardt
On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001.

American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the last seven months. And don't try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, those planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W. Bush's Air Force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they -- and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings -- officially become the property of President Barack Obama.

That's a sobering thought. He is, in fact, inheriting from the Bush administration a widening war in the region, as well as an exceedingly tenuous situation in devastated, still thoroughly factionalized, sectarian, and increasingly Iranian-influenced Iraq. There, the U.S. is, in actuality, increasingly friendless and ever less powerful. The last allies from the infamous "coalition of the willing" are now rushing for the door. The South Koreans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians -- I'll bet you didn't even know the latter two had a few troops left in Iraq -- are going home this year; the rump British force in the south will probably be out by next summer.

The Iraqis are beginning to truly go their own way (or, more accurately, ways); and yet, in January, when Barack Obama enters office, there will still be more American troops in Iraq than there were in April 2003 when Baghdad fell. Winning an election with an antiwar label, Obama has promised -- kinda -- to end the American war there and bring the troops -- sorta, mostly -- home. But even after his planned 16-month withdrawal of U.S. "combat brigades," which may not be welcomed by his commanders in the field, including former Iraq commander, now Centcom Commander David Petraeus, there are still plenty of combative non-combat forces, which will be labeled "residual" and left behind to fight "al-Qaeda." Then, there are all those "advisors" still there to train Iraqi forces, the guards for the giant bases the Bush administration built in the country, the many thousands of armed private security contractors from companies like Blackwater, and of course, the 1,000 "diplomats" who are to staff the newly opened U.S. embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone, possibly the largest embassy on the planet. Hmmmm.

And while the new president turns to domestic matters, it's quite possible that significant parts of his foreign policy could be left to the oversight of Vice President Joe Biden who, in case anyone has forgotten, proposed a plan for Iraq back in 2007 so filled with imperial hubris that it still startles. In a Caesarian moment, he recommended that the U.S. -- not Iraqis -- functionally divide the country into three parts. Although he preferred to call it a "federal system," it was, for all intents and purposes, a de facto partition plan.

If Iraq remains a sorry tale of American destruction and dysfunction without, as yet, a discernable end in sight, Afghanistan may prove Iraq squared. And there, candidate Obama expressed no desire to wind the war down and withdraw American troops. Quite the opposite, during the election campaign he plunked hard for escalation, something our NATO allies are sure not to be too enthusiastic about. According to the Obama plan, many more American troops (if available, itself an open question) are to be poured into the country in what would essentially be a massive "surge strategy" by yet another occupant of the Oval Office. Assumedly, the new Afghan policy would be aided and abetted by those CIA-run UAVs directed toward Pakistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and pals, while undoubtedly further destabilizing a shaky ally.

When it comes to rising civilian casualties from U.S. air strikes in their countries, both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari have already used their congratulatory phone calls to President-elect Obama to plead for an end to the attacks, which produce both a profusion of dead bodies and a profusion of live, vengeful enemies. Both have done the same with the Bush administration, Karzai to the point of tears.

The U.S. military argues that the use of air power is necessary in the face of a spreading, ever more dangerous, Taliban insurgency largely because there are too few boots on the ground. ("If we got more boots on the ground, we would not have to rely as much on airstrikes" was the way Army Brig. Gen. Michael Tucker, deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, put it.) But rest assured, as the boots multiply on increasingly hostile ground, the military will discover it needs more, not less, air power to back more troops in more trouble.

So, after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush's disastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success.

Finally, President-elect Obama accepted the overall framework of a "Global War on Terror" during his presidential campaign. This "war" lies at the heart of the Bush administration's fantasy world of war that has set all-too-real expanses of the planet aflame. Its dangers were further highlighted this week by the New York Times, which revealed that secret orders in the spring of 2004 gave the U.S. military "new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States."

At least twelve such attacks have been carried out since then by Special Operations forces on Pakistan, Somalia, most recently Syria, and other unnamed countries. Signed by Donald Rumsfeld, signed off on by President Bush, built-upon recently by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, these secret orders enshrine the Pentagon's right to ignore international boundaries, or the sovereignty of nations, in an endless global "war" of choice against small, scattered bands of terrorists.

As reporter Jim Lobe pointed out recently, a "series of interlocking grand bargains" in what the neoconservatives used to call "the Greater Middle East" or the "arc of instability" might be available to an Obama administration capable of genuinely new thinking. These, he wrote, would be "backed by the relevant regional players as well as major global powers -- aimed at pacifying Afghanistan; integrating Iran into a new regional security structure; promoting reconciliation in Iraq; and launching a credible process to negotiate a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world."

If, however, Obama accepts a War on Terror framework, as he already seems to have, as well as those "residual" forces in Iraq, while pumping up the war in Afghanistan, he may quickly find himself playing by Rumsfeld rules, whether or not he revokes those specific orders. In fact, left alone in Washington, backed by the normal national security types, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations, as once happened to another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who opted to escalate an inherited war when what he most wanted to do was focus on domestic policy.

Previews for a Political Zombie Movie

Domestically, it's clear enough that we are about to leave the age of Bush -- in tone and policy -- but what that leave-taking will consist of is still an open question. This is especially so given a cratering economy and the pot-holed road ahead. It is a moment when Obama has, not surprisingly, begun to emphasize continuity and reassurance alongside his campaign theme of "change we can believe in."

All you had to do was look at that array of Clinton-era economic types and CEOs behind Obama at his first news conference to think: been there, done that. The full photo of his economic team that day offered a striking profile of pre-Bush era Washington and the Washington Consensus, and so a hint of the Democratic world the new president will walk into on January 20, 2009.

How about former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, those kings of 1990s globalization, or even the towering former Fed chief from the first Bush era, Paul Volcker? Didn't that have the look of previews for a political zombie movie, a line-up of the undead? As head of the New America Foundation Steve Clemons has been writing recently, the economic team looks suspiciously as if it were preparing for a "Clinton 3.0" moment.

You could scan that gathering and not see a genuine rogue thinker in sight; no off-the-reservation figures who might represent a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking (other than, being hopeful, the president-elect himself). Clemons offers an interesting list of just some obvious names left off stage: "Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, James Galbraith, Leo Hindery, Clyde Prestowitz, Charlene Barshefsky, C. Fred Bergsten, Adam Posen, Robert Kuttner, Robert Samuelson, Alan Murray, William Bonvillian, Doug & Heidi Rediker, Bernard Schwartz, Tom Gallagher, Sheila Bair, Sherle Schwenninger, and Kevin Phillips."

Mobilizing a largely Clintonista brain trust may look reassuring to some -- an in-gathering of all the Washington wisdom available before Hurricane Bush/Cheney hit town, but unfortunately, we don't happen to be entering a Clinton 3.0 moment. What's globalizing now is American disaster, which threatens to level a vulnerable world.

In a sense, though, domestic policy may, relatively speaking, represent the good news of the coming Obama era. We know, for instance, that those preparing the way for the new president's arrival are thinking hard about how to roll back the worst of Bush cronyism, enrich-yourself-at-the-public-troughism, general lawlessness, and unconstitutionality. As a start, according to Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, Obama advisers have already been compiling "a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues," including oil drilling in pristine wild lands. In addition, Obama's people are evidently at work on ways to close Guantanamo and try some of its prisoners in U.S. courts.

However, if continuity domestically means rollback to the Clinton era, continuity in the foreign policy sphere -- Guantanamo aside -- may be a somewhat different matter. We won't know the full cast of characters to come until the president-elect makes the necessary announcements or has a national security press conference with a similar line-up behind him. But it's certainly rumored that Robert Gates, a symbol of continuity from both Bush eras, might be kept on as secretary of defense, or a Republican senator like Richard Lugar of Indiana or, more interestingly, retiring Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might be appointed to the post. Of course, many Clintonistas are sure to be in this line-up, too.

In addition, among the essential cast of characters will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Michael Mullen, and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, both late Bush appointees, both seemingly flexible military men, both interested in a military-plus approach to the Afghan and Iraq wars. Petraeus, for instance, reportedly recently asked for, and was denied, permission to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

All these figures will represent a turn away from the particular madness of the early Bush years abroad, one that actually began in the final years of his second term. But such a national security line-up is unlikely to include fresh thinkers, who might truly reimagine an imperial world, or anyone who might genuinely buck the power of the Pentagon. What Obama looks to have are custodians and bureaucrats of empire, far more cautious, far more sane, and certainly far more grown-up than the first-term Bush appointees, but not a cast of characters fit for reshaping American policy in a new world of disorder and unraveling economies, not a crew ready to break new ground and cede much old ground on this still American-garrisoned planet of ours.

Breathless in Washington

Let's assume the best: that Barack Obama truly means to bring some form of the people's will, as he imagines it, to Washington after eight years of unconstitutional "commander-in-chief" governance. That -- take my word for it -- he can't do without the people themselves expressing that will.

Of course, even in the Bush era, Americans didn't simply cede the public commons. They turned out, for instance, in staggering numbers to protest the President's invasion of Iraq before it ever happened, and again more recently to work tirelessly to elect Obama president. But -- so it seems to me -- when immediate goals are either disappointingly not achieved, or achieved relatively quickly, most Americans tend to pack their bags and head for home, as so many did in despair after the invasion was launched in 2003, as so many reportedly are doing again, in a far more celebratory mood, now that Obama is elected.

But hard as his election may have been, that was surely the easy part. He is now about to enter the hornet's nest. Entrenched interests. Entrenched ideas. Entrenched ideology. Entrenched profits. Entrenched lobbyists. Entrenched bureaucrats. Entrenched think tanks. An entrenched Pentagon and allied military-industrial complex, both bloated beyond imagining and virtually untouchable, along with a labyrinthine intelligence system of more than 18 agencies, departments, and offices.

Washington remains an imperial capital. How in the world will Barack Obama truly begin to change that without you?

In the Bush years, the special interests, lobbyists, pillagers, and crony corporations not only pitched their tents on the public commons, but with the help of the President's men and women, simply took possession of large hunks of it. That was called "privatization." Now, as Bush & Co. prepare to leave town in a cloud of catastrophe, the feeding frenzy at the public trough only seems to grow.

It's a natural reaction -- and certainly a commonplace media reaction at the moment -- to want to give Barack Obama a "chance." Back off those critical comments, people now say. Fair's fair. Give the President-elect a little "breathing space." After all, the election is barely over, he's not even in office, he hasn't had his first 100 days, and already the criticism has begun.

But those who say this don't understand Washington -- or, in the case of various media figures and pundits, perhaps understand it all too well.

Political Washington is a conspiracy -- in the original sense of the word: "to breathe the same air." In that sense, there is no air in Washington that isn't stale enough to choke a president. Send Obama there alone, give him that "breathing space," don't start demanding the quick ending of wars or anything else, and you're not doing him, or the American people, any favors. Quite the opposite, you're consigning him to suffocation.

Leave Obama to them and he'll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself, not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for "change we can believe in," which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published.

[Note for TomDispatch readers: For those who want to follow issues of war and peace, especially in the "arc of instability," I want to recommend four sites that are sure to prove as invaluable in the Obama era as they have been (to me at least) during the Bush years: Juan Cole's never miss-able Informed Comment blog, AntiWar.com (which has recently added Jason Ditz's useful daily summaries of the latest news developments like this Iraqi one), Paul Woodward's sharp-eyed site The War in Context, and the always fascinating and provocative online newspaper, Asia Times. I check in with all of them daily.]

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Obama's Toughest Challenge

America's Energy Crunch Comes Home
By Michael T. Klare

Of all the challenges facing President Barack Obama next January, none is likely to prove as daunting, or important to the future of this nation, as that of energy. After all, energy policy -- so totally mishandled by the outgoing Bush-Cheney administration -- figures in each of the other major challenges facing the new president, including the economy, the environment, foreign policy, and our Middle Eastern wars. Most of all, it will prove a monumental challenge because the United States faces an energy crisis of unprecedented magnitude that is getting worse by the day.

The U.S. needs energy -- lots of it. Day in and day out, this country, with only 5% of the world's population, consumes one quarter of the world's total energy supply. About 40% of our energy comes from oil: some 20 million barrels, or 840 million gallons a day. Another 23% comes from coal, and a like percentage from natural gas. Providing all this energy to American consumers and businesses, even in an economic downturn, remains a Herculean task, and will only grow more so in the years ahead. Addressing the environmental consequences of consuming fossil fuels at such levels, all emitting climate-altering greenhouse gases, only makes this equation more intimidating.

As President Obama faces our energy problem, he will have to address three overarching challenges:

1. The United States relies excessively on oil to supply its energy needs at a time when the future availability of petroleum is increasingly in question.

2. Our most abundant domestic source of fuel, coal, is the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases when consumed in the current manner.

3. No other source of energy, including natural gas, nuclear power, biofuels, wind power, and solar power is currently capable of supplanting our oil and coal consumption, even if a decision is made to reduce their importance in our energy mix.

This, then, is the essence of Obama's energy dilemma. Let's take a closer look at each of its key components.

Excessive Reliance on Oil

No other major power relies on getting so much of its energy from oil. Making that 40% figure especially daunting is this: the world supply of oil is about to contract. The competition for remaining supplies will then intensify, while most of what remains is located in inherently unstable regions, threatening to lead the U.S. into unceasing oil wars.

Just how much of the world's untapped oil supply remains to be exploited, and how quickly we will reach a peak of sustainable daily world oil output, are matters of some contention, but recently the scope of debate on this question has narrowed appreciably.

Most energy experts now believe that we have consumed approximately half of the planet's original petroleum inheritance and are very close to a peak in production. No one knows whether it will arrive in 2010, 2012, 2015, or beyond, but it is certainly near. In addition, most energy professionals now believe that global oil output will peak at far lower levels than only recently imagined -- perhaps 90-95 million barrels per day, not the 115-125 million barrels once projected by the U.S. Department of Energy. (Here I'm speaking only of conventional, liquid petroleum; there are some "unconventional" sources of oil -- Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, and the like -- that may boost these numbers by a few millions of barrels per day, without altering the global energy equation significantly.)

What underlies these more pessimistic assumptions? To begin with, the depletion rate of existing fields is accelerating. Most of the giant fields on which the world now relies for the bulk of its oil supplies were discovered 30 to 60 years ago and are now reaching the end of their productive life cycles.

It used to be thought that the depletion rate of these fields was about 4% to 5% a year, but in a study to be released November 12, the International Energy Agency (IEA), an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of wealthy industrialized nations), is expected to report that the decline rate is closer to 9%, an astonishingly high figure. At this rate of decline, the world's major fields will be depleted of their remaining supplies of oil relatively quickly, leaving us dependent on a constellation of smaller, less productive fields, often located in difficult to reach or unstable areas, as well as whatever new deposits the oil industry is able to locate and develop.

And this is the second big problem: Despite huge increases in the funds devoted to exploration, the oil companies are not finding giant new fields comparable to the "elephants" discovered in previous decades. Only two such fields were discovered between 1970 and 1990, and only one since -- the Kashagan field in Kazakhstan's corner of the Caspian Sea. True, the companies have discovered some large fields in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and off the coasts of Angola and Brazil, but these are neither on a par with the largest fields now in production, nor anywhere near as easy to bring on line. They will not be able to reverse the coming decline in global output.

Given these factors, it is clear that the global supply of oil is destined to begin contracting in the not-too-distant future, and that the global peak in production -- when it does arrive -- will be at a level much lower than previously assumed. The current global economic downturn and the sudden fall in energy prices may, for a while, mask this phenomenon, but they won't change it in any significant way.

Our excessive reliance on oil in good times and bad is made all the more problematic by the fact that, just as supplies are dwindling, global demand is expected to rise mainly because of increased consumption in China, India, and other developing nations.

As recently as 1990, the developing nations of Asia accounted for only a relatively small 10% of global oil consumption. Their economic growth has been so rapid, however, and their need for oil so voracious that they now consume about 18% of the world's supply. If current trends persist, that will rise to 27% in 2030, exceeding North American net consumption for the first time. This means -- if energy habits and present energy use don't change radically -- that Americans will be competing with Chinese and Indian consumers for every barrel of spare oil available on world markets, driving up prices and jeopardizing the health of our petroleum-dependent economy.

To make matters worse, more and more of the world's remaining oil production will be concentrated in the Middle East, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. That these areas are chronically unstable is hardly accidental: many bear the scars of colonialism or are delineated by borders drawn up by the colonial powers that bear no resemblance to often fractious ethnic realities on the ground. Many also suffer from the "resource curse": the concentration of power in the hands of venal elites that seek to monopolize the collection of oil revenues by denying rights to the rest of the population, thereby inviting revolts, coups, and energy sabotage of every sort.

As it has grown more reliant on oil deliveries from these areas, the United States has attempted to enhance its energy "security" by an increasing reliance on military force, even though such efforts have largely proved ineffectual. Despite all the money and effort devoted to enforcement of what was once known as the Carter Doctrine -- which stated that the uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil to the United States is a vital national interest to be protected by any means necessary, including military force -- the Persian Gulf is no more stable or peaceful today than it was in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter issued his famous decree.

Our over-reliance on oil, then, is our greatest energy vulnerability. But what are the alternatives?

The Problem with Coal

The energy source which the United States possesses in greatest abundance is coal. This country has the world's largest reserves, 247 billion metric tons, and is second only to China in using coal. In this country, coal is primarily employed to produce electricity, but it can also be converted into a diesel fuel -- known as coal-to-liquids or CTL -- to power cars and trucks. Although CTL, widely used by Germany during World War II to power its war machine, is still in its infancy in the U.S., it could conceivably be used to supplement future declining gas supplies.

When coal is burned in the conventional manner, however, it emits more climate-altering greenhouse gases than any other fossil fuel -- twice as much as natural gas and one-and-a-half times that of oil to produce the same amount of energy. As a result, any increase in our reliance on coal will lead to ever greater emissions of carbon dioxide, only accelerating the already perilous rate of global warming.

In addition, an increased U.S. reliance on coal would only flash a green light to China, India, and other countries eager to do likewise. The bottom line? Any hope of reversing the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in time to avert the most severe consequences of climate change would go out the window (possibly quite literally).

During the recent election campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain both spoke of speeding the development of "clean coal technology." In the present context, however, clean coal is a deceptive term, if not an outright misnomer. It generally refers to pollution-free coal, not to coal free of carbon emissions. Coal that would burn without damaging the climate is best referred to as climate-friendly coal, or "safe coal." At present, there are no power plants anywhere on the planet capable of burning coal in a climate-safe manner.

Right now, there is only one technology being seriously discussed that would burn coal safely: carbon capture and storage, or carbon sequestration. Under this process, powdered coal is combined with steam and turned into a gas; then the carbon is stripped away and eventually buried. This is a tricky and costly technique that has yet to be fully tested. But at the moment, it is the only foreseeable path to using coal in a climate-friendly way. President-elect Obama has spoken of his interest in this technology, but without a lot more support and investment -- no small matter in economically tough times -- it will never get the boost it deserves.

Consider the Alternatives

So what's left to satisfy our future energy needs?

Natural gas is the next biggest source and it possesses a number of advantages. Of all the fossil fuels, it releases the least amount of carbon dioxide when burned. We possess substantial, if not overwhelming, reserves of natural gas in this country. But like oil, it is a finite substance. Eventually, it, too, will peak and begin a decline of its own. Energy experts are less certain about when exactly this is likely to occur, but most see it coming a decade or so after oil's peak.

Our biggest problem with natural gas is that we are gradually running out of North American reserves and so must increasingly rely on supplies from elsewhere -- in this case, in the form of liquefied natural gas, or LNG. Fully 45% of the world's remaining reserves are, however, held by just three countries, Russia, Iran, and Qatar, while large amounts are also held by Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. This means, of course, that we face the same geopolitical problems relying on natural gas as we do with oil.

Some say we should increase our reliance on nuclear power. Nuclear power's attraction is that, once in operation, it does not emit carbon dioxide. It does, however, raise enormous safety issues and produces toxic radioactive wastes that must be stored for thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years in ultra-safe containers -- a technological challenge that has yet to be overcome. Given these problems, the rising costs and legal problems of building new reactors have deterred all but a few utilities from considering their construction, putting distinct limits on nuclear power's capacity to overcome America's energy crisis.

By far the most attractive alternative to oil and coal is obviously renewable energy, especially wind and solar power -- much praised but inadequately supported by politicians of both parties. These need no fuel source (save the sun and wind), are never used up, and emit no carbon dioxide. They seem the perfect solution to the planet's energy and climate crises.

The full potential of wind and solar power, however, cannot be realized until at least two other hurdles are overcome: the development of efficient storage systems to collect energy when the sun and wind are strong and release it when they are not, and the construction of an expanded nationwide electrical grid to connect areas of reliable wind (especially the mountain states and high plains) and sunshine (the Southwest) with the areas of greatest need. These are bound to be costly endeavors, but until they are fully funded, wind and solar power will not be capable of replacing more than a tiny fraction of oil and coal in the nation's overall energy mix. Unfortunately, against a backdrop of bad times in a new era of "cheap" oil that will not last, the likelihood of such funding at the levels needed has declined precipitously.

Much can be said about the potential of advanced biofuels (those not reliant on food crops like corn), geothermal energy, wave power, hydrogen power, and nuclear fusion, but these all remain in the same category as wind and solar (only more so): they show a lot of potential, but without substantially more research, development, and investment, they cannot help wean us from our reliance on oil and coal.

The Challenge to be Met

If this assessment is accurate, President Obama will face a tough, if not overwhelming, challenge in attempting to get the nation's long-term energy crisis in hand. On coming into office in increasingly tough times, he will be besieged by a host of immediate crises and demands for funds. On energy, his natural inclination, given limited financial resources, will undoubtedly be to make a series of modest gestures toward "green energy independence." This coming crisis, the central one of our lifetimes and those of our children and grandchildren, cannot, unfortunately, be solved via small-scale course corrections.

Needed is a major White House-led initiative on the scale of the World War II Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb or the Apollo Moon Project. The principal goals of such an epic undertaking would have to include:

1. Reducing oil's contribution to America's total energy supply by half over the next quarter century. This would require a comprehensive program of conservation, increased development of public transport, the accelerated development of electric-powered vehicles and advanced biofuels, and other technological innovations.

2. Gradually reducing U.S. reliance on coal, unless consumed in a climate-friendly manner, as well as providing government support for the development of carbon capture and storage technology.

3. Increasing the contribution of renewable energy sources to America's total energy mix from their current 6% to at least 25%, if not significantly more, by 2030. This would require substantial public investment in new technologies and electrical power lines.

4. Demilitarizing America's reliance on imported petroleum. This means repudiating the Carter Doctrine, dismantling the vast military apparatus created since 1980 to enforce that policy, and using the resulting savings -- as much as $150 billion per year, says a new report from the National Priorities Project -- to help finance the initiatives described above.

Only by embracing such goals can President Obama hope to overcome the long-term, potentially devastating energy crisis now facing this nation.

Michael T. Klare is professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books).

Copyright 2008 Michael T. Klare

Foreclosed

The George W. Bush Story
By Tom Engelhardt

They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen -- if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance.

When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them -- the "home front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

Indeed.

From a White House where "victory strategies" meant purely for domestic consumption poured out, to the Pentagon where bevies of generals, admirals, and other high officers were constantly being mustered, not to lead armies but to lead public opinion, their selling focus was total. They were always releasing "new product."

And don't forget their own set of soaring inside-the-Beltway fantasies. After all, if a salesman is going to sell you some defective product, it always helps if he can sell himself on it first. And on this score, they were world champs.

Because events made it look so foolish, the phrase "shock and awe" that went with the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003 has now passed out of official language and (together with "mission accomplished") into the annals of irony. Back then, though, as bombs and missiles blew up parts of Baghdad -- to fabulous visual effect in that other "theater" of war, television -- the phrase was constantly on official lips and in media reports everywhere. It went hand-in-glove with another curious political phrase: regime change.

Given the supposed unique technological proficiency of the U.S. military and its array of "precision" weapons, the warriors of Bushworld convinced themselves that a new era in military affairs had truly dawned. An enemy "regime" could now be taken out -- quite literally and with surgical precision, in its bedrooms, conference rooms, and offices, thanks to those precision weapons delivered long-distance from ship or plane -- without taking out a country. Poof! You only had to say the word and an oppressive regime would be, as it was termed, "decapitated." Its people would then welcome with open arms relatively small numbers of American troops as liberators.

It all sounded so good, and high tech, and relatively simple, and casualty averse, and clean as a whistle. Even better, once there had been such a demonstration, a guaranteed "cakewalk" -- as, say, in Iraq -- who would ever dare stand up to American power again? Not only would one hated enemy dictator be dispatched to the dustbin of history, but evildoers everywhere, fearing the Bush equivalent of the wrath of Khan, would be shock-and-awed into submission or quickly dispatched in their own right.

In reality (ah, "reality" -- what a nasty word!), the shock-and-awe attacks used on Iraq got not a single leader of the Saddamist regime, not one of that pack of 52 cards (including of course the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein, found in his "spiderhole" so many months later). Iraqi civilians were the ones killed in that precise and shocking moment, while Iraqi society was set on the road to destruction, and the world was not awed.

Strangely enough, though, the phrase, once reversed, proved applicable to the Bush administration's seven-year post-9/11 history. They were, in a sense, the awe-and-shock administration. Initially, they were awed by the supposedly singular power of the American military to dominate and transform the planet; then, they were continually shocked and disbelieving when that same military, despite its massive destructive power, turned out to be incapable of doing so, or even of handling two ragtag insurgencies in two weakened countries, one of which, Afghanistan, was among the poorest and least technologically advanced on the planet.

The Theater of War

In remarkably short order, historically speaking, the administration's soaring imperial fantasies turned into planetary nightmares. After 9/11, of course, George W. and crew promised Americans the global equivalent -- and Republicans the domestic equivalent -- of a 36,000 stock market and we know just where the stock market is today: only about 27,000 points short of that irreality.

Once upon a time, they really did think that, via the U.S. Armed Forces, or, as George W. Bush once so breathlessly put it, "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known," they could dominate the planet without significant help from allies or international institutions of any sort. Who else had a shot at it? In the post-Soviet world, who but a leadership backed by the full force of the U.S. military could possibly be a contender for the leading role in this epic movie? Who else could even turn out for a casting call? Impoverished Russia? China, still rebuilding its military and back then considered to have a host of potential problems? A bunch of terrorists? I mean… come on!

As they saw it, the situation was pretty basic. In fact, it gave the phrase "power politics" real meaning. After all, they had in their hands the reins attached to the sole superpower on this small orb. And wasn't everyone -- at least, everyone they cared to listen to, at least Charles Krauthammer and the editorial page of the Washington Post -- saying no less?

I mean, what else would you do, if you suddenly, almost miraculously (after an election improbably settled by the Supreme Court), found yourself in sole command of the globe's only "hyperpower," the only sheriff on planet Earth, the New Rome. To make matters more delicious, in terms of getting just what you wanted, those hands were on those reins right after "the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century," when Americans were shocked and awed and terrified enough that anything-goes seemed a reasonable response?

It might have gone to anyone's head in imperial Washington at that moment, but it went to their heads in such a striking way. After all, theirs was a plan -- labeled in 2002 the Bush Doctrine -- of global domination conceptually so un-American that, in my childhood, the only place you would have heard it was in the mouths of the most evil, snickering imperial Japanese, Nazi, or Soviet on-screen villains. And yet, in their moment of moments, it just rolled right out of their heads and off their tongues -- and they were proud of it.

Here's a question for 2009 you don't have to answer: What should the former "new Rome" be called now? That will, of course, be someone else's problem.

The Cast of Characters

And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy President and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in the crown" of Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas).

They headed a government that couldn't shoot straight or plan ahead or do anything halfway effectively, an administration that emphasized "defense" -- or "homeland security" as it came to be called in their years -- above all else; yet they were always readying themselves for the last battle, and so were caught utterly, embarrassingly unready for 19 terrorists with box cutters, a hurricane named Katrina, and an arcane set of Wall Street derivatives heading south.

As the supposed party of small government, they succeeded mainly in strangling civilian services, privatizing government operations into the hands of crony corporations, and bulking up state power in a massive way -- making an already vast intelligence apparatus yet larger and more labyrinthine, expanding spying and surveillance of every kind, raising secrecy to a first principle, establishing a new U.S. military command for North America, endorsing a massive Pentagon build-up, establishing a second Defense Department labeled the Department of Homeland Security with its own mini-homeland-security-industrial complex, evading checks and powers in the Constitution whenever possible, and claiming new powers for a "unitary executive" commander-in-chief presidency.

No summary can quite do justice to what the administration "accomplished" in these years. If there was, however, a single quote from the world of George W. Bush that caught the deepest nature of the president and his core followers, it was offered by an "unnamed administration official" -- often assumed to be Karl Rove -- to journalist Ron Suskind back in October 2004:

"He] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

"We create our own reality… We're history's actors."

It must for years have seemed that way and everything about the lives they lived only reinforced that impression. After all, the President himself, as so many wrote, lived in a literal bubble world. Those who met him were carefully vetted; audiences were screened so that no one who didn't fawn over him got near him; and when he traveled through foreign cities, they were cleared of life, turned into the equivalent of Potemkin villages, while he and his many armored cars and Blackhawk helicopters, his huge contingent of Secret Service agents and White House aides, his sniffer dogs and military sharpshooters, his chefs and who knows what else passed through.

Of course, the President had been in a close race with the reality principle (which, in his case, was the principle of failure) all his life -- and whenever reality nipped at his heels, his father's boys stepped in and whisked him off stage. He got by at his prep school, Andover, and then at Yale, a c-level legacy student and, appropriately enough when it came to sports, a cheerleader and, at Yale, a party animal as well as the president of the hardest drinking fraternity on campus. He was there in the first place only because of who he wasn't (or rather who his relations were).

Faced with the crises of the Vietnam era, he joined the Texas Air National Guard and more or less went missing in action. Faced with life, he became a drunk. Faced with business, he failed repeatedly and yet, thanks to his dad's friends, became a multi-millionaire in the process. He was supported, cosseted, encouraged, and finally -- to use an omnipresent word of our moment -- bailed out. The first MBA president was a business bust. A certain well-honed, homey congeniality got him to the governorship and then to the presidency of the United States without real accomplishments. If there ever was a case for not voting for the guy you'd most like to "have a beer with," this was it.

On that pile of rubble at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, with a bullhorn in his hands and various rescuers shouting, "USA! USA!" he genuinely found his "calling" as the country's cheerleader-in-chief (as he had evidently found his religious calling earlier in life). He not only took the job seriously, he visibly loved it. He took a childlike pleasure in being in the "theater" of war. He was thrilled when some of the soldiers who captured Saddam Hussein in that "spiderhole" later presented him with the dictator's pistol. ("'He really liked showing it off,' says a... visitor to the White House who has seen the gun. 'He was really proud of it.'") He was similarly thrilled, on a trip to Baghdad in 2007, to meet the American pilot "whose plane's missiles killed Iraq's Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" and "returned to Washington in a buoyant mood."

While transforming himself into the national cheerleader-in-chief, he even kept "his own personal scorecard for the war" in a desk drawer in the Oval Office -- photos with brief biographies and personality sketches of leading al-Qaeda figures, whose faces could be satisfyingly crossed out when killed or captured. He clearly adored it when he got to dress up, whether in a flight suit landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003, or in front of hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers wearing a specially tailored military-style jacket with "George W. Bush, Commander In Chief" hand-stitched across the heart. As earlier in life, he was supported (Karl Rove), enabled (Condoleezza Rice), cosseted (various officials), and so became "the decider," a willing figurehead (as he had been, for instance, when he was an "owner" of the Texas Rangers), manipulated by his co-president Dick Cheney. In these surroundings, he was able to take war play to an imperial level. In the end, however, this act of his life, too, could lead nowhere but to failure.

As it happened, reality possessed its own set of shock-and-awe weaponry. Above all, reality was unimpressed with history's self-proclaimed "actors," working so hard on the global stage to create their own reality. When it came to who really owned what, it turned out that reality owned the works and that possession was indeed nine-tenths of one law that even George Bush's handlers and his fervent neocon followers couldn't suspend.

Exit Stage Right

The results were sadly predictable. The bubble world of George W. Bush was bound to be burst. Based on fantasies, false promises, lies, and bait-and-switch tactics, it was destined for foreclosure. At home and abroad, after all, it had been created using the equivalent of subprime mortgages and the result, unsurprisingly, was a dismally subprime administration.

Now, of course, the bill collector is at the door and the property -- the USA -- is worth a good deal less than on November 4, 2000. George W. Bush is a discredited president; his job approval ratings could hardly be lower; his bubble world gone bust.

Nonetheless, let's remember one other theme of his previous life. Whatever his failures, Bush always walked away from disastrous dealings enriched, while others were left holding the bag. Don't imagine for a second that the equivalent isn't about to repeat itself. He will leave a country functionally under the gun of foreclosure, a world far more aflame and dangerous than the one he faced on entering the Oval Office. But he won't suffer.

He will have his new house in Dallas (not to speak of the "ranch" in Crawford) and his more than $200 million presidential "library" and "freedom institute" at Southern Methodist University; and then there's always that 20% of America -- they know who they are -- who think his presidency was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Believe me, 20% of America is more than enough to pony up spectacular sums, once Bush takes to the talk circuit. As the president himself put it enthusiastically,"'I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers.' With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, 'I don't know what my dad gets -- it's more than 50-75' thousand dollars a speech, and 'Clinton's making a lot of money.'"

This is how a legacy-student-turned-president fails upward. Every disaster leaves him better off.

The same can't be said for the country or the world, saddled with his "legacy."

Still, his administration has been foreclosed. Perhaps there's ignominy in that. Now, the rest of us need to get out the brooms and start sweeping the stables.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. To listen to a podcast in which he discusses Bush's record abroad, click here.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt