One evening late in February of 2003, a few weeks before the United States launched its first strike on Baghdad, George W. Bush gave a speech to the nation explaining the many great and good reasons to oust Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. The president’s address was typically defiant and certain; hindsight tells us it was also almost entirely wrong. Bush’s key rhetorical points — on Saddam’s dangerous arsenal, his links with terrorist groups, and the speed with which the U.S. would rebuild Iraq in the aftermath of war — now sound almost embarrassingly outdated, like the refrain from a 1980s one-hit wonder.
Yet one aspect of Bush’s 2003 speech — his explanation for how long the U.S. would occupy Iraq — is strangely current even today. “We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more,” Bush told the nation that night. Almost three years later, despite all that’s gone wrong in Iraq, this vague stance — staying in Iraq as long as Bush considers it necessary — still remains the administration’s policy for determining how and when to end the war.
Indeed, last week, the White House even featured this 2003 quote as the epigraph for its “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” a 35-page document the administration released as part of an effort to rehabilitate public support for the war. In the document, as well as in a speech Bush gave to a class of midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., the president explained the benchmarks he’d use to determine when troops could come home from Iraq. But his overarching message was the same as it ever was: We’ll stay in Iraq as long as we need to and not any longer — a message that many experts read as a dodge, an attempt to paper over a real debate over what we should, and should not, be doing in Iraq.
After all, nearly everyone wants to stay in Iraq as long as necessary — where people differ is in what constitutes “necessary.” If you call the foreign policy establishment in Washington these days, you’ll get a host of answers. While the president and a handful of other prominent leaders (Hillary Clinton) appear to have no plan on Iraq, it seems that just about everyone else in power does. The strategies span the gamut. Some advocate preserving the status quo (many Republicans, and Joe Lieberman); others call for major tactical and strategic changes, but no necessary troop withdrawal (Wes Clark, John McCain); some call for a significant troop drawdown over the next couple of years, starting as soon as next month (Joe Biden, John Kerry and possibly Clinton); and still others call for something more, something approaching a quick and immediate pullback of most personnel there (Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and possibly half the Democrats in the House).
What’s surprising is that, despite these various strategies, the Iraq debate actually seems to be converging upon a single vision for ending the war. Removing large numbers of U.S. troops from the country has emerged as a sensible, rather than a radical, plan: Many experts now believe that the U.S. presence in Iraq is fueling a large part of the insurgency, and that withdrawing troops could actually help make that country more secure. Pragmatic considerations — elections (in Iraq and in this country), the economic costs of the war, and the increasing strains on the military — are also forcing all sides to think, or at least talk about thinking about, ways to leave Iraq.
Notwithstanding quick-withdrawal proposals favored by some leaders, many Democrats reportedly fear being seen as weak on defense in the run-up to the 2006 vote, and appear to be collectively choosing a moderate plan for Iraq, one that calls for a gradual — rather than an immediate — withdrawal. Republicans, meanwhile, face the opposite political problem, as their “stay the course” message is ringing hollow with Americans. That explains why most Senate Republicans joined with Democrats in November to pass Sen. John Warner’s amendment calling on the White House to “explain to Congress and the American people its strategy for the successful completion of the mission in Iraq.” The amendment labeled 2006 a “year of transition” for the war.
Much credit for this new movement is due to Rep. John Murtha, the conservative Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam veteran who had long supported the war, but who suddenly declared his opposition to the fight last month. Murtha’s call to “redeploy” the troops spurred many other leaders to offer their own plans — and, more than that, Murtha’s strategy has emerged as the template for many exit plans, even if the authors of those plans don’t acknowledge Murtha as an inspiration.
“I think they’re all moving toward the same point,” says Lawrence Korb, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, and who is now a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. “You look at John Warner’s amendment and it’s not all that different from what Jack Murtha has been saying.” Korb says the reason for the convergence goes beyond politics. Many congressional leaders, he says, worry that the military can’t sustain the 160,000 troops we now have in Iraq. The Army, Murtha declared last week, is “broken, worn out” and “living hand to mouth.” Biden, Kerry and other moderates have been saying much the same thing, if in less astringent terms.
Military reality almost guarantees a significant drawdown of troops in the coming year — as few as 30,000 by some estimates, and as many as 80,000 by others. After the Iraqi parliamentary elections on Dec. 15, one scenario goes, the Iraqi government may ask the U.S. to reduce its presence, and the U.S. will then begin a large redeployment. The process would look not very different from what Murtha called for, with the bulk of the forces coming back in 2006, and the rest in 2007. Under most plans, a large contingent of troops would remain near Iraq — in Kuwait or in the Gulf — poised to strike quickly at terrorist targets.
The wild card in this picture, though, is Bush. As Lee Feinstein, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out, Bush’s goals in Iraq are “maximalist”: The president doesn’t just expect success in Iraq, he wants “complete victory,” and to eradicate the insurgency and build a democratic state that’s a beacon to its neighbors. Bush is, furthermore, immune to the political pressure that other leaders in Washington face — he doesn’t have to run again — and it’s not clear whether he and his defense establishment understand the difficulty of keeping the military stretched so thin for so long. Then there’s the scary stuff. In the New Yorker last week, Seymour Hersh pointed to another reason Bush may feel compelled to keep fighting in Iraq — his religious sense that “God put me here” to fight.
Taken together, Bush’s views on Iraq may mean that even if Congress and the foreign policy establishment muddles toward some halfway sensible solution, the president will just keep going the way he wants. “This president has a mind-set that says that we would have won in Vietnam if only we’d stuck with it,” says Rick Barton, a post-conflict reconstruction expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I think he’s going to try to stick with it here.”
Until recently, calling for a large-scale withdrawal of American troops from Iraq was thought to be politically off-limits for most in Congress, especially those moderate or conservative Democrats who once supported the war (liberals, such as Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, have been calling for withdrawal for some time). The mood changed on Nov. 17, when Murtha strayed from the pack. In an emotional statement, he declared the war to be all but lost. The U.S., he said, can’t accomplish anything further in Iraq; the military “has done everything that has been asked of them,” and the best course of action now was to “bring them home.”
Murtha pointed to two main factors that caused his turnaround on the war. A Vietnam veteran with deep ties to the military, Murtha was primarily concerned, he said, that the war was debilitating the military. Experts say that the only way to keep as many troops as we have in Iraq any longer is to extend deployment times, or call people back for their third, fourth and fifth tours, a course that many worry will ruin the all-volunteer forces. Murtha said he’d been hearing these fears from the generals themselves; many in the Pentagon, he said, believe the war may break the Army.
Murtha’s assessment of the dour mood in the Pentagon jibes with published reports and with analysts’ observations. “The generals who remember Vietnam start to see people coming back for the third and fourth time and they begin to say, ‘Wait a minute, this is not good,’” the Center for American Progress’s Korb says.
Murtha also feared that the military was only exacerbating the insurgency. “Our troops have become the primary target,” he said in his speech. “They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists.” Removing troops would remove a main insurgent cause and compel Iraqi security forces to begin looking out for themselves, he said.
Given these factors, Murtha said he saw no choice but to call for a “redeployment” in the force. What he meant by this was somewhat murky — he didn’t specify where he wanted to redeploy the troops to. Most observers took his comments to mean a full pullback of all troops to the United States — “cut and run,” as critics put it. But as Slate’s Fred Kaplan has pointed out, Murtha hasn’t advocated bringing all troops home, and instead wants to keep a sizable force “on the periphery” of Iraq, from where it could monitor, and if necessary intervene in, the country.
The Murtha plan resembles — and may have been inspired by — one put forward in October by Korb and Brian Katulis at the Center for American Progress. They call for redeploying 80,000 troops in Iraq during 2006 — 20,000 would be sent to Afghanistan, 14,000 to Kuwait, and the rest (all the Guard and Reserve troops, more than 40,000) would come back to the United States. Then, in 2007, the rest of the American force in Iraq would come home.
“By the end of 2007,” Korb and Katulis write, “the only US military forces in Iraq would be a small Marine contingent to protect the US embassy, a small group of military advisors to the Iraqi Government, and counterterrorist units that works closely with Iraqi security forces. This presence, along with the forces in Kuwait and at sea in the Persian Gulf area will be sufficient to conduct strikes coordinated with Iraqi forces against any terrorist camps and enclaves that may emerge and deal with any major external threats to Iraq.” (A PDF version of their paper is available here.)
If this careful withdrawal is what Murtha meant to call for, it’s not what most observers took from his speech. Murtha’s rhetoric emphasized bringing troops home immediately (the version of his speech on his Web site renders this phrase in all caps: “IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME”). Even many in his own party thought Murtha to be calling for something more precipitous, and did not immediately endorse his proposal. Still, Murtha’s speech opened the floodgates, and put pressure on other Democrats, not to mention on Republicans, to discuss their ideas on Iraq.
Within a week of Murtha’s statement, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware — who, like Murtha, had supported the war — put forward his own plan on Iraq in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He began by politely disagreeing with Americans like Murtha, whom he characterized as having concluded that “we cannot salvage Iraq.” “I share their frustration,” Biden said. “But I’m not there yet. I still believe we can preserve our fundamental security interests in Iraq as we begin to redeploy our forces.”
But though he characterized his ideas as more moderate than Murtha’s, Biden’s proposals, and his view of the fundamental challenges in Iraq, looked quite similar to those of the Pennsylvania congressman. Like Murtha, Biden sees the U.S. presence as fueling the insurgency. “A liberation is increasingly felt as an occupation,” as he put it. He also agrees with Murtha’s assessment that the troops are stretched too thin, a situation that means “it is virtually certain we will redeploy a significant number of forces from Iraq in 2006 and more will follow in 2007.”
Indeed Biden’s bottom line sounds pretty much like Korb’s plan: “Here is my conviction,” he said. “In 2006, American troops will begin to leave Iraq in large numbers. By the end of the year, I believe we will have redeployed at least 50,000 troops. In 2007, a significant number of the remaining 100,000 American soldiers will follow.”
A number of other moderates have endorsed similar proposals. John Kerry, who spoke at Georgetown in October, even before Murtha came forward with his plan, shares the idea that “our military presence in vast and visible numbers has become part of the problem, not the solution.” He calls for 20,000 troops to be withdrawn from Iraq “over the course of the holidays,” and the bulk of the force to be pulled back by the end of 2006.
Hillary Clinton has steadfastly refused to say exactly what she thinks about the situation in Iraq. “I disagree with those who believe we should pull out, and I disagree with those who believe we should stay without end,” she unhelpfully said over the weekend. But in a letter to constituents released late last month, even she seemed to endorse the pull-out-slowly plan.
”I believe we are at a critical point with the Dec. 15 elections that should, if successful, allow us to start bringing home our troops in the coming year, while leaving behind a smaller contingent in safer areas with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilities,” she wrote. ”I call on the president both for such a plan and for a full and honest accounting of the failures of intelligence — something we owe not only to those killed and wounded and their families, but to all Americans.”
Just because Democrats seem to be aligning on a plan does not, of course, mean the plan is the right one — and there are many critics of the emerging Democratic strategy. The White House and other Republicans charge, for one, that any announced pullout plan will doom the effort in Iraq. As soon as we declare our intentions, the administration contends, the insurgents will decide to wait us out until we’re gone, and then make a strike to take over the nation. There is, too, the legitimate question of who will provide security in Iraq once the U.S. leaves. As James Fallows points out in this month’s Atlantic, Iraqi security forces are nowhere near ready to patrol their own country; they’re improving, but not as fast as we need them to.
Some observers even disagree with Murtha’s and Biden’s fundamental charge that keeping large numbers of troops in Iraq could damage the Army. Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, notes that if one considers all the recent shortfalls caused by depressed recruitment, “you’re in the range of 30,000 fewer troops than where we’d like to be. That’s 3 percent. Even if you assume it’s going to keep getting worse, it’s not by itself a showstopper. You can say we’re going to be 4 percent below where we’re supposed to be, and that is a serious problem. But we’re also facing a serious problem of trying to win in Iraq.”
“I think he’s wrong,” O’Hanlon adds of Murtha’s contention that generals in the Army see the situation as untenable. “Very few of them go to the point that Jack Murtha does. People in the Army don’t say that the country’s overriding national security goal is to avoid breaking the Army. They say we want to prevail in Iraq.”
In an Op-Ed in Tuesday’s New York Times, Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander and Democratic presidential candidate, also rejected the idea that the military can’t maintain a large deployment any longer. “Yes, our military forces are dangerously overstretched. Recruiting and retention are suffering; among retired officers, there is deep concern that the Bush administration’s attitude on the treatment of detainees has jeopardized not only the safety of our troops but the moral purpose of our effort,” he wrote. “Still, none of this necessitates a pullout until the job is done.”
Then there are political considerations for Democrats. To be sure, the war is presently deeply unpopular; polls show that a majority of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the situation, and believe we were wrong to invade Iraq in the first place. At the same time, however, the public shows no clear, overwhelming appetite for withdrawing from Iraq immediately.
In a recent Time survey, 47 percent of respondents said they thought we should leave Iraq over the next 12 months regardless of the situation there — but a large number, 40 percent, thought we should wait for a stable government first, and 8 percent said we should put more troops in the country. The latest Gallup poll, meanwhile, showed 59 percent of the country willing to withdraw from Iraq only “when certain goals are met” there, with 35 percent advocating withdrawal “by a specific date.” A CBS News/New York Times poll released on Thursday showed that 58 percent of the public wants a timetable for withdrawal. But the Times noted, “36 percent said that if their representative called for immediate withdrawal, they would be less inclined to vote to re-elect him in November. Twenty-one percent said such a request would make them more likely to vote for a candidate; 40 percent said it would have no effect.”
If Democrats adopt a strategy for pulling out too quickly — and especially if they adopt the do-it-now rhetoric of Murtha and Pelosi, not to mention Howard Dean — some worry that the public might conclude, once again, that the party is weak on national security issues. “If we get a lot more of Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha advocating immediate withdrawal, all we need is one or two months of good news [from Iraq] for the public to conclude that Democrats don’t have a backbone in the face of adversity,” O’Hanlon, who identifies himself as a hawkish Democrat, says. “I am nervous that many Democrats may sense political opportunity here and may overplay their hand. Then Republicans can again trumpet their steadfastness, which may sound like a liability now but could be a virtue by next fall.”
But if there are pitfalls to the emerging Democratic proposal, there are also advantages. The main one is this: It’s a plan. There’s order, logic and coherence to it. And that’s a lot more than can be said of the White House’s “stay the course” proposal, which is inconsistent in how it defines the mission in Iraq, and vague about the time and energy we might need to accomplish that mission. Are we fighting in Iraq merely to bring stability there — what John McCain has called a “flawed but functioning democracy” — or are we looking to vanquish our terrorist foes once and for all (as the president suggested in his speech last week)? Bush can’t seem to pick one of those two options.
Feinstein, of the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that Bush’s speech did contain a few pragmatic prescriptions for dealing with the insurgency. For instance, Bush said, “My commanders tell me that as Iraqi forces become more capable, the mission of our forces in Iraq will continue to change. We will continue to shift from providing security and conducting operations against the enemy nationwide, to conducting more specialized operations targeted at the most dangerous terrorists. We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys.” As the Brookings Institution’s Ivo Daalder has noted, Bush’s proposal is similar to Murtha’s — they’re both arguing for our forces to take a peripheral role as Iraqi troops stand up and assume control.
But Feinstein says that Bush’s ideology seemed to get in the way of pragmatism. At other points in his speech, Bush appeared dreamily ideological, a man on a mission, undeterred by reality. No serious observer of the war can argue that it’s keeping Americans safer, yet Bush pushed that line repeatedly. “By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people,” he said. “Against this adversary, there is only one effective response: We will never back down. We will never give in. And we will never accept anything less than complete victory.”
“The president has chosen to invoke the war on terrorism as a rallying point for the war in Iraq,” Feinstein says. “I think we should be content just to leave Iraq better than we found it — but they obviously made a deliberate decision to maximize this,” to reach for an ideological goal — a terrorist-free, shining Iraq — rather than something more modest.
Bush also misses the point that Democrats, and just about every analyst, understand about the U.S. presence in Iraq — that at this late stage in the war, the occupation is a main catalyst for the insurgency. Analysts cite polls showing large numbers of Iraqis — as many as 80 percent — who say they oppose the presence of foreign troops there. Meanwhile, according to military assessments, the largest group of insurgents aren’t from al-Qaida or from across the border, but are instead native Iraqis who despise the U.S. presence. “These people are fighting to get us out of there,” Korb says of the insurgency; once we leave, or announce our intentions to leave, their reason for fighting will have vanished.
Barton, of CSIS, agrees. “I think the key to a successful insurgency is the domestic cover they get by fighting against the occupation,” he says. “The minute we say we’re willing to leave,” many of those who are fighting the occupation will have nothing to fight. The rest of the insurgents will then be “on notice. You’ll be shrinking their market and shrinking their space.”
Barton says this strategy would be especially effective if it were proposed by Iraqis, by the politicians who come into power after the elections next week. Given the overwhelming Iraqi distaste for the occupation, a truly sovereign, democratic Iraqi government would have no choice but to call on the U.S. to start to leave, he says. And if it does, the move would instantly legitimize the leadership. “Right now they’re Green-Zone politicians,” Barton says of the Iraqi government. But if they call for a negotiated withdrawal and if the U.S. listens, “that will be the most radical thing that’s happened in the Middle East” — an Arab government forcing the U.S. to change its international policy. “If that happens, then the details become almost superfluous,” he says.
Such a move, too, would serve to “concentrate their minds” on security issues, Barton says of the Iraqi politicians. If they know they won’t have the U.S. to protect them at some point down the line, they’ll work hard to build up their forces. Moreover, if the Iraqi soldiers realize they’re fighting for a sovereign nation rather than a quasi-American protectorate, they’ll have a greater incentive to stand up and fight.
As Barton describes it, a U.S. withdrawal prompted by Iraqis may be our best hope for saving ourselves, not to mention Iraq itself, from disaster. “And what’s the alternative?” he asks. “Do you believe we can continue to grind away at it like we have been? It’s not going to get any better with the model we have in place.”
But does Bush realize that? All signs point to no. “We have a commander in chief who when he gets into trouble likes to step on the accelerator,” Barton says. “And when you’re in the mud, that doesn’t work.”
When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s — which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.
Some of them — Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” — were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now. Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.
We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones. Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.
Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital
“The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.
That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like — and yet not exactly like — high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film and books aspire to reduce.
But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. “The Hunger Games” reminds us of that. Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen — Annie Oakley, Tank Girl and Robin Hood all rolled into one – who refuses to be disposed of.
Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.
In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died. If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.
Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.
Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things — including reality TV, of course. The U.S. Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment. Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.
The Return of Debt Peonage
In “The Hunger Games,” kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery — that is, extra chances to die — in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor young women for sex work abroad.
And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt — usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy — no matter what. In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.
One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.
In other words, we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And she’s not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt. What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.
According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts. These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:
Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.
About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.
The rest of us, the 99 percent, need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has everything to do with slashed tax rates — to the wealthy and corporations in particular — over the last 30 years. We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the hunger labyrinth.
The Labyrinths of Poverty
Which brings us to the hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing, food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and force by the Occupy movement.
One of the sad and moving spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who cooked superbly. They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.
We are in a new era of desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that workers can barely survive on them.
Of course, we do have one arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing. Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside. It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the world, higher than in the U.S.SR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there for drug offenses, 80 percent of those for simple possession.
Which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good at creating here. We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering (GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan.
And once our prisoners get out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this economy — speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life and hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who are the raw material they process. In this age, both systems seem increasingly like so many factories.
In the Shadow of 900 Tornados
But if you want to think about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s climate change, of course.
Our failure to do anything adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book “Eaarth.” His argument is that we’ve so altered the planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra “a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful Holocene one we trashed.
There were 160 tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States, and this April was similarly volatile. Remember the unprecedented wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the heat waves, the bizarrely hot North American January and other oddities? That’s science fiction of the scariest sort, and we’re in it. Or on it, on the crazy new planet we’ve made ourselves. Here in the U.S.A sector of Eaarth in the year 2012, 15,000 high-temperature records were broken in March alone, and summer is yet to come. A town in north-central Texas hit 111 degrees — in April! What turbulent planet is this?
One grain of good news: a lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”
If you want to talk about hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan from one of the world’s breadbaskets into a net food-importing nation, with dire consequences for the agricultural poor. Talk about China’s many impending ecological disasters, its degraded soil, contaminated air and water, its many systems ready to collapse. There’s more disruption of food production to come, a lot more, and lots more hunger, too.
Around this point in science fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.
Revolution 2012
2011 was the year of strange weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from over. They erupted in Russia, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, much of the Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa and Chile, among other spots in Latin America (some of which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol, the United States and much of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand.
Remember that revolution doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde aspect of the very violent “Hunger Games” trilogy, the way in which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning, whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers were subjugated by these means.
Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in “The Unconquerable World,” it’s what the state uses when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of “nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate our own power. That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake — as demonstrators around the world proved last year — is a force to be reckoned with; so call it “people power” instead.
When we come together as civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?
Still, many regimes have been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict“, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.
It’s May Day, a worldwide General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma) announced that it “had won a major battle”: their city is moving all its money out of Bank of America into a local bank. Last fall’s Move Your Money campaign included city money from the outset and quiet victories like this could begin to reshape our economic landscape. Activism in the streets is so intimidating that next month’s G8 Summit scheduled for Chicago will hole up at Camp David instead.
Meanwhile last week, both the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege from Occupy activists. The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in San Francisco, and afterward an arrested friend of mine posted this on Facebook: “I forgot to mention that Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome.”
In this way do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike and even Golden Gate Bridge workers will be protesting. May Day actions are planned across the globe.
Still alive and kicking, Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.
Of course, this is only a beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1 percent, and the prison and education rackets are more than capable of pushing back. So we need one more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a better world looks like. McKibben’s “Eaarth” and “Deep Economy” offer such a picture, as does William Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” even 120-odd years later, but we won’t get that from “The Hunger Games,” which, for all its thrilling, subversive and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.
May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it. It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.
So skip work, flip a bird at the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope.
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Anyone who would like to witness a vivid example of modern warfare that adheres to the laws of war — that corpus of regulations developed painstakingly over centuries by jurists, humanitarians, and soldiers, a body of rules that is now an essential, institutionalized part of the U.S. armed forces and indeed all modern militaries — should simply click here and watch the video.
Wait a minute: that’s the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video! The gunsight view of an Apache helicopter opening fire from half a mile high on a crowd of Iraqis — a few armed men, but mostly unarmed civilians, including a couple of Reuters employees — as they unsuspectingly walked the streets of a Baghdad suburb one July day in 2007.
Watch, if you can bear it, as the helicopter crew blows people away, killing at least a dozen of them, and taking good care to wipe out the wounded as they try to crawl to safety. (You can also hear the helicopter crew making wisecracks throughout.) When a van comes on the scene to tend to the survivors, the Apache gunship opens fire on it too, killing a few more and wounding two small children.
The slaughter captured in this short film, the most virally sensational of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, was widely condemned as an atrocity worldwide, and many pundits quickly labeled it a “war crime” for good measure.
But was this massacre really a “war crime” — or just plain-old regular war? The question is anything but a word-game. It is, in fact, far from clear that this act, though plainly atrocious and horrific, was a violation of the laws of war. Some have argued that the slaughter, if legal, was therefore justified and, though certainly unfortunate, no big deal. But it is possible to draw a starkly different conclusion: that the “legality” of this act is an indictment of the laws of war as we know them.
The reaction of professional humanitarians to the gun-sight video was muted, to say the least. The big three human rights organizations — Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and Human Rights First — responded not with position papers and furious press releases but with silence. HRW omitted any mention of it in its report on human rights and war crimes in Iraq, published nearly a year after the video’s release. Amnesty also kept mum. Gabor Rona, legal director of Human Rights First, told me there wasn’t enough evidence to ascertain whether the laws of war had been violated, and that his organization had no Freedom of Information Act requests underway to uncover new evidence on the matter.
This collective non-response, it should be stressed, is not because these humanitarian groups, which do much valuable work, are cowardly or “sell-outs.” The reason is: all three human rights groups, like human rights doctrine itself, are primarily concerned with questions of legality. And quite simply, as atrocious as the event was, there was no clear violation of the laws of war to provide a toehold for the professional humanitarians.
The human rights industry is hardly alone in finding the event disturbing but in conformance with the laws of war. As Professor Gary Solis, a leading expert and author of a standard text on those laws, told Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine, “I believe it unlikely that a neutral and detached investigator would conclude that the helicopter personnel violated the laws of armed conflict. Legal guilt does not always accompany innocent death.” It bears noting that Gary Solis is no neocon ultra. A scholar who has taught at the London School of Economics and Georgetown, he is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, and was an unflinching critic of the Bush-Cheney administration.
War and International “Humanitarian” Law
“International humanitarian law,” or IHL, is the trying-too-hard euphemism for the laws of war. And as it happens, IHL turns out to be less concerned with restraining military violence than licensing it. As applied to America’s recent wars, this body of law turns out to be wonderfully accommodating when it comes to the prerogatives of an occupying army.
Here’s another recent example of a wartime atrocity that is perfectly legal and not a war crime at all. Thanks to WikiLeaks’ Iraq War Logs, we now know about the commonplace torture practices employed by Iraqi jailers and interrogators during our invasion and occupation of that country. We have clear U.S. military documentation of sexual torture, of amputated fingers and limbs, of beatings so severe they regularly resulted in death.
Surely standing by and taking careful notes while the Iraqi people you have supposedly liberated from tyranny are getting tortured, sometimes to death, is a violation of the laws of war. After all, in 2005 General Peter Pace, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly contradicted his boss Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by commenting into a live mike that it is “absolutely the responsibility of every American soldier to stop torture whenever and wherever they see it.” (A young private working in Army Intelligence named Bradley Manning, learning that a group of Iraqi civilians handing out pamphlets alleging government corruption had been detained by the Iraqi federal police, raised his concern with his commanding officer about their possible torture. He was reportedly told him to shut up and get back to work helping the authorities find more detainees.)
As it turned out, General Pace’s exhortation was at odds with both official policy and law: Fragmentary Order 242, issued by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, made it official policy for occupying U.S. troops not to interfere with ongoing Iraqi torture. And this, according to some experts, is no violation of the laws of war either. Prolix on the limits imposed on the acts of non-state fighters who are not part of modern armies, the Geneva Conventions are remarkably reticent on the duties of occupying armies.
As Gary Solis pointed out to me, Common Article 1 of the Fourth Geneva Convention assigns only a vague obligation to “ensure respect” for prisoners handed over to a third party. On the ground in either Iraq or Afghanistan, this string of words would prove a less-than-meaningful constraint.
Part of the problem is that the laws of war that aspire to restrain deadly force are often weakly enforced and routinely violated. Ethan McCord, the American soldier who saved the two wounded children from that van in the helicopter video, remembers one set of instructions he received from his battalion commander: “Anytime your convoy gets hit by an IED, I want 360 degree rotational fire. You kill every [expletive] in the street!” (“That order,” David Glazier, a jurist at the National Institute for Military Justice, told me, “is absolutely a war crime.”) In other words, the rules of engagement that are supposed to constrain occupying troops in places like Afghanistan and Iraq are, according to many scholars and investigators, often belittled and ignored.
Legalized Atrocity
The real problem with the laws of war, however, is not what they fail to restrain but what they authorize. The primary function of International Humanitarian Law is to legalize remarkable levels of “good” military violence that regularly kill and injure non-combatants. IHL highlights a handful of key principles: the distinction between combatant and civilian, the obligation to use force only for military necessity, and the duty to jeopardize civilians only in proportion to the military value of a target.
Even when these principles are applied conscientiously — and often they aren’t — they still allow for remarkable levels of civilian carnage, which the Pentagon has long primly (and conveniently) referred to as “collateral damage,” as if it were a sad sideline in the prosecution of war. And yet civilian deaths in modern war regularly are the central aspect of those wars, both statistically and in other ways. Far from being universally proscribed, the killing of high numbers of civilians in a battle zone is often considered absolutely legal under those laws. In the pungent phrase of Professor David Kennedy of Harvard Law School, “We should be clear — this bold new vocabulary beats ploughshares into swords as often as the reverse.”
The relative weakness of the laws of war when it comes to preventing atrocities is not simply some recent debasement perpetrated by neoconservative Visigoths. Privileging the combatant and his (it’s usually “his”) prerogatives has been the historical bone marrow of those laws. In the Vietnam War, for instance, the declaration of significant parts of the South Vietnamese countryside as “free-fire zones,” and the “carpet bombing” of rural areas by B-52s carrying massive payloads were also done under cover of the laws of war.
IHL has certainly changed in some respects. A century ago, the discourse around the laws of war was far more candid than today. Jurists once regularly referred to “non-uniformed unprivileged combatants” simply as “savages” and the consensus view in mainstream scholarly journals of international law was that a modern army could do whatever it wanted to such obstreperous, lawless people (especially, of course, in what was still then the colonial world). On the whole, the history of IHL is a long record of codifying the privileges of the powerful against lesser threats like civilians and colonial subjects resisting invasion.
Even though the laws of war have usually been one more weapon of the strong against the weak, a great deal of their particular brand of legalism has seeped into antiwar discourse. One of the key talking points for many arguing against the invasion of Iraq was that it was illegal — and that was certainly true. But was the failure to procure a permission slip from the United Nations really the main problem with this calamitous act of violence? Would U.N. authorization really have redeemed any of it? There is also a growing faith that war can be domesticated under a relatively new rubric, “humanitarian intervention,” which purports to apply military violence in precise and therapeutic dosages, all strictly governed by international humanitarian law.
Here is where the WikiLeaks disclosures were so revealing. They remind us, once again, that the humanitarian dream of “clean warfare” — military violence that is smoothly regulated by laws that spare civilians — is usually a sick joke. We need to wean ourselves from the false comfort that the law is always on the side of civilians. We need to scrap our tendency to assume that international law is inherently virtuous, and that anything that shocks our conscience — that helicopter video or widespread torture in Iraq under the noses of U.S. soldiers — must be a violation of this system, rather than its logical and predictable consequence.
Let’s be clear: what killed the civilians walking the streets of Baghdad that day in 2007 was not “war crimes,” but war. And that holds for so many thousands of other Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed by drone strikes, air strikes, night raids, convoys, and nervous checkpoint guards as well.
Regulatory Capture
Who, after all, writes the laws of war? Just as the regulations that govern the pharmaceutical and airline industries are often gamed by large corporations with their phalanxes of lobbyists, the laws of war are also vulnerable to “regulatory capture” by the great powers under their supposed rule. Keep in mind, for instance, that the Pentagon employs 10,000 lawyers and that its junior partner in foreign policy making, the State Department, has a few hundred more. Should we be surprised if in-house lawyers can sort out “legal” ways not to let those laws of war get in the way of the global ambitions of a superpower?
It’s only fair that the last words on the laws of war go to Private Bradley Manning, now sitting in a prison cell in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, awaiting court-martial for allegedly passing troves of classified material to WikiLeaks, documents that offer the unvarnished truth about the Afghan War, the Iraq War, and Guantánamo. They are taken from the instant-message chatlogs he wrote under the handle of “bradass87” to the informant who turned him in. The young private saw very clearly what so many professors and generals take pains to deny: that the primary function of the laws of war is not to restrain violence, but to justify it, often with the greatest lawyerly ingenuity.
(02:27:47 PM) bradass87: i mean, we’re better in some respects… we’re much more subtle… use a lot more words and legal techniques to legitimize everything…
(02:28:19 PM) bradass87: but just because something is more subtle, doesn’t make it right
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People ask the question in various ways, sometimes hesitantly, often via a long digression, but my answer is always the same: no regrets.
In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid just hid the mistakes and flaws of those anonymous functionaries.
What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not scaredy-cat bureaucrats.
That was too much for even a well-seasoned cubicle warrior like me to ignore and so I wrote a book about it, “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the War for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.” I was on the spot to see it all happen, leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in rural Iraq while taking part up close and personal in what the U.S. government was doing to, not for, Iraqis. Originally, I imagined that my book’s subtitle would be “Lessons for Afghanistan,” since I was hoping the same mistakes would not be endlessly repeated there. Sometimes being right doesn’t solve a damn thing.
By the time I arrived in Iraq in 2009, I hardly expected to be welcomed as a liberator or greeted — as the officials who launched the invasion of that country expected back in 2003 — with a parade and flowers. But I never imagined Iraq for quite the American disaster it was either. Nor did I expect to be welcomed back by my employer, the State Department, as a hero in return for my book of loony stories and poignant moments that summed up how the United States wasted more than $44 billion in the reconstruction/deconstruction of Iraq. But I never imagined that State would retaliate against me.
In return for my book, a truthful account of my year in Iraq, my security clearance was taken away, I was sent home to sit on my hands for months, then temporarily allowed to return only as a disenfranchised teleworker and, as I write this, am drifting through the final steps toward termination.
What We Left Behind in Iraq
Sadly enough, in the almost two years since I left Iraq, little has happened that challenges my belief that we failed in the reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the war.
The Iraq of today is an extension of the Iraq I saw and described. The recent Arab League summit in Baghdad, hailed by some as a watershed event, was little more than a stage-managed wrinkle in that timeline, a lot like all those purple-fingered elections the U.S. sponsored in Iraq throughout the Occupation. If you deploy enough police and soldiers — for the summit, Baghdad was shut down for a week, the cell phone network turned off, and a “public holiday” proclaimed to keep the streets free of humanity — you can temporarily tame any place, at least within camera view. More than $500 million was spent, in part planting flowers along the route dignitaries took in and out of the heavily fortified International Zone at the heart of the capital (known in my day as the Green Zone). Somebody in Iraq must have googled “Potemkin Village.”
Beyond the temporary showmanship, the Iraq we created via our war is a mean place, unsafe and unstable. Of course, life goes on there (with the usual lack of electricity and potable water), but as the news shows, to an angry symphony of suicide bombers and targeted killings. While the American public may have changed the channel to more exciting shows in Libya, now Syria, or maybe just to “American Idol,” the Iraqi people are trapped in amber, replaying the scenes I saw in 2009-2010, living reminders of all the good we failed to do.
Ties between Iraq and Iran continue to strengthen, however, with Baghdad serving as a money-laundering stopover for a Tehran facing tightening U.S. and European sanctions, even as it sells electricity to Iraq. (That failed reconstruction program again!) Indeed, with Iran now able to meddle in Iraq in ways it couldn’t have when Saddam Hussein was in power, that country will be more capable of contesting U.S. hegemony in the region.
Given what we left behind in Iraq, it remains beyond anyone, even the nasty men who started the war in 2003, to claim victory or accomplishment or achievement there, and except for the odd pundit seeking to rile his audience, none do.
What We Left Behind at Home
The other story that played out over the months since I returned from Iraq is my own. Though the State Department officially cleared “We Meant Well” for publication in October 2010, it began an investigation of me a month before the book hit store shelves. That investigation was completed way back in December 2011, though State took no action at that time to terminate me.
I filed a complaint as a whistleblower with the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) in January 2012. It was only after that complaint — alleging retaliation — was filed, and just days before the OSC was to deliver its document discovery request to State, that my long-time employer finally moved to fire me. Timing is everything in love, war, and bureaucracy.
The charges it leveled are ridiculous (including “lack of candor,” as if perhaps too much candor was not the root problem here). State was evidently using my case to show off its authority over its employees by creating a parody of justice, and then enforcing it to demonstrate that, well, when it comes to stomping on dissent, anything goes.
My case also illustrates the crude use of “national security” as a tool within government to silence dissent. State’s Diplomatic Security office, its internal Stasi, monitored my home email and web usage for months, used computer forensics to spelunk for something naughty in my online world, placed me on a Secret Service Threat Watch list, examined my finances, and used hacker tools to vacuum up my droppings around the web — all, by the way, at an unknown cost to the taxpayers. Diplomatic Security even sent an agent around to interview my neighbors, fishing for something to use against me in a full-spectrum deep dive into my life, using the new tools and power available to government not to stop terrorists, but to stop me.
As our government accumulates ever more of what it thinks the American people have no right to know about, there will only be increasing persecutions as prosecutions. Many of the illegal things President Richard Nixon did to the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are now both legal (under the Patriot Act) and far easier to accomplish with new technologies. There is no need, for instance, to break into my psychiatrist’s office looking for dirt, as happened to Ellsberg; after all, the National Security Agency can break into my doctor’s electronic records as easily as you can read this page.
With its aggressive and sadly careless use of the draconian Espionage Act to imprison whistleblowers, the Obama administration has, in many cases, moved beyond harassment and intimidation into actually wielding the beautiful tools of justice in a perverse way to silence dissent. More benign in practice, in theory this is little different than the Soviets executing dissidents as spies after show trials or the Chinese using their courts to legally confine thinkers they disapprove of in mental institutions. They are all just following regulations. Turn the volume up from six to ten and you’ve jumped from vengeance to totalitarianism. We’re becoming East Germany.
What I Left Behind
There has been a personal price to pay for my free speech. In my old office, after my book was published in September 2011, some snarky coworkers set up a pool to guess when I would be fired — before or after that November. I put $20 down on the long end. After all, if I couldn’t be optimistic about keeping my job, who could?
One day in October, security hustled me out of that office, and though I wasn’t fired by that November and so won the bet, I was never able to collect. Most of those in the betting pool now shun me, fearful for their own fragile careers at State.
I’ve ended up talking, usually at night, with a few of the soldiers I worked with in Iraq. Some are at the end of a long Skype connection in Afghanistan, others have left the military or are stationed stateside. Most of them share my anger and bitterness, generally feeling used and unwanted now that they need a job rather than rote praise and the promise of a parade.
“We Meant Well” is, I think, pretty funny in parts. I recall writing it as an almost out-of-body experience as I tried to approach the sadness and absurdity of what was happening in Iraq with a sense of irony and black humor. That’s long gone, and if I were to write the story today, the saddest thing is that it would undoubtedly come out angry and bitter, too.
A Member of a Club That Would Have Me
Having left behind friends I turned out not to have, a career that dissolved beneath me, and a sense of humor I’d like to rediscover, I find myself a member of a new club I don’t even remember applying for: The Whistleblowers. I’ve now met with several of the whistleblowers I’ve written about with admiration: Tom Drake, Mo Davis, John Kiriakou and Robert MacLean, among others.
As ex- or soon-to-be-ex-government employees all, when we meet, we make small talk about retirement, annuities and the like. No one speaks of revolution or anarchy, the image of us the government often surreptitiously pushes to the media. After all, until we blew those whistles, we were all in our own ways believers in the American system. That, in fact, is why we did what we did.
My new club-mates represent hundreds of years of service — a couple of them had had long military careers before joining the civilian side of government — and we cover a remarkably broad swath of the American political spectrum. What we really have in common is that, in the course of just doing our jobs, we stumbled into colossal government wrongdoing (systematized torture, warrantless wiretapping, fraud and waste), stood up for what is right in the American spirit, and found ourselves paying surprising personal prices for acts that seemed obvious and necessary. We are guilty of naiveté, not treason.
Each of us initially thought that the agencies we worked for would be concerned about what we had stumbled upon or uncovered and would want to work with us to resolve it. If most of us are now disillusioned, we weren’t at the outset. Only by the force of events did we become transformed into opponents of an out-of-control government with no tolerance for those who would expose the truth necessary to create Thomas Jefferson’s informed citizenry. In meeting my club-mates, I learned that whistleblowers are not born, but created by a government with much to hide and an unquenchable need to hide it.
One of those whistleblowers, Jesselyn Radack, wrote a book about her experiences called “Traitor: The Whistleblower and the American Taliban.” At the dawn of the War on Terror, Radack, an attorney at the Department of Justice (DOJ), wrote a memo stating that John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” captured in Afghanistan, had rights and could not be interrogated without the benefit of counsel.
The FBI went ahead and questioned him anyway, and then DOJ tried to disappear Radack’s emails documenting this Constitutional violation. Ignoring her advice, the government tossed away the rights of one of its own citizens. Radack herself was subsequently forced out the DOJ, harassed, and had to fight simply to keep her law license.
As proof that God does indeed enjoy irony, Radack today helps represent most of the current crop of government whistleblowers (including me) in their struggles against the government she once served. Radack and I are now working with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker James Spione on a documentary about whistleblowers.
What Will Be Left Behind
So what’s left for me in my final days as a grounded State Department worker assigned to timeout in my own home? Given my situation, there is, of course, no desk to clean out; there are no knickknacks collected abroad over my 24 years to package up. All that’s left is one last test to see if the system, especially the First Amendment guaranteeing us the right to free speech, still has a heartbeat in 2012.
Though I could be terminated by State within a few weeks, I am otherwise only months away from a semi-voluntary retirement. Since I’m obviously out the door anyway, State’s decision to employ its internal security tools and expensive, taxpayer-paid legal maneuvers at this late date can’t really be about shortening my tenure by a meager four months. Instead, it’s clearly about mounting my head on a pike inside the lobby of State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a warning to its other employees not to dissent, or mention wrongdoing they might stumble across. Better, so the message goes, to sip the Kool Aid and keep one’s head down, while praising the courage of Chinese dissidents and Egyptian bloggers. The State Department is all about wanting its words, not its actions, to speak loudest.
Running parallel to the State Department termination process is an investigation by the Office of the Special Counsel into my claim of retaliation, which State is seeking to circumvent by tossing me out the door ahead of its conclusion. State wants to use my fate to send a message to its already cowed staff. However, if the Special Counsel concludes that the State Department did retaliate against me, then the message delivered will be quite a different one. It just might indicate that the First Amendment still does reach ever so slightly into the halls of government, and maybe the next responsible Foreign Service Officer will carry that forward a bit further, which would be good for our democracy.
One way or another, sometime soon the door will smack me in the backside on my way out. But whether the echo left behind inside the State Department will be one of justice or bureaucratic revenge remains undecided. My book is written and my career is over either way. However, what is left behind matters not just for me, but for all of us.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, embraced, friended, liked, tweeted or authorized this post.]
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U.S. Army soldiers respond after a suicide attack on the US..-led provincial reconstruction team (PRT) compound in the Behsood district of Jalalabad, east of Kabul Afghanistan, on Sunday, April 15, 15 2012. (Credit: AP Phot/Rahmat Gul) 
Dick Cheney, left, and Elliott Abrams (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
Still of Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old war photographer, from WikiLeaks' Collateral Murder video 
A man, left, inspects his destroyed vehicle at the scene of a car bomb attack in Ramadi, 70 miles (115 kilometers) west of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, March 20, 2012. Officials say attacks across Iraq have killed and wounded scores of people in a spate of violence that was dreaded in the days before Baghdad hosts the Arab world's top leaders. (AP Photo) (Credit: AP) 
The late Anthony Shadid 
