James Carroll’s “House of War” is ostensibly a history of a single American government building, that five-sided behemoth that sits across the river from Washington and is instantly recognizable to just about anyone in the world as the headquarters of the United States military. But if Carroll’s book actually reads like something much bigger than that, like a story not just of the Pentagon but of the last half-century of American foreign policy, well, that’s the point. “The Pentagon has been so much at the center of national life that one could write an entire history of the contemporary United States in its terms,” Carroll argues in his prologue. That’s just about what he does.
Carroll is a novelist, but he’s best known for two massive works of nonfiction — “Constantine’s Sword,” which examined the Catholic Church’s troubled history with Jews, and “American Requiem,” a memoir about how the Vietnam War ruined Carroll’s relationship with his father. Carroll, who is a former Catholic priest, and whose father was an Air Force general who worked in the Pentagon, is thus fond of personalizing history, and “House of War” runs along the same lines. As a kid, Carroll would slide down the Pentagon’s slick floors in his socks while his dad worked late in a coveted E-ring office. As an adult, he sees that something much less fun occurred in those halls — the Pentagon’s militaristic, coolly efficient bureaucracy swallowed up the American government and its people, he says, making war the constant order of our lives.
Carroll’s specific complaints will ring familiar to any peacenik: He argues that since Sept. 11, 1941, when ground was broken at the building’s site — Carroll makes much of this date, exactly 60 years before United flight 77 crashed into the building’s side — the U.S. has embarked on a series of foreign policy disasters. Among other things, he believes that dropping nuclear weapons on Japan was a mistake; that we should not have developed, and then shouldn’t have tested, the H-bomb; that we should have shared our nuclear knowledge with the Soviets and instituted an international framework to abolish nuclear weapons; that we were mistaken to think of the Soviets as our mortal enemies, and thus mistaken to have turned political differences into a near world-ending Cold War; that we missed many opportunities to end the nuclear arms race during that war, and that we were far more belligerent than the Soviet Union in how we conducted ourselves with those weapons; and that, finally, even today, though we no longer face an enemy that poses an existential threat to the nation, we’re needlessly maintaining a military force that is more dangerous than any other force in the world, capable of instantly destroying all life on the planet.
What’s interesting about this catalog, as Carroll points out, is that at various points in the nation’s history, many men in government made similar arguments. Their cries were drowned out, though, by the culture of the Pentagon, which always wanted more — more bombs, more planes, more ships, more war. It’s this thesis, as well as Carroll’s unquestionably solid research, that makes his story much more than a standard antiwar rant. Other than a few stock villains — notably the mad bomber Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general who controlled the American nuclear arsenal for more than two decades — Carroll doesn’t characterize the folks who worked in the building as evil. “The Pentagon’s is a story of ordinary people who acted with good intentions, faced tragic dilemmas, and resisted what they saw happening right in front of them,” he writes. They didn’t set out to make the mistakes they did; rather, institutional momentum led them astray.
Carroll spoke to Salon from his home in Boston.
What I liked about your story is this idea that the Pentagon created a kind of bureaucracy of warfare — you’re saying that the Pentagon as an institution forms American policy, rather than individual leaders making decisions. Can you explain how that works?
Well, I’m no social scientist, but it’s clear bureaucracies generally have a life of their own, and the challenge always in a bureaucracy is to balance the momentum of the impersonal with the moral agency of the human beings involved. The Pentagon is the avatar, the ultimate example of that, not just for the size of it but because of some of the aspects of military culture that took hold after World War II, when technology became such a dominant part of military life. There’s an impersonality in the technology itself — you see this especially when nuclear weapons come to dominate the strategic position of the United States after World War II.
So the reason I begin this book the way I do is to argue that really four things happen at once — I’m locating them as happening in one week [in January 1943, the week the Pentagon was opened]. Number one, the decision by Roosevelt and Churchill to define Allied war aims as the “unconditional surrender” of Japan and Germany, imbuing the martial purpose of World War II with a kind of spirit of totality that it did not have until then. The second thing that happened was the initiation of the combined bombing offensive against the German homeland. The third thing that happens is the commission to build the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos. So unconditional surrender, warfare fought from the air, nuclear weapons, all three innovations come at the moment of the dedication of the Pentagon.
The four developments combined in an unprecedented and unpredictable way — if any of the people present in the government could have imagined what they were creating, I seriously doubt they would have wanted to go forward with it. A momentum is generated right there at the beginning that undercuts traditional notions of American morality. We’ve never reckoned with the civilian carnage wreaked by the United States Air Force in the last six months of World War II. More than a million civilians killed after the war was already won. The bombing of Japanese cities in March of 1945 killed more civilians than Japanese military people were killed in the entire war. The bombing of German cities in the same period killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Your main example of this bureaucracy taking over the decision-making was Truman’s “decision” to use nuclear weapons, which you say was not a decision at all.
Well, someone I cite compared Truman to a surgeon coming into an operating room after the patient was already cut open and having to decide whether to remove the diseased organ then.
Well, and then they justified it after the fact by arguing — and this has become the main way we remember the decision to use the bomb — that it saved us from invading Japan and consequently saved many lives.
Yes, George H.W. Bush was the last to say that the atomic bomb saved us a couple million casualties. I lay out how the numbers of casualties became part of the myth.
One of the things that revisionist historians have pointed out with some convincing detail is that the Japanese were ready to surrender by the summer of 1945, and there was ambivalence, especially on the part of those in the defense establishment who wanted to see the atomic bomb used, about receiving the Japanese surrender signals. One of the great questions raised by revisionist historians is whether America’s intentions in the summer of 1945 had shifted from Japan to Russia. We wanted to use the bomb to intimidate Moscow, to make sure that Moscow understood that we were to be reckoned with.
I take some pains to play out the complicated historical debate on both sides, and I reach my own conclusion, which was that the bomb was unnecessary. It’s a pointed debate that is unknown to most Americans. Most Americans don’t know, for example, that General Eisenhower opposed the use of the atomic bomb.
The most amazing thing is that, as you point out, even after we used the bomb the Japanese didn’t “unconditionally” surrender.
Right, there’s the other irony here, which is that we accepted a conditional surrender. If we had told the Japanese in June or July that they would be welcome to keep their emperor — who was a divine being to them — I’m convinced that the Japanese would have promptly surrendered. That was the last issue with the Japanese: You can’t do to our emperor what you’ve done to Hitler and Mussolini. And that was what the Japanese were fighting for in the end. As it turned out we allowed the emperor to survive as the emperor. The Japanese imperial house still stands today.
Why do you think there’s been a refusal on the part of the American people to look at the evidence about whether it was right to use nuclear weapons?
The reason we don’t look directly at this history and fail to reckon with it is because if we did we’d see how unjustified our continued reliance on our nuclear arsenal is. The most important example of the momentum I’m describing in this book, this unchecked momentum, is what happened at the end of the Cold War. Because by the end of the Cold War a massive military machine had been set up and the thing that justified it, our enemy the Soviet Union, disappeared. Yet that machine was not dismantled.
There’s the big clue of the momentum I’m talking about. How is it that in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 — not so long ago — there was a lot of talk about something called the peace dividend, but it never came? The American military did not significantly change its posture with regard to nuclear weapons, even under Bill Clinton. Why did that happen? It’s the great unanswered question. And because it happened that way the responses of George W. Bush to 9/11 have all been extremely and unnecessarily militarist. We responded to 9/11 as though we were in the thick of the Cold War. The great symbol of that is an anecdote from the 9/11 Commission, which is that when we finally scrambled jet fighters to respond that morning, they went out over the Atlantic Ocean looking for incoming attacks from the Soviet Union. The other great symbol is George W. Bush fleeing to the command bunker at Offutt Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command bunker that had been created by Curtis LeMay. That’s the perfect symbol of our problem. It’s not so much him I’m faulting here. What I’m suggesting is there was this unchecked Niagara current, a current that flows from the Pentagon to the disastrous cliff just ahead of us.
You do tell the stories of some of the men who tried to change this. The one who’s most tragic is Robert McNamara.
McNamara tried desperately to change it — he’s a tragic hero of this book in a way. I don’t attend so much to his role in Vietnam as I do to his heroic effort to wrest control of the nuclear arsenal from Curtis LeMay and the generals in the Pentagon.
Can you recount that?
Well, in a way the most important fact of the Cold War is that we had 200 nuclear weapons — all atomic bombs — in 1950. And by 1960 we had close to 20,000 nuclear weapons, and by then mostly thermonuclear weapons. And that was an accumulation that was not decided upon by anybody. It was presided over by Curtis LeMay. Dwight D. Eisenhower saw it unfold and that’s mainly what he was warning about when he left office, what he called the military-industrial complex.
The thing that was really astounding about this monstrous nuclear arsenal was that even though there was lip service paid to civilian control, there really was no civilian control because of the nature of the communications required to administer such an arsenal. Control of that arsenal belonged to the generals, especially LeMay. LeMay had his own intelligence sources. He was poised to initiate World War III based on his own assessments that the Soviets were preparing to launch their nuclear arsenals.
McNamara was horrified when he realized how massive and unaccountable this arsenal was. He challenged LeMay directly —
And astoundingly, when he asked for the plans he was told that even he didn’t have authority to look at them.
Yes, at the beginning of his tenure he asked to see the SIOP and the J-SCAP — the secret Pentagon documents that detailed what the Pentagon plan against the Soviet Union and the communist world would be. He was told, We don’t show that to anyone. He said, I’m not anyone, I’m the secretary of defense. He had to go to the White House and get backup to get access to the documents. And what he found when he saw them was horrifying: An all-out attack against hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cities all over the communist world. If we went to war against Moscow we were also going to obliterate Albania. A conflict with Moscow was going to bring us into a war with China. There were no distinctions made; there was one monolithic communist enemy.
McNamara tried to rationalize it. He spent the most important effort before he was swamped with Vietnam to bring some kind of rational order to the idea of nuclear war. And where he wound up was realizing the whole thing is so irrational that there is no rational order possible.
I recount how close we came to nuclear exchange with the Soviets not just over Cuba but in a way even more frighteningly over Berlin the year before. And it was because Kennedy and McNamara decided that the possibility of nuclear war was so horrifying that by the time the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded Kennedy had already decided against nuclear weapons. He was the one standing alone against his advisors on that.
And then Kennedy becomes the first president to announce that we need a new way.
In a way the most important thing that my book hopes to do is remind Americans that there was a moment after World War II when the leadership of this country was unified in rejecting the idea of nuclear war and determined to put in place structures that would be an alternative to war. Kennedy embodied that powerfully in 1963 in his speech at American University when, having been through the horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he called for a new way of organizing international relations. And he used the word “peace.” He was not a softie, he was not a dove, yet he came through to the point where he understood that peace had to be how the nations of the world organized their relations with each other. And his plea was heard in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev ordered that speech to be broadcast throughout the Soviet Union, and within weeks the U.S. and the Soviet Union began serious negotiations on a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing. It was the first arms control treaty, and it was the beginning of the arms control regime that finally ended the Cold War.
The thing that was so moving to me was Kennedy based his belief in peace on our common mortality. We all are human, we all die, we all cherish our children. It wasn’t just rhetoric. And of course the fact that it wasn’t rhetoric was made all the more palpable that November, when we saw his own mortality.
And the other thing that happened under Kennedy and McNamara was the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is where your father comes into the story.
It’s one of the places where the story is personal to me. Because my father was an officer devoted to the purposes of the Pentagon, I’ve never been able to think of the people in the Pentagon as anything but driven by high ideals. In the early ’60s he was appointed the first director, the founding director, of the Defense Intelligence Agency. [The DIA is the Pentagon's unified military intelligence service, which McNamara hoped would improve the military's intelligence-gathering efforts.]
And the reason for that was a history of intelligence failures in the Pentagon.
Well, the intelligence establishment was at the mercy of the individual turf priorities — so Air Force intelligence was always seeing enemy threats based on what the Air Force wanted, for example. The immediate cause of McNamara and Kennedy establishing the DIA was the so-called missile gap, which was a belief in the late ’50s into 1960 that the Soviet Union was leading the United States by some considerable margin in the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was a complete myth. But it served the purposes of the Air Force. And shortly after the United States launched its first spy satellite, photographs from space demonstrated conclusively that the Soviet Union did not have a massive ICBM force. In fact it had four missiles.
It was such an egregious example that Kennedy and McNamara began to take control of intelligence away from the services. The Defense Intelligence Agency was McNamara’s attempt to wrest control of intelligence the way he’d tried to wrest control of the nuclear arsenal. And ultimately I’m not sure he was successful in this effort, either.
It’s interesting because intelligence failures have dominated our recent history. It seems that intelligence failures are one of the main stories of the Pentagon.
Well, that’s true, and it’s a human condition story, really. First of all when you’re trying to assess what an enemy is up to you pay your military and your intelligence people to prepare for the worst case. So intelligence by definition is supposed to be an ultimate example of worst-case thinking. The trouble with worst-case thinking is you begin to project threats and imagine threats as if they’re real, and you begin to create responses based on those. Pretty soon you forget that you’ve imagined the threat.
And that’s what happened again and again and again with the Soviet Union, which is why we the Americans were constantly taking the initiative up the escalation ladder. The Pentagon was always imagining that the Soviet Union was ahead of us when it never was, with the single exception of Sputnik. That innovation was the only time the Soviet Union beat us, but we were constantly inventing and imagining Soviet threats. Even to the end, when Mikhail Gorbachev was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks rather than to defend the collapsing Soviet Union, the CIA and Pentagon were reporting that it was all a ploy.
We’ve seen this same thing in relationship to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. We imagine the worst, and then we treat our imagined fear as if it’s rock-solid. It’s an old story. It’s easy to single out George W. Bush and Colin Powell for falsifying intelligence, but actually it goes back beyond that.
You also say that the Pentagon missed the most important reason the Soviet Union was splintering in the 1980s, the people’s-power movement in Poland and elsewhere.
The most important factor in ending the Cold War, I would argue, was Solidarity, the labor movement formed on the shipyards in Gdansk. Nonviolent mass movements spread like wildfire in the satellite nations and then into Russia itself. American intelligence completely missed this, which is why at the same time we were funding the Contras in Central America. So we’re sending money and arms to the Contras while not supporting Solidarity — it’s the classic case of missing something crucial. And why was that? It was because in the United States we could not imagine nonviolent resistance as a force for change.
We were also funding terrorists in Afghanistan.
Indeed so, funding what effectively what became al-Qaida.
In this culture, the other person who emerges as a hero here — even though I think that you would like him not to be — is Reagan.
Yes, the great irony of this history, and certainly not something I expected when I set out to find it, is that the person who did the most to bring about the nonviolent end of the Cold War was Ronald Reagan, the hawk of hawks. And what he did was find it possible to respond creatively to initiatives put forward by the true hero of this story, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Just as Americans didn’t recognize how World War II ended, we haven’t recognized how the Cold War ended. George H.W. Bush and people after him have talked about us having “won” the Cold War. We didn’t win the Cold War. The Soviet Union decided to stop fighting it. And Ronald Reagan was a willing partner that enabled it. It’s a very moving and beautiful story.
And this was despite the objections of his advisors.
Indeed so; Reagan was condescended to by his advisors. Only a few days ago there was an Op-Ed piece by Max Kampelman, a leading arms control negotiator for Ronald Reagan, who was reminding people that Reagan himself was a nuclear abolitionist. This is news today because Washington has completely deleted nuclear abolition as an American goal. We’re resuming enhancement of our nuclear arsenal and we’re looking to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were committed in principle — it didn’t happen for numbers of complicated reasons I explain — to the elimination of nuclear weapons off the face of the earth. And in doing that Reagan was just like the great statesmen of the World War II era. Like Truman — Truman himself argued that we had to find a way to get rid of nuclear weapons. Americans have to remember that.
In fact, we Americans are bound by a treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, clause VI of which obligates the United States to work toward elimination of nuclear weapons.
But under the Nuclear Posture Review under Bill Clinton, we decided that there was a minimum number of nuclear weapons we had to keep.
Yes, that’s the “hedge.” The hedge was to protect us in case Russia experimented with fascism. What that hedge did was it gave the Russians and the Chinese a reason to maintain their weapons, so there are still thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, and there shouldn’t be. Even a hawk would agree that we don’t need thousands — the deterrence purpose could be served with hundreds, a couple hundred.
And now the Bush administration is suggesting — or at least not taking off the table — the idea of using nuclear weapons against Iran.
It’s one of the most astounding things in recent months. As Seymour Hersh reported a few weeks ago, American tactical bombers are practicing the kind of maneuvers that are only used to drop a nuclear weapon. Well, even to pretend is wrong, because it violates the most important things put in place by Harry Truman, which is the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable, and we’ll never threaten a non-nuclear state with nuclear use. Well, we’re threatening nuclear use, and we’re apparently engaging in war games.
What do we expect the Iranians to do? Obviously they’re going to dig in and accelerate their strategy. This is profoundly destructive. It’s a profound betrayal of the government’s obligation to protect us. It makes us more vulnerable to nuclear weapons than we were five or 10 years ago.
You really think we are more vulnerable now?
We are, because the non-proliferation regime is in collapse. We aren’t in danger of Russia attacking us or China, but obviously the threat from terrorism — the threat of a nihilist attack on New York City with a dirty bomb — is real. But where’s he going to get that nuclear material? He’s going to get it when the non-proliferation regime breaks down. That’s what’s at risk here. The Bush administration has already given Iran and North Korea every reason to get a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration is sponsoring proliferation, and that’s what’s making this so risky.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about is the recent criticism of Donald Rumsfeld from former generals. What do you make of this? And how much stock should we put in their criticisms — what does it say about civilian control of the military if we start listening to generals about whom to fire in the Pentagon?
Well, there’s always been some tension between civilians and the brass, and sometimes the generals are less warlike than the civilians. General Marshall did not want to go to war in Korea, Dean Acheson did. The civilian hawks in the early Vietnam years drove the initiative to war. The military are not necessarily hawkish people. The most hawkish person inside the Pentagon in recent years was Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was looking for a reason to fight a war against Iraq.
In this case, with the military increasingly criticizing the administration and the secretary of defense, it doesn’t strike me that the criticism breaks down into groups that are less warlike and more warlike. The generals’ complaints are mostly about the tactical decisions concerning how to conduct this war. The generals aren’t raising a much more basic question, which is why are we fighting an unnecessary war? The generals have a stake in that question. Why did this administration embark on this war when we were not attacked or in danger of being attacked? Where are the generals criticizing the basic decision to abuse the American military to launch an unnecessary war, to launch it carelessly, and to launch it with such disastrous consequences? The United States Army is destroying itself in Iraq. Where is the military outrage?
Do you think that’s another consequence of this military bureaucracy — the generals get a lot out of this war?
It’s true. The war rewards, it makes people important, it keeps the national security establishment at the center of government. Of course it generates the budget — this war is rescuing the military budget, billons and billions of dollars. We’re spending more money on our defense than all of the rest of the world combined. The first Gulf War rescued the military at the end of the Cold War. This war is rescuing the military when there were reasons it should have been significantly downsized.
And there’s also the bureaucratic momentum of going with the flow in a large, impersonal bureaucracy. Notice the phenomenon that has shown itself again and again. When these men are retired, they find their conscience. Robert Jay Lifton calls it “retirement syndrome.” It began with Henry Stimson — Henry Stimson upon retiring as secretary of war issued his challenge to Truman to share the atomic bomb. Dwight D. Eisenhower did it — it was when he was leaving the presidency that he challenged the military-industrial complex. Hello? Mr. President, why didn’t you challenge it in 1956, why wait until 1960 to do it? Retirement syndrome — people going out the door, saying finally in full conscience what’s horrible about what they’ve been doing. It’s a function of the bureaucracy. People within the bureaucracy feel this kind of loyalty to it. You also saw this with Robert McNamara, who turned against the war in Vietnam but continued to preside over it.
And McNamara told you that his involvement in the firebombing of Tokyo was a war crime.
He did. He observed that if we had lost the war, he and Curtis LeMay would surely have been tried as war criminals.
Finally I want to ask how the Pentagon changed the American people. You say we’ve become a militarized, “vengeful people.” Do you really believe that?
I do. I love my country, and the American people are good people. But we are allowing the government to do things in our name that are wrong, they are criminal. If I could say something really outrageous, I think that the American people today have turned against the war in Iraq for the wrong reasons. They’ve turned against it because we’re losing. We should be against this war because it’s wrong and unnecessary. If this war had gone the way Rumsfeld and company thought it would go, Americans would have been fine with it. And that’s appalling. And of course if it had gone the way they thought it was going to go, we’d be in Iran today. That’s the tragic good news here. This war has gone so badly that the American imperial enterprise has been stalled. Thank God for that.
But, again, we the American people have not reckoned with what we did at the end of World War II. And one of the things that happened on 9/11 is that we looked at ourselves and presumed to think of ourselves as world-historic victims. What we suffered was tragic, and indeed a catastrophe, but on the scale of suffering it was very minor compared to the kind of suffering we’ve inflicted on other nations, and we’re still doing today.
Well, is it possible to change this?
To me the greatest symbol of hope is what happened at the end of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, beginning with Chernobyl. It’s a miracle of my lifetime that a nonviolent popular movement led to the demise of the Soviet system. And if that can happen, the equivalent can happen on our side. We have to break the myth of military power. We have to understand that there are many more grievous threats to our nation than those that the Pentagon can protect us from.
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) 
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