After witnessing the first jetliner crash into the Twin Towers on that Sept. 11 morning, a friend’s wife and 7-year-old daughter fled to their nearby Manhattan loft and ran to the roof to look around. From there, they saw the second plane explode in a rolling ball of flaming fuel across the rooftops. It felt like the heat of a fiery furnace.
Not long after, the girl was struck with blindness. She rarely left her room. Her parents worked with therapists for months, trying various techniques including touch and visualization, before the young girl finally recovered her sight.
“The interesting new development,” my friend reports, “is that she no longer remembers very much, which she told me when I asked her if she would be willing to speak with you.”
That’s what happened to America itself 10 years ago this Sunday on 9/11, though it might be charged that many of us were blinded by privilege and hubris long before.
In effect, 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage arising from a pre-existing blindness as to the way much of the world sees us. That in turn led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — in all, a dozen “shadow wars,” according to The New York Times. Bob Woodward, in his crucial book, Obama’s Wars, noted that there were already secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more than 60 countries as of 2009.
From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of the “Long War,” a counterinsurgency vision arising from the failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting U.S. open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or 20 future presidential terms. The taxpayer costs of this Long War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending on the Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now squeezing our states, cities, and most Americans.
Besides this mortgaging of the future, civil liberties were thought to require a shrinking proper to a state of permanent and secretive war, and so the Patriot Act was promulgated. All this happened after 9/11 through democratic default and denial. Who knows what future might have followed if Al Gore, with a half-million popular-vote margin over George Bush, had prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court instead of losing by the vote of a single justice?
In any event, only a single member of Congress, Barbara Lee of Berkeley-Oakland, voted against Bush’s initial Sept. 14, 2001, request for emergency powers (war authorization) to deal with the aftermath of the attacks. Only a single senator, Russ Feingold, voted against the Patriot Act.
Were we not blinded by what happened on 9/11? Are we still? Let’s look at some numbers we almost never see.
The total number of American casualties now is beyond twice the toll of those who died in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., on 9/11. The casualties are rarely totaled, but they are broken down into three categories by the Pentagon and Congressional Research Service.
There is Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan but — in keeping with the Long War definition — also covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Second, there is Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor, Operation New Dawn, the name adopted after September 2010 for the 47,000 U.S. advisers, trainers, and counterterrorism units still in Iraq. The scope of these latter operations includes Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
According to Gen. Tommy Franks, the top American commander for the Iraq invasion, these territories include not only Muslim majorities but also 68 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and the passageway for 43 percent of petroleum exports, another American geo-interest that was heavily denied in official explanations of reasons for American military actions there. (See Michael Klare’s Blood and Oil and Antonia Juhasz’s The Bush Agenda for more on this.)
A combined 6,197 Americans had been killed in these wars as of the middle of August, in the name of avenging 9/11, a day when 2,996 Americans died. As of Aug. 16, the total number of American wounded in those wars had reached 45,338, and that figure is rising rapidly. An additional 56,462 persons suffering “non-hostile injuries and diseases” were carried out of those war zones by Medevac. The total figure for U.S. casualties — dead, wounded, injured, diseased — was 107,996.
And the active-duty military-suicide rate for the decade is at a record high of 2,276, not counting veterans who had left the service or those who have tried unsuccessfully to take their own lives. In fact, the military suicide rate for last year was greater than the American death toll in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has long played a numbers game with these body counts. Accurate information has always been painfully difficult to obtain — there was a time, for instance, when the Pentagon refused to count as Iraq war casualties any soldier who died from his or her wounds outside of Iraq’s airspace.
The fog surrounding the toll in Iraqi and Afghan civilian casualties will be seen in the future as one of the great scandals of the era. Briefly, the United States and its allies in Baghdad and Kabul have relied on eyewitness, media, or hospital numbers instead of the more common cluster-sampling interview techniques used in conflict zones like the first Gulf War, Kosovo, or the Congo.
The United Nations has a conflict of interest as a party to the military conflict and acknowledged in a July 2009 UN human-rights report footnote that “there is a significant possibility that the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is under-reporting civilian casualties.” In August, even the mainstream media derided a claim by the White House counterterrorism adviser that there hasn’t been a single “collateral,” or innocent, death during an entire year of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, a period in which 600 people were killed, all of them alleged militants.
A partial explanation for that blindness: The Los Angeles Times reported on April 9 that military officials and human rights groups say that U.S. Special Forces are responsible for “a disproportionate share of civilian casualties caused by western troops … though there are no precise figures because many of their missions are deemed secret.”
Among the most bizarre symptoms of the blindness is the tendency of most deficit hawks to become big spenders on Iraq and Afghanistan, at least until lately. The direct costs of the war now come to $1.23 trillion, or $444.6 billion for Afghanistan and $791.4 billion for Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project.
But that’s another sleight-of-hand, when one considers the so-called indirect costs like long-term veterans’ care. Leading economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes recently testified to Congress that their previous estimate of $4 to $6 trillion in ultimate costs was conservative. Nancy Youssef, of McClatchy Newspapers in D.C., in my opinion the best war reporter of the decade, wrote recently that “it’s almost impossible to pin down just what the United States spends on war.” The president himself expressed “sticker shock,” according to Woodward’s book, when presented with cost projections during an internal review in 2009.
The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets but our unborn children’s future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfuscations, and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy being waged deliberately by the Pentagon.
As Gen. Stanley McChrystal said much too candidly in February 2010, “This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.”
In his 2010 book Counterinsurgency, David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, wrote that Petraeus’ goal was to achieve a “unity of perception management measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators’ gallery of the international community.”
This new “war of perceptions” relies on naked media manipulation such as the treatment of media commentators as “message amplifiers.” But it also involves high-technology information warfare, highlighting the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment.
Consider just what we have learned about Iraq and Afghanistan because of WikiLeaks: tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq never before disclosed; instructions to U.S. troops not to investigate torture when conducted by U.S. allies; the existence of Task Force 373, carrying out night raids in Afghanistan; the CIA’s secret army of 3,000 mercenaries; private parties by DynCorp featuring trafficked boys as entertainment; and an Afghan vice president carrying $52 million in a suitcase. The efforts of the White House to prosecute Julian Assange and persecute PFC Bradley Manning in military prison should be of deep concern to anyone who believes in the public’s right to know.
The news that this is not a physical war but mainly one of perceptions will not be received well among American military families or Afghan children, which is why responsible citizens should refuse to accept The Official Story. That simple act of resistance necessarily leads to the kind of questioning that is essential to the recovery of a democratic society.
Read, for example, this early martial line of Rudyard Kipling, the English poet of the white man’s burden: “When you’re left wounded on Afghanistan’s plains and the women come out to cut up what remains/ just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/And go to your God like a soldier.” Years later, after Kipling’s beloved son was killed in World War I and his remains never recovered, the poet wrote: “If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied.”
An important part of the story of the peace movement, and the hope for peace itself, is the process by which hawks come to see their own mistakes. A brilliant history/autobiography in this regard is Dan Ellsberg’s Secrets, about his evolution from defense hawk to historic whistle-blower during the Vietnam War. Ellsberg writes movingly about how he was influenced on his journey by contact with young men on their way to prison for draft resistance.
The military occupation of our minds will continue until many more Americans become familiar with the strategies and doctrines in play during the Long War.
The writings of Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and retired Army lieutenant colonel whose son was killed in Iraq in 2007, is one place to begin. Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, has written The New American Militarism and edited The Long War, both worth absorbing.
For the military point of view, there is the 2007 Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual developed by Petraeus, with its stunning resurrection of the Phoenix model from Vietnam, in which thousands of Vietnamese were tortured or killed before media outcry and Senate hearings shut it down. Kilcullen, Petraeus’ main doctrinal adviser, even calls for a “global Phoenix program” to combat Al Qaeda-style groups. These are Ivy League calls to war, Kilcullen even endorsing “armed social science” in a New Yorker article in 2007.
For a criticism of counterinsurgency and defense of the “martial spirit,” Bing West’s recent The Wrong War is a must-read. West, a combat Marine and former Pentagon official, worries that counterinsurgency is turning the army into a Peace Corps, when it needs grit and bullets. “America is the last Western nation standing that fights for what it believes,” he roars.
Not enough is being written about how to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but experts with much to say are the University of Michigan’s Scott Atran (Talking to the Enemy) and former UK envoy Sherard Cowper Coles (Cables from Kabul). Also there is my own 2007 book, Ending the War in Iraq, which sketches a strategy of grass-roots pressure against the pillars of the policy. (The pillars necessary for the war are public opinion, trillions of dollars, thousands of available troops, and global alliances; as those fall, the wars must be resolved by diplomacy.)
The more we know about the Long War doctrine, the more we understand the need for a long peace movement. The pillars of the peace movement, in my experience and reading, are the networks of local progressives in hundreds of communities across the United States. Most of them are citizen volunteers, always immersed in the crises of the moment, nowadays the economic recession and unemployment.
Look at them from the bottom up and not the top down, and you will see:
• the people who marched in the hundreds of thousands during the Iraq War;
• those who became the enthusiastic consumer base for Michael Moore’s documentaries and the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush statements;
• early supporters of Howard Dean when he opposed the Iraq war and the stalwarts who formed the anti-war base for Barack Obama;
• the online legions of MoveOn who raised millions of dollars and turned out thousands of focused bloggers;
• the voters who dumped a Republican Congress in 2006 on the Iraq issue, when the party experts said it was impossible;
• the millions who elected Obama president by an historic flood of voluntary enthusiasm and get-out-the-vote drives;
• and the majorities who still oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and want military spending patterns reversed.
This peace bloc deserves more. It won’t happen overnight, but gradually we are wearing down the pillars of the war. It’s painfully slow, because the president is threatened by Pentagon officials, private military contractors, and almost the entire Republican Party (except the Ron Paul contingent), all of whom benefit from the politics and economics of the Long War.
But consider the progress, however slow. In February of this year, Rep. Barbara Lee won passage of a unanimous resolution at the Democratic National Committee calling for a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan and transfer of funds to job creation. The White House approved of the resolution. Then 205 House members, including a majority of Democrats, voted for a resolution that almost passed, calling for the same rapid withdrawal. Even the AFL-CIO executive board, despite a long history of militarism, adopted a policy opposing the war in Afghanistan.
The president himself is quoted in Obama’s Wars as opposing his military advisors, demanding an exit strategy and musing that he “can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”
At every step of the way, it must be emphasized, public opinion in congressional districts has been a key factor in changing establishment behavior.
In the end, the president decided to withdraw 33,000 American troops from Afghanistan by next summer and to continue “steady” withdrawals of the rest (68,000) from combat roles by 2014. At this writing, it is unclear how many remaining troops Obama will withdraw from Iraq or when, and whether the drone attacks on Pakistan will be forced to an end.
The Arab Spring has demolished key pillars of the Long War alliance, particularly in Egypt, where until recently the CIA took its detainees for torture.
Obama’s withdrawal decision upset the military but also most of the peace advocates he presumably wanted to win back. The differences revealed a serious gap in the inside-outside strategy applied by many progressives.
After a week of hard debate over the president’s plan, for example, Sen. John Kerry invited Tim Carpenter, leader of the heavily grass-roots Progressive Democrats of America, into his office for a chat. Kerry had slowly reversed his pro-war position on Afghanistan and said he thought Carpenter would be pleased with the then-secret Obama decision on troop withdrawals. From Kerry’s insider view, the number 33,000 was a very heavy lift, supported mainly by Vice President Joe Biden but not by the national security mandarins. (Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had called Biden “ridiculous,” and McChrystal’s later ridicule of Biden helped lose the general his job.)
From Carpenter’s point of view, 33,000 seemed a disappointing too little, too late. While it was definite progress toward a phased withdrawal, bridging the differences between the Democratic liberal establishment and the idealistic progressive networks will remain an ordeal through the 2012 elections.
As for al Qaeda, there is always the threat of another attack, like those attempted by militants aiming at Detroit during Christmas 2009 or Times Square in May 2010. In the event of another such terrorist assault originating from Pakistan, all bets are off: According to Woodward, the United States has a “retribution” plan to bomb 150 separate sites in that country alone, and there are no apparent plans for The Day After.
Assuming that nightmare doesn’t happen, today’s al Qaeda is not the al Qaeda of a decade ago. Osama bin Laden is dead, its organization is damaged, and its strategy of conspiratorial terrorism has been displaced significantly by the people-power democratic uprisings across the Arab world.
It is clear that shadow wars lie ahead but not expanding ground wars involving greater numbers of American troops. The emerging argument will be over the question of whether special operations and drone attacks are effective, moral, and consistent with the standards of a constitutional democracy. And it is clear that the economic crisis finally is enabling more politicians to question the trillion-dollar war spending.
Meanwhile, the 2012 national elections present an historic opportunity to awaken from the blindness inflicted by 9/11.
Diminishing the U.S. combat role by escalating the drone wars and Special Operations could repeat the failure of Richard Nixon in Vietnam. Continued spending on the Long War could repeat the disaster of Lyndon Johnson. A gradual winding down may not reap the budget benefits or political reward Obama needs in time.
With peace voters making a critical difference in numerous electoral battlegrounds, however, Obama might speed up the “ebbing,” plausibly announce a peace dividend in the trillions of dollars, and transfer those funds to energy conservation and America’s state and local crises. His answer to the deficit crisis will have to include a sharp reduction in war funding, and his answer to the Tea Party Republicans will have to be a Peace Party.
Tom Hayden wrote this piece exclusively for publication by members of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.
Editor’s note: After more than 50 years of activism, politics, and writing, Tom Hayden is a leading voice for ending the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and reforming politics through a more participatory democracy.
