Engelhardt - A nation unmade by war: a TomDispatch book

PRAISE FOR A NATION
UNMADE BY WAR

Unlike lesser writers distracted by the latest antics of the man with the orange hair, the brilliant Tom Engelhardt keeps our focus where it should be: on the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars we spend in unending wars, on the vast militarized empire whose leaders belief that they can control the world undermines our childrens future and sends young men and women to die in fruitless conflicts.

Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts

The mainstream media call it the Age of Trump. Tom Engelhardt knows better: its the Era of America Unhinged. This new collection of essays gives us Engelhardt at his very best: incisive, impassioned, and funny even, in a time of great darkness.

Andrew Bacevich, author of Americas War for the Greater Middle East

Tom Engelhardt is a tireless analyst of the miseries of American Empire. In this indispensable book he shines an unrelenting spotlight on the steep cost to everyday Americans of the sunny fantasies about Middle East dominance retailed by generals, politicians, and think tank rats inside the Beltwayfairy tales intended to obscure the dark failures of this enterprise.

Juan Cole, author of The New Arabs

We Americans have learned to sleep through our multiple wars, but Tom Engelhardt relentlessly shakes us awake. For sixteen years now, he has watched in astonishment and written the scene-by-scene review of this imploding empire, and he only becomes sharper as old reels rewind and play again. In this volume, the nation wasted at home by its profligate wars abroad picks a big orange emperor, flanked by his very own generals, to lead us on into well, just read the book!

Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers

Since September 11, no one has had a keener eye for American militarism, hypocrisy, and flat-out folly than Tom Engelhardt.

John Dower, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Embracing Defeat

The violence, destruction, and suffering resulting from the imperial arrogance of Bush, Cheney, and cohorts have proceeded on their shocking course while most Americans, Tom Engelhardt writes, were only half paying attention. Regular readers of his incisive, lucid, and brutally informative columns could not fail to pay attention and to be appalled at what was revealed. Their impact is all the more forceful in this collection, which casts a brilliant and horrifying light on a sordid chapter of history, far from closed.

Noam Chomsky

In his searing new book, Tom Engelhardt has composed a requiem for a nation turned upside down by the relentless pursuit of global power. A devastating critique of the national security state, A Nation Unmade takes the reader from Nixon and Vietnam to Bush and the Iraq War through post-9/11 America, chronicling the errors, deceptions, and policy decisions which have ushered in a state of permanent war, reducing nations to rubble, wreaking chaos and confusion at home, and threatening the very principles upon which the country was founded. A must read for any student of twenty-first century America.

Karen J. Greenberg, author of Rogue Justice

A
NATION
UNMADE
BY WAR

A TomDispatch Book

TOM ENGELHARDT

2018 Tom Engelhardt

Published in 2018 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-902-4

Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution,

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Mimi Bark.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

For Will and Maggie.
My life would be unimaginable without you.

INTRODUCTION

An Empire of Nothing at All?

As I was taking a last look at this book, the Costs of War Project at Brown Universitys Watson Institute published a new estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into Americas war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets). On average, thats at least $23,386 per taxpayer.

Keep in mind that such figures, however eye-popping, are only the dollar costs of our wars. They dont, for instance, include the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They dont include the costs to this countrys infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkablyin these years, almost uniquelybipartisan fashion into whats still laughably called national security. Thats not, of course, what would make most of us more secure, but what would make themthe denizens of the national security stateever more secure in Washington and elsewhere. Were talking about the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the US nuclear complex, and the rest of that state-within-a-state, including its many intelligence agencies and the warrior corporations that have, by now, been fused into that vast and vastly profitable interlocking structure.

In reality, the costs of Americas wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable. Just look at photos of the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria, Sirte in Libya, or Marawi in the southern Philippines, all in ruins in the wake of the conflicts Washington set off in the post9/11 years, and try to put a price on them. Those views of mile upon mile of rubble, often without a building still standing untouched, should take anyones breath away. Some of those cities may never be fully rebuilt.

And how could you even begin to put a dollars-and-cents value on the larger human costs of those wars: the hundreds of thousands of dead? The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight? How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettling other parts of the planet? Their presence (or more accurately a growing fear of it) has, for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing populist movements that threaten to tear Europe apart. And who could forget the role that those refugeesor at least fantasy versions of themplayed in Donald Trumps full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?

Opening the Gates of Hell

Americas never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a war; then to proclaim it nothing short of a Global War on Terror; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle Eastand ultimately the planetas no other imperial power had ever done.

Their overwrought geopolitical fantasies and their sense that the US military was a force capable of accomplishing anything they willed it to do launched a process that would cost this world of ours in ways that no one will ever be able to calculate. Who, for instance, could begin to put a price on the futures of the children whose lives, in the aftermath of those decisions, would be twisted and shrunk in ways frightening even to imagine? Who could tote up what it means for so many millions of this planets young to be deprived of homes, parents, educationsof anything, in fact, approximating the sort of stability that might lead to a future worth imagining?