[Peace-discuss] You aren't surprised Obama's reneging on withdrawal, are you?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Tom Engelhardt (Editor of TomDispatch.com)
Posted: November 15, 2010 03:23 PM
The Stimulus Package in Kabul (I Was Delusional -- I Thought One Monster 
'Embassy' Was the End of It)

You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going 
to end, is it? Not ever. Rationally, you know perfectly well that whatever your 
“it” might be will indeed end, because everything does, but your gut tells you 
something different.

I had that moment recently when it came to the American way of war. In the past 
couple of weeks, it could have been triggered by an endless string of 
ill-attended news reports like theChristian Science Monitor piece headlined 
“U.S. involvement in Yemen edging toward ‘clandestine war.’” Or by the millions 
of dollars in U.S. payments reportedly missing in Afghanistan, thanks to 
under-the-table or unrecorded handouts in unknown amounts to Afghan civilian 
government employees (as well as Afghan security forces, private-security 
contractors, and even the Taliban). Or how about the news that the F-35 “Joint 
Strike Fighter,” the cost-overrun poster weapon of the century, already long 
overdue, will cost yet more money and be produced even less quickly?

Or what about word that our Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has officially 
declared the Obama administration “open” to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq after 
the announced 2011 deadline for their withdrawal? Or how about the news from 
McClatchy’s reliable reporter Nancy Youssef that Washington is planning to start 
“publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in 
Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama's pledge that 
he'd begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011”?

Or that bottomless feeling could have been triggered by the recent request from 
the military man in charge of training Afghan security forces, Lieutenant 
General William Caldwell, for another 900 U.S. and NATO trainers in the coming 
months, lest the improbable “transition” date of 2014 for Afghan forces to “take 
the lead” in protecting their own country be pushed back yet again. ("No 
trainers, no transition," wrote the general in a “report card” on his mission.)

Or it could have been the accounts of how a trained Afghan soldier turned his 
gun on U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, killing two of them, and then fled 
to the Taliban for protection (one of a string of similar incidents over the 
last year). Or, speaking of things that could have set me off, consider this 
passage from the final paragraphs of an Elisabeth Bumiller article tucked away 
inside the New York Times on whether Afghan War commander General David Petraeus 
was (or was not) on the road to success: “'It is certainly true that Petraeus is 
attempting to shape public opinion ahead of the December [Obama administration] 
review [of Afghan war policy],' said an administration official who is 
supportive of the general. 'He is the most skilled public relations official in 
the business, and he’s trying to narrow the president’s options.'”

Or, in the same piece, what about this all-American analogy from Bruce Riedel, 
the former CIA official who chaired President Obama’s initial review of Afghan 
war policy in 2009, speaking of the hundreds of mid-level Taliban the U.S. 
military has reportedly wiped out in recent months: “The fundamental question is 
how deep is their bench.” (Well, yes, Bruce, if you imagine the Afghan War as 
the basketball nightmare on Elm Street in which the hometown team’s front five 
periodically get slaughtered.)

Or maybe it should have been the fact that only 7 percent of Americans had 
reports and incidents like these, or evidently anything else having to do with 
our wars, on their minds as they voted in the recent midterm elections.

The Largest “Embassy” on Planet Earth

Strange are the ways, though. You just can’t predict what’s going to set you 
off. For me, it was none of the above, nor even the flood of Republican war 
hawks heading for Washington eager to “cut” government spending by “boosting” 
the Pentagon budget. Instead, it was a story that slipped out as the midterm 
election results were coming in and was treated as an event of no importance in 
the U.S.

The Associated Press covered U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry's 
announcement that a $511 million contract had been awarded to Caddell 
Construction, one of America’s “largest construction and engineering groups,” 
for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul. According to the 
ambassador, that embassy is already “the largest... in the world with more than 
1,100 brave and dedicated civilians... from 16 agencies and working next to 
their military counterparts in 30 provinces,” and yet it seems it’s still not 
large enough.

A few other things in his announcement caught my eye. Construction of the new 
“permanent offices and housing” for embassy personnel is not to be completed 
until sometime in 2014, approximately three years after President Obama’s July 
2011 Afghan drawdown is set to begin, and that $511 million is part of a $790 
million bill to U.S. taxpayers that will include expansion work on consular 
facilities in the Afghan cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat. And then, if the 
ambassador’s announcement was meant to fly below the media radar screen in the 
U.S., it was clearly meant to be noticed in Afghanistan. After all, Eikenberry 
publicly insisted that the awarding of the contract should be considered “an 
indication... an action, a deed that you can take as a long-term commitment of 
the United States government to the government of Afghanistan.”

(Note to Tea Party types heading for Washington: This contract is part of a new 
stimulus package in one of the few places where President Obama can, by 
executive fiat, increase stimulus spending. It has already resulted in the 
hiring of 500 Afghan workers, and when construction ramps up, another 1,000 more 
will be added to the crew.)

Jo Comerford and the number-crunchers at the National Priorities Project have 
offered TomDispatch a hand in putting that $790 million outlay into an American 
context: “$790 million is more than ten times the money the federal government 
allotted for the State Energy Program in FY2011. It's nearly five times the 
total amount allocated for the National Endowment for the Arts (threatened to be 
completely eliminated by the incoming Congress). If that sum were applied 
instead to job creation in the United States, in new hires it would yield more 
than 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers, and employ more than 13,000 in 
the burgeoning clean energy industry."

Still, to understand just why, among a flood of similar war reports, this one 
got under my skin, you need a bit of backstory.

Singular Spawn or Forerunner Deluxe?

One night in May 2007, I was nattering on at the dinner table about reports of a 
monstrous new U.S. embassy being constructed in Baghdad, so big that it put 
former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s grandiose Disneyesque palaces to shame. 
On 104 acres of land in the heart of the Iraqi capital (always referred to in 
news reports as almost the size of Vatican City), it was slated to cost $590 
million. (Predictable cost overruns and delays -- see F-35 above -- would, in 
the end, bring that figure to at least $740 million, while the cost of running 
the place yearly is now estimated at $1.5 billion.)

Back then, more than half a billion dollars was impressive enough, even for a 
compound that was to have its own self-contained electricity-generation, 
water-purification, and sewage systems in a city lacking most of the above, not 
to speak of its own antimissile defense systems, and 20 all-new blast-resistant 
buildings including restaurants, a recreation center, and other amenities. It 
was to be by far the largest, most heavily fortified embassy on the planet with 
a “diplomatic” staff of 1,000 (a number that has only grown since).

My wife listened to my description of this future colossus, which bore no 
relation to anything ever previously called an “embassy,” and then, out of the 
blue, said, “I wonder who the architect is?” Strangely, I hadn’t even considered 
that such a mega-citadel might actually have an architect.

That tells you what I know about building anything. So imagine my surprise to 
discover that there was indeed a Kansas architect, BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), 
previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation's world headquarters in 
Overland Park, Kansas; the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri; and 
Harrah's Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri. Better yet, BDY was so 
proud to have been taken on as architect to the wildest imperial dreamers and 
schemers of our era that it posted sketches at its website of what the future 
embassy, its “pool house,” its tennis court, PX, retail and shopping areas, and 
other highlights were going to look like.

Somewhere between horrified and grimly amused, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch, 
entitled “The Mother Ship Lands in Baghdad” and, via a link to the BDY drawings, 
offered readers a little “blast-resistant spin” through Bush’s colossus. From 
the beginning, I grasped that this wasn’t an embassy in any normal sense and I 
understood as well something of what it was. Here’s the way I put it at the time:

As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was 
never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed 
land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of 
imperial control center suitable for the planet's sole ‘hyperpower,’ dropped 
into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington's 
dream and Kansas City's idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul 
-- or a khan.
In other words, a U.S. “control center” at the heart of what Bush administration 
officials then liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or the “arc of 
instability.” To my surprise, the piece began racing around the Internet and 
other sites -- TomDispatch did not then have the capacity to post images -- 
started putting up BDY’s crude drawings. The next thing I knew, the State 
Department had panicked, declared this a “security breach,” and forced BDY to 
take down its site and remove the drawings.

I was amazed. But (and here we come to the failure of my own imagination) I 
never doubted that BDY’s bizarre imperial “mother ship” being prepared for 
landing in Baghdad was the singular spawn of the Bush administration. I saw it 
as essentially a vanity production sired by a particular set of fantasies about 
imposing a Pax Americana abroad and a Pax Republicana at home. It never crossed 
my mind that there would be two such “embassies.”

So, on this, call me delusional. By May 2009, with Barack Obama in the White 
House, I knew as much. That was when two McClatchy reporters broke a story about 
a similar project for a new “embassy” in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, at 
the projected cost of $736 million (with a couple of hundred million more slated 
for upgrades of diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan).

Simulating Ghosts

Now, with the news in from Kabul, we know that there are going to be three 
mother ships. All gigantic beyond belief. All (after the usual cost overruns) 
undoubtedly in the three-quarters of a billion dollar range, or beyond. All 
meant not to house modest numbers of diplomats acting as the face of the United 
States in a foreign land, but thousands of diplomats, spies, civilian personnel, 
military officials, agents, and operatives hunkering down long-term for war and 
skullduggery.

Connect two points and you have a straight line. Connect three points and you 
have a pattern -- in this case, simple and striking. The visionaries and 
fundamentalists of the Bush years may be gone and visionless managers of the 
tattered American imperium are now directing the show. Nonetheless, they and the 
U.S. military in the region remain remarkably devoted to the control of the 
Greater Middle East. Even without a vision, there is still the war momentum and 
the money to support it.

While Americans fight bitterly over whether the stimulus package for the 
domestic economy was too large or too small, few in the U.S. even notice that 
the American stimulus package in Kabul, Islamabad, Baghdad, and elsewhere in our 
embattled Raj is going great guns. Embassies the size of pyramids are still 
being built; military bases to stagger the imagination continue to be 
constructed; and nowhere, not even in Iraq, is it clear that Washington is 
committed to packing up its tents, abandoning its billion-dollar monuments, and 
coming home.

In the U.S., it’s clearly going to be paralysis and stagnation all the way, but 
in Peshawar and Mazar-i-sharif, not to speak of the greater Persian Gulf region, 
we remain the spendthrifts of war, perfectly willing, for instance, to ship fuel 
across staggering distances and unimaginably long supply lines at $400 a gallon 
to Afghanistan to further crank up an energy-heavy conflict. Here in the United 
States, police are being laid off. In Afghanistan, we are paying to enroll 
thousands and thousands of them and train them in ever greater numbers. In the 
U.S., roads crumble; in Afghanistan, support for road-building is still on the 
agenda.

At home, it’s peace all the way to the unemployment line, because peace, in our 
American world, increasingly seems to mean economic disaster. In the Greater 
Middle East, it’s war to the horizon, all war all the time, and creeping 
escalation all the way around. (And keep in mind that the escalatory stories 
cited above all occurred before the next round of Republican warhawks even hit 
Washington with the wind at their backs, ready to push for far more of the same.)

The folks who started us down this precipitous path and over an economic cliff 
are now in retirement and heading onto the memoir circuit: Our former president 
is chatting it up with Matt Lauer and Oprah; his vice president is nursing his 
heart while assumedly writing about “his service in four presidential 
administrations”; his first secretary of defense is readying himself for the 
publication of his memoir in January; and his national security adviser, then 
secretary of state (for whom Chevron once named a double-hulled oil tanker), is 
already heading into her second and third memoir. But while they scribble and 
yak, their policy ghosts haunt us, as does their greatest edifice, that embassy 
in Baghdad, now being cloned elsewhere. Even without them or the neocons who 
pounded the drums for them, the U.S. military still pushes doggedly toward 2014 
and beyond in Afghanistan, while officials “tweak” their drawdown non-schedules, 
narrow the president’s non-options, and step in to fund and build yet more 
command-and-control centers in the Greater Middle East.

It looks and feels like the never-ending story, and yet, of course, the imperium 
is visibly fraying, while the burden of distant wars grows ever heavier. Those 
“embassies” are being built for the long haul, but a decade or two down the 
line, I wouldn’t want to put my money on what exactly they will represent, or 
what they could possibly hope to control.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation 
Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How 
Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch a Timothy MacBain 
TomDispatch video interview with me on our "stimulus" spending abroad by 
clicking here or download it to your iPod, here.


[Note: For those still interested, some of the BDY sketches of the Baghdad 
embassy remain up at Antiwar.com. Click here to see them. And while I’m at it, 
let me make a heartfelt bow to Antiwar.com, without which TomDispatch research 
would truly be hell and, in particular, Jason Ditz, whose daily updates are 
must-read fare for me. Other crucial must-read sites for collecting war info 
include Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, Paul Woodward’s the War in Context, and 
Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt