The American Way Of War Part 6

Thinking about this, I wonder what kind of "face" should be put on global governance in Washington?

FIVE.

The Bush Legacy: What They Did (Wrong).

Ponzi Scheme Presidency.

From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the a.s.syrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting-in almost comic-strip style-various b.l.o.o.d.y royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows a.s.syrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the "body count." So I learned by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient a.s.syrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that a.s.syrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious pharaohs).

Give credit to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Rembrandt burgher staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it's no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads 117 on a frieze, imagine an a.s.syrian scribe making his count, and-eerily enough-feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles "the march of civilization" (as my parents' generation once called it) has actually covered.

Prejudiced Toward War.

If you need an epitaph for the Bush administration, here's one to test out: They tried. They really tried. But they couldn't help it. They just had to count.

In a sense, George W. Bush did the a.s.syrians proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced torture chambers, his officially approved kidnap-pings, the murders committed by his interrogators, the ma.s.sacres committed by his troops and mercenaries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered from the air, it's easy enough to imagine what those a.s.syrian scribes would have counted. True, his White House didn't have friezes of his victories (one problem being that there were none to glorify). All it had was Saddam Hussein's captured pistol proudly stored in a small study off the Oval Office.

Almost three thousand years later, however, Bush's "scribes," still traveling with the imperial forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere. Many of those body counts were duly made public. This record of American "success" was visible to anyone who visited the Pentagon's website and viewed its upbeat news articles complete with enumerations of "Taliban fighters" (or, in Iraq, "terrorists"), the air force's news feed listing the number of sorties against "anti-Afghan forces," or the U.S. Central Command's stories of killing "Taliban militants."

On the other hand, history, as we know, doesn't repeat itself and-unlike the a.s.syrians-the Bush administration would have preferred not to count, or at least not to make its body counts public. One of its small but tellingly unsuccessful struggles, a sign of the depth of its failure on its own terms, was to avoid the release of those counts. This aversion to the body count made some sense. After all, since the 1950s, body counting for the U.S. military has invariably signaled not impending victory, but disaster, and even defeat.

One of the strangest things about the American empire has been this: Between 1945 and George W. Bush's second term, the U.S. economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the planet's financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the height of the cold war, always came in a provincial second.) In the same period, the U.S. military effectively garrisoned much of the globe from the Horn of Africa to Greenland, from South Korea to Qatar, while its navy controlled the seven seas, its air force dominated the global skies, its nuclear command stood ready to unleash the powers of planetary death, and its s.p.a.ce command watched the heavens. In the wake of the cold war, its various military commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win the wars that mattered.

Because the neocons of the Bush administration brushed aside this counterintuitive fact, they believed themselves faced with an unparalleled opportunity triggered by the attacks of 9/11. With the highest-tech military on the planet, funded at levels no other set of nations could c.u.mulatively match, the United States, they were convinced, was uniquely situated to give the phrase "sole superpower" historically unprecedented meaning. Even the a.s.syrians at their height, the Romans in their Pax Romana centuries, the British in the endless decades when the sun could never set on their empire, would prove amateurs by comparison.

In this sense, President Bush, Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist idolaters-and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose main tenet was the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word "bellicose." They were prejudiced toward war. With awesome military power at their command, they were convinced that they could go it alone as the dominating force on the planet. As with true believers everywhere, they had only contempt for those they couldn't convert to their worldview. That contempt made "unilateralism" their strategy of choice, and a global Pax Americana their goal (along with, of course, a Pax Republicana at home).

The Return of the Body Count.

It was in this context that they were not about to count the enemy dead. In their wars, as these fervent, inside-the-Beltway utopians saw it, there would be no need to do so. With the "shock and awe" forces at their command, they would refocus American attention on the real metric of victory, the taking of territory and of enemy capitals. At the same time, they were preparing to disarm the only enemy that truly scared them, the American people, by making none of the mistakes of the Vietnam era, including-as the president later admitted-counting bodies.

Of course, both the Pax Americana and the Pax Republicana would prove will-o'-the-wisps. As it turned out, the Bush administration, blind to the actual world it faced, disastrously miscalculated the nature of American power-especially military power-and what it was capable of doing. And yet, had they taken a clear-eyed look at what U.S. military power actually achieved in action since 1945, they might have been sobered. In the major wars (and even some minor actions) the military fought in those decades, it had been ma.s.sively destructive but never victorious, nor even particularly successful. In many ways, in the cla.s.sic phrase of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, it had been a "paper tiger."

Yes, it had "won" largely meaningless victories-in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein's helpless military in 1990 (in a war that settled nothing); in NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995. On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand up to American power, while also, in more minor operations, running afoul of Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993.

It was in the context of defeat and then frustration in Korea that the counting of enemy bodies began. Once Chinese Communist armies had entered that war in ma.s.sive numbers in late 1950, and inflicted a terrible series of defeats on American forces without being able to sweep them off the peninsula, that conflict settled into a "meat grinder" of a stalemate in which the hope of taking significant territory faded. Yet some measure of success was needed as public frustration mounted in the United States. In this way began the infamous body count of enemy dead.

The body count reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War, again as a shorthand way of measuring success in a conflict in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to distinguish from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. Those tallies of dead bodies, announced daily by military spokesmen to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the public face of American "success" in the Vietnam era. Each body was to be further evidence of what General William Westmoreland called "the light at the end of the tunnel." When those dead bodies and any sense of success began to part ways, however, when, in the terminology of the times, a "credibility gap" opened between the metrics of victory and reality, the body count morphed into a symbol of barbarism as well as of defeat, helping to stoke an antiwar movement.

This was why, in choosing to take on Saddam Hussein's shattered military in 2003-the administration expected a "cakewalk" campaign that would "shock and awe" enemies throughout the Middle East-they officially chose not to release any counts of enemy dead. General Tommy Franks, commander of the administration's Afghan operation in 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, put the party line succinctly: "We don't do body counts." As the president finally admitted in some frustration to a group of conservative columnists in October 2006, his administration had "made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team." Not intending to repeat the 1960s experience, he and his advisers had planned out an opposites war on the home front (anything done in Vietnam would not be done this time around), and that meant not offering official counts of the dead that might stoke an antiwar movement-until, that is, frustration truly set in, as in Korea and Vietnam.

When the taking of Baghdad in April 2003 proved no more a cap-stone on American victory than the taking of Kabul in November 2001, when everything began to go disastrously wrong and the carefully enumerated count of the U.S. military dead in Iraq rose precipitously, when "victory" (a word that the president still invoked fifteen times in a single speech in November 2005) adamantly refused to make an appearance, the moment for the body count had arrived. Despite all the planning, they just couldn't stop themselves. A frustrated President Bush expressed it this way: "We don't get to say that-a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it."

Soon enough the Pentagon was regularly releasing such figures in reports on its operations, and, in December 2006, the president, too, first slipped such a tally into a press briefing: "Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy."

It wasn't, of course, that no one had been counting. The president, as we know from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, kept "his own personal scorecard for the [global] war [on terror]"-photographs with "brief biographies and personality sketches" of the "Most Wanted Terrorists" ready to be crossed off when U.S. forces took them out. The military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it did represent a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration that never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.

That implicit admission, however, took years to arrive, and, in the meantime, Iraqis and Afghans-civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police, and military men-were dying in prodigious numbers.

The Charnel House of History.

As it happened, others were also counting. Among the earliest of them, Iraq Body Count carefully added up Iraqi civilian deaths as doc.u.mented in reputable media outlets. (Their estimate has over the years reached about 100,000-and, circ.u.mscribed by those words "doc.u.mented" and "civilian," doesn't begin to get at the full scope of Iraqi deaths.) Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took up the task, using sophisticated sampling techniques, including door-to-door interviews under exceedingly dangerous conditions, to arrive at reasonable approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have come up with figures ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to a million or more in a country with a prewar population of perhaps twenty-six million. UN representatives have similarly attempted, under difficult circ.u.mstances, to keep a count of Iraqis fleeing into exile-exile being, after a fashion, a form of living death-and have estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, were "internally displaced."

Similar attempts have been made for Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance, done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes in that country. But, of course, the real body count in either country will never be known. One thing is certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should routinely be portrayed as a success, thanks to the Bush administration's "surge" policy in 2007-08. Only a country-or a punditry or a military-incapable of facing the depths of destruction let loose could reach such a conclusion.

If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush administration have led to destruction, and remarkably regularly to piles of dead or tortured bodies, counted or not. In fact, it's reasonable to say that every Bush administration foreign policy dream, including its first-term fantasy about a pacified "Greater Middle East" and its late second-term vision of a facilitated "peace process" between the Israelis and Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies and in failure. The Bush administration's Global War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of one trillion taxpayer dollars (but sure to be in the mult.i.trillions when all is said and done), Bush's mad "global war" simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a street-corner hustler. Madoff, by his own accounting, squandered perhaps $50 billion of other people's money. The Bush administration took a trillion dollars of ours and handed it out to its crony corporate buddies and to the Pentagon as down payments on disaster. The laid off, the pensionless, the foreclosed, the suicides-imagine what that trillion dollars might have meant to them. And the price tag continues to soar.

Bernie Madoff ended up behind bars, but Bush administration officials will face no such accountability. Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of ma.s.sive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt. All this was brought to us by a president who said the following in his first inaugural address: "I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility...to call for responsibility and try to live it as well."

Bush ruled, we know, by quite a different code. Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a Caesar-of destruction.

Veni, vidi, vastavi...I came, I saw, I devastated.

With Us or Against Us?

On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack address to the nation, George W. Bush was already using the phrase "the war on terror." On September 13, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced that the administration was planning to do a lot more than just take out those who had attacked the United States. It was going to go about "removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism." We were, Bush said that day, in a state of "war." In fact, we were already in "the first war of the twenty-first century." As R. W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times reported, "[T]he Bush administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism...or face the certain prospect of death and destruction." Stand with us against terrorism-or else. That would be the measure by which everything was a.s.sessed in the years to come. That very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that the United States would "rip [the bin Laden] network up" and "when we're through with that network, we will continue with a global a.s.sault on terrorism."

A global a.s.sault on terrorism. How quickly the president's Global War on Terror was on the scene. And no nation was immune. On September 14, the news was leaked that "a senior State Department official" had met with "15 Arab representatives" and delivered a stiff "with us or against us" message: Join "an international coalition against terrorism" or pay the price. There would be no safe havens. The choice-as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage would reportedly inform Pakistan's intelligence director after the 9/11 attacks-was simple: Join the fight against al-Qaeda or "be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age."

From that day to this, the Global War on Terror would be the organizing principle for the Bush administration as it shook off "the constraints," loosed the CIA, and sent the U.S. military into action-as it went, in short, for the Stone Age jugular. The phrase "Global War on Terror," while never quite catching on with the public, would become so familiar in the corridors of Washington that it would soon morph into one of the least elegant acronyms around (GWOT), sometimes known among neocons as "World War IV"-they considered the cold war as World War III-or by military men and administration officials, after Iraq devolved from fantasy blitzkrieg into disaster, as "the Long War."

In the administration's eyes, the GWOT was to be the key to the magic kingdom, the lever with which the planet could be pried open for American dominion. It gave us an interest everywhere. After all, as Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke would say in January 2002, "The estimates are anywhere from 50 or 60 to 70 countries that have al Qaeda cells in them. The scope extends far beyond Afghanistan." Administration officials, in other words, were already talking about a significant portion of existing states as potential targets. This was not surprising, since the GWOT was meant to create planetary free-fire zones. These al-Qaeda targets or breeding grounds, after all, had to be emptied. We were, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials were saying almost immediately after 9/11, going to "drain" the global "swamp" of terrorists. And any countries that got in the way had better watch out.

With us or against us, that was the sum of it, and terror was its measure. If any connection could be made-even, as in the case of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, a thoroughly bogus one-it immediately offered a compelling home-front explanation for possible intervention. The safety and security of Americans was, after all, at stake in every single place where those terrorist mosquitoes might be breeding. If you had the oil lands of the planet on your mind (as was true with d.i.c.k Cheney's infamous Energy Task Force), then the threat of terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism, was a safe bet. If you wanted to fortify your position in new oil lands, then the ticket was to have the Pentagon move in, as in Africa, to help weak, possibly even failing, states prepare themselves against the forces of terror.

At home, too, you were for us or against us. Those few who opposed the Patriot Act, for instance, were obviously not patriots. The minority who claimed that you couldn't be at "war" with "terror," that what was needed in response to 9/11 was firm, ramped-up police action were simply laughed out of the room. In the kindliest light, they were wusses; in the worst light, essentially traitors. They lacked not only American redbloodedness, but a willingness to be b.l.o.o.d.y-minded. End of story.

In the wake of those endlessly replayed, apocalyptic-looking scenes of huge towers crumbling and near-mushroom-clouds of ash billowing upwards, a chill of end-time fear swept through the nation. War, whatever name you gave it, was quickly accepted as the obvious, commensurate answer. In a nation in the grips of the politics of fear, it seemed reasonable enough that a restoration of "security"-American security-should be the be-all and end-all globally. Everything, then, was to be calibrated against the successes of the GWOT.

From Seattle to Tampa, Toledo to Dallas, fear of terrorism became a ruling pa.s.sion, as well as a pure moneymaker for the mini homeland-industrial complex that grew up around the new Department of Homeland Security. A thriving industry of private security firms, surveillance outfits, and terror consultants proliferated. With their help, the United States would be locked down in an unprecedented way-and to do that, we would also have to lock down the planet by any means necessary. We would fight "them" everywhere else, as the president would say again and again, so as not to fight them here.

A Nation of Cowards?

Most of the things that needed to be done to make us safer after 9/11 undoubtedly could have been done without much fuss, without a new, more bureaucratic, less efficient Department of Homeland Security, without a new, larger U.S. "intelligence community," without pumping ever more money into the Pentagon, and certainly without invading and occupying Iraq. Most societies that have dealt with terror, often far worse campaigns than what we have experienced, despite 9/11, have faced the dangers involved without becoming obsessive over their safety and security, without locking down their countries, and then attempting to do the same with the planet, as the Bush administration did. In the process, we may have turned ourselves into the functional equivalent of a nation of cowards, ready to sacrifice so much of value on the altar of the G.o.d of "security."

Think of it: Nineteen fanatics with hijacked planes, backed and funded by a relatively small movement based in one of the most impoverished places on the planet, did all this. Or, put more accurately, faced with the look of the apocalypse and the dominating urges of the Bush administration, we did what al-Qaeda's crew never could have done. Blinding ourselves via the GWOT, we released American hubris and fear upon the world, in the process making almost every situation we touched progressively worse for this country.

The fact is that those who run empires can sometimes turn the right levers in societies far away. Historically, they have sometimes been quite capable of seeing the world and actual power relations as they are, clearly enough to conquer, occupy, and pacify other lands. Sometimes, they were quite capable of dividing and ruling local peoples for long periods, or hiring native troops to do their dirty work. But here's the dirty miracle of the Bush administration: thinking GWOT all the way, its every move seemed to do more damage than the last, not just to the world, but to the fabric of the country they claimed they were protecting.

Opinion polls indicate that terrorism is no longer at the top of the American agenda of worries. Nonetheless, don't for a second think that the subject isn't lodged deep in national consciousness. When asked "How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism," a striking 39 percent of Americans were either "very worried" or "somewhat worried," and another 33 percent registered as "not too worried," according to the pollsters of CNN/Opinion Research Corporation.

The obsession with terrorism has also been built into our inst.i.tutions, from Guantanamo to the Department of Homeland Security. It's had the time to sink its roots into fertile soil. It now has its own industries, lobbying groups, profit centers. Unbuilding it will be a formidable task indeed. It is a Bush legacy that no president is likely to reverse soon, if at all.

Ask yourself honestly: Can you imagine a future America without a Department of Homeland Security? Can you imagine a new administration ending the global lockdown that has become synonymous with Americanism?

Yet here's the irony. Essential power relations in the world turn out to have next to nothing to do with the War on Terror (which may someday be seen as the last great ideological gasp of American globalism). In this sense, terrorism, no matter how frightening, is an ephemeral phenomenon. The fact is, non-state groups wielding terror as their weapon of choice can cause terrible pain, harm, and localized mayhem, but they simply don't take down societies like ours. To think that possible is to misunderstand power on this planet. In that sense, the Global War on Terror's greatest achievement-for American rulers and ruled alike-may simply have been to block out the world as it was, to block out, that is, reality.

Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a National Emergency.

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into context, and then tell me you're not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the United States and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from riptides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion pa.s.sengers transported. In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February, killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006. And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, a.s.saulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York's Hudson River when disaster might have ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was killed.) The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 pa.s.sengers and crew, all of whom survived. Had the inept Abdulmutallab actually succeeded, the death toll would not have equaled the 324 traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008; while the destruction of four Flight 253s from terrorism would not have equaled New York State's 2008 traffic death toll of 1,231 (341 of whom, or 51 more than those on Flight 253, were cla.s.sified as "alcohol-impaired fatalities").

Had the twenty-three-year-old Nigerian set off his bomb, it would have been a nightmare for the people on board, and if it actually succeeded in taking the plane down, a tragedy for those who knew them. It would certainly have represented a safety and security issue, but it would not have been a national emergency, nor a national-security crisis.

And yet here's the strange thing: thanks to what didn't happen on Flight 253, the media essentially went mad, 24/7. Newspaper coverage of the failed plot and its ramifications actually grew for two full weeks after the incident until it had achieved something like full-spectrum dominance, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the days after Christmas, more than half the news links in blogs related to Flight 253. At the same time, the Republican criticism machine (and the media universe that goes with it) ramped up on the subject of the Obama administration's terror wimpiness; the global air transport system plunked down millions of dollars on new technology that evidently will not find underwear bombs; the homeland security-industrial complex had a field day; and fear, that adrenaline rush from h.e.l.l, was further embedded in the American way of life.

Under the circ.u.mstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so much.

The few Americans who, since 2001, have died from anything that could be called a terror attack in the United States-whether the thirteen killed at Fort Hood or the soldier murdered outside an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas-were far outnumbered by the thirty-two dead in a 2007 ma.s.s killing at Virginia Tech, not to speak of the relatively regular moments when workers or former workers "go postal." Since September 11, terror in the United States has rated above fatalities from shark attacks and not much else. Since the economic meltdown of 2008, it has, in fact, been left in the shade by violent deaths that stem from reactions to job loss, foreclosure, inability to pay the rent, and so on.

This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely convulsed by, and that can't seem to get enough of, fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.

Inst.i.tutionalizing Fear Inc.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, brought the fear of terrorism into the American bedroom via the TV screen. That fear was used with remarkable effectiveness by the Bush administration, which color-coded terror for its own ends.

Today, any possible or actual terror attack, any threat no matter how far-fetched, amateurish, poorly executed, or ineffective, raises a national alarm, always seeming to add to the power of the imperial presidency and threatening to open new "fronts" in the now-unnamed global war. The latest is in Yemen, thanks in part to that young Nigerian who was evidently armed with explosives by a home-grown organization of a few hundred men that goes by the name al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The fear of terrorism has, by now, been inst.i.tutionalized in our society-quite literally so-even if the thing we're afraid of has, on the scale of human problems, something of the will-o'-the-wisp about it. For those who remember their cold war fiction, it's more specter than SPECTRE.

That fear has been embedded in what once was an un-American word, more easily a.s.sociated with Soviet Russia or n.a.z.i Germany: "homeland." It has replaced "country," "land," and "nation" in the language of the terror-mongers. "The homeland" is the place that terrorism, and nothing but terrorism, can violate. In 2002, that terror-embedded word got its own official government agency: the Department of Homeland Security, our second "defense" department, which has a 2010 budget of $39.4 billion (while overall "homeland security" spending in the 2010 budget reached $70.2 billion). Around it has grown up a little-attended-to homeland-security complex with its own interests, businesses, a.s.sociations, and lobbyists (including jostling crowds of ex-politicians and ex-government bureaucrats).

As a result, more than eight years after 9/11, an amorphous state of mind has manifested itself in the actual state as a kind of Fear Inc. A number of factors have clearly gone into the creation of Fear Inc. and now ensure that fear is the drug constantly shot into the American body politic. These would include: The imperial presidency: The Bush administration used fear not only to promote its wars and its Global War on Terror, but also to unchain the commander in chief of an already imperial presidency from a host of restraints. The dangers of terror and of al-Qaeda, which became the global bogeyman, and the various proposed responses to it, including kidnapping ("extraordinary rendition"), secret imprisonment, and torture, turned out to be the royal road to the American unconscious and so to a presidency determined, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others liked to say, to take the gloves off. It remains so and, as a result, under Barack Obama, the imperial presidency only seems to gain ground. Under the pressure of the Flight 253 incident, for instance, the Obama administration has adopted the Bush administration's position that a president, under certain circ.u.mstances, has the authority to order the a.s.sa.s.sination of an American citizen abroad. In this case, New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, who has been linked to the 9/11 plotters, the Fort Hood killer, and Abdulmutallab. The Bush administration opened the door to this possibility and now a Democratic president may be stepping through.

The 24/7 media moment: 24/7 blitz coverage was once reserved for the deaths of presidents (as in the a.s.sa.s.sination of John F. Kennedy) and public events of agreed-upon import. In 1994, however, it became the coin of the media realm for any event bizarre enough, sensational enough, celebrity-based enough to glue eyeb.a.l.l.s. That June, O. J. Simpson engaged in his infamous low-speed car "chase" through Orange County followed by more than twenty news helicopters while ninety-five million viewers tuned in and thousands more gathered at highway overpa.s.ses to watch. No one's ever looked back. Of course, in a traditional media world that's shedding foreign and domestic bureaus and axing hordes of reporters, radically downsizing newsrooms and shrinking papers to next to nothing, the advantages of focusing reportorial energies on just one thing at a time are obvious. Those 24/7 energies are now regularly focused on the fear of terrorism and events that contribute to it, like the plot to down Flight 253.

The Republican criticism machine and the media that go with it: Once upon a time, even successful Republican administrations didn't have their own megaphone. That's why, in the Vietnam era, the Nixon administration battled the New York Times so fiercely (and-my own guess-that played a part in forcing the creation of the first "op-ed" page in 1970, which allowed administration figures like Vice President Spiro Agnew and ex-Nixon speechwriter William Safire to gain a voice at the paper). By the George W. Bush era, the struggle had abated. The Times and papers like it only had to be pacified or cut out of the loop, since from TV to talk radio, publishing to publicity, the Republicans had their own megaphone ready at hand. This is, by now, a machine chockablock full of politicians and ex-politicians, publishers, pundits, military "experts," journalists, shock jocks, and the like (categories that have a tendency to blend into each other). It adds up to a seamless web of promotion, publicity, and din. It's capable of gearing up on no notice and going on until a subject-none more popular than terrorism and Democratic spinelessness in the face of it-is temporarily flogged to death. It ensures that any failed terror attack, no matter how hopeless or pathetic, will be in the headlines and in public consciousness. It circulates constant fantasies about possible future apocalyptic terror attacks with atomic weaponry or other weapons of ma.s.s destruction. (And in all of the above, of course, it is helped by a host of tagalong pundits and experts, news shows, and news reports from the more liberal side of the aisle.) The Democrats who don't dare: It's remarkable that the sharpest president we've had in a while didn't dare get up in front of the American people after Flight 253 landed and tell everyone to calm down. He didn't, in fact, have a single intelligent thing to say about the event. He certainly didn't remind Americans that, whatever happened to Flight 253, they stood in far more danger heading out of their driveways behind the wheel or pulling into a bar on the way home for a beer or two. Instead, the Obama administration essentially abjectly apologized, insisted it would focus yet more effort and money on making America safe from air terrorism, widened a new front in the Global War on Terror in Yemen (speeding extra money and U.S. advisers that way), and when the din from its critics didn't end, "pushed back," as Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote, by claiming "that they were handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did." It's striking when a Democratic administration finds safety in the claim that it's acting like a Republican one, that it's following the path to the imperial presidency already cleared by George W. Bush. Fear does that to you, and the fear of terror has been inst.i.tutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of society.

9/11 Never Ends.

Fear has a way of reordering human worlds. That only a relatively small number of determined fanatics with extraordinarily limited access to American soil keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvious. What the fear machine produces is the dark underside of the charming Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, "A View of the World from 9th Avenue," in which Manhattan looms vast as the rest of the planet fades into near nothingness.

When you see the world "from 9th Avenue," or from an all-al-Qaeda-all-the-time "news" channel, you see it phantasmagorically. It's out of all realistic shape and proportion, which means you naturally make stupid decisions. You become incapable of sorting out what matters and what doesn't, what's primary and what's secondary. You become, in short, manipulable.

This is our situation today.

People always wonder: What would the impact of a second 9/11-style attack be on this country? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pinp.r.i.c.k terror events blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up to a second, third, fourth, fifth 9/11 when it comes to American consciousness.