Farewell, the American Century
by Tom Engelhardt and Andrew J. Bacevich


Imagine if, on the day in early April when Jiverly Voong walked into the American Civic Association Building in Binghamton, New York, and gunned down 13 people, you read this headline in the news: "Binghamton in shock as police investigate what some critics call 'mass murder.'" If American newspapers, as well as the TV and radio news were to adopt that as a form, we would, of course, find it absurd. Until proven guilty, a man with a gun may be called "a suspect," but we know mass murder when we see it. And yet, in one of the Bush administration's lingering linguistic triumphs, even as information on torture programs pours out, the word "torture" has generally suffered a similar fate.

The agents of that administration, for instance, used what, in the Middle Ages, used to be known bluntly as "the water torture" – we call it "waterboarding" – 183 times in a single month on a single prisoner and yet the other morning I woke up to this formulation on National Public Radio's Morning Edition: "...harsh interrogations that some consider torture." And here's how Gwen Ifill of the News Hour put it the other night: "A tough Senate report out today raised new questions about drastic interrogations of terror suspects in the Bush years." Or as USA Today typically had it: "Obama opened the door for possible investigation and prosecution of former Bush administration officials who authorized the 'enhanced interrogation techniques' that critics call torture." Or, for that matter, the New York Times: "...the Bush administration's use of waterboarding and other techniques that critiques say crossed the line into torture..."

Torture, as a word, except in documents or in the mouths of other people – those "critics" – has evidently lost its descriptive powers in our news world where almost any other formulation is preferred. Often these days the word of choice is "harsh," or even "brutal," both substitutes for the anodyne "enhanced" in the Bush administration's own description of the package of torture "techniques" it institutionalized and justified after the fact in those legal memos. The phrase was, of course, meant to be law-evading, since torture is a crime, not just in international law, but in this country. The fact is that, if you can't call something what it is, you're going to have a tough time facing what you've done, no less prosecuting crimes committed not quite in its name.

What we call things, the names we use, matters. How, for instance, we imagine our past affects how we see the present and future, as Andrew Bacevich makes clear below. It's little wonder that Bacevich's book, The Limits of Power, officially published in paperback today, became a bestseller. He has a way of hacking through the verbiage of our world, always heading for reality; he also has a way, as the Chinese used to put it, of "rectifying names" – that is, bringing reality and naming practices back into sync. Here, for instance, is how, at the end of Limits, he frames Washington's consensus urge to respond to two failed wars and a failing global mission by expanding the U.S. military:


"America doesn't need a bigger army. It needs a smaller – that is, more modest – foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities. Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise."

Now, let him go to work in the same fashion on our truncated "American Century" (and catch a video of him discussing the subject as well). ~ Tom

Rewriting the Past by Adding In What's Been Left Out
By Andrew J. Bacevich


In a recent column, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen wrote, "What Henry Luce called 'the American Century' is over." Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce's pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.

When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of Life, his essay, "The American Century," hit the newsstands at a moment when the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.

With the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, Americans diddled. Luce urged them to get off the dime. More than that, he summoned them to "accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world... to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Read today, Luce's essay, with its strange mix of chauvinism, religiosity, and bombast ("We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan to the entire world..."), does not stand up well. Yet the phrase "American Century" stuck and has enjoyed a remarkable run. It stands in relation to the contemporary era much as "Victorian Age" does to the nineteenth century. In one pithy phrase, it captures (or at least seems to capture) the essence of some defining truth: America as alpha and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding spirit and inspiration for all humankind.

In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the U.S. military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on December 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the U.S. not only preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to look like.

Thank You, Comrades

So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its celebrants.

The problems with this account are two-fold. First, it claims for the United States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores, or trivializes matters at odds with the triumphal story-line.

The net effect is to perpetuate an array of illusions that, whatever their value in prior decades, have long since outlived their usefulness. In short, the persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has become downright malignant. Although Richard Cohen may be right in declaring the American Century over, the American people – and especially the American political class – still remain in its thrall.

Constructing a past usable to the present requires a willingness to include much that the American Century leaves out.

For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.

By comparison, the United States suffered 2% of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.

For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true "Greatest Generation" is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.

Hard on the heels of World War II came the Cold War, during which erstwhile allies became rivals. Once again, after a decades-long struggle, the United States came out on top.

Yet in determining that outcome, the brilliance of American statesmen was far less important than the ineptitude of those who presided over the Kremlin. Ham-handed Soviet leaders so mismanaged their empire that it eventually imploded, permanently discrediting Marxism-Leninism as a plausible alternative to liberal democratic capitalism. The Soviet dragon managed to slay itself. So thank you, Comrades Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev.

Screwing the Pooch

What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by the United States – missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the problems bedeviling us today.

The instances of folly and criminality bearing the label "made-in-Washington" may not rank up there with the Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik Revolution, the appeasement of Adolf Hitler, or the Holocaust, but they sure don't qualify as small change. To give them their due is necessarily to render the standard account of the American Century untenable.

Here are several examples, each one familiar, even if its implications for the problems we face today are studiously ignored:

Cuba. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the proclaimed purpose of liberating the so-called Pearl of the Antilles. When that brief war ended, Washington reneged on its promise. If there actually has been an American Century, it begins here, with the U.S. government breaking a solemn commitment, while baldly insisting otherwise. By converting Cuba into a protectorate, the United States set in motion a long train of events leading eventually to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even today's Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The line connecting these various developments may not be a straight one, given the many twists and turns along the way, but the dots do connect.

The Bomb. Nuclear weapons imperil our existence. Used on a large scale, they could destroy civilization itself. Even now, the prospect of a lesser power like North Korea or Iran acquiring nukes sends jitters around the world. American presidents – Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line – declare the abolition of these weapons to be an imperative. What they are less inclined to acknowledge is the role the United States played in afflicting humankind with this scourge.

The United States invented the bomb. The United States – alone among members of the nuclear club – actually employed it as a weapon of war. The U.S. led the way in defining nuclear-strike capacity as the benchmark of power in the postwar world, leaving other powers like the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China scrambling to catch up. Today, the U.S. still maintains an enormous nuclear arsenal at the ready and adamantly refuses to commit itself to a no-first-use policy, even as it professes its horror at the prospect of some other nation doing as the United States itself has done.

Iran. Extending his hand to Tehran, President Obama has invited those who govern the Islamic republic to "unclench their fists." Yet to a considerable degree, those clenched fists are of our own making. For most Americans, the discovery of Iran dates from the time of the notorious hostage crisis of 1979-1981 when Iranian students occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran, detained several dozen U.S. diplomats and military officers, and subjected the administration of Jimmy Carter to a 444-day-long lesson in abject humiliation.

For most Iranians, the story of U.S.-Iranian relations begins somewhat earlier. It starts in 1953, when CIA agents collaborated with their British counterparts to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and return the Shah of Iran to his throne. The plot succeeded. The Shah regained power. The Americans got oil, along with a lucrative market for exporting arms. The people of Iran pretty much got screwed. Freedom and democracy did not prosper. The antagonism that expressed itself in November 1979 with the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was not entirely without cause.

Afghanistan. President Obama has wasted little time in making the Afghanistan War his own. Like his predecessor he vows to defeat the Taliban. Also like his predecessor he has yet to confront the role played by the United States in creating the Taliban in the first place. Washington once took pride in the success it enjoyed funneling arms and assistance to fundamentalist Afghans waging jihad against foreign occupiers. During the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, this was considered to represent the very acme of clever statecraft. U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen caused the Soviets fits. Yet it also fed a cancer that, in time, exacted a most grievous toll on Americans themselves – and has U.S. forces today bogged down in a seemingly endless war.

Click Here For Video

Act of Contrition

Had the United States acted otherwise, would Cuba have evolved into a stable and prosperous democracy, a beacon of hope for the rest of Latin America? Would the world have avoided the blight of nuclear weapons? Would Iran today be an ally of the United States, a beacon of liberalism in the Islamic world, rather than a charter member of the "axis of evil?" Would Afghanistan be a quiet, pastoral land at peace with its neighbors? No one, of course, can say what might have been. All we know for sure is that policies concocted in Washington by reputedly savvy statesmen now look exceedingly ill-advised.

What are we to make of these blunders? The temptation may be to avert our gaze, thereby preserving the reassuring tale of the American Century. We should avoid that temptation and take the opposite course, acknowledging openly, freely, and unabashedly where we have gone wrong. We should carve such acknowledgments into the face of a new monument smack in the middle of the Mall in Washington: We blew it. We screwed the pooch. We caught a case of the stupids. We got it ass-backwards.

Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.

Indeed, we ought to apologize. When it comes to avoiding the repetition of sin, nothing works like abject contrition. We should, therefore, tell the people of Cuba that we are sorry for having made such a hash of U.S.-Cuban relations for so long. President Obama should speak on our behalf in asking the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for forgiveness. He should express our deep collective regret to Iranians and Afghans for what past U.S. interventionism has wrought.

The United States should do these things without any expectations of reciprocity. Regardless of what U.S. officials may say or do, Castro won't fess up to having made his own share of mistakes. The Japanese won't liken Hiroshima to Pearl Harbor and call it a wash. Iran's mullahs and Afghanistan's jihadists won't be offering to a chastened Washington to let bygones be bygones.

No, we apologize to them, but for our own good – to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United States participated fully in the barbarism, folly, and tragedy that defines our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.

To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.

April 29, 2009

Tom Engelhardt co-founder of the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. To catch an audio interview in which he discusses our airborne assassins, click here. Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, is just out in paperback.

http://lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt378.html

The libertarian nuts at Rockwell always have some weird inner conflicts going on. Dreams of exceptionalism trapped in bodies immobilized by fear and loathing for the US.





Stowaway on the next Obama contrition tour.

That's the point, don't get caught up in exceptionalism, it's bullshit. The authors have nothing against Americans, he's taking the Establishment and Washington elite to task.





Obama's foreign policy is pretty much standard US foreign policy.

I doubt we'll see any shift in the war machine, the deceit, etc.

Who knows what Obama would do if he had freedom of action without political consequences. Being as much Kenyan as American I see no reason he should believe in American exceptionalism. So far the only thing he is exceptional at is apologizing for the US. Showing contrition as your writers would put it. That doesn't mean he can avoid using the military he insults to get his own way and prove he's not weak-kneed, even though there isn't much in Afghanistan worth fighting over.




 And I haven't heard him mention Osama since he was elected. That used to be an important goal. Important enough to take troops from Iraq to concentrate on, even when the outcome in Iraq was in doubt.

Are you on drugs?

damn good drugs



LMFAO!!

he was UNIMPORTANT enough to DUMP and thereby GO TO IRAQ

You sir, are a braying ass and a forking rightwing idiot. Do you even care about truth at all or are you just an assassin?

I would advise anyone to avoid that particular concoction. Kid Charlemagne would be proud.

Libertarians ought to believe in exceptionalism if anyone does. As opposed to the liberal/leftists that believe in equality of outcomes and socialism.

Libertarians are ardent proponents of individual liberty, private property and voluntary associations.

Worship of the state is not one of their core beliefs.

Belief in "American exceptionalism" is not belief in individualism.

used to be entitlement

now its just arrogance

BB

While I have no issue with Mr Bacevich decrying American missteps in his screed about the "American Century", he totally misses the mark when he wants to credit the Soviet Union for the defeat of Germany in WWII. Yes, Germany's conflict with the Soviet Union did largely seal her fate, and yes, too, the Soviets lost tens of millions in that conflict. But let's go back aways from the fact of their warfare against each other, or the claim the the US was a Johnny-Come-Lately who took cheap victories and claims of credit for their work. The Soviet Union only entered the conflict against Germany a little less than six months prior to the entry of the US in December of 1941. At least our official entry. In point of fact, we had already lost two destroyers to German action while escorting supply convoys across the Northern Atlantic to free Europe. Even more to the point, the only reason the Soviet Union became a belligerent against Germany was a strategic blunder and greed on the part of Hitler and his General Staff. They decided, with the start of Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941, that the Soviets would be easy pickings for the Wehrmacht, so it was time to militarily abrogate the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, in which they agreed not to fight each other and to acceed to each other's claims on what of Europe they decided to take by force. In short - had Hitler and his staff abided by that agreement - the Soviets would not have been one of the Allies, and there would have been no Eastern Front. But Hitler got greedy and his general Staff totally misread the success of Finland's resistance to Soviet conquest, as the Soviets were too inept to defeat the Wehrmacht. They forgot that the Finnish taiga is no place to try and fight a mechanized war - your forces will drown in the bogs and swamps - leaving it to an old-fashioned hand-to-hand battle where you are fighting a foe who knows the terrain far better than you. Advantage Finland. And Hitler and the boys read the tea leaves wrongly. But as bad as they read them - they still almost succeeded.

As a historian, or historical analyst, Mr. Bacevich makes a common mistake - he picked the wrong point in time to start his analysis to back up his factually correct argument that Germany's ship of state foundered on the rocks of the Soviet defense of her cities. That ship never had to sail those waters in the first place and in fact violated their own agreement with the Soviets on where they would sail. Had they not done so, Europe, including merry old England may well have succumbed prior to December the 7th, or at least so shortly thereafter that nothing we could have done from our end would have made a difference. Face it - the cause of Germany's defeat was Germany herself in this case.

So, "Thank You, Comrades"? No. Thank you Kameraden. For being stupid at the right time. Or as Napoleon said, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

That, of course, is nuts.

The Soviet Union could also take some credit for Hitler's success, as they signed a non-aggression pact to save themselves and that took pressure off of Hitler. The USSR was no better than the Germans, we just ended up as allies out of mutual necessity.

I certainly believe in American Exceptionalism, though it doesn't have anything to do with "equality of outcomes" or "Socialism," even if I were to accept the silly conjecture that these issue define the left. The problem with American Exceptionalism, of course, is that it sets a standard one needs to live up to in order to retain that honorific. We appear to have had great difficulty living up to that standard of the last 8 years, though we appear to be back on track now. When you see a liberal complaining about, say torture, it's because the person really believes in American Exceptionalism and consequently is serious about living up to it. Those who reject the idea that our country is exceptional in this manner appear to prefer an empty sort of populist nationalism over patriotism. This sort of populist nationalism would be just as at home in America as communist China. There's nothing special about it. The only difference in the geographical boundaries involved.

Oil in the Caucuses?

No, but belief in a smaller state doesn't preclude wanting that smaller state to be exceptional.

Obama has set a standard for downsizing expectations, I'll give him that. He's told us we will have to get by on less, and is working to provide it.

See, that's what I mean. Why don't you admit that you missed the whole "American exceptionalism" reference and made an irrelevant point?

Huh? Did the USSR not have enough enemies already in the mid 1930s? It should have taken it upon itself to engage Nazi Germany whilst England and France were enjoying their "belle indifference"?

That "took pressure off Hitler"? Who was pressuring Hitler when the non-agression pact was signed?

Most points are irrelevant, but if we didn't make those points along with the others there wouldn't be much left. I do believe a country can strive to be exceptional. I also understand the libertarian point about the individual. I don't see why we can't have both. Without trying to wipe out all those little non-exceptional countries that is.

Looking back, don't you think the Soviets would have eventually abrogated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Even if Hitler hadn't turned East, it's quite possible Stalin may have let his expansionist tendencies justify occupation past the Baltic States and Eastern Europe.



I like to go back WWI to understand the overall geopolitics of WWII. I've always thought WWII was simply the second act of WWI - a continuation of unfinished business from the old order of Europe.

You could take it back even further. The total war version of earlier more civil Euro conflicts.

The USSR did not have the luxury of taking unilateral aggresive military action against Germany. The USSR was not exactly 'secure' between 1917 and the non-aggression pact with Hitler. It's not as if England and France were really trying to contain Hitler a whole lot, either.

Stalin went much less than that with a non-aggression pact, and got surprised for his trouble.

Let's cut to the chase. What would you have expected the USSR, as a state, forget ideologies, personalities, etc. given its extremely recent date of birth and given its enemies, to have done?

Not trusting Hitler might have been a start. Granted, allying with democracies like Britain and France might not have bought them much.

Maybe, maybe not. In the secret portion of the pact itself take note:

"Secret Additional Protocol.

Article I. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.

Article II. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.

The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish States and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments.

In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.

Article III. With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinteredness in these areas.

Article IV. This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.
Moscow, August 23, 1939.
For the Government of the German Reich v. Ribbentrop

Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R. V. Molotov "

Note that this agreement gives them two of the three Baltic States, Latvia and Estonia, a fair amount of Poland, and Eastern Moldova to include her Black Sea ports. Thus, the USSR achieves quite a few of Russia's historical objectives - a warm water port, free access to the Baltic, revenge on Poland (who once ruled Russia), a "guarantee" of German non-aggression (That worked out well, didn't it?), and the inference of a free hand and lessened competition in the areas of Southeastern Europe beyond Bessarabia (the aforementioned Eastern Moldova). I think the USSR drove a pretty good bargain in the process of Germany trying real hard to not have to watch her back as she tried to consolidate Western Europe. Had both parties abided it may have worked out much differently than it did once Germany made her Napoleonic mistake.

There are quite a few historians who indeed refer to the First and Second World Wars as The European Civil Wars. A case can be made I think, and it is certain that the Treaty of Versailles had a direct connection to the setting of conditions for WWII including Hitler's rise to power. While that case is interesting , I find it a heavily Euro-centric analysis that ignores the linkages and obvious, and startling, warnings of the rise of an imperial power in Asia in Japan, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1903. But most Western historians make that error. Could be why most survey courses in modern or world histories always seem to relegate discussions of Asian history to the back of the book, and always seem to run out of semester before they run out of book. Not wise.

Easy to not bargain hard with the Ruskies if there is no intent to live by the treaty when it no longer suited Germany's needs... Not sure when it occurred to Germans that they would need vast oil resources to take over the world (or at least western world) but Africa and Russian campaigns seemed to be about that very thing. It would have "helped" if they had found a better partner than Italy and perhaps had a better coordinated strategy with Japan.

Watching several of the Midway documentaries on the military channel it was a string of fortunate events that created the opportunity for that victory, had it gone the other way, had the US lost it's three carriers, had the Japanese Navy then pushed hard for the capital ships, it could have been a very tough slog and perhaps not enough breathing room for a Europe first strategy...

It was a close run thing..

The one thing we had going was there were a LOT of carriers going to be coming online. The Japanese planned on a short war to gain ground then a peace deal with the decadent peace-loving and weak Americans. If they had known it was going to be unconditional surrender or nothing smarter heads might have prevailed.


http://ehistory.osu.edu/wwii/USNCV.cfm


The Ships
During the war twenty-two U.S. Navy fleet carriers (CVs) and nine small aircaft carriers (CVLs) served in World War II. Eight ships were built before the war started and the rest were built during the war. (Most of the carriers were named after American battles and famous former Navy ships.) The eight carriers built before the war are organized into the following classes:





For the first 18 months of the conflict, the U.S. had barely enough carriers to hold the line let alone project power in the Pacific. At one point in November 1942, only two carriers were operational in the Pacific (four carriers had been sunk.)

http://ehistory.osu.edu/wwii/pic_data.cfm?id=3940
At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), three operational carriers were stationed in the Pacific: Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga. (Langley was also in the Pacific but in October 1936 it had been converted from an operational carrier to a seaplane tender.) The other four carriers were located in the Atlantic. Yorktown and Hornet were transferred to the Pacific in December 1941 and March 1942. Wasp entered the Pacific in June 1942. Ranger was dispatched to the Pacific after a overhaul in July 1944.

Starting in December 1942, the Essex class carriers started to enter service and by late 1943 the U.S. had enough carrier forces to perform operations throughout the Pacific.