We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide.  And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide.  But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.  A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth.  It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.

The truth is, whatever we call them, it’s time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world.  Yes, I know, 9/11 was horrific.  Almost 3,000 dead, massive towers down, apocalyptic scenes.  And yes, when it comes to terror attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings weren’t pretty either.  But in both cases, those who committed the acts paid for or will pay for their crimes.

In the case of the terrarists -- and here I’m referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell -- you’re the one who’s going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren. You can take one thing for granted: not a single terrarist will ever go to jail, and yet they certainly knew what they were doing.

It wasn’t that complicated. In recent years, the companies they run have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more frenetic and ingenious ways. The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Only this month, the CO2 level reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. A consensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on.

How to Make Staggering Amounts of Money and Do In the Planet

None of this was exactly a mystery. It’s in the scientific literature. NASA scientist James Hansen first publicized the reality of global warming to Congress in 1988. It took a while -- thanks in part to the terrarists -- but the news of what was happening increasingly made it into the mainstream. Anybody could learn about it.

Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing “doubts” about the science (since it couldn’t actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes “dirtier” energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways.

The peak oil people hadn’t been wrong when they suggested years ago that we would soon hit a limit in oil production from which decline would follow.  The problem was that they were focused on traditional or “conventional” liquid oil reserves obtained from large reservoirs in easy-to-reach locations on land or near to shore.  Since then, the big energy companies have invested a remarkable amount of time, money, and (if I can use that word) energy in the development of techniques that would allow them to recover previously unrecoverable reserves (sometimes by processes that themselves burn striking amounts of fossil fuels): fracking, deep-water drilling, and tar-sands production, among others.

They also began to go after huge deposits of what energy expert Michael Klare calls “extreme” or “tough” energy -- oil and natural gas that can only be acquired through the application of extreme force or that requires extensive chemical treatment to be usable as a fuel.  In many cases, moreover, the supplies being acquired like heavy oil and tar sands are more carbon-rich than other fuels and emit more greenhouse gases when consumed.  These companies have even begun using climate change itself -- in the form of a melting Arctic -- to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies.  With the imprimatur of the Obama administration, Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has been preparing to test out possible drilling techniques in the treacherous waters off Alaska. 

Call it irony, if you will, or call it a nightmare, but Big Oil evidently has no qualms about making its next set of profits directly off melting the planet.  Its top executives continue to plan their futures (and so ours), knowing that their extremely profitable acts are destroying the very habitat, the very temperature range that for so long made life comfortable for humanity.

Their prior knowledge of the damage they are doing is what should make this a criminal activity.  And there are corporate precedents for this, even if on a smaller scale.  The lead industry, the asbestos industry, and the tobacco companies all knew the dangers of their products, made efforts to suppress the information or instill doubt about it even as they promoted the glories of what they made, and went right on producing and selling while others suffered and died.

And here’s another similarity: with all three industries, the negative results conveniently arrived years, sometimes decades, after exposure and so were hard to connect to it.  Each of these industries knew that the relationship existed.  Each used that time-disconnect as protection.  One difference: if you were a tobacco, lead, or asbestos exec, you might be able to ensure that your children and grandchildren weren’t exposed to your product.  In the long run, that’s not a choice when it comes to fossil fuels and CO2, as we all live on the same planet (though it's also true that the well-off in the temperate zones are unlikely to be the first to suffer).

If Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 plane hijackings or the Tsarnaev brothers’ homemade bombs constitute terror attacks, why shouldn’t what the energy companies are doing fall into a similar category (even if on a scale that leaves those events in the dust)?  And if so, then where is the national security state when we really need it? Shouldn’t its job be to safeguard us from terrarists and terracide as well as terrorists and their destructive plots?

The Alternatives That Weren’t

It didn’t have to be this way.

On July 15, 1979, at a time when gas lines, sometimes blocks long, were a disturbing fixture of American life, President Jimmy Carter spoke directly to the American people on television for 32 minutes, calling for a concerted effort to end the country’s oil dependence on the Middle East.  “To give us energy security,” he announced,

“I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun... Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.  Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”

It’s true that, at a time when the science of climate change was in its infancy, Carter wouldn’t have known about the possibility of an overheating world, and his vision of “alternative energy” wasn’t exactly a fossil-fuel-free one.  Even then, shades of today or possibly tomorrow, he was talking about having “more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias.”  Still, it was a remarkably forward-looking speech. 

Had we invested massively in alternative energy R&D back then, who knows where we might be today?  Instead, the media dubbed it the “malaise speech,” though the president never actually used that word, speaking instead of an American “crisis of confidence.”  While the initial public reaction seemed positive, it didn’t last long.  In the end, the president's energy proposals were essentially laughed out of the room and ignored for decades.

As a symbolic gesture, Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the White House.  (“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”)  As it turned out, “a road not taken” was the accurate description.  On entering the Oval Office in 1981, Ronald Reagan caught the mood of the era perfectly.  One of his first acts was to order the removal of those panels and none were reinstalled for three decades, until Barack Obama was president.

Carter would, in fact, make his mark on U.S. energy policy, just not quite in the way he had imagined.  Six months later, on January 23, 1980, in his last State of the Union Address, he would proclaim what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine: “Let our position be absolutely clear,” he said. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

No one would laugh him out of the room for that.  Instead, the Pentagon would fatefully begin organizing itself to protect U.S. (and oil) interests in the Persian Gulf on a new scale and America’s oil wars would follow soon enough.  Not long after that address, it would start building up a Rapid Deployment Force in the Gulf that would in the end become U.S. Central Command.  More than three decades later, ironies abound: thanks in part to those oil wars, whole swaths of the energy-rich Middle East are in crisis, if not chaos, while the big energy companies have put time and money into a staggeringly fossil-fuel version of Carter’s “alternative” North America.  They’ve focused on shale oil, and on shale gas as well, and with new production methods, they are reputedly on the brink of turning the United States into a “new Saudi Arabia.”

If true, this would be the worst, not the best, of news.  In a world where what used to pass for good news increasingly guarantees a nightmarish future, energy “independence” of this sort means the extraction of ever more extreme energy, ever more carbon dioxide heading skyward, and ever more planetary damage in our collective future.  This was not the only path available to us, or even to Big Oil.

With their staggering profits, they could have decided anywhere along the line that the future they were ensuring was beyond dangerous.  They could themselves have led the way with massive investments in genuine alternative energies (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, algal, and who knows what else), instead of the exceedingly small-scale ones they made, often for publicity purposes.  They could have backed a widespread effort to search for other ways that might, in the decades to come, have offered something close to the energy levels fossil fuels now give us.  They could have worked to keep the extreme-energy reserves that turn out to be surprisingly commonplace deep in the Earth.

And we might have had a different world (from which, by the way, they would undoubtedly have profited handsomely).  Instead, what we’ve got is the equivalent of a tobacco company situation, but on a planetary scale.  To complete the analogy, imagine for a moment that they were planning to produce even more prodigious quantities not of fossil fuels but of cigarettes, knowing what damage they would do to our health.  Then imagine that, without exception, everyone on Earth was forced to smoke several packs of them a day.

If that isn’t a terrorist -- or terrarist -- attack of an almost unimaginable sort, what is?  If the oil execs aren’t terrarists, then who is?  And if that doesn’t make the big energy companies criminal enterprises, then how would you define that term?

To destroy our planet with malice aforethought, with only the most immediate profits on the brain, with only your own comfort and wellbeing (and those of your shareholders) in mind: Isn’t that the ultimate crime? Isn’t that terracide?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note: Thanks go to my colleague and friend Nick Turse for coming up with the word "terracide."]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

I worked for years as an editor at Pantheon Books. Its publisher, maybe the most adventurous in the business, was André Schiffrin. Among his many accomplishments, he "discovered" Studs Terkel (already a well-known Chicago radio personality), published his first oral history (Division Street: America), and made him a bestseller. Sometime after I arrived at Pantheon in the mid-1970s, he asked me to take a last look at a new manuscript by Studs. It was the equivalent of sending the second team onto the field, but it began my own long relationship with the famed oral historian. He was an experience -- a small man who, when he wasn't listening professionally in a fashion beyond compare, never stopped talking. In doing so, he had an almost magical way of making those around him feel larger than life. Later, I would be the editor for two of his oral histories, one on death and the other on hope (in that splendid order and the second with the Studs-appropriate title Hope Dies Last).

Last October, Bill Moyers interviewed me about the dismal state of American politics. As our conversation was ending, he suddenly asked: "What keeps you going against all the evidence?" At that moment, Studs came to mind. I mentioned editing "one of the greats of our world" and responded this way: "It turned out that when he wrote his book about hope, it was all about activists and the basic point he made was: in good times you could just be hopeful about your life. You didn't have to be an activist. You didn't have to be an anything. In bad times, if you want to be hopeful, you have to take a step. You've got to take some step to do something in the world. And in that sense, TomDispatch is my medicine against despair. So what makes me hopeful is doing TomDispatch."

All true. But I realize now that it wasn't quite a full response. I had left out one crucial figure in my life: Rebecca Solnit, who taught me how to hope in a world that seemed dismal indeed. She was the one who -- I've written about it before -- slipped through the barely ajar door of my life in May 2003, at a moment as grim and dreary as any in my political experience. The largest antiwar movement ever to protest a war that had yet to happen had just packed its tents and gone home in despair, while Baghdad was occupied by American troops and George W. Bush and his top officials were in their "mission accomplished" triumphalist mode. Many activists then feared that they would remain so forever and would have dismissed out of hand someone who suggested that their Pax Americana dreams of domination would begin unraveling in mere weeks (as happened), not decades or centuries.

Ten years ago, exactly to the day, I published Rebecca's miraculous piece "Acts of Hope," which she would later expand into her book Hope in the Dark. It was written to welcome that "darkness" which seemed already to be enveloping us. It was written with a sense of how the expectable unravels, of how the future surprises us, often enough with offerings not of horror but of hope.

Every now and then, news about U.S. military bases abroad actually gets a little attention. The most recent example: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's announcement that the U.S. will be able to keep nine bases after the 2014 withdrawal of its combat troops. ("'They want nine bases... across the country, in Kabul, Bagram, Mazar, Jalalabad, Gardez, Kandahar, Helmand, Shindand and Herat,' he told faculty members and students [at Kabul University]. 'We agree to give the bases. We see their presence after 2014 in Afghanistan as a positive.'") These aren't, of course, small bases. Two of them, Bagram and Kandahar, are veritable monsters, and so offer some indication of Washington's possible plans -- evidently still in flux -- for keeping U.S. troops, trainers, advisors, special operations forces, CIA types, private security contractors, assorted allied Afghan militias, and whatnot in place once the war is officially "over" and "withdrawal" complete.

Most of the time, though, you have to be a fanatic news jockey to notice pieces about what could be considered the most singular aspect of the American overseas persona: our "empire of bases" (as Chalmers Johnson used to call it). Though base numbers remain staggering and historically unprecedented, most Americans are hardly aware of their existence. So, picking and choosing from the last month of overlooked base news, how many of you noticed that a U.S. KC-135 refueling plane, based at an American "military installation" connected to Manas International Airport near Bishtek, went down over northern Kyrgyzstan? How many of you knew that the U.S. had a military installation in Kyrgyzstan, just a hop, skip, and a jump across Tajikistan from Afghanistan? How many of you can even locate Kyrgyzstan? (I just checked my own atlas to be sure!)

How many of you heard that a U.S. military helicopter, evidently from a U.S. base -- one of a number -- in South Korea, crashed recently near the North Korean border? Or that the Chinese press is now plugging for the "return" of the Japanese island of Okinawa, with its huge U.S. military complex? How many of you realized that 68 years after the end of World War II, the U.S. still has dozens of bases there and that Okinawans continue to protest the construction of a new base amid the staggering concentration of foreign military installations on their soil?

How many of you noticed that Spain, going through tough economic times and significant defense cutbacks, has upped its basing relationship with the U.S.? According to the Christian Science Monitor, "500 U.S. Marines are in the process of deploying to Morón Air Base in southern Spain as part of a rapid reaction force that will act as the vanguard to protect American interests in the increasingly volatile North African region." And speaking of Northern Africa, did you notice the report by John Reed at Foreign Policy mapping U.S. installations, especially drone bases, there and elsewhere in Africa, including satellite shots of installations you've probably never heard of in places like Arba Minch in Ethiopia, Niamey in Niger, the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, and Lamu on the Kenyan coast? (Hey, don't beat up on yourself. We Americans have next to no idea what's being done in our name globally!)

Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible weapon of all, the atomic bomb, that city-buster, that potential civilization-destroyer, was used as soon as it was available. Depending on your historical interpretation, it was either responsible for ending World War II in the Pacific or rushed into action before that war could end. In either case, it launched the atomic age.

During the Cold War, the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, relied on a strategy that used to be termed, without irony, "mutual assured destruction" or MAD. Its intent was simple enough: to hold off a planetary holocaust by threatening to commit one. With their massive nuclear arsenals, those two imperial states held each other and everyone else on the planet hostage. Each safely secured more than enough nukes to be able to absorb a "first strike" that would devastate its territory, leaving possibly tens of millions of its citizens dead or wounded, and still return the (dis)favor.

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, nuclear weapons did, too -- without going away. The American and Russian arsenals, and the nuclear geography that underlay them, remained in place, just largely unremarked upon. In the meantime, the weaponry itself spread. In those years, the last superpower, which seldom discussed its own arsenal, selectively focused its energies on containing the spread of nuclear weaponry in three nations: the first was Pakistan some part of whose ever-growing nuclear arsenal it feared might fall into the hands of extreme Islamic fundamentalists in a land Washington was in the process of destabilizing via a war in neighboring Afghanistan and a CIA drone campaign in its tribal borderlands; the second was North Korea, a country encouraged in its quest for nuclear weapons by watching the U.S. take down two autocrats, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, who gave up their nuclear programs prior to U.S. interventions; and the third was Iran, which had a nuclear program (started by the U.S. in an era when the country was considered our bulwark in the Persian Gulf), but as far as anyone knows no plans to weaponize it.

In the meantime, Washington (and so the American media) simply ignored the very existence of Israel's massive nuclear arsenal and actually aided the further development of the Indian nuclear program. In these years, it also threatened or, in the case of Iraq, a country that no longer had a nuclear program, actually launched what Jonathan Schell has called "disarmament wars."

That the spread of nuclear weapons, whatever the country, is a danger to us all is obvious. Who exactly will use such weapons next and where remains unknown. But there is no reason to believe that, sooner or later, nuclear weapons -- which have now spread to nine countries -- and are likely to spread further, will not be used again.

Recently, a Texas-based nonprofit got a lot of publicity by announcing that it had fired the first handgun ever made almost totally by a 3-D printer. This act, modest enough in itself, nonetheless highlights a trend of our time. Weaponry that once only a large state, mobilizing scientists, industrial power, and resources could produce can now be made by ever-smaller states -- say North Korea with limited resources and a malnourished populace. Similarly, weapons once made by large companies can now be assembled by individuals. Or put another way, ever more powerful weaponry is increasingly available to ever less powerful states and even non-state actors. It was, for instance, the Aum Shinrikyo cult that, in 1995, produced sarin nerve gas -- "the poor man's atomic bomb" -- in its own laboratory and used it in the Tokyo subways, killing 13, just as in the U.S. anthrax began arriving in the mail a week after 9/11, killing five people.

We don't know where or why a nuclear weapon will be used. We don't know whether it will be a North Korean, South Korean, Indian, Pakistani, Lebanese, Iranian, Israeli, or even American city that will be hit. All we should assume is that, as long as such weapons are developed, amassed, and stored for use, one day they will be used with consequences that, as Nick Turse, author of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves, reports in "Nuclear Terror in the Middle East," are -- even for those who have studied the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- beyond imagining.

Indefinite detention of the innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way. Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a hunger strike. That act has certainly gotten Washington's and the media's collective attention. After all, could there be anything more extreme than striking against your own body to make a point? Suicide by strike? It's the ultimate statement of protest and despair. Certainly, the strikers have succeeded in pushing Guantanamo out of the netherworld of non-news and onto front pages, into presidential news conferences, and to the top of the TV newscasts. That, in a word, is extraordinary. But what exactly do those prisoners, many now being force-fed, want to highlight? Here's one thing: despite the promise he made on entering the Oval office, President Obama has obviously not made much of an effort to close the prison, which, as he said recently, "hurts us, in terms of our international standing... [and] is a recruitment tool for extremists."

If Congress has been thoroughly recalcitrant when it comes to closing Guantanamo, the president's idea of what shutting down that prison meant proved curious indeed. His plan involved transferring many of the prisoners from Cuba, that crown jewel of the offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the Bush administration set up in January 2002, to a super-max-style prison in Illinois ("Gitmo North"). That would mean, of course, transferring indefinite detention from the offshore world of extraordinary rendition, black sites, and torture directly into the heart of the American justice system. Obama himself has indicated that at least 50 of the prisoners can, in his view, never be released or tried (in part because confessions were tortured out of some of them). They would be kept in what he, in the past, politely termed "prolonged detention."

Here's a second thing the strikers undoubtedly wanted to highlight and it's even harder to take in: Guantanamo now holds 86 prisoners (out of the 166 caged there) who have been carefully vetted by the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and so on, and found to have done nothing for which they could be charged or should be imprisoned. All 86 have been cleared for release -- years late, often after brutal interrogation experiences sometimes involving torture. The problem: there is nowhere to release them to, especially since the majority of them are Yemenis and President Obama has imposed a moratorium on transferring any prisoner to Yemen.

Then there are the prisoners who may indeed have done something criminal in regard to the U.S., but had confessions tortured out of them which won't hold up in court. They are among the ones who will never be brought to trial, but never cleared for release either. In other words, indefinite detention, something anathema to the American justice system, will for the conceivable future be us. The fact that relatively few Americans seem fazed by this should be startling. No charges, no trials, but never getting out of prison: that would once have been associated with the practices of a totalitarian state.

We know one thing: no one, not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, or other top officials involved in setting up such a global system of injustice, sweeping up the innocent with the guilty, and subjecting them to horrors without end (including now force-feeding) will ever be brought to justice in an American court, nor will anyone involved in the system of rendition, torture, or abuse. In the Obama years, while indefinite detention remained a grim American reality, the government, as TomDispatch regular and former State Department officer Peter Van Buren himself experienced, honed other methods for punishing those it was unhappy with, especially whistleblowers of all sorts.

It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia.  Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms.  There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad.  Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared.

And then there was one.  There had never been such a moment: a single nation astride the globe without a competitor in sight.  There wasn’t even a name for such a state (or state of mind).  “Superpower” had already been used when there were two of them.  “Hyperpower” was tried briefly but didn’t stick.  “Sole superpower” stood in for a while but didn’t satisfy.  “Great Power,” once the zenith of appellations, was by then a lesser phrase, left over from the centuries when various European nations and Japan were expanding their empires.  Some started speaking about a “unipolar” world in which all roads led... well, to Washington.

To this day, we’ve never quite taken in that moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly -- above all, to Washington -- became imperial crash-and-burn.  Left standing, the Cold War's victor seemed, then, like an empire of everything under the sun.  It was as if humanity had always been traveling toward this spot.  It seemed like the end of the line.

The Last Empire?

After the rise and fall of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Mongols, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English, the Germans, and the Japanese, some process seemed over.  The United States was dominant in a previously unimaginable way -- except in Hollywood films where villains cackled about their evil plans to dominate the world.

As a start, the U.S. was an empire of global capital.  With the fall of Soviet-style communism (and the transformation of a communist regime in China into a crew of authoritarian “capitalist roaders”), there was no other model for how to do anything, economically speaking.  There was Washington’s way -- and that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both controlled by Washington) -- or there was the highway, and the Soviet Union had already made it all too clear where that led: to obsolescence and ruin.

In addition, the U.S. had unprecedented military power.  By the time the Soviet Union began to totter, America's leaders had for nearly a decade been consciously using “the arms race” to spend its opponent into an early grave.  And here was the curious thing after centuries of arms races: when there was no one left to race, the U.S. continued an arms race of one.

In the years that followed, it would outpace all other countries or combinations of countries in military spending by staggering amounts.  It housed the world’s most powerful weapons makers, was technologically light years ahead of any other state, and was continuing to develop future weaponry for 2020, 2040, 2060, even as it established a near monopoly on the global arms trade (and so, control over who would be well-armed and who wouldn’t).

It had an empire of bases abroad, more than 1,000 of them spanning the globe, also an unprecedented phenomenon.  And it was culturally dominant, again in a way that made comparisons with other moments ludicrous.  Like American weapons makers producing things that went boom in the night for an international audience, Hollywood's action and fantasy films took the world by storm.  From those movies to the golden arches, the swoosh, and the personal computer, there was no other culture that could come close to claiming such a global cachet.

The key non-U.S. economic powerhouses of the moment -- Europe and Japan -- maintained militaries dependent on Washington, had U.S. bases littering their territories, and continued to nestle under Washington’s “nuclear umbrella.”  No wonder that, in the U.S., the post-Soviet moment was soon proclaimed “the end of history,” and the victory of “liberal democracy” or “freedom” was celebrated as if there really were no tomorrow, except more of what today had to offer.

No wonder that, in the new century, neocons and supporting pundits would begin to claim that the British and Roman empires had been second-raters by comparison.  No wonder that key figures in and around the George W. Bush administration dreamed of establishing a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and possibly over the globe itself (as well as a Pax Republicana at home).  They imagined that they might actually prevent another competitor or bloc of competitors from arising to challenge American power. Ever.

No wonder they had remarkably few hesitations about launching their incomparably powerful military on wars of choice in the Greater Middle East.  What could possibly go wrong?  What could stand in the way of the greatest power history had ever seen?

Assessing the Imperial Moment, Twenty-First-Century-Style

Almost a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union disappeared, what’s remarkable is how much -- and how little -- has changed.

On the how-much front: Washington’s dreams of military glory ran aground with remarkable speed in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Then, in 2007, the transcendent empire of capital came close to imploding as well, as a unipolar financial disaster spread across the planet.  It led people to begin to wonder whether the globe’s greatest power might not, in fact, be too big to fail, and we were suddenly -- so everyone said -- plunged into a “multipolar world.”

Meanwhile, the Greater Middle East descended into protest, rebellion, civil war, and chaos without a Pax Americana in sight, as a Washington-controlled Cold War system in the region shuddered without (yet) collapsing.  The ability of Washington to impose its will on the planet looked ever more like the wildest of fantasies, while every sign, including the hemorrhaging of national treasure into losing trillion-dollar wars, reflected not ascendancy but possible decline.

And yet, in the how-little category: the Europeans and Japanese remained nestled under that American “umbrella,” their territories still filled with U.S. bases.  In the Euro Zone, governments continued to cut back on their investments in both NATO and their own militaries.  Russia remained a country with a sizeable nuclear arsenal and a reduced but still large military.  Yet it showed no signs of “superpower” pretensions.  Other regional powers challenged unipolarity economically -- Turkey and Brazil, to name two -- but not militarily, and none showed an urge either singly or in blocs to compete in an imperial sense with the U.S.

Washington’s enemies in the world remained remarkably modest-sized (though blown to enormous proportions in the American media echo-chamber).  They included a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran and North Korea), a minority insurgency or two, and relatively small groups of Islamist “terrorists.”  Otherwise, as one gauge of power on the planet, no more than a handful of other countries had even a handful of military bases outside their territory.

Under the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its moment of total ascendancy, the Earth’s sole superpower with a military of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication couldn’t win a war against minimally armed guerillas.  Even more strikingly, despite having no serious opponents anywhere, it seemed not on the rise but on the decline, its infrastructure rotting out, its populace economically depressed, its wealth ever more unequally divided, its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power heading toward the national security state.  Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.

And then, of course, there was China.  On the planet that humanity has inhabited these last several thousand years, can there be any question that China would have been the obvious pick to challenge, sooner or later, the dominion of the reigning great power of the moment?  Estimates are that it will surpass the U.S. as the globe’s number one economy by perhaps 2030.

Right now, the Obama administration seems to be working on just that assumption.  With its well-publicized “pivot” (or “rebalancing”) to Asia, it has been moving to “contain” what it fears might be the next great power.  However, while the Chinese are indeed expanding their military and challenging their neighbors in the waters of the Pacific, there is no sign that the country’s leadership is ready to embark on anything like a global challenge to the U.S., nor that it could do so in any conceivable future.  Its domestic problems, from pollution to unrest, remain staggering enough that it’s hard to imagine a China not absorbed with domestic issues through 2030 and beyond.

And Then There Was One (Planet)

Militarily, culturally, and even to some extent economically, the U.S. remains surprisingly alone on planet Earth in imperial terms, even if little has worked out as planned in Washington.  The story of the years since the Soviet Union fell may prove to be a tale of how American domination and decline went hand-in-hand, with the decline part of the equation being strikingly self-generated.

And yet here’s a genuine, even confounding, possibility: that moment of “unipolarity” in the 1990s may really have been the end point of history as human beings had known it for millennia -- the history, that is, of the rise and fall of empires.  Could the United States actually be the last empire?  Is it possible that there will be no successor because something has profoundly changed in the realm of empire building?  One thing is increasingly clear: whatever the state of imperial America, something significantly more crucial to the fate of humanity (and of empires) is in decline.  I’m talking, of course, about the planet itself.

The present capitalist model (the only one available) for a rising power, whether China, India, or Brazil, is also a model for planetary decline, possibly of a precipitous nature.  The very definition of success -- more middle-class consumers, more car owners, more shoppers, which means more energy used, more fossil fuels burned, more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere -- is also, as it never would have been before, the definition of failure.  The greater the “success,” the more intense the droughts, the stronger the storms, the more extreme the weather, the higher the rise in sea levels, the hotter the temperatures, the greater the chaos in low-lying or tropical lands, the more profound the failure.  The question is: Will this put an end to the previous patterns of history, including the until-now-predictable rise of the next great power, the next empire?  On a devolving planet, is it even possible to imagine the next stage in imperial gigantism?

Every factor that would normally lead toward “greatness” now also leads toward global decline.  This process -- which couldn’t be more unfair to countries having their industrial and consumer revolutions late -- gives a new meaning to the phrase “disaster capitalism.”

Take the Chinese, whose leaders, on leaving the Maoist model behind, did the most natural thing in the world at the time: they patterned their future economy on the United States -- on, that is, success as it was then defined.  Despite both traditional and revolutionary communal traditions, for instance, they decided that to be a power in the world, you needed to make the car (which meant the individual driver) a pillar of any future state-capitalist China.  If it worked for the U.S., it would work for them, and in the short run, it worked like a dream, a capitalist miracle -- and China rose.

It was, however, also a formula for massive pollution, environmental degradation, and the pouring of ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere in record amounts.  And it's not just China.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about that country's ravenous energy use, including its possible future “carbon bombs,” or the potential for American decline to be halted by new extreme methods of producing energy (fracking, tar-sands extraction, deep-water drilling).  Such methods, however much they hurt local environments, might indeed turn the U.S. into a “new Saudi Arabia.”  Yet that, in turn, would only contribute further to the degradation of the planet, to decline on an ever-larger scale.

What if, in the twenty-first century, going up means declining?  What if the unipolar moment turns out to be a planetary moment in which previously distinct imperial events -- the rise and fall of empires -- fuse into a single disastrous system?

What if the story of our times is this: And then there was one planet, and it was going down.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

As a teenager, you dreamed of being a writer and I imagine you dream of it still. When young, you were a cartoonist and, ever since, you've noted the exaggeration in our world. You were the editor-in-chief of a newspaper and, with the skills you honed, you've never stopped editing our history -- from our first myths to late last night. You were imprisoned and it left you with an understanding of how we've imprisoned this planet and its inhabitants. You went into exile and so grasp the way many in this uprooted world of ours never feel, or are allowed to feel, at home.

You've traveled this planet so widely that, as a friend of yours once told you, "If it's true what they say about the road being made by walking, you must be the commissioner of public works." And on those travels, you've discovered that boundaries between states (and states of mind) are not to be trusted, so as a writer you've never felt cowed by categories or hesitated to merge journalism, history, scholarship, and the thrilling feel of fiction, of recreating other worlds so intensely that we seem to inhabit them ourselves.

And none of this would have happened if your youthful dream -- to be a soccer player -- had come true. Instead, you've played "the beautiful game" on the page. You've even explained our unjust, unequal world by noting the only place where North and South meet on "an equal footing" -- a soccer field at the mouth of the Amazon River that the Equator cuts right through, "so each team plays one half in the South and the other half in the North."

You're so well known in Latin America that, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez met President Barack Obama, the only gift he chose to give him was a copy your early book Open Veins of Latin America, whose subtitle explains why it remains so relevant 42 years after its publication: "five centuries of the pillage of a continent."

Your work has been translated into 28 languages, which is undoubtedly part of the reason you mourn the loss of words on this planet. You have a way of finding people. Your first English translator, Cedric Belfrage, was a former British journalist who covered the silent movies in Hollywood for the Beaverbrook press, helped found the left-wing National Guardian in the U.S., was deported in the McCarthy period, and ended up in Mexico. You seem to have known everyone who was anyone, for better and sometimes worse, over the last several thousand years, and many who could have been someone if their circumstances and the powers-that-be hadn't made that impossible. You've taken us with you to visit Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as she first enters a convent in "New Spain," studies "the things God created" that were forbidden to women, is set upon by the Inquisition, forced to renounce literature, and "chooses silence, or accepts it, and so America loses its best poet."

You've been with Ben Franklin as he sends up a kite and discovers "that heavenly fires and thunders express not the wrath of God but electricity in the atmosphere," while his sister Jane "resembling him in talent and strength of will," has a child every two years and toils raising those that live, forgotten by history, but not by you. You've been with Joseph Stalin's son Yakov, after his suicide attempt, when his father standing at his hospital bedside tells him, "You can't even get that right."

You somehow take our embattled world and tell its many stories in ways no one else can. And perhaps because people sense the storyteller in you, they regularly -- I've seen this myself -- come up to you and spill their guts. So one more volume from you, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, a daily prayer book for our moment, is cause for elation. We should celebrate you for stealing the fire of the gods, like the Cakchiquels, descended from the Mayas, who reputedly hid it "in their mountain caves," or in your case, in your books which, from Open Veins to Children of the Days, burn ever bright.

After all these decades, here's the strange thing: what I remember are his hands, not his face. But perhaps that's fitting for a writer. His name was Robert Shaplen and he was a correspondent for The New Yorker. My parents knew him and, as a boy, I idolized him. From World War II on, he covered Asia. He seemed to me the most adventurous man on the planet. With him in mind, I was sure that there could be nothing better or more romantic than being a "foreign correspondent." (That, of course, was before I grew up and discovered that I didn't even like to travel.) It was a dream that stuck with me for years, along with the dream of the newspaper itself, and the habit learned in boyhood -- now disappearing from much of our world -- of reading the paper daily (sports section first, then front to back).

Even now, it's an addiction I can't shake. When it comes to the print paper, however, I'm increasingly part of a lonely crowd. I first realized the change was coming in the early 2000s. Back then, I used to parachute into the Berkeley journalism school every spring to be an editor to a crew of future reporters. Every morning, you could get free copies of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and a couple of other papers. As a lifelong news junkie, it seemed like heaven to me. But to my surprise, my students often didn't take the papers at all, free or not. One day, one of them explained that by the time she hit school, she had already checked out the New York Times and the L.A. Times online twice (the night before and that morning). The actual paper was already older than Methuselah in her eyes.

In a new piece -- "Is the Press Too Big to Fail?" -- media critic Todd Gitlin offers a timely reminder that my journalistic dreams were just that. The news, with the usual notable exceptions, was generally a tawdry affair in the service of power. Still, can there be any question that, as the newspaper fades, we're entering a new age of conglomerated mainstream chaos? You only needed to check out the "coverage" of the Boston Marathon bombing aftermath -- which you would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb to miss -- to know that. What possible dreams (other than coverage nightmares) could emerge from that?

If we got what must have been the largest, most militarized manhunt in our history for two young men briefly on the run in one city, I suspect we also got the largest, most intensive, least impressive media coverage for a single event of (probably) little long-term import. It was the sort of thing that gives the word "overkill" a bad name. (Have we learned nothing from the over-the-top reaction to the 9/11 attacks?) The case itself may fade, but the example of shutting down a city and flooding it with thousands of heavily up-armored police and SWAT teams won't, nor will the flooding of it with just about every media resource that exists on the planet. There's been nothing like it for blotting out the rest of the world (not in my memory anyway) since the O. J. Simpson car chase of 1994 -- and that only lasted hours.

Where's the romance of journalism now? Not, certainly, in watching days of those talking heads pontificating, of terror "experts" offering their remarkably pointless expertise while next to nothing was known about the suspected bombers, of listening to an endless stream of non-news or swiftly reported errors and idiocies, or of watching vast crowds of reporters cordoned off from the hope of being close to any possible story, ducking and talking breathlessly about nothing whatsoever.

Of course, since O.J., there have been memorable moments in the development of the single 24/7 media spectacle, starting with the first Gulf War in 1990, that initial TV total war with logos, high-tech graphics, nose-cone snuff films, theme music, and retired American generals ("consultants") mimicking sports announcers analyzing the campaign that units they might once have commanded were involved in. During the recent manhunt, however, just about every major cable channel was on it, and the networks soon followed so that for days all of TV seemed to be nothing but a vast media gaggle in the streets of Boston. The news itself was a bizarre potage of rumor, unnamed sources with misinformation, quarter-truths, half-truths, outright inaccuracies, and god knows what else. In an age of news staff cutbacks and dropping revenue, it's so much cheaper, of course, to focus all your media energies on one single place and any unfolding event that will glue eyeballs. It was certainly a bizarre spectacle that still needs its chronicler.

In the meantime, Gitlin offers a little survey of American print journalism on the way down, without a hint of romance in sight.

Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.”  In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened.  Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power.  He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world... for future forms of blowback.”

Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.”  In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged.  It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.

Talk about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did. All of this laid the foundation for... well, in 1999 when Johnson was writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had “freed ourselves of... any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe.”

With Blowback, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically unprecedented garrisoning of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally.  After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to the center of the 9/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and became a bestseller, while “blowback” and that phrase “unintended consequences” made their way into our everyday language.

Chalmers Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar.  Now, more than a decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter.  His name is Jeremy Scahill.  In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in service to its foreign wars, was working manically to “privatize” national security and the U.S. military by hiring rent-a-spies, rent-a-guns, and rent-a-corporations for its proliferating wars. 

In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation to heart -- that we Americans can’t see our world as it is.  And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows.  As two administrations in Washington arrogated ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making.  In the process, they transformed an increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military.

In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state -- and no one else.  Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end.  It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name.  As a result, there was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written.  Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.

Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC.  In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., “an executive assassination wing,” as Seymour Hersh once put it, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.  It next turned its hunter/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military.  In those years, Scahill started following the footsteps of special ops types into the field, while mainlining into sources in their community as well as other parts of the American military and intelligence world.

In his new book, he dramatically retraces the bureaucratic intel wars in Washington as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community muscled up, and secret presidential orders gave JSOC, in particular, unprecedented authority to turn the globe into a free-fire zone.  Finally, as a reporter, he traveled to a series of danger spots -- Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan -- that Americans could care less about, where the U.S. military and the CIA (in conjunction with private security contractors) were experimenting with and developing new ways of waging Washington’s spreading secret wars.

As Scahill writes in his acknowledgements, thanking another reporter who traveled with him, “We were shot at together on rooftops in Mogadishu, slept on dingy floors in rural Afghanistan, and traveled together in the netherlands of Southern Yemen.”  That catches something of the spirit behind a book produced by a dedicated, unembedded, independent reporter -- a thoroughly impressive, even awe-inspiring piece of work.

In the process, Scahill, who in these years broke a number of major stories as national security correspondent for the Nation magazine, fills us in on those American military death squads in Iraq, nightmarish special ops night raids in Afghanistan (that target all the wrong people), secret renditions of terror suspects to a CIA-funded jail in Somalia (after President Obama had forsworn “rendition”), the dispatching of drones and cruise missiles in disastrous strikes on civilians in Yemen, the hunting down and assassination of American citizens (aka terror suspects, although 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki certainly wasn’t one) also in Yemen on the orders of the president, the complex world of JSOC-CIA-Blackwater operations in Pakistan -- and so much more, including an indication that JSOC has even launched secret ground operations of some sort in Uzbekistan. (Who knew?)

Dirty Wars is also, in Johnson’s terms, a history of the future; that is, a history of potential blowback-to-come, a message in a bottle sent to us from the hidden front lines of America’s global battlefields -- and therein lies a tale of tales.

Preparing the Battlefield

A couple of years back, TomDispatch correspondent Ann Jones told me something I’ve never forgotten.  Having spent time with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, she described their patrols in the countryside this way: yes, there were dangers, mainly IEDs (roadside bombs) and the odd potshot taken at them, but on the whole the areas they patrolled every day were eerily “empty.”  In some sense, it almost seemed as if no one was there, as if they were fighting a ghost war on -- her term -- an empty battlefield.

As it happens, her observation has a planetary analogue that lies at the heart of Scahill’s remarkable book.  As you may remember, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took no time at all for Bush administration officials to think big.  Notoriously, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began urging aides to build a case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein only five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.  Within weeks administration figures were already talking with confidence about the need to “drain the swamp” of terrorists and enemies on a global scale.  They were reportedly planning to target 60 to 80 countries, almost a third to close to one-half of the nations on this planet.  In other words, when they quickly declared a Global War on Terror, they weren’t kidding.  They meant it quite literally and, as Scahill reports, they promptly went to work building up the kinds of forces -- secret and at their command alone -- that could fight anywhere on the sly.

As these forces were dispatched globally to collect intelligence, train foreign forces (also often “special” and secret), and especially hunt and kill terrorists, a new tradecraft term came into play, a phrase as crucial to Scahill’s book as “blowback” was to Johnson’s.  They were, it was claimed, going out to “prepare the battlefield” (or alternately, “the battlespace” or “the environment”).  That process of preparation couldn’t have been more breathtakingly hubristic.  Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the situation this way: “Today, the entire world is the ‘battlespace.’”

Here’s the strange thing, though: when those secret forces went out to do their dirty work, that global battlefield was, using Jones’s term, remarkably, eerily empty.  There was hardly anyone there.  Perhaps hundreds or at most a few thousand jihadis scattered mainly in the backlands of the planet.  If “preparing the battlefield” turned out to be the crucial term of the era, it wasn't exactly a descriptively accurate one.  More on the mark might have been: “creating the battlefield” or “filling the empty battlefield.”

The pattern that Scahill traces brilliantly might have boiled down to a version of the tag line for the movie Field of Dreams: if you prepare it, they will come.  The result was not so much a war on, as a war of, and for, terror.  Washington would, at one and the same time, produce a killing machine and a terror-generating machine.  Dirty Wars catches the way its top officials became convinced that the planet’s last superpower, with “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” (as American presidents now never grow tired of repeating), could simply kill its way to victory globally.

As Scahill also shows, they were often remarkably successful at eliminating the figures on their “kill list” of targeted enemies from Osama bin Laden on down: Bin Laden himself in Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Aden Hashi Ayro in Somalia, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as various “lieutenants” of top al-Qaeda figures and allied groups.  And yet, as those on the kill lists died, thanks to the CIA’s drones and JSOC’s raiders, so did others.  Often enough, they were innocent civilians -- and in quantity.  People who shouldn’t have ever had their doors kicked in, their sons arrested or their pregnant wives shot down, and who bitterly resented what they experienced.  And so before Washington knew it, the kill list was growing larger, not smaller, and its wars were becoming more, not less, intense and spreading to other lands.  The battlefield, copiously prepared, was filling with enemies.

A Perpetual Motion Machine for the Destabilization of the Planet

As Washington launched its post-9/11 adventures, the neoconservative allies of the Bush administration, believing the wind in their sails, eyed the vast area from North Africa to the Central Asian border of China (aka “the Greater Middle East”) that they liked to call the “arc of instability.”  The job of the U.S., they imagined, was to bring stability to that “arc” by using America's overwhelming military power to create a Pax Americana in the region.  They were, in other words, fundamentalists and the U.S. military was their born-again religion.  They believed that its techno-power would trump every other form of power on the planet, hands down.

In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and in light of the ongoing disastrous war in Afghanistan, if you look at the Greater Middle East today -- from Pakistan to Syria, Afghanistan to Mali -- you’ll know what instability is really all about.  Twelve years later, much of the region has been destabilized to one degree or another, which might pass as the definition for Washington of short-term success and long-term failure.

In reality, they should have known better from the start.  After all, behind the global war launched by the Bush administration and carried on by Obama was a twenty-first-century replay of a brutal flop of a strategy in Washington’s failed war in Vietnam.  The phrase that went with it back then was “the crossover point,” the supposedly crucial moment in what was bluntly thought of as a “war of attrition.”  

The idea was simple enough.  The staggering firepower available to Washington would be brought to bear on the Vietnamese enemy with the obvious, expectable result: sooner or later, a moment would be reached in which the U.S. would be killing more of that enemy than could be replaced by recruitment in South Vietnam or the infiltration of reinforcements from the North.  At that moment, Washington would “crossover” into victory.  We know just where that led -- to the infamous body count (which the Bush administration tried desperately to avoid in Iraq and Afghanistan), to slaughter on a staggering scale, and to defeat when the prodigious number of enemies killed somehow never resulted in the U.S. crossing over.

And here’s the ironic thing.  Like his father who, as the first Gulf War ended in 1991, spoke ecstatically of having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” George W. Bush and his top officials had an overwhelming allergy to the memory of Vietnam.  Yet they still managed to launch a global war of attrition against a range of groups they defined as “terrorists.” They were clearly planning to kill them, one by one if possible, or in “signature” groups if necessary, until some crossover point was reached, until the enemy was losing more members than could be replaced and victory came into sight. As in Vietnam, of course, that crossover point never arrived and it’s increasingly clear that it never will.  Scahill’s reporting couldn’t be more incisive on the subject.

Dirty Wars is really the secret history of how Washington launched a series of undeclared wars in the backlands of the planet and killed its way to something that ever more closely resembled an actual global war, creating a world of enemies out of next to nothing.  Think of it as a bizarre form of unconscious wish fulfillment and the results -- they came! -- as a field of nightmares.

What was created in the process now seems more like a perpetual motion machine for the destabilization of the planet.  Just follow the spread of drone bases and of JSOC’s raiders, and you can actually watch the backlands of the globe destabilizing before your eyes, or read Scahill’s book and get a superb blow-by-blow account of just how it happened.  The process is now well underway in Africa where destabilization seems to be heading south from Libya via Mali.

Reread Blowback 13 years later and it’s hard to believe that anyone was so ahead of his times, given the human predilection for being unable to foresee much of anything.  Perhaps the saddest thing that can be said about Dirty Wars is that, the way things look, 13 years from now Scahill's book, too, may seem as fresh as last night’s news.  He has laid out a style of off-the-books war-making that seems destined to be perpetuated, no matter what administration is in power.

Much remains unknown when it comes to our recent non-war wars.  Thirteen years from now we may know far more about what JSOC, the CIA, and others were really doing in these years.  None of that, however, is likely to change the pattern Scahill has set down for us.

So let’s not hesitate to say it: mission accomplished!  The world may not have been a battlefield then.  But they prepared the global battlespace so well that it’s heading in that direction now.

Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a way of coming home.  Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings.  The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in American history.  In its own way, it was also an example of the empty battlefield.  An 87-square mile metropolitan area was almost totally locked down. At least 9,000 heavily up-armored local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, hundreds of National Guard troops, SWAT teams, armored vehicles, helicopters, and who knows what else hit the streets of greater Boston’s neighborhoods in a search for two dangerous, deluded young men, one of whom ended up bloodied inside a boat in a backyard just outside the zone the police had cordoned off to search in Watertown.  It was a spectacle that would have been unimaginable in pre-9/11 America.

The expense must have been staggering (especially if you add in business losses from the city’s shutdown).  In the end, of course, one of the suspects was killed and the other captured -- and celebrations of that short-term success began immediately on the streets of Boston and in the media.  But here, too, killing your way to success is unlikely to prove a winning strategy.  After all, we’re already in Scahill’s blowback world in which, no matter the number of deaths, there is unlikely to be a crossover point.

After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombing suspect, was captured, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a new phrase into the American lexicon.  While calling for the 19-year-old to be held as an “enemy noncombatant” (à la Guantanamo), he wrote, "The homeland is the battlefield."  That should send chills down the spine of any reader of Dirty Wars.

Above all else, there’s this: while the world burned and melted, Washington set itself one crucial global mission: to send its secret forces out onto that global battlefield to hunt random jihadis. It may be the worst case of imperial risk assessment since Nero fiddled and Rome burned.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers:  This essay focused on Jeremy Scahill’s new book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books).  In June, a film of the same title directed by Rick Rowley and based on the book will hit the theaters.  I’ve seen it in preview.  Its focus differs from the book’s.  Scahill is its narrator.  It's deeply personal and is powerfully humanizing of those whose doors we’ve kicked in during this last grim decade-plus.  It could be the documentary of the year.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration.  Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable.  The coverage in the media has been hair-raising.  The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.

Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn't count on Guam either.

It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult.  If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment.

In the previous century, there were two devastating global wars, which left significant parts of the planet in ruins.  There was also a "cold war" between two superpowers locked in a system of mutual assured destruction (aptly acronymed as MAD) whose nuclear arsenals were capable of destroying the planet many times over.  Had you woken up any morning in the years between December 7, 1941, and December 26, 1991, and been told that the leading international candidate for America's Public Enemy Number One was Kim Jong-un’s ramshackle, comic-opera regime in North Korea, you might have gotten down on your hands and knees and sent thanks to pagan gods.

The same would be true for the other candidates for that number one position since September 11, 2001: the original al-Qaeda (largely decimated), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula located in poverty-stricken areas of poverty-stricken Yemen, the Taliban in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, unnamed jihadis scattered across poverty-stricken areas of North Africa, or Iran, another rickety regional power run by not particularly adept theocrats.

All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror."  We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow.  From our police to our borders, we’ve up-armored everywhere.  We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.”  And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.

Few in this country have found this striking.  Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.

You know that feeling when you wake up and realize you’ve had the same recurrent nightmare yet again? Sometimes, there’s an equivalent in waking life, and here’s mine: every now and then, as I read about the next move in the spreading war on terror, the next drone assassination, the next ratcheting up of the surveillance game, the next expansion of the secrecy that envelops our government, the next set of expensive actions taken to guard us -- all of this justified by the enormous threats and dangers that we face -- I think to myself: Where’s the enemy?  And then I wonder: Just what kind of a dream is this that we’re dreaming?

A Door Marked “Enemy” and No One Home

Let’s admit it: enemies can have their uses.  And let’s admit as well that it’s in the interest of some in our country that we be seen as surrounded by constant and imminent dangers on an enemy-filled planet.  Let’s also admit that the world is and always will be a dangerous place in all sorts of ways.

Still, in American terms, the bloodlettings, the devastations of this new century and the last years of the previous one have been remarkably minimal or distant; some of the worst, as in the multi-country war over the Congo with its more than five million dead have passed us by entirely; some, even when we launched them, have essentially been imperial frontier conflicts, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or interventions of little cost (to us) as in Libya, or frontier patrolling operations as in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Northern Africa.  (It was no mistake that, when Washington launched its special operations raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, to get Osama bin Laden, it was given the code name “Geronimo” and the message from the SEAL team recording his death was “Geronimo-E KIA” or “enemy killed in action.”)

And let’s admit as well that, in the wake of those wars and operations, Americans now have more enemies, more angry, embittered people who would like to do us harm than on September 10, 2001.  Let’s accept that somewhere out there are people who, as George W. Bush once liked to say, “hate us" and what we stand for.  (I leave just what we actually stand for to you, for the moment.) 

So let’s consider those enemies briefly.  Is there a major state, for instance, that falls into this category, like any of the great warring imperial European powers from the sixteenth century on, or Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, or the Soviet Union of the Cold War era?  Of course not.

There was admittedly a period when, in order to pump up what we faced in the world, analogies to World War II and the Cold War were rife.  There was, for instance, George W. Bush’s famed rhetorical construct, the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), patterned by his speechwriter on the German-Italian-Japanese “axis” of World War II.  It was, of course, a joke construct, if reality was your yardstick.  Iraq and Iran were then enemies.  (Only in the wake of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have they become friends and allies.)  And North Korea had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them.  Similarly, the American occupation of Iraq was once regularly compared to the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan, just as Saddam Hussein had long been presented as a modern Hitler.

In addition, al-Qaeda-style Islamists were regularly referred to as Islamofascists, while certain military and neocon types with a desire to turn the war on terror into a successor to the Cold War took to calling it “the long war,” or even “World War IV.”  But all of this was so wildly out of whack that it simply faded away.

As for who’s behind that door marked “Enemy,” if you opened it, what would you find?  As a start, scattered hundreds or, as the years have gone by, thousands of jihadis, mostly in the poorest backlands of the planet and with little ability to do anything to the United States.  Next, there were a few minority insurgencies, including the Taliban and allied forces in Afghanistan and separate Sunni and Shia ones in Iraq.  There also have been tiny numbers of wannabe Islamic terrorists in the U.S. (once you take away the string of FBI sting operations that have regularly turned hopeless slackers and lost teenagers into the most dangerous of fantasy Muslim plotters).  And then, of course, there are those two relatively hapless regional powers, Iran and North Korea, whose bark far exceeds their potential bite.

The Wizard of Oz on 9/11

The U.S., in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century.  There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China.  It’s true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died.  When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn’t actually an apocalyptic event.

The enemy was still nearly nonexistent.  The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars.  It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects.  It in no way endangered the state.  In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers.  It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one.  It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years.  It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.

When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less.  And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment -- a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country.  The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on “A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century.”  If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban's Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.

To put this in perspective, consider two obvious major dangers in U.S. life: suicide by gun and death by car.  In 2010, more than 19,000 Americans killed themselves using guns.  (In the same year, there were “only” 11,000 homicides nationwide.)  In 2011, 32,000 Americans died in traffic accidents (the lowest figure in 60 years, though it was again on the rise in the first six months of 2012).  In other words, Americans accept without blinking the equivalent yearly of more than six 9/11s in suicides-by-gun and more than 10 when it comes to vehicular deaths.  Similarly, had the underwear bomber, to take one post-9/11 example of terrorism, succeeded in downing Flight 253 and murdering its 290 passengers, it would have been a horrific act of terror; but he and his compatriots would have had to bring down 65 planes to reach the annual level of weaponized suicides and more than 110 planes for vehicular deaths.

And yet no one has declared war on either the car or the gun (or the companies that make them or the people who sell them).  No one has built a massive, nearly trillion-dollar car-and-gun-security-complex to deal with them.  In the case of guns, quite the opposite is true, as the post-Newtown debate over gun control has made all too clear.  On both scores, Americans have decided to live with perfectly real dangers and the staggering carnage that accompanies them, constraining them on occasion or sometimes not at all. 

Despite the carnage of 9/11, terrorism has been a small-scale American danger in the years since, worse than shark attacks, but not much else.  Like a wizard, however, what Osama bin Laden and his suicide bombers did that day was create an instant sense of an enemy so big, so powerful, that Americans found “war” a reasonable response; big enough for those who wanted an international police action against al-Qaeda to be laughed out of the room; big enough to launch an invasion of revenge against Iraq, a country unrelated to al-Qaeda; big enough, in fact, to essentially declare war on the world.  It took next to no time for top administration officials to begin talking about targeting 60 countries, and as journalist Ron Suskind has reported, within six days of the attack, the CIA had topped that figure, presenting President Bush with a “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” a plan that targeted terrorists in 80 countries.

What’s remarkable is how little the disjuncture between the scope and scale of the global war that was almost instantly launched and the actual enemy at hand was ever noted here.  You could certainly make a reasonable argument that, in these years, Washington has largely fought no one -- and lost.  Everywhere it went, it created enemies who had, previously, hardly existed and the process is ongoing.  Had you been able to time-travel back to the Cold War era to inform Americans that, in the future, our major enemies would be in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya, and so on, they would surely have thought you mad (or lucky indeed).

Creating an Enemy-Industrial Complex

Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable.  The vast national security building and spending spree -- stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world’s intercepted communications -- would have been unlikely.

Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety.  The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.

Without 9/11 and the perpetual “wartime” that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit U.S. Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the “drone lobby” that goes with them might never have developed; and the U.S. military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it -- effectively the president’s private army, air force, and navy -- and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.

For all of this to happen, there had to be an enemy-industrial complex as well, a network of crucial figures and institutions ready to pump up the threat we faced and convince Americans that we were in a world so dangerous that rights, liberty, and privacy were small things to sacrifice for American safety.  In short, any number of interests from Bush administration figures eager to “sweep it all up” and do whatever they wanted in the world to weapons makers, lobbyists, surveillance outfits, think tanks, military intellectuals, assorted pundits... well, the whole national and homeland security racket and its various hangers-on had an interest in beefing up the enemy.  For them, it was important in the post-9/11 era that threats would never again lack a capital “T” or a hefty dollar sign.

And don’t forget a media that was ready to pound the drums of war and emphasize what dangerous enemies lurked in our world with remarkably few second thoughts.  Post-9/11, major media outlets were generally prepared to take the enemy-industrial complex’s word for it and play every new terrorist incident as if it were potentially the end of the world.  Increasingly as the years went on, jobs, livelihoods, an expanding world of “security” depended on the continuance of all this, depended, in short, on the injection of regular doses of fear into the body politic.

That was the “favor” Osama bin Laden did for Washington’s national security apparatus and the Bush administration on that fateful September morning.  He engraved an argument in the American brain that would live on indelibly for years, possibly decades, calling for eternal vigilance at any cost and on a previously unknown scale.  As the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), that neocon think-tank-cum-shadow-government, so fatefully put it in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a year before the 9/11 attacks: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.”

So when the new Pearl Harbor arrived out of the blue, with many PNAC members (from Vice President Dick Cheney on down) already in office, they naturally saw their chance.  They created an al-Qaeda on steroids and launched their “global war” to establish a Pax Americana, in the Middle East and then perhaps globally.  They were aware that they lacked opponents of the stature of those of the previous century and, in their documents, they made it clear that they were planning to ensure no future great-power-style enemy or bloc of enemy-like nations would arise. Ever.

For this, they needed an American public anxious, frightened, and ready to pay.  It was, in other words, in their interest to manipulate us.  And if that were all there were to it, our world would be a grim, but simple enough place.  As it happens, it’s not.  Ruling elites, no matter what power they have, don’t work that way.  Before they manipulate us, they almost invariably manipulate themselves.

I was convinced of this years ago by a friend who had spent a lot of time reading early Cold War documents from the National Security Council -- from, that is, a small group of powerful governmental figures writing to and for each other in the utmost secrecy.  As he told me then and wrote in Washington’s China, the smart book he did on the early U.S. response to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, what struck him in the documents was the crudely anti-communist language those men used in private with each other.  It was the sort of anti-communism you might otherwise have assumed Washington’s ruling elite would only have wielded to manipulate ordinary Americans with fears of Communist subversion, the “enemy within,” and Soviet plans to take over the world.  (In fact, they and others like them would use just such language to inject fear into the body politic in those early Cold War years, that era of McCarthyism.)

They were indeed manipulative men, but before they influenced other Americans they assumedly underwent something like a process of collective auto-hypnotism in which they convinced one another of the dangers they needed the American people to believe in.  There is evidence that a similar process took place in the aftermath of 9/11.  From the flustered look on George W. Bush’s face as his plane took him not toward but away from Washington on September 11, 2001, to the image of Dick Cheney, in those early months, being chauffeured around Washington in an armored motorcade with a “gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat, you could sense that the enemy loomed large and omnipresent for them.  They were, that is, genuinely scared, even if they were also ready to make use of that fear for their own ends.

Or consider the issue of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, that excuse for the invasion of Iraq.  Critics of the invasion are generally quick to point out how that bogus issue was used by the top officials of the Bush administration to gain public support for a course that they had already chosen.  After all, Cheney and his men cherry-picked the evidence to make their case, even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed, and ignored facts at hand that brought their version of events into question.  They publicly claimed in an orchestrated way that Saddam had active nuclear and WMD programs.  They spoke in the most open ways of potential mushroom clouds from (nonexistent) Iraqi nuclear weapons rising over American cities, or of those same cities being sprayed with (nonexistent) chemical or biological weapons from (nonexistent) Iraqi drones.  They certainly had to know that some of this information was useful but bogus.  Still, they had clearly also convinced themselves that, on taking Iraq, they would indeed find some Iraqi WMD to justify their claims.

In his soon-to-be-published book, Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill cites the conservative journalist Rowan Scarborough on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s growing post-invasion irritation over the search for Iraqi WMD sites.  “Each morning,” wrote Scarborough, “the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust.  Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier.  One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’  At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers.”

In other words, those top officials hustling us into their global war and their long-desired invasion of Iraq had also hustled themselves into the same world with a similar set of fears.  This may seem odd, but given the workings of the human mind, its ability to comfortably hold potentially contradictory thoughts most of the time without disturbing itself greatly, it’s not.

A similar phenomenon undoubtedly took place in the larger national security establishment where self-interest combined easily enough with fear.  After all, in the post-9/11 era, they were promising us one thing: something close to 100% “safety” when it came to one small danger in our world -- terrorism.  The fear that the next underwear bomber might get through surely had the American public -- but also the American security state -- in its grips.  After all, who loses the most if another shoe bomber strikes, another ambassador goes down, another 9/11 actually happens?  Whose job, whose world, will be at stake then?

They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war.  They live in the Cathedral of the Enemy.  They were the first believers and they will undoubtedly be the last ones as well.  They are invested in the importance of the enemy.  It’s their religion.  They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they.

The comic strip character Pogo once famously declared: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” How true. We just don’t know it yet.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Recently, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a major speech at the National Defense University on cutting military -- a.k.a. defense -- spending. Hagel is considered a "realist" and so when it comes to such cuts, this is undoubtedly the best we're likely to get out of Washington for a long time to come. Unfortunately, it turns out that the best is pretty poor stuff.

The speech was filled with the sort of complaints we've already grown used to hearing from the Pentagon about the "deep cuts... imposed by sequester." These, Hagel insisted, will result in "a significant reduction in military capabilities." (In fact, President Obama's just released 2014 budget calls for only a miniscule 1.6 percent cut in the Pentagon's bloated budget.) There was also the usual boilerplate stuff about the U.S. global military stance -- "America's responsibilities are as enormous as they are humbling" -- and about the "vacuum" we'd create on planet Earth if we reduced it in any way. As the Nation's Robert Dreyfuss wrote, "Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it isn't the job of the United States to go stumbling into every regional conflict, humanitarian crisis, failed state, and would-be terrorist nest that arises. Whatever those things are, they're not 'vacuum' to be filled."

Like Leon Panetta before him, Hagel, who took a voluntary sequester pay cut, managed to make it sound as if the U.S. military were teetering at the edge of some financial cliff. He spoke mournfully, for instance, of the Pentagon having "significantly less resources than the department had in the past." Well... no, as Mark Thompson of Time magazine pointed out, it just ain't so.

The facts aren't difficult to sort out, even for those of us who aren't secretaries of defense. In a world filled with the most modest of enemies, after those "sequestration" and other planned cuts in the military budget are taken into account, the country would still be spending at levels that weren't reached in the Cold War years when there were two overarmed superpowers on the planet. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded last month, "In real terms, after the reduction in 2013, DoD's base budget is about what it was in 2007, and is still 7 percent above the average funding since 1980."

Among Hagel's more accurate, if disheartening, comments was his praise for the way the U.S. military had, in the post-9/11 era, grown "more expeditionary." Back in the nineteenth century, that phrase would instantly have been recognized as code for "imperial" -- for, that is, a great power exerting its muscle by policing the far frontiers of the planet. In ending his speech, Hagel added definitively, "America does not have the luxury of retrenchment." So here's a simple budget-cutting formula for you: if you can't retrench and become less "expeditionary," then significant cuts to the military, not to speak of the full-scale national security state, including the homeland-security complex and the intelligence-security complex, simply will not happen. There's only one way to cut the national security budget in a meaningful way: downsize the mission.

With tax day looming, the National Priorities Project's Mattea Kramer put some number-crunching energy into what a people's budget might look like with genuine military cuts in a less imperial world. Her answer in "A Tax Day Plan for Righting the Republic": don't underestimate the much-ignored wisdom of the American people on where their tax dollars should (but won't) go.

At 72, climate scientist James Hansen is retiring as head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies to work even more actively on climate-change issues. Keep in mind that, in congressional testimony in 1988, he first put climate change on the national map. "It is time to stop waffling so much," he told the congressional committee members, "and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here." He then went on to suggest a future "probability of extreme events like summer heat waves... and the likelihood of heat wave drought situations in the Southwest and Midwest." (Any of that sound faintly familiar a quarter-century later?) It was, at the time, a startling statement. Recently, in an email to the members of 350.org, the environmental organization he helped to found, former New Yorker reporter Bill McKibben wrote: "If 350.org has a patron saint, it's Jim [Hansen]. It was his 2008 paper that gave us our name, identifying 350 parts per million CO2 as the safe upper limit for carbon in the atmosphere."

That's no small praise from the writer who, only a year after Hansen spoke up, first put global warming on the map in a popular book, The End of Nature. He was at least a decade or more ahead of the rest of us, and more recently he's led the popular charge on climate change and especially, in the last year, on trying to block the building of Keystone XL. That's the pipeline slated to bring tar sands, a particularly "dirty" (and in carbon terms, dirty to produce) form of crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Just the other day, as if to provide a little exclamation point on his energetic campaign, during which Hansen has been arrested twice in acts of civil disobedience, a pipeline through which Exxon was already running Canadian "heavy crude" (reputedly a particularly corrosive form of oil) burst in an Arkansas town. The neighborhood affected, according to NPR's "Morning Edition," was left "looking like a scene out of the Walking Dead."

As a scientist and an activist, Hansen has proven a remarkable figure. (He will soon be awarded the prestigeous Ridenhour Courage Prize.) After a February arrest protesting the Keystone pipeline, he told the Washington Post, "We have reached a fork in the road," adding that politicians have to understand that they can "go down this road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have -- tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic -- but the science tells us we can't do that without creating a situation... our children and grandchildren will have no control over, which is the climate system."

Recently, there was a striking New York Times portrait of him by Justin Gillis headlined "Climate Maverick to Retire From NASA." That word "maverick," while by no means wrong, might be a little deceptive in 2013, since a maverick is a loner, an outlier, and in climate-change terms these days, there is nothing terribly mavericky about Hansen's suggestions that climate change is likely to radically transform this planet unless we begin to get our greenhouse gas output under control soon. These days, in fact, he's surrounded by a worried mass of scientists.

In Gillis's piece there was a passage that, despite everything I've read, managed to shock me, and I thought it worth citing here (then check out McKibben's latest piece, "Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the 'Stonewall' of the Climate Movement? And If So, Is That Terrible News?"). Writing about how early Hansen highlighted the dangers of global warming, and how he was doubted at the time, Gillis added, "Yet subsequent events bore him out. Since the day he spoke, not a single month's temperatures have fallen below the 20th-century average for that month. Half the world's population is now too young to have lived through the last colder-than-average month, February 1985. In worldwide temperature records going back to 1880, the 19 hottest years have all occurred since his testimony."

Even if you set aside the man-made environmental disaster that is China (at a cost now estimated conservatively at $230 billion annually), ever more expensive disasters seem to be on the rise globally. Moreover, thanks to climate change -- that is, the greenhouse gases we've been pumping into the atmosphere at record levels -- the distinction between man-made catastrophes and natural ones is rapidly blurring. In the United States, we've recently suffered a one-two punch when it comes to extreme weather: 2011 now holds the American record for weather disasters that cost $1 billion dollars or more with 14 of them, and 2012 came in an uncomfortably close second with 11. (You can check out the list here.) The Swiss Insurance firm Munich Re points out that "nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America." A dubious honor.

And of them all, perhaps the most expensive of recent times, already estimated to have cost more than $50 billion, is the drought that had 60 percent of the country in its grip last year and has continued relentlessly into 2013, parching the Southwest, the Midwest, and parts of the West. This, in turn, almost assures another season of "record" wildfires and, according to early predictions, possibly a new round of flooding from late season heavy snowfall in the upper Midwest and especially along the Red River.

In addition, on the billion-dollar bad-news side of things, scientists now believe that the continuing dramatic loss of ice in Arctic waters, which has been heating up that region, is also changing northern hemispheric weather patterns. It is evidently ensuring more extreme weather in the middle latitudes which helps explain, for instance, Europe's "frozen spring" of 2013, and will evidently lead to even warmer summers for most of us.

And when we're talking about extreme weather, extreme events, and disasters, let's not forget that globally the likelihood of extreme energy events like BP's massive oil spill in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico is also on the rise. After all, as Michael Klare has long argued at this site, energy companies are now ever more regularly going after extreme energy in situations of rising danger. As a result, from the frack zone in the U.S. and the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil to the Arctic seas of Alaska, the possibility of distinctly energy-company-made disasters is on the rise (as, of course, are record oil company profits).

In other words, we're now on a planet where extreme disaster seems ever more normal and, when it comes to the weather, such extremes can increasingly be considered man-made or at least human-influenced. It's important to keep in mind as well that what's a catastrophe for many of us always turns out to be the main chance and a profit center for at least a few of us. As Steve Fraser, TomDispatch's historian-in-residence (who tells tales of American history you never learned in school), reminds us, there's a backstory to the way genuine disasters are never disasters for everyone and it couldn't be more relevant to our increasing catastrophe of a world. (As a tiny example, consider that each horrific oil spill means more oil company dollars flowing to lobbyists and to Congress -- and so yet more high times on Washington's K Street.)

America's post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush's administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and various oil companies, as well as a set of mercenary rent-a-gun outfits like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy that came into their own in this period. It took the plunge into Iraq in March 2003, sweeping those corporations and an increasingly privatized military in with it. In the process, Iraq would become an example not of the free market system, but of a particularly venal form of crony capitalism (or, as Naomi Klein has labeled it, "disaster capitalism").

Add in another factor: in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began pouring money into the Pentagon, into, that is, an organization whose budget has never been able to pass an audit. There was so staggeringly much money to throw around then -- and hubris to spare as well. Among the first acts of L. Paul Bremer III, the new American proconsul in Baghdad, was the disbanding of Saddam Hussein's army (creating an unemployed potential insurgent class) and the closing down of a whole range of state enterprises along with the privatization of the economy (creating their unemployed foot soldiers). All of this, in turn, paved the way for a bonanza of "reconstruction" contracts granted, of course, to the administration's favorite corporations to rebuild the country. There were slush funds aplenty; money went missing without anyone blinking; and American occupation officials reportedly "systematically looted" Iraqi funds.

In April 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad, it was already aflame and being looted by its own citizens. As it turned out, the petty looters soon enough went home -- and then the real looting of the country began. The occupiers, thanks to the U.N., fully controlled Iraq's finances and no one at the U.N. or elsewhere had the slightest ability to exercise any real supervision over what the occupation regime did or how it spent Iraq's money. Via a document labeled "Order 17," Bremer granted every foreigner connected to the occupation enterprise the full freedom of the land, not to be interfered with in any way by Iraqis or any Iraqi political or legal institution. He gave them all, that is, an official get-out-of-jail-free card.

Who could be surprised, then, that the massive corporate attempt to rebuild Iraq would result in a plague of overbilling, remarkable amounts of shoddy or useless work, and a blown $60 billion "reconstruction" effort that would leave the country with massive unemployment and without reliable electricity, water, or sewage systems? Could there be a sadder story of how war making and corruption were being wedded on a gigantic scale in an already fading new century? As it turned out, the answer to that question was: yes.

Had you searched for "Israel, nuclear weapons" at Google News in the wake of President Obama's recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: "Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon" (CNN), "Obama vows to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive" (the Times of Israel), Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran (the San Angelo Times), "US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran's plutonium-producing reactor" (Associated Press), "Obama says 'there is still time' to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute; Netanyahu hints at impatience" (NBC), "Iran's leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks" (Fox).

By now, we're so used to such a world of headlines -- about Iran's threatening nuclear weapons and its urge to "wipe out" Israel -- that we simply don't see how strange it is. At the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia (theoretically because of sequester budget cuts), the U.S. continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest-sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever-tightening sanctions, its skies filled with U.S. spy drones, its offshore waters with U.S. warships. Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv in the first cyberwar in history. As early as 2007, the U.S. Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross-border activities, assumedly using U.S. special operations forces -- and that's only what's known about the pressure being exerted on Iran. With this, and the near-apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called "regime change." (Who can forget the neocon quip of the pre-Iraq-invasion moment: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran"?)

And all of this is due, so we're told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one because it doesn't exist, and most observers don't think that Tehran is in the process of preparing to build one either. In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it -- if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject -- is a nuclear will-o'-the-wisp. In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan's expanding nuclear arsenal. And yet, in that shaky, increasingly destabilized country, such an existing arsenal has to qualify as a genuine and growing regional danger.

Similarly, you can read endlessly in the mainstream about President Obama's recent triumphs in the Middle East and that Iranian nuclear program without ever stumbling upon anything of significance about the only genuine nuclear arsenal in the vicinity: Israel's. On the rare occasions when it is even mentioned, it's spoken of as if it might or might not exist. Israel, Fox News typically reports, "is believed to have the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Mideast." It is, of course, Israeli policy (and a carefully crafted fiction) never to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal. But the arsenal itself isn't just "believed" to exist, it is known to exist -- 100-300 nuclear weapons' worth or enough destructive power to turn not just Iran but the Greater Middle East into an ash heap.

To sum up: we continue to obsess about fantasy weapons, base an ever more threatening and dangerous policy in the region on their possible future existence, might conceivably end up in a war over them, and yet pay remarkably little attention to the existing nuclear weapons in the region. If this were the approach of countries other than either the U.S. or Israel, you would know what to make of it and undoubtedly words like "paranoia" and "fantasy" would quickly creep into any discussion.