It Is Unbeliveable How We As Country Can Not Learn By Other Country's Mistakes. Our Belief In American Exceptialism At Work.

How Have We Become the United States of Fear?

Thursday 15 December 2011

by: Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

(Image: Haymarket Books)

Mark Karlin: Your last chapter in so many ways embodies what you have covered in TomDispatch, and what is at the core of our crisis of democracy today: imperial decline. When did our American empire begin to implode?

Tom Engelhardt: Well, I have no doubt that, economically speaking, we've been losing traction for quite a while on that downhill slope, but a crucial "moment" was certainly Washington's decision to follow what I call "the Soviet path." After all, in those last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, the far weaker of the two superpowers, threw money into its military while its deficits rose and its infrastructure crumbled - and of course it got mired in a terrible war, a "bleeding wound," in Afghanistan. It all sounds eerily familiar, no? Washington's decision, in its moment of Cold War triumph, to follow essentially the same path and the Bush administration's wild belief that it could drive U.S. military power unilaterally into the heart of the Greater Middle East and establish a Pax Americana there (the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were only supposed to be the beginning of the process) had a similar effect. Now, of course, we have soaring deficits, rotting infrastructure and unending war in Afghanistan (and elsewhere). It could give you the chills.

MK: How is the instigation of a state of national fear tied into the effort to maintain empire?

TE: I think that the real thing it's tied into is an effort over this last decade to turn what I call the "national security complex" into America's growth industry. Fear - of terrorism and nothing else - has been the "drug" that has powered the national security state to heights and a size it never reached when it had a genuine superpower enemy with a nuclear arsenal. Today, the intelligence bureaucracy dwarfs what existed in the Cold War era; the Pentagon budget is so much larger and so on. Give credit where it's due: it's been quite a feat based on remarkably little when you think about it.

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