The United States of Fear

ferocious energy. There is no other record like it. The last of these was undoubtedly Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution. Others would certainly include the peasant uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty in the seventeenth century and, around the time of the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion. That was led by a man we would today call a cultist who had created a syncretic mix of Chinese religions and Christianity—and who considered himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Before Qing Dynasty forces finally suppressed it and a series of other rebellions, an estimated twenty million people died.

When Chinese leaders banned and then tried to stamp out the fast-spreading Falun Gong movement, they were not—as reported here—simply “repressing religion,” they were suppressing what they undoubtedly feared could be the next Taiping Rebellion. Even if few intelligence analysts in the West are thinking about any of this, rest assured that the Communist rulers of China know their own history. That’s one reason why they have been so quick to crack down on any Arab Spring–like demonstrations.

In addition, though I’m no economist, when I look around this planet I continue to wonder (as the Chinese must) about the limits of growth for all of us, but especially for such a vast country that is desperate for energy and other raw materials, with an aging population and an environment already heavily polluted by the last forty years of unchecked industrial expansion. There is no question that China has invested in its military, put together a powerful (if largely defensive) navy, elbowed its neighbors on questions of undersea mineral rights, and gone on a global search to lock up future energy resources and key raw materials.

Nonetheless, if predictions were to be made and trends projected, it might be far more reasonable to predict a cautious Chinese government, focused on keeping its populace under control and solving confounding domestic problems, than an expansively imperial one. It’s almost inconceivable that China could or would ever play the role the United States played in 1945 as the British Empire went down. It’s hard even to imagine China as another Soviet Union in a great global struggle with the United States.

And speaking of the conjunctures of history, here’s another thought for the U.S. Navy: What if this isn’t an imperial planet anymore? What if, from resource scarcity to global warming, humanity is nudging up against previously unimagined limits on unbridled growth? From at least the seventeenth century on, successive great powers have struggled to control vast realms of a globe in which expansion eternally seemed the name of the game. For centuries, one or more great powers were always on hand when the previous great imperial power or set of powers faltered.

In the wake of World War II, with the collapse of the Japanese and German Empires, only two powers worthy of the name were left, each so mighty that together they would be called “superpowers.” After 1991, only one remained, so seemingly powerful that it was sometimes termed a “hyperpower” and many believed it had inherited the Earth.

What if, in fact, the United States is indeed the last empire? What if a world of rivalries, on a planet heading into resource scarcity, turned out to be less than imperial in nature? Or what if—and think of me as a devil’s advocate here—this turned out not to be an imperial world of bitter rivalries at all, but in the face of unexpectedly tough times, a partnership planet?

Unlikely? Sure, but who knows? That’s the great charm of the future. In any case, just to be safe, you might not want to start preparing for the Chinese century quite so fast or bet your bottom dollar on China as number one. Not just yet anyway.

Afterword ON BEING A CRITIC

All the World’s a Stage (for Us)

In March 2010, I wrote about a crew of pundits and warrior-journalists eager not to see the U.S. military leave Iraq. That piece appeared on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times (and in a longer version at TomDispatch.com) and then began wandering the media world. One of its stops was the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

From a military man came this emailed response: “Read your article in Stars and Stripes. When was the last time you visited Iraq?” A critique in fifteen well-chosen words. So much more effective than a long, angry email, and his point was interesting. At least, it interested me. After all, as I wrote back, I was then a sixty-five-year-old guy who had never been anywhere near Iraq and undoubtedly never would be. I have to assume that my emailer had spent time there, possibly more than once, and disagreed with my assessments.

Firsthand experience is not to be taken lightly. What, after all, do I know about Iraq? Only the reporting I’ve been able to read from thousands of miles away or analysis found on the blogs of experts like Juan Cole. On the other hand, even from thousands of miles away, I was one of many who could see enough, by early 2003, to go into the streets and demonstrate against an onrushing disaster of an invasion that a lot of people, theoretically far more knowledgeable on Iraq than any of us, considered just the cat’s meow, the “cakewalk” of the new century.

It’s true that I’ve never strolled down a street in Baghdad or Ramadi or Basra, armed or not, and that’s a deficit if you want to write about the American experience in Iraq. It’s also true that I haven’t spent hours sipping tea with Iraqi tribal leaders, or been inside the Green Zone, or set foot on even one of the vast American bases that the Pentagon’s private contractors have built in that country. (Nor did that stop me from writing regularly about “America’s ziggurats” when most of the people who visited those bases didn’t consider places with 20-mile perimeters, multiple bus lines, PXs, familiar fast-food franchises, Ugandan mercenary guards, and who knows what else, to be particularly noteworthy structures on the Iraqi landscape and so, with rare exceptions, worth commenting on.)

I’m certainly no expert on Shiites and Sunnis. I’m probably a little foggy on my Iraqi geography. And I’ve never seen the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. On the other hand, it does occur to me that a whole raft of American pundits, government officials, and military types who have done all of the above, who have spent time up close and personal in Iraq (or, at least, in the American version of the same), couldn’t have arrived at dumber conclusions over these last many years.

So, firsthand experience, valuable as it may be for great reporters like, say, Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post and now the New York Times, or Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent, can’t be the be-all and end-all either. Sometimes being far away, not just from Iraq, but from Washington and all the cloistered thinking that goes on there, from the visibly claustrophobic world of American global policymaking, has its advantages. Sometimes, being out of it, experientially speaking, allows you to open your eyes and take in the larger shape of things, which is often the obvious (even if little noted).

I can’t help thinking about a friend of mine whose up-close and personal take on U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan was that they were trapped in an American-made box, incapable of seeing beyond its boundaries—of, that is, seeing Afghanistan.

I have no doubt that being there is generally something to be desired. But if you take your personal blinders with you, it often hardly matters where you are. Thinking about my Stars and Stripes reader’s question, the conclusion I’ve provisionally come to is this: It’s not just where you go, it’s also how you see what’s there, and no less important who you see, that matters—which means that sometimes you can actually see more by going nowhere at all.

An Iraqi Tragedy