by John Mitchell Henshaw

From the Spring, 1968 issue of The American Mercury. John Henshaw wrote this article shortly after Israel’s conquests in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TINY Israel from a midget to a giant is in the making. The grand design of Judaic-Zionist expansionist doctrine is to seize all the oil-rich lands from the shores of the Euphrates to the banks of the Nile.

In defining the aims of Zionism, Hebrew scholar Levnoch Osman recently said: “In our eternal Book of Books (the Torah), the lofty ethical teachings of which are cherished by all mankind, the land of Israel is described not as a long, narrow strip of land with wavy, crooked borders, but as a state with broad natural borders. God has promised to Patriarch Abraham the following:

“I give unto them the land where they have sown their seed, from the river of Egypt unto the great river of Euphrates’ (Genesis 15:18). And so, in order to realize the words of this prophecy, the Israeli state had to continue, not in the borders it has today but within its broad historical boundaries.”

And as far back as 1952 Moshe Dayan, the present Israeli defense minister, declared:

“Our task consists of preparing the Israeli army for the new war approaching in order to achieve our ultimate goal, the creation of an Israeli empire.”

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who served as an adviser on Near Eastern affairs to the British delegation at the Versailles Conference, in a newspaper article published in June last year stated the Zionist aims in these words:

We are Jews, the living representatives of Judah, one of the 12 tribes of Israel that conquered most of Palestine in the 13^th century B.C. We held Judah’s share of the conquered territory for seven centuries, till we were deported by Nebuchadnezzer in 587 B.C. We were back again within less than half a century, and we then held Judea, once more, for the next 773 years, till we were evicted by the Romans in A.D. 135. We have never renounced our claim to the land of Israel. We have always hoped, believed, and proclaimed that we shall get this land back again. It is our land, we contend.

After another 1,883 years we did recover a foothold there in 1918, and during the half-century since then, by devoted hard work, ability and military valor, we have built up our present national State of Israel, and have inflicted three smashing defeats on the Arabs, who have been trying to evict us again.

We want to have a country of our own again, like other peoples and like our own ancestors. We also need to have a country of our own, because, since the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity in the fourth century A.D., we have been penalized and persecuted by the Western Christian majority among whom we have had to live.

The persecution has culminated in the unprecedented crime of genocide, which has been committed against us in our lifetime by a Western people, the Germans, in Europe. We are not going to let the Arabs commit the same crime of genocide against us here, in our own land of Israel.

Genocide in Six-day War

Apologist Toynbee omitted mentioning the fact that the Jews themselves are currently engaged in genocide. During the Six-Day War last summer, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan ordered Brig. Gen. Yesha’ahu Gavish, the Israeli commander of the Sinai campaign, to ruthlessly drive the hapless Egyptian troops into the Sinai Desert to die of thirst, hunger and heat. Temperature on the arid Sinai rise to more than 100 degrees during the day. For over two weeks thousands of wretched Egyptian stragglers wandered over the swirling wastes finally drop dead in their tracks.

U.S. reconnaissance planes flying on the perimeter of the Sinai Desert took hundreds of pictures of the stragglers and reported there were 50,000 Egyptians dead or dying on the desert at the time. The U.S. Air Force loaded 60,000 gallons of water in five-gallon jerry-cans on pallets and prepared to drop them in the area where stragglers were observed. However, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered the projected mission of mercy halted after he received phone calls from White House foreign policy-planner Walt Rostow and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg.

This flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war amounted to genocide, designed to destroy a whole nation.

Newspaper reporters visiting the war zones in Syria and Jordan, reported that if one sniper in a village fired on Israeli troops, the whole village was destroyed including the women and children. Napalm is frequently used.

This systematic extermination is an ideological doctrine of Zionism. The leading exponent of genocide is the chauvinist Moshe Dayan, whom the Zionists have proclaimed a Biblical “messiah” on a white horse. Arrogant, boastful Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, chief of the Israeli General Staff, who plotted and executed the Six-Day blitzkrieg last June, is in direct charge of the projected expansionist program from the Euphrates to the Nile.

The scope of this ambitious scheme of territorial seizures and exploitation has been recognized by at least a few of our American military strategists for years. This writer recalls that a dozen years ago an Army lieutenant colonel, who was a student at the War College, confined that some of his instructors believed the Zionist expansionist policy would provide the spark to ignite World War III.

(Incidentally, the then lieutenant colonel is now one of the top commanding generals in Vietnam.)

By guile, treachery and bloodletting, the Zionists plot to annex all of Jordan, virtually all of Syria, half of Iraq and a large part of Saudi Arabia and all of the rich cotton lands of the Nile Valley. It would be a simpler matter then to grab Yemen, Aden, Muscat, Qatar and Oman with their rich oil development. Israel is already well advanced in the development of its first nuclear warhead.

According to the Zionists’ schedule of operations, within a decade the Israeli empire be the master of the Middle East and take its place as a nuclear superpower on equal footing with the Soviet Union and the United States. David Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company will pay its royalties to the Israeli military usurpers instead of the Arab sheiks.

Fabulous Oil Reserves

The stakes are high in this traditionally British-protected region. The Persian Gulf and adjacent countries hold 70 percent of the non-communist world’s oil reserves and produce half of its oil output. British withdrawal from Aden creates a power vacuum that will inevitably be filled by Israel and the Soviet Union.

The British have expressed the pious hope that their withdrawal would galvanize the Arab rulers into dropping their feuds and really unite in a mutual defense pact. However, the spreading oil boom is intensifying the territorial ambitions of rival kingdoms, sultanates and sheikdoms. Iran is selling oil to Israel, another aggravating factor in Mideast tensions.

Like the tentacles of an octopus the Israeli armed forces struck out in all directions into Jordan, Syria and Egypt in Israel’s Six-Day aggression last June. Even when encountering no resistance, the Israeli armored forces abruptly halted at predetermined strategic terrain points; they had accomplished their mission in the first phase of the Zionist Grand Design of imperialistic conquest. It was time to stop and consolidate their gains rather than risk spreading their forces too thin.

Israeli leader Menachem Begin says:

“The return of even one bit of earth to the Arab would be a betrayal of the nation.”

The grandiose idea of an Israeli empire controlling the Middle East is now for the first time arousing great popular enthusiasm among Jews everywhere in the world.

Officially Israel is continuing the pretense of keeping the door open to negotiations that might result in return of the conquered territory, in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel and a peace treaty.

Jordan’s King Hussein has reportedly already made a secret and desperate offer to Israel: In exchange for the return of the West Bank of the Jordan River, Hussein agreed to demilitarize it, negotiate border adjustments and even waive his insistence upon regaining the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel rejected the offer. Israeli Minister of Labor Yigal Allon bluntly stated:

“The natural border of the country is the Jordan River — a border that would be established only if Israel kept the West Bank areas it took from Jordan.”

Gen. Aluf Ezer Weizmann, second highest-ranking officer in the Israeli army, is even more adamant: “We shall stay where we are and bring in Jews. We now have the unusual opportunity to consolidate the state for the Jewish people and help prevent future wars.”

“If there is a fourth war,” Defense Minister Moshe Dayan gloats, “we are in a position to win more decisively than ever.”

And he warned that in the “fourth war” the great cities of Cairo, Damascus and Amman will be annihilated. This is in conformity with the genocidal plan.

Eretz Israel

Israelis bitterly complain that along with the occupied territory that is three times the size of Israel, they have inherited its population of 1,330,000 Arabs.

Aliyah — voluntary relocation to Israel — has been a flop as far as Western Jews are concerned — few of them want to go to the Holy Land of their forefathers. The majority of Jews now in Israel are from Asia and Africa.

The System of government in Israel is a mixture of theocracy and gerontocracy. Full citizenship requires membership in the Jewish religion and Jewish ancestry. Israeli authorities refuse to accept Arabs or “Gentiles” (non-Jews) as full citizens with equal civil, political, and economic rights. Militant Zionists frankly admit that Israel and neighboring Arab nations cannot coexist. They claim that the incompatibility is due to ideological fanaticism. However, the Arab oil lands are fabulously rich.

“We must take steps leading to a long-range consolidation, lest we be considered a temporary, transient factor in the occupied areas,” declares Israel Galili, minister without portfolio in the Israeli Cabinet.

The Zionists have invented the term “coercive noninterference” in explaining how they force the subjugated Arabs to cooperate with their conquerors. When the mayor of Nablus announced that he would resign rather than front for the Jews, the Israeli military officers told him that no one would be appointed to replace him, which would result in utter chaos. They mayor had second thoughts, stayed and obeyed the Jewish military commanders. Hundreds of similar examples could be cited.

Arabs Fear Genocide

“The Middle East today is dominated by raw, naked, savage, animal fear. The Arab nations are driven by the fear of mass death, by the fear of Israel’s genocidal intentions toward them. Israel, by bringing in immigrants from all over the world, has upset the demographic balance of the Middle East.

“The first basic fact about populations is that they multiply. They population of Israel is increasing, and the populations of the Arab nations are increasing. In the conflict between populations, either Arabs or Jews must someday end up being driven into arid desert wastes which will not support them, where they will find relief only in the oblivion of death. Israel means to kill the Arab populations and to occupy their lands. The Arabs, driven by fear of death, react powerfully. They seek the protection of a powerful nation, Russia, to which they will become tributary in return for protection…

“For the free world, this is a practically irretrievable disaster,” says Benjamin H. Freedman.

We might well rationalize all this as strictly none of our business except that hundred of millions of American foreign aid dollars are being spent for the enrichment of the international Zionist network extending from Tel Aviv to Paris, London and New York. The Israelis are already pumping oil from Egyptian wells and splitting the profits with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil combine. This is only the prelude.

Now for the first time Soviet Russia is successfully penetrating the oil-rich Mideast countries. The Russians have made agreements to explore for oil in Iraq, Iran and Egypt. They have extended bids for cooperative ventures to Algeria, Syria and Kuwait. The agreement with Iraq provides for development of oil reserves in an area taken away from Western companies.

Most of the Arab oil countries are starting oil firms to give them a stronger hold on their petroleum reserves and a bigger percentage of profits. They have also recently hiked their royalties they get from the big Anglo-American oil firms.

The Soviets furnish the technical know-how to the Arab oil industry and work out world marketing agreements with the Arab rulers. The Soviet naval fleet is standing in the Mediterranean. The Kremlin has launched an aggressive campaign to establish a protectorate over the Mideast oil lands. Russia finally has a firm grip on Egypt. Syria is now totally dependent on Soviet weapons and the protective arm of Moscow. The Soviets have a facility in Latakia.

Yemen is receiving Soviet arms, Russian advisers are training its army, and Soviet armed forces are establishing base facilities in Yemen. After all the millions the U.S. gave Iran in foreign aid, the ungrateful Shah (who has $300 million stashed away in Swiss banks) is cooperating with the Soviets in construction of a natural gas pipeline that would feed Iranian gas to parts of Russia not easily served by Russian gas.

The sub-rosa partnership between Zionism and communism is still a fact. As Israel drives the Arabs into the arms of the Kremlin, Israel expands, fulfilling a grand design and an aggressive plan agreed upon years ago. And like the Arabs, Americans are helpless victims in this international crime.

The late John Henshaw was at one time chief “legman” for columnist Drew Pearson. He broke with Pearson after discovering that his own expenses were being paid by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a lobby for Israel, which had a “special relationship” with Pearson. Mr. Henshaw has seen Zionist power from both sides.

THE LEADERSHIP of the United States and their British cohorts have been deceiving the public for more than 100 years. Now yoked to Zionism, they are a deadly combination — and they are also deadly to themselves. (pictured: General Stanley McChrystal)

I don’t think the rest of the world really understands what’s wrong with America.  They see America as this huge bully, killing and maiming millions of people worldwide while America itself is collapsing.  The world is right about that. They also see that most Americans are blind to the aggressive nature of Washington and its wars — not aware of it at all.

Clearly, the world has a suicidal, homicidal, insane entity on the loose. But no one really understands why.

The United States Department of Defense (DOD), as well as the Wall Street bankers, and just about every other corporation in America are no longer cognizant that their actions are self-defeating.  The DOD is no longer protecting its own country. The Federal Reserve is no longer printing money which has any value. Wall Street creates unbelievably complex Ponzi schemes which have no — or a negative — value.  The thing they all have in common is that they themselves don’t understand how their actions are contributing to their own defeat.  There’s a reason for this, and once you know it, it becomes obvious.

The United States of America is suffering from an epidemic of Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a form of autism which some say is caused by too much mercury in vaccines, or other toxins.

Asperger’s victims are capable of highly complex understanding of singular issues (compartmentalized, myopic thinking), but are unable to comprehend the ramifications of their actions in a larger picture. Asperger’s victims are often not cognizant that the tasks they perform are either useless, highly detrimental to themselves, or highly detrimental to others.  Asperger’s victims view the world through a myopic lens of complete self-absorption and are not capable of knowing they are dangerous to themselves or others.  They are also not able to show remorse or true empathy to anyone.

One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s victims is their ability to diagram highly complex issues which they themselves understand — while failing to see that the complex issue so diagrammed is peripheral or useless to the overall job they’re trying to perform. See the diagram below (click for a full-size image) — which was actually part of a presentation on how the US military and NATO can “win” their war of aggression in Afghanistan. (By the way, according to a commenter on National Public Radio today, US troops there are still “pumped up” for their missions by telling them “we” are fighting for vengeance for 9/11 — with which Afghans and the Taliban had precisely nothing to do.)

People capable of such myopic obsession are normally unemployable in real-word businesses, but those with this kind of mentality seem to have found a niche in the American financial, political, and military establishments.

Without self-awareness there is no hope.

Read about the Asperger-like “PowerPoint Rangers” who have come to dominate the junior officer corps in Afghanistan

The United States and their British cohorts have been deceiving the public
>> for more than 100 years.

by Tom Engelhardt

SOMETIMES, it’s the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.

Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

“U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be ‘modest, realistic,’ and ‘above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,’ Gates said. ‘The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.'”

Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: “there must be an Afghan face on this war.” U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace – and no less unremarked upon – for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on events there.

Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory – and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War – ours – a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war.

And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. It’s the language – behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought – that is essential to Washington’s vision of itself as a planet-straddling goliath. Think of that “Afghan face”/mask, in fact, as part of the flotsam and jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious.

Of course, words create realities even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from certain global realities; but it also has the potential to blind us to those realities, which, in perilous times, can be dangerous indeed. So let’s consider just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.

War Hidden in Plain Sight: There has recently been much reporting on, and even some debate here about, the efficacy of the Obama administration’s decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war, now calls “Af-Pak” – the Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since August 2008, more than 30 such missile attacks have been launched on the Pakistani side of that border against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. The pace of attacks has actually risen since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, as have casualties from the missile strikes, as well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.

Thanks to Senator Diane Feinstein, we also know that, despite strong official Pakistani government protests, someone official in that country is doing more than looking the other way while they occur. As the Senator revealed recently, at least some of the CIA’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the skies over Af-Pak are evidently stationed at Pakistani bases. We learned recently as well that American Special Operations units are now regularly making forays inside Pakistan “primarily to gather intelligence”; that a unit of 70 American Special Forces advisors, a “secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command,” is now aiding and training Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps paramilitary troops, again inside Pakistan; and that, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) these American efforts, the influence of the Pakistani Taliban is actually expanding, even as Pakistan threatens to melt down.

Mystifyingly enough, however, this Pakistani part of the American war in Afghanistan is still referred to in major U.S. papers as a “covert war.” As news about it pours out, who it’s being hidden from is one of those questions no one bothers to ask.

On February 20th, the New York Times‘ Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger typically wrote:

“With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government… Under standard policy for covert operations, the C.I.A. strikes inside Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama administration or the Bush administration.”

On February 25th, Mazzetti and Helene Cooper reported that new CIA head Leon Panetta essentially bragged to reporters that “the agency’s campaign against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the ‘most effective weapon’ the Obama administration had to combat Al Qaeda’s top leadership… Mr. Panetta stopped short of directly acknowledging the missile strikes, but he said that ‘operational efforts’ focusing on Qaeda leaders had been successful.” Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported the next day that Panetta said the attacks are “probably the most effective weapon we have to try to disrupt al Qaeda right now.” She added, “Mr. Obama and National Security Adviser James Jones have strongly endorsed their use, [Panetta] said.”

Uh, covert war? These “covert” “operational efforts” have been front-page news in the Pakistani press for months, they were part of the U.S. presidential campaign debates, and they certainly can’t be a secret for the Pashtuns in those border areas who must see drone aircraft overhead relatively regularly, or experience the missiles arriving in their neighborhoods.

In the U.S., “covert war” has long been a term for wars like the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which were openly discussed, debated, and often lauded in this country. To a large extent, when aspects of these wars have actually been “covert” – that is, purposely hidden from anyone – it has been from the American public, not the enemies being warred upon. At the very least, however, such language, however threadbare, offers official Washington a kind of “plausible deniability” when it comes to thinking about what kind of an “American face” we present to the world.

Imperial Naming Practices: In our press, anonymous U.S. officials now point with pride to the increasing “precision” and “accuracy” of those drone missile attacks in taking out Taliban or al-Qaeda figures without (supposedly) taking out the tribespeople who live in the same villages or neighboring compounds. Such pieces lend our air war an almost sterile quality. They tend to emphasize the extraordinary lengths to which planners go to avoid “collateral damage.” To many Americans, it must then seem strange, even irrational, that perfectly non-fundamentalist Pakistanis should be quite so outraged about attacks aimed at the world’s worst terrorists.

On the other hand, consider for a moment the names of those drones now regularly in the skies over “Pashtunistan.” These are no less regularly published in our press to no comment at all. The most basic of the armed drones goes by the name of Predator, a moniker which might as well have come directly from those nightmarish sci-fi movies about an alien that feasts on humans. Undoubtedly, however, it was used in the way Col. Michael Steele of the 101st Airborne Division meant it when he exhorted his brigade deploying to Iraq (according to Thomas E. Ricks’ new book The Gamble) to remember: “You’re the predator.”

The Predator drone is armed with “only” two missiles. The more advanced drone, originally called the Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over Af-Pak, has been dubbed the Reaper – as in the Grim Reaper. Now, there’s only one thing such a “hunter-killer UAV” could be reaping, and you know just what that is: lives. It can be armed with up to 14 missiles (or four missiles and two 500-pound bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly wallop.

Oh, by the way, those missiles are named as well. They’re Hellfire missiles. So, if you want to consider the nature of this covert war in terms of names alone: Predators and Reapers are bringing down the fire from some satanic hell upon the peasants, fundamentalist guerrillas, and terrorists of the Af-Pak border regions.

In Washington, when the Af-Pak War is discussed, it’s in the bloodless, bureaucratic language of “global counterinsurgency” or “irregular warfare” (IW), of “soft power,” “hard power,” and “smart power.” But flying over the Pashtun wildlands is the blunt-edged face of predation and death, ready at a moment’s notice to deliver hellfire to those below.

Imperial Arguments: Let’s pursue this just a little further. Faced with rising numbers of civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged Afghan public, American officials tend to place the blame for most sky-borne “collateral damage” squarely on the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen bluntly explained recently, “[T]he enemy hides behind civilians.” Hence, so this Empire-speak argument goes, dead civilians are actually the Taliban’s doing.

U.S. military and civilian spokespeople have long accused Taliban guerrillas of using civilians as “shields,” or even of purposely luring devastating air strikes down on Afghan wedding parties to create civilian casualties and so inflame the sensibilities of rural Afghanistan. This commonplace argument has two key features: a claim that they made us do it (kill civilians) and the implication that the Taliban fighters “hiding” among innocent villagers or wedding revelers are so many cowards, willing to put their fellow Pashtuns at risk rather than come out and fight like men – and, of course, given the firepower arrayed against them, die.

The U.S. media regularly records this argument without reflecting on it. In this country, in fact, the evil of combatants “hiding” among civilians seems so self-evident, especially given the larger evil of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, that no one thinks twice about it.

And yet like so much of Empire-speak on a one-way planet, this argument is distinctly uni-directional. What’s good for the guerrilla goose, so to speak, is inapplicable to the imperial gander. To illustrate, consider the American “pilots” flying those unmanned Predators and Reapers. We don’t know exactly where all of them are (other than not in the drones), but some are certainly at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

In other words, were the Taliban guerrillas to leave the protection of those civilians and come out into the open, there would be no enemy to fight in the usual sense, not even a predatory one. The pilot firing that Hellfire missile into some Pakistani border village or compound is, after all, using the UAV’s cameras, including by next year a new system hair-raisingly dubbed “Gorgon Stare,” to locate his target and then, via console, as in a single-shooter video game, firing the missile, possibly from many thousands of miles away.

And yet nowhere in our world will you find anyone making the argument that those pilots are in “hiding” like so many cowards. Such a thought seems absurd to us, as it would if it were applied to the F-18 pilots taking off from aircraft carriers off the Afghan coast or the B-1 pilots flying out of unnamed Middle Eastern bases or the Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia. And yet, whatever those pilots may do in Afghan skies, unless they experience a mechanical malfunction, they are in no more danger than if they, too, were somewhere outside Las Vegas. In the last seven years, a few helicopters, but no planes, have gone down in Afghanistan.

When the Afghan mujahedeen fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the CIA supplied them with hand-held Stinger missiles, the most advanced surface-to-air missile in the U.S. arsenal, and they did indeed start knocking Soviet helicopters and planes out of the skies (which proved the beginning of the end for the Russians). The Afghan or Pakistani Taliban or al-Qaeda terrorists have no such capability today, which means, if you think about it, that what we here imagine as an “air war” involves none of the dangers we would normally associate with war. Looked at in another light, those missile strikes and bombings are really one-way acts of slaughter.

The Taliban’s tactics are, of course, the essence of guerrilla warfare, which always involves an asymmetrical battle against more powerful armies and weaponry, and which, if successful, always depends on the ability of the guerrilla to blend into the environment, natural and human, or, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong so famously put it, to “swim” in the “sea of the people.”

If you imagine your enemy simply using the villagers of Afghanistan as “shields” or “hiding” like so many cowards among them, you are speaking the language of imperial power but also blinding yourself (or the American public) to the actual realities of the war you’re fighting.

Imperial Jokes: In October 2008, Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, refused to renew the U.S. lease at Manta Air Base, one of at least 761 foreign bases, macro to micro, that the U.S. garrisons worldwide. Correa reportedly said: “We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami – an Ecuadorean base. If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.”

This qualifies as an anti-imperial joke. The “leftist” president of Ecuador was doing no more than tweaking the nose of goliath. An Ecuadorian base in Miami? Absurd. No one on the planet could take such a suggestion seriously.

On the other hand, when it comes to the U.S. having a major base in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian land that not one in a million Americans has ever heard of, that’s no laughing matter. After all, Washington has been paying $20 million a year in direct rent for the use of that country’s Manas Air Base (and, as indirect rent, another $80 million has gone to various Kyrgyzstani programs). As late as last October, the Pentagon was planning to sink another $100 million into construction at Manas “to expand aircraft parking areas at the base and provide a ‘hot cargo pad’ – an area safe enough to load and unload hazardous and explosive cargo – to be located away from inhabited facilities.” That, however, was when things started to go wrong. Now, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has voted to expel the U.S. from Manas within six months, a serious blow to our resupply efforts for the Afghan War. More outrageous yet to Washington, the Kyrgyzstanis seem to have done this at the bidding of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has the nerve to want to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in what used to be the borderlands of the old Soviet Union.

Put in a nutshell, despite the crumbling U.S. economic situation and the rising costs of the Afghan War, we still act as if we live on a one-way planet. Some country demanding a base in the U.S.? That’s a joke or an insult, while the U.S. potentially gaining or losing a base almost anywhere on the planet may be an insult, but it’s never a laughing matter.

Imperial Thought: Recently, to justify those missile attacks in Pakistan, U.S. officials have been leaking details on the program’s “successes” to reporters. Anonymous officials have offered the “possibly wishful estimate” that the CIA “covert war” has led to the deaths (or capture) of 11 of al Qaeda’s top 20 commanders, including, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, “Abu Layth al-Libi, whom U.S. officials described as ‘a rising star’ in the group.”

“Rising star” is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with Empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it’s not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves – hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, for instance, American officials spent a remarkable amount of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist enemy, aka “the bamboo Pentagon.” Of course, it wasn’t there to be found, except in Washington’s imperial imagination.

In the Af-Pak “theater,” we may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Underpinning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that the key to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the Taliban) is destroying its leadership one by one. As key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the missile attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures (as well as whoever was in their vicinity), are distinctly counterproductive. The deaths of those figures in no way compensates for the outrage, the destabilization, the radicalization that the attacks engender in the region. They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening each of those movements.

What it’s hard for Washington to grasp is this: “decapitation,” to use another American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless guerrilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless Washington would be.

Only recently, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that, while top U.S. officials were exhibiting optimism about the effectiveness of the missile strikes, Pakistani officials were pointing to “ominous signs of Al Qaeda’s resilience” and suggesting “that Al Qaeda was replenishing killed fighters and midlevel leaders with less experienced but more hard-core militants, who are considered more dangerous because they have fewer allegiances to local Pakistani tribes… The Pakistani intelligence assessment found that Al Qaeda had adapted to the blows to its command structure by shifting ‘to conduct decentralized operations under small but well-organized regional groups’ within Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Imperial Dreams and Nightmares: Americans have rarely liked to think of themselves as “imperial,” so what is it about Rome in these last years? First, the neocons, in the flush of seeming victory in 2002-2003 began to imagine the U.S. as a “new Rome” (or new British Empire), or as Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as February 2001 in Time magazine, “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”

All roads on this planet, they were then convinced, led ineluctably to Washington. Now, of course, they visibly don’t, and the imperial bragging about surpassing the Roman or British empires has long since faded away. When it comes to the Afghan War, in fact, those (resupply) “roads” seem to lead, embarrassingly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Iran. But the comparison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the brain.

When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post recently, drumming up support for the revised, age-of-Obama American mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn’t help starting off with an inspiring tale about the Romans and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that they conquered. As he tells it, the ruler the Romans installed in Locri, a rapacious fellow named Pleminius, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen assures us, the Locrians so believed in “the reputation for equanimity and fairness that Rome had built” that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate, knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded restitution; and indeed, the tyrant was removed.

Admittedly, this seems a far-fetched analogy to the U.S. in Afghanistan (and don’t for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even though the Obama-ites evidently now believe him corrupt and replaceable). Still, as Mullen sees it, the point is: “We don’t always get it right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference.”

Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, in his somewhat overheated brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just) “early” Romans – before, of course, the fatal rot set in.

And then there’s the Washington Post‘s Thomas Ricks, a superb reporter who, in his latest book, gives voice to the views of Centcom Commander David Petraeus. Reflecting on Iraq, where he (like the general) believes we could still be fighting in “2015,” Ricks begins a recent Post piece this way:

“In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East… The structures brought home a sad realization: It’s simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East… It was a week when U.S. forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean – following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British.”

With the waning of British power, Ricks continues, it “has been the United States’ turn to take the lead there.” And our turn, as it happens, just isn’t over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from our imperial capital and from our military viceroys out on the peripheries.

Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys. They seem to channel the imperial unconscious. Take David Petraeus. For him, too, the duties and dangers of empire evidently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of key figures, civilian and military, he has lately begun to issue warnings about Afghanistan’s dangers. As the Washington Post reported, “[Petraeus] suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan. ‘Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,’ he said. ‘We cannot take that history lightly.'”

Of course, he’s worrying about the graveyard aspect of this, but what I find curious – exactly because no one thinks it odd enough to comment on here – is the functional admission in the use of this old adage about Afghanistan that we fall into the category of empires, whether or not in search of a graveyard in which to die.

And he’s not alone in this. Secretary of Defense Gates put the matter similarly recently: “Without the support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the U.S. would simply ‘go the way of every other foreign army that’s ever been in Afghanistan.'”

Imperial Blindness: Think of the above as just a few prospective entries in The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak that will, of course, never be compiled. We’re so used to such language, so inured to it and to the thinking behind it, so used, in fact, to living on a one-way planet in which all roads lead to and from Washington, that it doesn’t seem like a language at all. It’s just part of the unexamined warp and woof of everyday life in a country that still believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly fight wars halfway across the globe, find triumph or tragedy in the gain or loss of an air base in a country few Americans could locate on a map, and produce military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the way a do-it-yourself furniture maker would produce instructions for constructing a cabinet from a kit.

We don’t find it strange to have 16 intelligence agencies, some devoted to listening in on, and spying on, the planet, or capable of running “covert wars” in tribal borderlands thousands of miles distant, or of flying unmanned drones over those same borderlands, destroying those who come into camera view. We’re inured to the bizarreness of it all and of the language (and pretensions) that go with it.

If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak were ever produced, who here would buy it? Who would feel the need to check out what seems like the only reasonable and self-evident language for describing the world? How else, after all, would we operate? How else would any American in a position of authority talk in Washington or Baghdad or Islamabad or Rome?

So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too. And we know what finally happened to their empire and the language that went with it. Such a language plays its role in normalizing the running of an empire. It allows officials (and in our case the media as well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the smooth functioning of such an enormous undertaking. Embedded in its words and phrases is a fierce way of thinking (even if we don’t see it that way), as well as plausible deniability. And in the good times, its uses are obvious.

On the other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease to function well, that same language can suddenly work to blind the imperial custodians – which is, after all, what the foreign policy “team” of the Obama era is – to necessary realities. At a moment when it might be important to grasp what the “American face” in the mirror actually looks like, you can’t see it.

And sometimes what you can’t bring yourself to see can, as now, hurt you.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years…

Read the full article at Russell Means Freedom