The United States of Fear by Tom Engelhardt

Author:Tom Engelhardt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Commentary & Opinion, Current Affairs, Political Science, Imperialism
ISBN: 9781608461547
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2011-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Waist Deep in the Washington Quagmire

Numbers to Die For

In my 1950s childhood, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: “If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and ever.” Or if you were young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine’s parody, “Ripup’s Believe It or Don’t!”

With our Afghan and Iraq Wars on my mind, I’ve been wondering whether Ripley’s moment hasn’t returned. Here, for instance, are some figures offered in a March 30, 2010, Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the “drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq”: “There are . . . more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq.” Admittedly, that list lacks the “believe it or not” tagline, but otherwise Ripley’s couldn’t have put it more staggeringly. And here’s Pillsbury’s Ripley-esque kicker: the American drawdown will be the “equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York.”

When it comes to that slo-mo drawdown, all the numbers turn out to be staggering. They are also a reminder of just how the Pentagon has been fighting its wars in these last years—like a compulsive shopper without a twelve-step recovery program in sight. Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million (all numbers cited in one media account or another), whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which are still operating with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them) or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.

Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses.

In Ripley’s terms, if you were to put all the vehicles, equipment, and other materiel we managed to transport to Iraq and Afghanistan “four abreast,” they, too, might stretch on close to forever. And wouldn’t that be an illustration worthy of the old Ripley’s cartoon—all those coffeemakers and porta-potties and Internet cafés, even imported sand that, if more widely known about, might change the phrase “taking coals to Newcastle“ to “bringing sand to Iraq”?

You see, for all the sand Iraq did have, from the point of view of the U.S. military it didn’t have the perfect type

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