The End of Victory Culture

By Tom Engelhardt / Publication: July 1, 2007

n an updated edition to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story forward into the twenty-first century.

He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, "Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought "victory culture" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Husseins Iraq; and how, from its "Mission Accomplished" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land. This book is an autopsy of a once vital American myth: the cherished belief that triumph over a less-than-human enemy was in the American grain, a birthright and a national destiny. The End of Victory Culture is a compelling account of how America's premier story - of inevitable triumph against all odds - underwent a dizzying decomposition from Hiroshima to Iraq.

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Excerpts from the End of Victory Culture

It has been said that each of our many wars and interventions since the Reagan administration ordered the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 has proved yet another living laboratory for the military-industrial complex; for the testing of ever newer, ever more powerful, more technologically sophisticated generations of weaponry. The practically sub-nuclear MOAB (nicknamed the "Mother of all Bombs"), for instance, was rushed from its testing grounds in Florida to the Persian Gulf region just days too late for use in the invasion of Iraq. Its first battle tests will have to await our next frontier war -- even if that frontier turns out, once again, to be in the oil heartlands of the planet. ___

Though refined in each war to follow from Panama to Afghanistan, the Pentagon's approach remained at heart defensive, based on a set of negative, near-biblical injunctions. Thou shalt not, for instance, show "body bags" on television (since American casualties turn off the public and hence might lead to a lessening of war support at home). In the process, body bags were renamed and functionally taken off the air, while the bodies of the American dead were essentially flown home in the dead of night and the coffins carefully unloaded beyond the sight of reporters or cameras. Another Vietnam-era injunction, put into a pungent phrase by Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of our Afghan War in 2001, was: "We don't do body counts." This injunction slowly faded in the years after the invasion as Iraq turned into a full-scale counterinsurgency war, but for a while the dead of war on either side of the battle ceased to exist. As late as November 2006, president Bush expressed his irritation to a group of conservative news columnists that "[w]e don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it." the problem, he explained in frustration was: "We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team." ___

Reporters were now to be "embedded" in military units, bonded with the military through prewar "boot camps," and then sent off to relay the war back to us, unit by unit, from those convoys of Bradley fighting vehicles and abrams tanks, which bore such a resemblance to the long lines of pioneer wagons heading west in countless westerns. Born in part of technological necessity, the idea of embedding reporters also reflected how confident the administration was of victory over Saddam Hussein's punchless army -- confident enough to take a chance on a steady flow of images in real time from the once hated, dreaded media. Movie-making and war-making would now be intertwined. The location of this production would be Iraq. The director would be the Pentagon. The production staff would be situated at that quarter-million-dollar set for war briefings at centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and Americans would see our troops advance in triumph just the way they were supposed to, just the way they had on-screen all those long, glorious years ago.
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___ Meanwhile, the growth of a thoroughly uncontrollable political internet, working in "36/7" time, and attracting ever more readers, turned out to be a problem of a different kind. Its various oppositional sites and bloggers were generally intent on dismantling the Bush Administration's heroic tales almost as they arose in a way that a largely cowed mainstream media certainly wasn't. For instance, the thrilling and heroic close-up photos of jubilant Iraqis pulling down the statue of the hated dictator Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad -- images that went instantly and triumphantly around the world and into every American Newspaper -- were soon being undermined on the Web. There, you could see the longer shots of the crowd, clearly indicating that it was exceedingly small, and had been organized by, as well as directed by, the American Military. ___

In our noisy cultural universe, amid what Todd Gitlin has called "the torrent" of the media, sooner or later (usually sooner) just about everything, wars and administrations included, is swept away. As the Bush Administration -- by 2004-5 crying out in the wilderness for the media to produce some "good news" stories about Iraq -- discovered, it's not easy to build something permanent in a looter's paradise where, in Donald Rumsfeld's memorable phrase, "stuff happens" all the time -- or in a situation where those being assigned to do the rebuilding are themselves plunderers. In the cultural free market of the moment, you can't create a lasting mythology out of war. You can hardly make it to the next event.

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The US Has 761 Military Bases across the Planet We Simply Never Talk About It . that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.
http://www.alternet.org/story/97913/the_us_has_761_military_bases_across_the_planet,_and_we_simply_never_talk_about_it

@Surviving Victory

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