The United States of Fear [Paperback]

Tom Engelhardt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 13, 2011

In 2008, when the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet’s “sole superpower” would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence.

In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the “Soviet path”—pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security—and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff.

This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country—gripped by terror fantasies—was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned.

Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist “sole superpower” of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tom Engelhardt created and runs Tomdispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Englehardt is also co-founder and co-editor of Metropolitan Books' The American Empire Project.

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: Haymarket Books (December 13, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1608461548
• ISBN-13: 978-1608461547
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #300,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Tom Englehardt's latest book February 27, 2012

By Chris

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Something very much in evidence in this book is Mr. Englehardt's ability as a writer. The essays in this book are well written.

Some of the topics covered by the author include terrorism vs. food poisoning in terms of the threat presented to Americans; Raymond Davis; and the author's education about the world through viewing foreign films while growing up in Manhattan in the 1950's. A recurrent subject in the book is the misleading or facial nature of the "deadlines" civilian and military officials give for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. The exorbitant costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan military ventures are another prominent theme. For example, he focuses heavily on the mega-embassies/regional command centers/cities within cities that we have built or are building in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Englehardt quotes a National Priorities Project study which found that the $790 million price tag for the new embassy and consular facilities in Afghanistan could have provided jobs for 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers and 13,000 clean energy workers in the US. Other exorbitant costs noted by the author include several tens of billions of dollars in unsuccessful programs to train Afghan military and police and $773,000 to remodel a cinder block building to house a KFC/Taco Bell for our soldiers in Guantanamo Bay. The Gitmo torture camp, of course, is still open though Obama promised to close it.

The American method of fighting the "War on Terror" receives coverage in this book. He discusses examples of civilian casualties from the American war in Afghanistan (along with a few in Iraq). He notes that Wikileaks released a video of a US Apache helicopter attack on a Baghdad street in July 2007 that killed 12 non-combatants, including two Reuters employees and a father of two children who had stopped his vehicle to help the wounded of the attack. The Pentagon covered up this massacre until Wikileaks released the video of it. Englehardt notes that Wikileaks also released Pentagon logs showing that hundreds of civilians had been killed in unreported US military actions in Afghanistan. Englehardt reports an incident in February 2010 in Paktia province in Afghanistan. In that incident US snipers killed a local police intelligence chief, his brother and three women. The snipers dug the bullets out of the dead women, bound and gagged them and claimed that the dead men had killed the women in an "honor killing." The American media, as is their wont, accepted the military's version at face value until the version started to crumble and the military paid the victim's relatives $30,000 and sacrificed a goat. Other atrocities include a US raid that killed prosperous Afghan businessman with ties to the Afghan government and 76 members of his extended family in August 2008; the killing of 27 civilians in an attack on a minibus in February 2010; the indiscriminate shooting by marine special forces retaliating for a suicide bomb along an Afghan road in April 2007, killing--among others-- a 75 year old man and a 16 year old girl gathering grass for her family's farm; and a March 2011 massacre of 9 Afghan boys collecting wood. David Petraeus and Robert Gates apologized for this last atrocity to President Karzai though in the case of another air attack that killed 65 civilians--including children--Petraeus suggested that it was a fabricated atrocity. According to Englehardt, the US has also massacred at least half a dozen Afghan wedding parties in air attacks since 2001. He quotes Stanley McChrystal as saying that US troops have killed a lot of people who were no threat to them at checkpoints in Afghanistan. He notes that US troops have been in the habit of bulldozing homes and destroying agricultural walls in southern Afghanistan in order to build roads and other conveniences for their war against the Taliban.

Englehardt implies that civilian deaths caused by the US military in Afghanistan are, for the most part, not deliberate. However American pilots are often unable to tell the difference between insurgents and non-combatants. Often, information about suspected terrorists is very unreliable.
Englehardt notes that Mike Mullen and Robert Gates declared that Jullian Assange had a lot of blood on his hands as a result of the Wikileaks file leaks. He notes that it is rather rich that Mullen and Gates make this charge, when it is they who have real blood on their hands.

Englehardt's overall picture is that US foreign policy is dominated by a military industrial complex--most particularly Pentagon officials and arms manufacturers who have a vested interest in continued astronomical military spending. State, local and federal budgets are being slashed for essential services but the military budget is only slowed in its growth. The United States accounts for 47 percent of the world's military spending. In spite of the military-industrial complex, Englehardt writes that American power is declining and it won't be long before the US is not the superpower it once was. He suggests that the Arab Spring--with the overthrow of US supported dictators in Egypt and Tunisia-demonstrates this erosion of American power. He notes recent efforts to revitalize the bugaboo of Chinese military power as one of the justifications for increasing American military spending.

It is certainly depressing that Bradley Manning, Jullian Assange and other whistleblowers are prosecuted by President Obama--who also refuses to prosecute Bush administration torture enablers and war criminals. Of course, Obama himself along with Gates, Mullen, George HW Bush, John Negroponte, Bill Clinton etc. are not prosecuted in spite of being guilty of crimes against humanity.

Englehardt discusses the use of drones in US combat operations but I wish he would have cited the studies about the many hundreds of civilians that Obama's drone attacks have killed in Pakistan.

The author provides no footnotes but explains in a note at the very end of the book that URL sources are available on the pages where these essays were originally published at TomDispatch.com

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the drones don't get you than the fallout must! February 21, 2012

By Griot Lover

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I am reading this work, pausing, contemplating the author's presentation, his argument and feeling so many feelings. I have a sense of gratitude to the author. Gratitude for his valor in writing this book. Perhaps his act will be one of the last reference points for what valor used to mean before it became a meaningless logo, perhaps the name of a new video training game to prepare our video game warriors to operate multiple drones over multiple sites. I am absorbing this author's well presented, fact-based presentation of what is happening while we in America fall even deeper and deeper into the sleep of our self-involved issues: our inability to share wealth, our inability to care for our sick, our unwillingness to value the child in our country, to provide a quality public education system, to address poverty...it is a hard book to read. It is an inconvenient truth, one of the thousands of calls to awareness, acceptance and action in this nation of its diminishing seemingly emasculated or deeply drugged, or tremendously distracted society. Perhaps it takes an act of valor to read it....but no, that's not valor either. Valor is something I am wondering about today. Thank you to the author and publishers for putting this forward. I am surprised that more reviews have not been posted...maybe I shouldn't be. Perhaps the only valorous thing a citizen can do is get active, protest, confront and try to maintain a view of workability and a better day for the world, its current state, its future.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great scholarship, astute journalism, unflagging patriotism, and biting honesty March 30, 2012

By Robert Jacobson

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Engelhardt's work, always incisive on military matters -- I almost wrote, "national security," but that would be surrendering to fear -- here extends his analysis beyond the bombs-and-bullets crowd to consider how else the nation's fear of a non-existent boogeyman has warped and twisted the American nation, society, and culture so that they are almost unrecognizable from the pre-Cold War days. "Over a cliff!" Tom warns. Too late. In the four months since the book was published, the US has gone from wrack to ruin. Speculation on gasoline, a quarter of the nation's mortgages "underwater," wildly unfair taxation, the ownership of our politics by whoever coughs up enough millions, vast credit debt, and of course military spending have just about used up our opportunities for change. Now we will bear the bloom of the dragon's teeth planted over the last seven decades. Two hundred years to build a nation, 70 to tear it down. Welcome the Dark Ages. Tom can prepare us, he can't save us. Sigh.