Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

MORE PRAISE FOR
Drift
 

“America is in urgent need of a real debate over its addiction to sprawling militarism and endless war. It affects, and degrades, every aspect of national life: political, cultural, and economic. Nobody is better positioned to trigger that debate than Rachel Maddow, and that’s exactly what she does in this
startlingly insightful and well-written
book. By stripping away the propaganda that distorts national security policy and laying bare its reality, Maddow has written
one of those rare political books that can transform Americans’ understanding of what their government is actually doing.”

—GLENN GREENWALD
, columnist for Salon and
author of
Liberty and Justice for Some

 

“Written with the flair for scintillating satire that has endeared Rachel Maddow to liberals and moderates alike
—and infuriated neoconservatives, evangelicals, and some tea partiers—
Drift
is funny, rich, and right
. But at its end, when you put it down, you will be troubled. We are losing our republic and Ms. Maddow tells you why.”

—LAWRENCE WILKERSON
, professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

 


Drift
is a serious and carefully conceived piece of investigative reporting
, illuminating a subject—the vast and mostly secret militarization of our society—that most Americans have no idea of, thanks in large part to the failure of many high-profile journalists to discuss it. Rachel has once again broken the mold and
she should be immensely proud of this book, which is written in the same bright, clear, engaging style she brings to broadcast television.”

—MATT TAIBBI
, author of
Griftopia

 

“Rachel Maddow’s
Drift
is
a long overdue and provocative examination of the abuses, excesses, and just plain foolish elements in our national security systems
. These are issues that deserve our attention.”

—TOM BROKAW
, NBC News special correspondent and bestselling author of
The Greatest Generation

 

“In
Drift
, people who love Rachel Maddow will discover that
her gift for finding amazing anecdotes and funny, revealing details totally translates to the page
. People who hate her may be surprised by how often in
Drift
she espouses some of the most conservative values: a suspicion of big government and unbridled federal power, a zeal to cut wasteful spending and a yearning to return to the intentions of the Founding Fathers.”

—IRA GLASS
, host of public radio’s
This American Life

 

“Brilliant book
.
Drift
will stun Americans with its portrait of a hyperventilating United States that has produced too many real-life
Dr. Strangelove
moments. Drawing from thoughtful, national-interest-driven conservatives and not just the liberal establishment, Maddow makes the case that what ought to be a strong nation is instead risking shipwreck, by letting war and military matters escape real political and economic gravitational forces.
Every page informs and angers at the same time.”

—STEVE CLEMONS
, Washington editor-at-large for
The Atlantic

 

Copyright © 2012 by Rachel Maddow

 

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

 

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Maddow, Rachel.
   Drift: the unmooring of American military power/Rachel Maddow.—1st ed.
      p. cm.
1. National security—United States. 2. United States—Military policy.
3. United States—Armed Forces—Appropriations and expenditures.
4. Militarism—United States. 5. Political culture—United States.
6. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 7. United States—Politics and government—1989– I. Title.

 

UA23.M17 2012
306.2′70973—dc23                  2012000998

 

eISBN: 978-0-307-46100-1

 

Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Jacket photograph and interior illustration by Kevin Van Aelst

 

v3.1

 

             To former vice president Dick Cheney.

             
Oh, please let me interview you
.

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Those truths are well established. They are read in every page which records the progression from a less arbitrary to a more arbitrary government, or the transition from a popular government to an aristocracy or a monarchy.

—James Madison, “Political Observations,” April 20, 1795

Contents
 
 
 
Prologue
 
Is It Too Late to Descope This?
 

IN THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE I LIVE IN HAMPSHIRE COUNTY
, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.

The American taxpayers’ investment in my town’s security didn’t stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor’s back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean a few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time
we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor’s back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantánamo.” Mostly it’s funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantánamo gets every summer. Even though it’s town-owned land, access to Little Guantánamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it’s my neighbors’ land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It’s going feral in there.

It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people, for instance, that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan, the way we ought to stick it to Osama bin Laden, the way to dispense American tax dollars to maximize American aims in that faraway country, would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of rococo narco-chic McMansions and apartment/office buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs and stoned guards lounging on the sidewalks, wearing bandoliers and plastic boots. No one ever made the case that this is what America ought to build in response to 9/11. But that is what we built. An average outlay of almost $5 billion a month over ten years (and counting) has created a twisted war economy in Kabul. Afghanistan is still one of the four poorest
countries on earth; but now it’s one of the four poorest countries on earth with a neighborhood in its capital city that looks like New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s, when Newark mobsters built garish mansions and dotted the grounds with lawn jockeys and hand-painted neo-neoclassic marble statues.

Walking around this Zircon-studded neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan (named for the general who commanded the Afghan Army’s rout of the British in 1842), one of the weirdest things is that the roads and the sewage and trash situation are palpably worse here than in many other Kabul neighborhoods. Even torqued-up steel-frame SUVs have a hard time making it down some of these desolate streets; evasive driving techniques in Wazir Akbar Khan often have more to do with potholes than potshots. One of the bigger crossroads in the neighborhood is an ad hoc dump. Street kids are there all day, picking through the newest leavings for food and for stuff to salvage or sell.

There’s nothing all that remarkable about a rich-looking neighborhood in a poor country. What’s remarkable here is that there aren’t rich Afghan people in this rich Afghan neighborhood. Whether or not the owners of these giant houses would stand for these undrivable streets, the piles of garbage, the sewage running down the sidewalk right outside their security walls, they’re not here to see it. They’ve moved to Dubai, or to the United States, or somewhere else that’s safer for themselves and their money. (Or our money.) Most of these fancy properties in Wazir Akbar Khan were built by the Afghan elite with profits from the international influx of cash that accompanied the mostly American influx of war a decade ago—built to display status or to reap still more war dollars from the Western aid agencies and journalists and politicians and diplocrats and private contractors who need proper places to stay in the capital. The surges big and small have been good to the property
barons of Wazir Akbar Khan: residential real estate values were reportedly up 75 percent in 2008 alone. Check the listings under Kabul “villas” today and you’ll find properties priced from $7,000 to $25,000 a month with specs like this: four floors, a dozen rooms, nine toilets, three big kitchens, sleeps twenty.

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