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| January 3, 2013 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Apocalypse When?
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Welcome to 2013! This January, TD plans to have another stellar line-up of provocative pieces for you by the likes of Bill McKibben, Nick Turse, Rebecca Solnit, Jonathan Schell, Noam Chomsky, Karen Greenberg, Michael Klare, Ann Jones, and others. If you have a little extra time, urge your friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to put their email addresses into the “subscribe” window at the upper right of our home page and sign on for the TomDispatch email notices that 32,000 of you already receive whenever a new piece is posted. Word of mouth remains our most powerful ally -- and that means you! Glad to be back. Tom]
The U.S. Intelligence Community’s New Year’s Wish Megatrends, Game-Changers, Black Swans, Tectonic Shifts, and a World Not That Different From 2012 By Tom Engelhardt Think of it as a simple formula: if you’ve been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you’re going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be. And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the future, but to plant the Stars and Stripes in that future has had the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in its grip since the mid-1990s. That was the moment when it first occurred to some in Washington that U.S. power might be capable of controlling just about everything worth the bother globally for, if not an eternity, then long enough to make the future American property. Ever since, every few years the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the IC’s “center for long-term strategic analysis,” has been intent on producing a document it calls serially Global Trends [fill in the future year]. The latest edition, out just in time for Barack Obama’s second term, is Global Trends 2030. Here’s one utterly predictable thing about it: it’s bigger and more elaborate than Global Trends 2025. And here’s a prediction that, hard as it is to get anything right about the future, has a 99.9% chance of being accurate: when Global Trends 2035 comes out, it’ll be bigger and more elaborate yet. It’ll cost more and still, like its predecessor, offer a hem for every haw, a hedge for every faintly bold possibility, a trap-door escape from any prediction that might not stick. None of this should be surprising. In recent years, with a $75 billioncollective budget, the IC, that historically unprecedented labyrinth of17 intelligence agencies and outfits, has been one of Washington’smajor growth industries. In return for almost unfettered funding and a more-than-decade-long expansion of its powers, it’s promised one thing to the American people: safety, especially from “terrorism.” As part of a national security complex that has benefitted enormously from a post-9/11 lockdown of the country and the creation of a permanent war state, it also suffers from the classic bureaucratic disease of bloat. So no one should be shocked to discover that its forays into an anxiety-producing future, which started relatively modestly in 1997, have turned into ever more massive operations. In this fifth iteration of the series, the authors have given birth to a book-length paean to the future and its dangers. For this, they convened groups of “experts” in too many American universities to count, consulted too many individual academics to name despite pages of acknowledgements, and held “meetings on the initial draft in close to 20 countries.” In other words, a monumental effort was made to mount the future and reassure Washington that, while a “relative economic decline vis-à-vis the rising states is inevitable,” the coming decades might still prove an American plaything (even if shared, to some extent, with China and those rising powers). Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
