Tom Engelhardt: The Theater of the Imperially Absurd

Do you remember, in 2001-2002, when top Bush administration officials, the neocons and their supporters, and allied pundits used to talk about an "arc of instability" that coincided with the energy heartlands of the planet? It was imagined to extend from North Africa through the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, right up to the Chinese border. Back then, they imagined that it was the destiny of "the last superpower" to put its ultimate mark (its "footprint" in Pentagonese) on those lands, filled with "rogue states," and bring them to order. In this piece, I return to that "arc," which wasn't then all that unstable, and consider the dimensions of the disaster that has since ensued.

Here's the remarkable thing, when you think about it: All the Bush administration had to do was meddle in any country in that arc of instability (and which one didn't it meddle in?), for actual instability, often chaos, sometimes outright catastrophe to set in. It's been quite a record, the very opposite of an imperial golden touch.

On any day, of course, you can see case by case evidence of this in the media. You can check out the Iraqi, or Somali, or Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani disasters, or impending disasters. But what you never see is all those crises and potential crises discussed in one place -- without which the magnitude of our present grave situation and the dangers in our future are hard to grasp. So I take a sweeping look at the process by which the Bush administration stitched that "arc" together into a genuine "Rube Goldberg instability machine," one where any group, across thousands of miles, might pull some switch that would set chaos rolling, the flames licking across the oil heartlands of the planet.

I take up the six obvious crisis areas in the arc today from Pakistan to Somalia (and several possible candidates for future crises as well) before turning to the last place in the "arc" that the Bush administration destabilized, Washington D.C., and the way in which the administration, in the end, destabilized itself. "Imagine all that," I conclude, "and then ask yourself, what levers on that Rube Goldberg machine they've done so much to create are they still capable of pulling?" ...