Let their joy be our joy.

Thus the prophet Mohammed, having encountered Jews fasting to commemorate the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, marked what would be the Day of Ashura on the Muslim calendar. The liberation of modern Egypt from thirty years of despotism is its own Exodus, the power and significance of which will not be fully appreciated for a generation. Nor is it at all clear where the journey will take a people who have known nothing but the whip hand of pharaohs, caliphs, kings, imperial occupiers and, most recently, a secular tyrant.

One thing is obvious, however, though it has been drowned out by the euphoric din that radiates from Tharir Square across the Arab world: the manner, as much as the fact, of Hosni Mubarak’s departure will hasten the long recessional of American influence and authority, particularly in the Middle East. The by-now irredeemable gap between the reality of the region and the one concocted in Washington leaves little room for imagination and daring, as revealed by the cautious and equivocating way in which President Obama handled his end of the crisis. By conflating the Muslim Brotherhood with Al Qaeda, for example, America has all but relieved itself of any credibility it may have once enjoyed among the Arabs. Brandishing the Zionist cudgel, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, this week urged “the unequivocal rejection of any involvement by the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremists” in the transfer of power in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Fortunately, the capacity of Ros-Lehtinen to shape Middle Eastern affairs is as limited as her comprehension of them. But she and functionaries like her can frustrate US attempts to engage the Middle East on its own terms, a radical approach suited to revolutionary times. Appealing for a transition gradual enough to allow secular political groups to compete with the more muscular Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared as parochial political elites throwing rocks at a passing train.

The failure of Washington to anticipate Egypt’s upheaval is symptomatic of its gradual estrangement from the world it presumes to lead. So as not to antagonize Mubarak,   the State Department after 9/11 segregated its diplomats from opposition groups, in particular the well-connected Brotherhood, effectively neutralizing its eyes and ears. The Pentagon, which enjoys strong ties to its Egyptian counterpart through officer-exchange programs that date back three decades, apparently produced little in the way of useful information about a looming succession crisis. Nor, for that matter, did the CIA.

Here was an intelligence shortage of epic proportions. For years, Egypt’s opposition leaders, intellectuals, and journalists had been warning anyone who would listen about the mortal absurdity of Mubarak’s vow to die in office even as he was grooming his son to succeed him, a prospect emphatically rejected by both the military and civil society. What did reach Washington, according to the trove of US diplomatic cables released in January by Wikileaks, was the message that the military would willingly guarantee a dynastic transfer of power. A July 2009 cable, based on an interview with an Egyptian politician, assures Foggy Bottom that a smooth transition is likely. “There would be some violence around the upcoming 2010 parliamentary and 2011 presidential elections,”according to the cable, “but…security forces would be able to keep it under control.”

The cable continues: “Widespread politically-motivated unrest was not likely because it was not part of the ’Egyptian mentality’. Threats to daily survival, not politics, were the only thing to bring Egyptians to the streets en masse.”

By ruling out relations with legitimate political movements abroad in reaction to political pressure at home, America denies itself the reference points needed to navigate competently through an unpredictable and often hazardous world. Rather than light a candle to illuminate the path before it, Washington curses the darkness of inconvenient facts. So when the dawn rose over Egypt to reveal a new age, America was nowhere to be found.

The ebullience of a near-emancipated Egypt stands in revealing contrast to the hand-wringing in Washington over its implications. Only now, as it becomes not only possible but highly probable that President Hosni Mubarak may soon be exiled to his own Elba, are America’s diplomatic and security apparatchiks projecting a Middle East without their most dependable Arab autocrat.

How, they wonder aloud, will the US impose its authority on the region if its fighter and refueling jets are barred from Egyptian airspace and its warships are prohibited from entering the Suez Canal? What chances are there for Middle East peace should a new regime open its border with Gaza? What if the Muslim Brotherhood turns the Arab world’s most vital nation into an Islamic republic?  “This is a big deal with huge potential consequences for U.S. strategic interests in a vital region,” Martin S. Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, breathlessly told The New York Times. “We’re in completely uncharted territory,”

True enough for the Yanks, though for previous imperial powers this is all well-worn terrain. In the early 1950s, the British and French were caught flat-footed by a barracks coup against their own Egyptian proxy, the voraciously corrupt, incompetent and rotund King Farouk. When Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the so-called “Free Officers” who brought down Farouk, emerged as president, among his first acts was to nationalize the Franco-British controlled Suez Canal. In response, London and Paris, with Israeli help, maneuvered to undermine Nassar and restore their authority by invading the canal zone. The 1956 Suez Crisis ended in ignominy for the conspirators when US President Dwight D. Eisenhower all but ordered them to withdraw, while Nasser’s credibility soared throughout the non-aligned world.

Just as London and Paris cursed Egyptian resistance to their hegemony – British Prime Minister Anthony Eden likened Nasser to Hitler, while British radio called him a “barking dictator” – American policymakers now dread the prospect of challenges to their own. Unlike Eden, however, who did little to hide his contempt for Third World upstarts, US leaders are now caught in the rip-tides of their own hypocrisy. Nowhere has America’s public embrace of human rights and self-determinism clashed as discordantly as they have in its quiet support for Hosni Mubarak, who famously cowed US officials into line with ominous talk of an Islamist revolution should he yield to any form of dissent. In late 2005, when Mubarak finally relented to President George W. Bush’s pressure for national elections, which despite gross occasions of fraud and voter intimidation resulted in a resounding triumph for the Muslim Brotherhood, Bush backed away from his “freedom agenda.” Since then, Mubarak’s despotism has only intensified.

For anyone who has followed Egypt’s political paroxysms over the last decade, the current reckoning comes as no surprise. While reporting in Egypt two years ago, opposition leaders assured me they would not tolerate another term of dictatorship. Analyst Osama Harb was most prescient. In the end, he said, Mubarak would be undone by his own legacy of corruption, malfeasance and the “miserable condition” of average Egyptians. There would be “general chaos,” he said, and “tanks in the streets.”

Predictably, such warnings were lost on the New Rome, where the imperial warrant is held in higher regard than the foreign unfortunates who stagger beneath it. Empire is the highest, and thus most pernicious, expression of militarization, and in Hosni Mubarak Washington enjoyed a most agreeable host. Like most of America’s post-Cold War partnerships, the relationship between the two parties had become an end in itself, a diplomatic compact Malthusian in its rate of diminishing returns. From a depleted US treasury, Cairo is showered with billions of dollars in subsidies to preserve its peace treaty with Israel, support of which is as much a strategic liability for America as it is for Egypt; it must concede its air and sea lanes to the Pentagon in Levantine wars of ruinous consequence; sustain an Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” that achieves a mirage of deliberation but nothing of substance; and suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, the only Egyptian political party whose leaders regularly submit their authority to scheduled, transparent and democratic referendums.

If ever there was an unholy alliance in need of exorcism, this is it. Tonight, I hoist a glass given to me years ago by a waiter at Cairo Station’s main cafe (an art-deco jewel), in tribute to the legions of Egyptians who bravely reject the post-Ottoman Middle East and the western powers that usurped it.

Egypt for the Egyptians.

At a time when our nation’s security apparatus is no doubt refreshing contingency plans for a war with North Korea, it’s worth noting that the North Koreans themselves doggedly persevere despite oppression from within and a militarized US foreign policy from without. For a counter-narrative to the predictable Sturm und Drang between Washington and Pyongyang, see below:

The bedlam revealed here is not a regular occurrence in ancient Sonchon, a North Korean coastal city about thirty-five miles south of the border with China. Sightings of foreigners are about as infrequent as they are anywhere else in the self-styled “Hermit Kingdom,” so it’s not surprising that a long-awaited visit from a delegation of aid workers would be celebrated with a decidedly unproletarian extravagance.

The lanky gent above toasting his bibulous hosts is Dr. Stephen Linton, who has just completed his resupply of medical goods at Sonchon People’s Hospital. The seated apparatchik with the toothy grin and heroically pomaded hair is the hospital director, and the young lady greeting Linton’s glass with one of her own is the proprietress of People’s No. 6 Diner, which apparently doubles as Sonchon’s top restaurant and unofficial greeting hall for visiting dignitaries.

I was along for the ride while reporting a profile of Linton and his work with North Korea’s tuberculosis victims. Journalists are regarded warily in the country, and I had been given the ground rules well before my arrival for the twelve-day assignment: no photographs between destinations, don’t talk politics with the minders, stick with the group at all times, don’t go near TB patients unless you’re wearing a mask, and eat and drink whatever the North Koreans put in front of you.

Hold it. Eat and drink? We were talking, or so I thought, about a famine-stricken country where people are commonly reduced to eating boiled tree bark. Could the local economy muster a selection of foodstuffs beyond the inevitable offerings of kimchi, the spicy fermented cabbage that is a staple in rich South Korea and a guilty pleasure in its impoverished neighbor?

As it turned out, the delegation did not want for good eating. On the contrary, we were welcomed and provided for as honored guests while we journeyed from one rural sanatorium to the next in a convoy of SUVs. At every stop, after dispensing drugs, electrocardiographs, parkas, and stethoscopes, we were ushered into the office of the director and treated to platters of roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, apples, and roast chicken. On tap were bottles of beer and soju, a high-octane hooch brewed from fermented potatoes or grains. (It’s best administered as a general anesthetic, of which the country is in dreadfully short supply.) The head of a care center in Ryongsong, a northern district of Pyongyang, celebrated our arrival by passing around shot glasses of ginseng-flavored soju that had the flavor and viscosity of cough syrup. We washed the shots down with beer chasers. It was nine in the morning.

Occasionally Linton and his delegation would be fêted beyond the confines of the care center. But the saturnalia at Sonchon was unforgettable. The business of resupply done, we were escorted to the diner, where a narrow table was set for 16 guests. Within minutes, we were steeped in small dishes filled with culinary confections hauled mostly from the nearby Yellow Sea. There were fried clams in their shells, crabmeat, cold cuttlefish diced and marinated in spicy garlic sauce, whole baby squid, fried dumplings, pâté of donkey meat, green-bean pancakes with congealed pig-fat centers (good for digestion, I was told), and rabbit fricassee prepared at table on portable gas stoves.

The toastmasters came at us in human waves. The soju and the steam from the fricassee provided an illusion of ambient warmth in defiance of North Korea’s severe energy shortages, though no one removed their coats. The diner’s windows fogged up, and the feast went on for more than two hours. Reluctantly, Linton declared our need to move on, which unleashed a scramble for photographs with the exclusively female and impressively apple-cheeked staff. Heady from the attention and nearly blind from the booze, I briefly convinced myself that I had liberated North Korea.

A snap snowstorm arrived, and with it its sobering properties. We climbed into the vehicles and continued on our way.

Among the many columns recently penned in tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, of particular interest was James Ledbetter’s contribution in the current edition of The Nation. Ledbetter, author of a new book on Eisenhower and the military-industrial complex of which he forewarned, highlights the unlikely solidarity between the conservative president and the liberal Nation. He points out that the magazine emphatically applauded Ike’s farewell address even as the rest of the national media ignored it or fumbled over its meaning. Within weeks into the Kennedy administration, after the alarmist prattle about a “missile gap” between US and Soviet strategic forces had been revealed as a  fraudulent perversity – there was indeed disequilibrium, but it was stacked in Washington’s favor – an Eisenhower aide noted to his old boss that the matter of a military-industry complex “turns out to be curiously yeasty.” He then praised The Nation, which, “of all things, has suddenly interested itself in the same thing, and has written a column on the subject.”

The Ledbetter column is resonant of a growing convergence between the libertarian right and progressive left in opposition to the militarization of US foreign policy. Its manifesto was unveiled last July, when Democratic Congressmen Barney Frank and Republican Ron Paul co-authored a plea for “substantial reductions” in defense spending. Since then, several blue-ribbon panels have concluded that meaningful deficit reduction is impossible without a significant pairing back of America’s military commitments abroad. Predictably, reactionaries like House Armed Service Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, also known as “the Congressman from Boeing” for his close ties to the defense industry, loudly condemned such apostasy and called instead for a dramatic increase in the Pentagon’s budget. Together with the Frank-Paul letter, however, the commissions’ findings confirmed that the logic of a foreign policy that fairly matches the nation’s commitments with its resources is appreciated on both sides of the political divide.

This concert of interests does not surprise me. While researching State vs. Defense I interviewed prominent policymakers and military officers widely identified as conservatives who openly lamented the militarization of US foreign policy. They included Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to George HW Bush, who keeps a life-sized bust of Eisenhower in his office and who clearly regretted how Ike’s warning of a looming national security state failed to galvanize the polity. Similarly, former Centcom commander and retired Marine four-star general Anthony Zinni argued for the closure of the Pentagon’s static bases in Asia and Europe, which he called “legacy deployments” of the Cold War. Zinni referred admiringly to George C. Marshall, perhaps the nation’s greatest soldier-statesmen since George Washington, who like the founding fathers feared that muscle-bound defense bureaucracies, coupled with an imperial writ, would become crippling ends in themselves.

Throughout his career in uniform, Marshall refused to vote in national elections, so fiercely did he respect the primacy of civilian authority over security policy. He and his generation of military officers, diplomats and policymakers – who mobilized the nation for war in a world that was far more precarious than it is today – understood that restraint, as Thucydides wrote, is a gesture of power that impresses men most. One wonders what they would have made of partisans like Buck Mckeon.

Dwight Eisenhower was no seer. He was not endowed by the gods with gifts of prophesy. The tough-minded warning he delivered exactly fifty years ago Monday was tempered by his own half-century of service in both the military and civilian spheres of government. As a soldier, he shared the founding fathers’ dread that a standing army might corrupt and fracture the republic. As president, he parried the trigger-happy thrusts of his general officers – particularly the demented Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command – eager to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. When the aging, bespectacled president gathered the nation for his farewell address and disparaged the “grave implications” of the country’s “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” it was the final overture of a well-worn public servant.

Eisenhower delivering his farewell address (January 17, 1961)

A soldier-statesmen known foremost for restraint, who had felt the sting of McCarthyite alarmism he knew to be the handmaiden of militarism, Eisenhower was now alerting his fellow Americans of a real threat from within. “In the councils of government,” he said, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Anticipating increased pressure from the Pentagon and its friends in Congress for unwarranted defense outlays, Eisenhower warned against mortgaging “the material assets of our grandchildren” at the expense of their “political and spiritual heritage.” He admonished his fellow citizens to be aware of the abuses of power that a permanent military bureaucracy may engender. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” he said, “can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

In a concise 1,938 words, Eisenhower elegantly and presciently foreshadowed a nation consumed by the culture and economics of endless war. And like Cassandra, he was ignored by a nation oblivious to its fate. We are assured by a priesthood of conventional thinkers that Washington spends far less on its armed forces than it did in Ike’s day. This is true, though it is irrelevant given how the US faces no symmetrical threat and is unlikely to for the foreseeable future. Apologists for American militarization blithely estimate defense spending at less than 5 percent of gross domestic product and 19 percent of the federal government – also true, if defense outlays ended with the Pentagon’s budget, which they do not. When one factors in related expenditures such as the costs of intelligence gathering, maintaining nuclear weapons, and the demands of homeland security and veterans’ affairs, plus the interest paid on such outlays, the true burden of America’s security state is closer to ten percent of GDP and a near-quarter of federal spending.

Eisenhower was more skin-flint than peace-nik. He offset skimpy defense budgets by investing heavily in the nation’s strategic arsenal, the so-called “New Look” scorned by much of the Pentagon brass as inflexible, and he toppled regimes suspected by John Foster Dulles, his belligerent Secretary of State, for being Soviet proxies or, equally unacceptable, “non-aligned” players on the Cold War pitch. If his farewell address was among the most profound of Ike’s legacies, his decision to topple Mohammad Mosaddegh, the freely elected prime minister of Iran, was a ruinous one.

One can reasonably conclude, however, that Eisenhower would have been horrified by America’s weaponized empire. He was the product of an age where America’s armies demobilized after winning their wars and troops eagerly settled back into civilian life. Today, Washington maintains some 800 military bases worldwide and a vast armada of warships controlling both the heavens and the Earth, permanent deployments that are as great a financial burden as they are a moral one. (Indeed, the Pentagon’s post-Desert Storm residual force in Saudi Arabia, which according to Osama bin Laden was legitimate provocation for his attacks on America, suggests that empire is more a liability to national security than it is an asset.) Like Cicero, Ike would have understood this to be the subversion of republican ideals. The fact that the hero of Normandy and one of the nation’s most successful of modern presidents could not preempt such a state of affairs suggests how deep and irrevocable the fix truly is.

State vs. Defense, to be published by Crown Books in August 2011, is an account of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, a fact lamented even by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In forensic detail, the book shows how the corruption of George Kennan’s containment doctrine into a mandate for endless war has wrought the ruinous mismatch between America’s diplomatic and military resources. It dispels the notion that the Pentagon’s policy-making primacy began with the George W. Bush administration and its War on Terror and instead dates its genesis to the dawn of the Cold War, when successive American presidents, bowing to political imperative, answered militarily to what were in fact diplomatic challenges best met through peaceful means. This Web site serves as a resource and forum for anyone concerned about the crisis of US diplomacy and the global consequences of American militarization.