Prisoners of War
The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression has sparked a great reckoning. Barack Obama now argues that it represents a "failed philosophy," "the idea that if we give more and more to those with the most, prosperity will trickle down to everyone else." His broadscale indictment of the "era of greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street and in Washington" plasters John McCain, a self described "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution, to his record, and exposes his recent cross dressing as a populist tribune.
Yet, the Iraq War, surely the worst foreign policy debacle at least since Vietnam, has had little effect in challenging the "failed philosophy" that an imperial America is the "indispensable nation" needed to police the globe. Even as Congress balked at the $700 billion bail out of Wall Street and Republicans filibustered against even a token $50 billion stimulus plan for Main Street, next year's $700 billion military budget was passed without a murmur.
Today in the New York Times, the Institute for America's Future which I co-direct published an "op ad" entitled Prisoners of War. It makes the simple point that we will be unable to put our nation back on track at home if we remain prisoners of war abroad.
For the ad and back materials, go here.
We are spending about $12 billion a month on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The latter will end costing $3 trillion. More troops are being dispatched to the former. We maintain an empire of over 700 bases across the world. Our navy polices the seven seas. We spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined -- and that is apparently not enough. Both major party political candidates are committed to increasing the size of the military and the amount we will spend on it.
Yet the military has no answer to the major challenges we face to our security -- a globalized economy of increasing instability, the rise of India and China, increasing global indebtedness that can't be sustained, a growing dependence on foreign oil, catastrophic climate change and the accompanying resource struggles.
Even, as a study from the Rand Corporation, the Pentagon's own think thank notes, the declaration of a Global War on Terror has detracted from a sensible strategy to deal with al Qaeda and its allies. We've turned fanatics into warriors, inflating their importance and adding to their attraction. We've squandered lives and money in Iraq, alienating our allies, exhausting our military, and emboldening our adversaries. We've slighted the global intelligence sharing, financial pressure, and aggressive policing which are the core of a realistic strategy, and weakened the necessary public campaign to appeal to moderate Islam and isolate the suicidal zealots. When you carry only a hammer, as any carpenter would tell you, more and more things start looking like nails.
Just as the financial crisis calls into question the market fundamentalism of the last years, one would think the Iraq debacle would trigger a debate about our imperial policies and our distorted priorities. Sadly, the absence of a serious peace movement has left the cloistered world of our national security managers undisturbed. As we head into what surely will be an election that brings a sea change to our politics, we remain prisoners of war.
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Just for those who think that the United States ought to focus on Afghanistan:
"EXCEPT at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian. [...] Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. [...]
Into this happy world the nineteenth century brought two new facts: the breech-loading rifle and the British government. The first was an enormous luxury and blessing; the second an unmitigated nuisance. The convenience of the breech-loading, and still more of the magazine rifle, was nowhere more appreciated than in the Indian highlands. A weapon which would kill with accuracy at fifteen hundred yards opened a whole new vista of delights to every family or clan which could acquire it. One could actually remain in one's own house and fire at one's neighbour nearly a mile away [...]
No one would have minded these expeditions if they had simply come, had a fight and then gone away again [...] these intruders began to make roads through many of the valleys...
"My Early Life”, Winston Churchill
Great post -- and ominous warning.
I remember when the Soviet Union sent its troops into Afghanistan, with Brzezinski and others venting about the expansion of Soviet power in the arc of crisis. Eqbal Ahmad, the brilliant scholar and activist from Pakistan, said immediately, "This is the Soviet Vietnam. They will lose badly in Afghanista
Increasing American forces in Afghanistan is simply a further step down the wrong road
Welcome to Vietnam III.
"Increasing American forces in Afghanistan is simply a further step down the wrong road."
Indeed. And to what purpose, stated by the u.s. government or any of the candidates for the executive branch, are there still troops there? Some ephemeral war against Bin-Laden?
I ahte to say it, but you are right. No one has ever "won" in Afghanistan - it is not a country. Can we provide relief? Maybe? Can we "win?" Not a chance.
Great article. One of the sad truths of business is that once an industry sets itself up, it rarely wants to disappear on its own! Instead, it pushes for "growth"; numbers that will send its stock rising. That's why Starbucks felt the need to put up a shop on every damned street corner until people got sick of the sight (and aroma) of them. So if your business is war, what are you gonna do? Just sit around hoping wars will happen? What sort of self respecting capitalist does that? No, you buy politicians! They come pretty cheap, when you consider we're talking about multi-billion dollar contracts here. Then you get them to persuade everybody what an unsafe world we live in.
Would you like fries with that fighter plane?
For a good, simple explanation of how the military became a business, read John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards"
The Bush administration wants to perpetuate war to eternally feed the defense industry it profits from. They want terrorism to flourish so we have that enemy out there to fear and fight and have the need to spend this kind of money on.
Yeah, as you point out, we are prisoners. A real peace movement cannot possibly thrive in this environment:
Reporters are thrown in jail for not disclosing their sources, the FBI stalk people who peaceably demonstrate to revise medieval capital punishment laws, our entire telecommunications footprint is thrown open to fair game for warrantless examinations, and any who openly complain can now legally be designated as "enemy combatants" under a 2006 law that explicitly strips such individuals of whatever rights they had previously imagined were granted to them by the founding documents of the country.
For the first time since the Civil War, the US army is ordering a tour of duty on home soil, in clear violation of laws existing since 1807: http://www
You point out a lot of things that a lot of people are noticing. but what do you expect anyone to do other than emigrate to another country?
Well, Robert...d
Read Paul Kennedy's book:
The rise and fall of the Great Powers: Economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000.
The current crises has discredited the US economic model. The extreme free market ideology is bankrupt. The explosive triple deficit will force the US to adapt. The extreme inequality of income is slowly dividing the US in an extremely rich class an a majority of semi indentured citizens (Animal farm: "some pigs are more equal than other pigs" seems to be disturbingly applicable to the US now. That will prove to be untenable. Delaying change will make the inevitable changes only more painful. The US moral standing was very much damaged by the role the US played in the period before that invasion in Iraq: Firm statements on highly questionable or even possibly fabricated evidence. The Georgia war can be characterized as subject to the same propaganda slant. The NEOCON wet-dream of a unipolar world is slowly turning in a nightmare.
Economics will force the USA in a more moderate role in the world. Hopefully some more solidarity and compassion between its citizens will move it to a also a economically more equal society.
THANK YOU, MR. BOROSAGE. The gargantuan cost of our military empire is the elephant in the room that noone talks about. This should be issue #1.
The yearly cost of maintaining our military empire is well over $1,000,000,000,000 (that's a TRILLION dollars thrown down a rat hole EVERY YEAR). We are being bankrupted by the military-i
Where are the statesmen who will start talking about this reality? Ron Paul is the only one I've heard. Obama? Gore? Pelosi? Kerry? Feingold? Who will start telling the truth about our unsustainable military/war/empire spending?
McCain, Bush, Cheney, Blount, Bohner, and the closet Republican Lieberman? Let us add all of them to the party. And what about Kucinich who wants impech Bush, which I heartily support along with reducing the US military budget to something far more sustainable.
Foreign policy experts, PhD economists, erudite hawks of military affairs touting themselves to be Sun Tzu incarnate, PhD sociologists, oversubscription to unproven ideology, dissertations and proclamations of ideological supremacy, these and more are part of this democracy.
Forgive the simple their simplicity. Martin Luther King gave several speeches that should serve as American foreign policy, domestic policy, and social policy for the ages. Sure, he is touted as a great maker of speeches. Such analysis misses his greatness and cheapens his gift. Those who really care for America do not quote him in remembrance of eloquently uttered words. His words stand as a recommendation of sanity and goodness, as a caution against tyranny and hatred, and as ideas for change leading to stronger and better implementations of the nation state.
The cycle of life and death continues. Still more are added to the list of those, no longer amongst us, yet quotable. Some of the living, seek to be distinguished by on-cue parroting of what the dead said, expanding upon what the dead said, or disproving what the dead and quotable has said.
Will we ever adapt and adhere to what the dead has said? Is history only to be recited and wrongly repeated but not rightly adhered to in shaping the present? If Martin’s words were applied, they would be more than speeches to recall, they would be life manifest, they would be crisis addressed, and they would be change we can believe in.
"As we head into what surely will be an election that brings a sea change to our politics, we remain prisoners of war. "
amen
When you carry only a hammer,
as any carpenter would tell you,
more and more things start looking like nails.
WELL THAT JUST ABOUT COMPLETES THE
SET OF BU$HE'S FOREIGH POLICY TOOLS
Karzai was on Al Jazera tonight stating that after futile attempts to get the Saudi's to help him, he was going to try to initiate talks with the Taliban. Maybe it will work better than fighting them, which we will never "win", whatever that means. The Bush crowd planned this deconstruction of the country well. Empty the coffers of the U.S. before they leave office and there will be no money left for social program's or for the working and middle class. On top of that our property and savings, if we have either, are tanking. I am 72 years old and don't have any way of recouping this loss. I lost six thousand dollars from my twenty thousand IRA this week and my house has lost two hundred thousand in value in the last six months. I have had this house for 45 years and it was my next egg for my old, old age. My kid's can't even afford to buy a house and they have no pension plan as my late husband and I have, even if it is nominal.
Watch out anyone who has grandkids going into high school My 15 year old grand daughter (who is anti war) inadvertently got her name on the Navy's list, by participating in a "fitness" test sponsored by the Military at her high school. She has asked to have her name removed from their records. Fat chance of that happening.
One thing has NOTHING to do with the other! BOTH are failed policies-one economic,one foreign policy!!!
Wow - you are right on point!
I am sure the Pentagon does not want to give up its control of that kind of a budget.
However - societies around the world have changed - we need a military that matches it -
something smaller and smarter -
The present situation with respect to foreign affairs is Eisenhower's worst nightmare come true. And of course, it doesn't take an MBA from Harvard Business School to figure out that when we spend $700 billion dollars for a military budget (this doesn't include purported homeland security expenses such as the Coast Guard or Department of Energy funds spent maintaining a nuclear weapons stockpile that everyone but a raving lunatic publicly states can never be used) that means we have that much less money to spend on projects that directly benefit citizens. For years, I have heard Americans complain about burdensome taxes when the tax rates of the rest of the civilized world are substantially higher then ours. The problem for Americans has never been that we pay too much tax. It only appears that way because we get virtually no direct benefit from the money we pay. The few direct benefits that all Americans can relate to, infrastructure and education, have been ignored or mismanaged for so long it remains to be seen how much money will be required for repairs. We certainly can;t afford $700 billions dollars to the Pentagon and expect bridges that don't collapse.
Eisenhower was a modern re-incarnation of George Washinton.
I take issue with your line, "the absence of a serious peace movement." I and millions of others participated in the movement to prevent the Iraq war. It was an international movement and it played a key role in de-legitimating the invasion -- not in the American press but everywhere else. That de-legitimation was a major reason why politicians in other countries chose not to support or collaborate with the invasion, which in turn left the U.S. pouring mostly its own resources into Iraq. Result? The U.S. military, bogged down in Iraq, has been unavailable ever since to implement most of the rest of the neo-con military agenda. Which has been a good thing for the U.S. and the world. Did the peace movement do this alone? Obviously not. But we contributed to this outcome and are proud of it. We expect to be ignored in the mainstream press but why ignore us here?
I agree with you in part. We had the largest public mobilization against the war ever ---- before the war started. Even the New York Times, at the time in the flush of their slavish pro-war reporting, hailed the rise of a "third force" in global politics.
And then the war started. When it turned bad, opposition grew once more. The newly elected Democratic Congress passed a bill to end the war on a date certain. The president vetoed it. Republicans voted to sustain his veto. The peace movement had its test -- show the Rs and conservative Dems that they would pay dearly for that vote. That mobilization fizzled. Only one vote changed.
Worse, the opposition to Iraq has not generated a serious broader critique of America's national security policy. When John Edwards had the temerity to question the phrase "war on terror," he got blistered from the right and precious little support from the peace movement. To this day, the reassessment that should be taking place is AWOL in the political debate. As a long time critic of our national security policies, I consider that our failure.
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