Is America Hooked on War?
Cross-posted with tomdispatch.com.
"War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.
Last week, for instance, a New York Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger was headlined "Obama Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue." It offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.
"Doubts," of course, imply dissent, and in fact just the week before there had been a major break in Washington's ranks, though not among Democrats. The conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece offering blunt advice to the Obama administration, summed up in its headline: "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." In our age of political and audience fragmentation and polarization, think of this as the Afghan version of Vietnam's Cronkite moment.
The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on the other hand, represented a more typical Washington moment. Ignored, for instance, was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's end-of-August call for the president to develop an Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus of the piece was instead an upcoming speech by Michigan Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He was, Schmitt and Sanger reported, planning to push back against well-placed leaks (in the Times, among other places) indicating that war commander General Stanley McChrystal was urging the president to commit 15,000 to 45,000 more American troops to the Afghan War.
Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist of Levin's message about what everyone agrees is a "deteriorating" U.S. position: "[H]e was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces."
Think of this as the line in the sand within the Democratic Party, and be assured that the debates within the halls of power over McChrystal's troop requests and Levin's proposal are likely to be fierce this fall. Thought about for a moment, however, both positions can be summed up with the same word: More.
The essence of this "debate" comes down to: More of them versus more of us (and keep in mind that more of them -- an expanded training program for the Afghan National Army -- actually means more of "us" in the form of extra trainers and advisors). In other words, however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public now views the war, however much the president's war coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices will be between more and more.
No alternatives are likely to get a real hearing. Few alternative policy proposals even exist because alternatives that don't fit with "more" have ceased to be part of Washington's war culture. No serious thought, effort, or investment goes into them. Clearly referring to Will's column, one of the unnamed "senior officials" who swarm through our major newspapers made the administration's position clear, saying sardonically, according to the Washington Post, "I don't anticipate that the briefing books for the [administration] principals on these debates over the next weeks and months will be filled with submissions from opinion columnists... I do anticipate they will be filled with vigorous discussion... of how successful we've been to date."
State of War
Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. Similarly, we've become used to the idea that, when various forms of force (or threats of force) don't work, our response, as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version of the same under a new or rebranded name -- the hot one now being "counterinsurgency" or COIN -- in a marginally different manner. When it comes to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally the order of the day.
This wasn't always the case. The early Republic that the most hawkish conservatives love to cite was a land whose leaders looked with suspicion on the very idea of a standing army. They would have viewed our hundreds of global garrisons, our vast network of spies, agents, Special Forces teams, surveillance operatives, interrogators, rent-a-guns, and mercenary corporations, as well as our staggering Pentagon budget and the constant future-war gaming and planning that accompanies it, with genuine horror.
The question is: What kind of country do we actually live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) lists 16 intelligence services ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency? What could "intelligence" mean once spread over 16 sizeable, bureaucratic, often competing outfits with a cumulative 2009 budget estimated at more than $55 billion (a startling percentage of which is controlled by the Pentagon)? What exactly is so intelligent about all that? And why does no one think it even mildly strange or in any way out of the ordinary?
What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now submitted an even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and two wars' worth of disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?
What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This, in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220 million upgrade of the base that includes new "water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms, and power generating plants." And what about the U.S. air base built at Balad, north of Baghdad, that now has 15 bus routes, two fire stations, two water treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two power plants, a water bottling plant, and the requisite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago's O'Hare International?
What kind of American world are we living in when a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of private security contractors in that country?
What do you make of a world in which the U.S. has robot assassins in the skies over its war zones, 24/7, and the "pilots" who control them from thousands of miles away are ready on a moment's notice to launch missiles -- "Hellfire" missiles at that -- into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild, mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan? What does it mean when American pilots can be at war "in" Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is "the most dangerous part of your day"?
What does it mean when, for our security and future safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest ideas imaginable for developing high-tech weapons systems, many of which sound as if they came straight out of the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example, Boeing's advanced coordinated system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield surveillance equipment slated for seven Army brigades within the next two years at a cost of $2 billion and for the full Army by 2025; or the Next Generation Bomber, an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic bomber, "a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere," for 2035? What does it mean about our world when those people in our government peering deepest into a blue-skies future are planning ways to send armed "platforms" up into those skies and kill more than a quarter century from now?
And do you ever wonder about this: If such weaponry is being endlessly developed for our safety and security, and that of our children and grandchildren, why is it that one of our most successful businesses involves the sale of the same weaponry to other countries? Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this, which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don't tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers. Recently, the Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, for instance, wrote a piece on the subject which appeared inside the paper on a quiet Labor Day. "Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows" was the headline. Perhaps Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable with his subject, because he included the following generic description: "In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations..." The figures he cited from a new congressional study of that "highly competitive" market told a different story: The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came "a distant second" with $3.7 billion. In sales to "developing nations," the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market. In other words, with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position -- in this case, in things that go boom in the night. With the American car industry in a ditch, it seems that this (along with Hollywood films that go boom in the night) is what we now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state. Is that an American accomplishment you're comfortable with?
On the day I'm writing this piece, "Names of the Dead," a feature which appears almost daily in my hometown newspaper, records the death of an Army private from DeKalb, Illinois, in Afghanistan. Among the spare facts offered: he was 20 years old, which means he was probably born not long before the First Gulf War was launched in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. If you include that war, which never really ended -- low-level U.S. military actions against Saddam Hussein's regime continued until the invasion of 2003 -- as well as U.S. actions in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, not to speak of the steady warfare underway since November 2001, in his short life, there was hardly a moment in which the U.S. wasn't engaged in military operations somewhere on the planet (invariably thousands of miles from home). If that private left a one-year-old baby behind in the States, and you believe the statements of various military officials, that child could pass her tenth birthday before the war in which her father died comes to an end. Given the record of these last years, and the present military talk about being better prepared for "the next war," she could reach 2025, the age when she, too, might join the military without ever spending a warless day. Is that the future you had in mind?
Consider this: War is now the American way, even if peace is what most Americans experience while their proxies fight in distant lands. Any serious alternative to war, which means our "security," is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian terms then, war is indeed peace in the United States and peace, war.
American Newspeak
Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever more constricted form of English that would, sooner or later, make "all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended," he wrote in an appendix to his novel, "that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought... should be literally unthinkable."
When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our permanent situation, in good Orwellian fashion it has also been sundered from a set of words that once accompanied it.
It lacks, for instance, "victory." After all, when was the last time the U.S. actually won a war (unless you include our "victories" over small countries incapable of defending themselves like the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing "victory" over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades old that has proved a catastrophe. Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and Korean Wars and the last time the U.S. military was truly victorious was in 1945.
But achieving victory no longer seems to matter. War American-style is now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When George W. Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror (aka World War IV), conceived as a "generational struggle" like the Cold War, he caught a certain American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war system can't absorb victory. Any such endpoint might indeed prove to be a kind of defeat.
No longer has war anything to do with the taking of territory either, or even with direct conquest. War is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography.
Similarly drained of its traditional meaning has been the word "security" -- though it has moved from a state of being (secure) to an eternal, immensely profitable process whose endpoint is unachievable. If we ever decided we were either secure enough, or more willing to live without the unreachable idea of total security, the American way of war and the national security state would lose much of their meaning. In other words, in our world, security is insecurity.
As for "peace," war's companion and theoretical opposite, though still used in official speeches, it, too, has been emptied of meaning and all but discredited. Appropriately enough, diplomacy, that part of government which classically would have been associated with peace, or at least with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means, has been dwarfed by, subordinated to, or even subsumed by the Pentagon. In recent years, the U.S. military with its vast funds has taken over, or encroached upon, a range of activities that once would have been left to an underfunded State Department, especially humanitarian aid operations, foreign aid, and what's now called nation-building. (On this subject, check out Stephen Glain's recent essay, "The American Leviathan" in the Nation magazine.)
Diplomacy itself has been militarized and, like our country, is now hidden behind massive fortifications, and has been placed under Lord-of-the-Flies-style guard. The State Department's embassies are now bunkers and military-style headquarters for the prosecution of war policies; its officials, when enough of them can be found, are now sent out into the provinces in war zones to do "civilian" things.
And peace itself? Simply put, there's no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it's left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell's Newspeak, while "peace" remains with us, it's largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it's just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.
What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases -- recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone -- and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America's true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also -- always -- marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
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war makes money?
if i understand the article correctly, it actually wastes money - for the majority of people whose government cannot 'afford' healthcare.
the money 'made' by war goes to a very limited circle.
and it creates public poverty.
Of course you're addicted to war and have been for decades. Your annual military budget is greater than the rest of the world COMBINED. Your annual budget increase ALONE is greater than the ENTIRE military budgets of your closest competitors. No nation needs to spend this much on defence (if you're actually defending yourselves which, al Queda aside, is increasingly rare) and more than that, you're spending it on the wrong things. Your military programs are largely designed for fighting large-scale land wars against a superpower that no longer exists rather than fight limited-scale surgical wars.
No other western nation has the American level of hero worshipping the military. Yes, we're all proud of our veterans and all want to take care of them but only in the USA are they considered something akin to superheroes. Only in the US is "military veteran" a qualification for high office in itself. In the US, the PNAC documents (a blueprint for world domination) were seen as legitimate foreign policy within the last five years. The rest of the western world grew out of that about seventy years ago.
Actually as a percentage of GDP our defense budget is historically low for this century. We're just much wealthier than the rest of the world. Kinda like the foreign aid budgets. America gives by far the most in dollar terms but as a % of GDP Norway/Denmark give the most.
Countries gave up world domination 70 years ago? What does that mean? 1939 was the year Hitler decided NOT to dominate western Europe. That's news to me. Last time I looked Germany was part of western Europe. Western Europe didn't have colonies all over Africa 70 years ago, oh wait. I think your math is a bit off and so is your logic.
Thank the Reaganites and Bushies for that particular fact. The rest of us knew better and voted against them. Unfortunately, too many Americans didn't vote AT ALL during those elections.
You obviously have never heard of Francisco Franco, among all of the other military dictators (Augusto Pinochet, Charles DeGaulle [although some would argue his status as a dictator, he acted like an emperor], Paul von Hindenberg, Benito Mussolini, Papa Doc Duvalier, and a number of others come to mind) who were all from Western nations. If Americans worshiped war heroes, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter (the latter three DID serve in the military, but they couldn't be characterized as heroes), Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, and a large number of our other Presidents would never have been elected to the Presidency. You shouldn't make broad sweeping statements without substantive facts. Ours is a representative form of government, but the unfortunate truth is that too many of our "representatives" have come to represent only the interests of those who PAY them to represent them. Big corporations have lots of money to "donate" to the causes of politicians that get translated into advertisements broadcast to voters, many of whom believe only what they see on TV, being too intellectually lazy to dig for pertinent facts about the true qualifications of those running for office. This process has led, too often, to potential voters becoming so turned off to the political process that they fail to participate in it, leaving the field wide open for the election of those who will pander to big money interests, like the arms industry.
Everybody who has never read this brief note (14 pages as pdf) article by Gen. Smedley Butler Written C1935 really should:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.pdf
The 1930s were similar in a lot of ways to the era we find ourselves heading into - an economic "Recovery" period after a 'Depression' where large societial shifts are occurring, where radicalized foreign powers are gaining in power & influence, and where the corporate powers who have an interest in keeping arms production high have a very strong influence.
I read a very interesting book about 2 years ago, a book which was written in ~1996 called the 4th Turning that has a lot of very prophetic bits about what 'we' would be going through over the next couple of decades. The authors are light on details (and they admit so - as predicting the future is iffy), but the broad strokes they paint are not far from the general marks.
Go look this up:
http://www.fourthturning.com/
If somebody wants to read it and can't afford to get a copy - let me know and I'll loan you mine.
We need a new mindset - and we aren't going to get it without more societal pain, and without significantly changing the power structure of our Government.
I would also add the various speeches and writings of General David M. Shoup whoe was the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps under JFK. He resigned from the military and retired as his protest over the Vietnam War.
He saw Vietnam as a completely unwinnable war for money and profit from day one. He saw it as his duty to protest the mis-use of American troops being brutally sent to their death in such an immoral war. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at Tarawa in WWII.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Shoup
And, of course, I would add the warning of this General also.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
The Hippie from Galilee once said "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword." He was certainly not speaking about Roman soldiers standing nearby. He was speaking in the Zoroastrian sense about vast economic systems of wrong livelihood of mass death at the end of one World Age and the beginning of another. Why don't the Christian right get it? Why don't they get the now quite cinematic warning that we have now come to the Day of the Flying Nails to carry out the Crucifixion of Man. Why isn't anyone getting this in the "churches"? Why?
So this is how we now live as Americans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Kznmrc3o4
But don't you know,... We've always been at war with Eurasia,...
Or somebody,... haven't we?
If a state of war becomes the norm (and it has) then the masses are easier to control
I agree in large part with the column. Our militarized economy began after WW 2 with the military-industrial complex about which the late President Eisenhower warned us. The decentralized nature of military procurement makes it more difficult, especially for Congress, to cut defense spending as the cuts may negatively affect a local district's employment rate.
The Obama Administration has been in office less than a year, so it's too early to judge the extent of any changes it will make to the defense establishment. On a positive note, the F-22 looks to be on its last legs, missle defense systems in eastern Euroope have been scaled back or scrapped, and the President is committed to overturning DADT - a policy that robs the military of talented personnel due to an inherent and harmless characteristic (being gay).
In the orginal draft of Eisenhower's speech he talked of the Military-congressional-industrial complex. Obviously it was politically imprudent to say what he personally believed.
The rot set in back in 1886 when a court reporter effectively wrote the following conclusion into law: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."
Our militarized economy began with the imperial pursuits in the 18th & 19th Centuries, known as the Conquest of the West, and eradication of Native People from the lands that white settlers wanted -- similar to what's been going on in Israel since the 1890s.
Unfortunately, at this point leaving Afghanistan would amount to telling Al Qaeda "Take Pakistan's nukes, please."
This is an excellent article; yes, America is hooked on war. Eisenhower tried to warn us and we weren't listening. Check out "Full Spectrum Dominance" by F.W. Engdahl at http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/index.html. It makes for some very interesting, enlightening and disturbing reading.
obama's next big move, negociating with iran on iran's terms. way to go.
Oh, shove off. We all know you lot will be attacking Obama no matter what he does.
High finance is a gun. And politics is knowing when to pull the trigger. If you never pulled the trigger no one would ever know you had the gun. That's why God in his blessed wisdom gave us W and the christian evangelical right.
That story brought to mind the delema of USSR collapse. Oh my God, suddenly there is no enemy. Fate was on our side when our ally Saddam decided to pull a big bank job, the third time historically Iraq had invaded Kuwait to steal money. President McKinnleys mission from God is still with us. Heeding the audible voice he gave us colonies, empire, we even coined a term "battle ship diplomacy". to explain it, by jingo. It sure impressed Kiaser Bill.
Tom, sad but true, war seems to be the only profitable export the US has left.
excellent article.
War and military plus politics gives a many sided debate. Now add in three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand men and women back in the USA wanting their jobs back. Add to that a military budget for supplying those military personnel drying up and thousands more people out of work. That is one part of the real story on why we are still in Afghanistan....
middleamerican2010
Casey
It seems to be the way of some - Trent Franks, for example, just spoke to BBC world news a few minutes ago and condemned President Obama saying he believed "the President has just possibly endangered the entire free world" in making an agreement with Russia (?). I admit I did not catch the beginning of the interview by phone but gee whiz isn't that an attempt to inflame the international community to riled up republican levels? Sure riled me that he said it.
for conservatives its always 1980
Or 1880, or 1480. Retrograde intellects -- especially Trent Franks.
It's big business. Any anyone who tells you the massive defense budget is necessary because we need to avoid " another 9/11" is just using propaganda. There is clearly enough money for all of us to live well, to have health care, to have the basic necessities of life. Yet our government keeps committing all that money to building new and more detached ways of killing other people.
We are not hooked on war, but the people who make a lot of money on it and have money to spend on lobbyists are.
Stop blaming the government and the lobbyists. Until Americans stop re-electing the same crooked bunch to Congress you all share the responsibility for what America has become. Americans like to #1 and are quite willing to sacrifice things like health care and education so the can puff their chests out beat up the weaker kids in the schoolyard.
For all your power and weapons, Americans are the most fearful people on the planet. You guys were actually afraid Saddam was going to come and get you, or that North Korea is going to kill you all if they are not stopped. Better start bombing Venezuela before they are ready to invade you. Or maybe bird flu is gonna git ya. Or Mexicans. You people have the least to fear out of anybody yet are always afraid of something
It's all about propaganda. Orwell had it right. Tell a big lie often enough and it becomes the truth to those who hear it.
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