Month: May 2013

Our Disneyland Approach to Empire

Iraqi theme park?Remember in 2011 after SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden and Disney wanted to trademark the unit’s name for a collection of toys and games and miscellanea?

It’s one of those blips on our collective cultural radar that seems insignificant, yet it points to our tendency to see war and empire as a game, as a form of entertainment, as a product.

This attitude is not confined to corporations like Disney.  Consider this telling passage from Kim Barker’s “The Taliban Shuffle,” which discusses the potential attractions to service in places like Afghanistan:

“It was a place to escape, to run away from marriages and mistakes, a place to forget your age, your responsibilities, your past, a country in which to reinvent yourself.  Not that there was anything wrong with that, but the motives of most people were not likely to help a fragile and corrupt country stuck somewhere between the seventh century and Vegas.”

Our tendency to view foreign lands and peoples as an opportunity for adventure and escape is hardly new, of course.  But it certainly says something about our failure to understand and confront the severity of the challenges once we intervened in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Recall President George W. Bush’s weirdly wistful comment in 2008 about Afghanistan being a sort of Wild West, a romantic adventure, a place of excitement and danger.  Bush said he envied our troops and their opportunity for Afghan romance.

I wonder why as a young buck he didn’t go to Vietnam in the 1960s for romance and danger.  And I gather he’d never heard of Rudyard Kipling’s take on the pleasures awaiting the young British soldier on the Afghan plains:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen! 

It was said about the British that they acquired an empire in a fit of absentmindedness.  Did we acquire our empire in a fit of pure escapism?

Wanton and wasteful imperial entanglements are only accelerating our national decline.  Yet we continue to treat foreign lands as a sort of Disney theme park.   Troops smile and pose under Saddam Hussein’s crossed swords (at least they used to) or in front of Predator drones and other exotic weaponry.  Everything overseas is a photo op and an opportunity to win a trophy (or a medal).

But even as we seek “romance” and “danger” in foreign lands, a place “to reinvent ourselves,” we paradoxically bring with us all the trappings of consumerist America, hence our steroidal bases with all the conveniences of home (well, in Muslim lands, maybe not liquor, at least openly).

And when we get fed up with the natives and roughing it, we know we can just leave.

But if Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything, it’s that the price of admission is far too high.  We should keep our theme parks and our fantasies where they belong: right here in America.

W.J. Astore

War is a Racket

The business of wars and weapons sales is booming, with the United States leading the pack as the world’s foremost “merchant of death,” as Michael Klare notes in this article on the global arms trade for TomDispatch.com.

But why should we be surprised?  War has always been a racket.  And if you don’t believe me that forever war is forever profitable – for some, I recommend that you read War Is A Racket (1935), a classic polemic written by U.S. Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler.  Twice awarded the Medal of Honor, Major General Butler turned against military adventurism in the 1930s as he saw how his efforts and those of his men were exploited by elites to expand corporate wealth and power, even as they exempted themselves from the hardships and dangers of combat.

Plaque in Philly in Honor of Smedley Butler. Photo by author.
Plaque in Philly in Honor of Smedley Butler. Photo by author.

As Butler put it in War Is A Racket:

“How many of the war millionaires shouldered a rifle [during World War I]?  How many of them dug a trench?  How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out?  How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets?  How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy?  How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?”

Not many.  Butler knew who really paid war’s high bills:

“Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill.  His family pays too.  They pay it in the same heart-break that he does.  As he suffers, they suffer.  At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly … And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.”

And Butler knew how best to put an end to the racket of war.  He was blunt – and right:

“We must take the profit out of war.”

“We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.”

“We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.”

Tragically, since the end of World War II Butler’s sage advice has been completely ignored.  War is more profitable now than ever.  We permit our youth to have no say in whether there should be a war.  (Congress hasn’t issued a formal declaration of war since 1941.)  And today as a country we equate “home defense” with the world’s strongest military, configured for global reach, global power, boasting of “full-spectrum dominance.”

Unless we heed Butler’s advice, debilitating wars will continue.  They will continue because perpetual war is simply too profitable.  In the racket of war, the chief racketeers are easy to identify.  As Butler knew, just follow the money.

W. J. Astore

Memorial Day Lesson: Forever War is Forever Profitable — For Some

Long May It Wave. Photo by the author in Maine, 2006
Long May It Wave. Photo by the author in Maine, 2006

Heading north from the Beltway via Highway 1 to the centers of US power in Washington, DC you’ll pass through trendy Alexandria, Virginia, before encountering scrappier neighborhoods closer in. But don’t worry, because within just a few miles, the glint of ultra-modern office buildings appears on the horizon.  Behold America’s own Emerald City, appropriately named Crystal City, Virginia!

The nameplates on the buildings there reveal powerful governmental (the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and corporate (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other major defense contractors) entities. Walking into the lobby of any of these defense industry titans reveals a level of swankiness that would not be out of place in a five-star luxury hotel. Conference rooms outfitted with the very latest technology enfold you in plush comfortable chairs. One can’t help but to conclude that business is going very well here. It’s crystal clear that you’ve arrived among the winners of America’s imperial moment.

A quick detour to the Pentagon, just on the outskirts of Crystal City, confirms that forever war continues to be forever profitable — for some. Just look at the constellations of stars — generals’ and admirals’ stars, that is — in the Pentagon’s corridors of power.  Since September 2001, Congressional authorizations of flag-rank, three- and four-star levels “have increased twice as fast as one- and two-star generals,” notes Dina Rasor, citing Congressional testimony from Ben Freeman of the Project on Government Oversight.

Small wonder that governmental and corporate facilities in military-budget-fueled Crystal City shine so brightly.  The US military budget was $861 billion in fiscal year 2011, representing 58 percent of the federal discretionary budget.  By comparison, federal spending on education usually consumes a paltry four percent of that same budget.  And despite the so-called sequester “cuts” to the defense budget, America’s projected yearly defense budgets under President Obama continue to be larger than the projected military spending of the next ten highest-spending nations… combined.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower had it right when he said to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1953 that:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children …. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Ike in 1959
Ike in 1959

Ike, a retired five-star general, was right. We must reverse an ethos in this country that sees cuts in war spending as emasculating. We must embrace the idea of a “peace dividend” that facilitates investment in our citizens and our communities. It sure beats payola to major corporations for their inflated weaponry.

For a nation hooked on warriors and warfighters and weapons, such a change in ethos won’t be easy.  But we need to make it. Because if we continue on our present path of blockbuster defense budgets and unending global military commitments, we know who loses – and it’s not the major defense contractors or the Pentagon brass.

Memorial Day reminds us who loses; we visit their graves, mourn their deaths, and vow to end the madness of war.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com, Huffington Post, History News Network, and Truthout, among other sites.