W.J. Astore
Even as the Military-Industrial Complex Becomes Ever Stronger and More Dangerous, We Must Keep Fighting Against It
In today’s article, I’d like to feature insights from friends and colleagues.
At TomDispatch, Tom Engelhardt takes on man’s seemingly endless addiction to war, an addiction most certainly manifested by the US of A, where bumper stickers tell me peace comes through superior firepower. Check out Tom’s article here. Not only do we wage war on each other, Tom notes, we wage war on the planet. In fact, few things degrade the environment more than war and all the destruction it brings with it.
John Rachel, a peace activist, has a telling theme: War is making us poor. He’s been making short punchy videos to hammer home the point. Check out his latest here:
Why are wars so persistent in the U.S., despite their stupidity, their destruction, their waste? One of my readers put it well in a comment to me:
The endless wars without a traditional definition of success have not been failures to those who have profited. For them, the only war that is lost, is the one that ends. God forbid one should be won under the standard definition and profits then ended.
Cynical? Not when you measure that statement against the U.S. experience of war since 1945.
Finally, also at TomDispatch, David Vine and Theresa Arriola have an article: “The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All,” which is what Ike warned us about in 1961 if we refused to act as alert and knowledgeable citizens to keep that complex in check. Their article features clear and insightful charts on the basic features of the MIC and the dangers it poses. Here’s an example:
Vine and Arriola are part of an effort whose goal it is to dismantle, or very much to downsize, that complex. (I’ve been involved in their efforts.) Here’s the website:
https://www.dismantlethemic.org
Where you’ll find more charts and resources.
Meanwhile, last week the “liberal” New York Times posted an article ostensibly written by Senator Roger Wicker calling for even more military spending by the U.S.
Here’s how The New York Times introduced Wicker’s op-ed on May 29th:
In a guest essay today, Senator Roger Wicker writes that we are approaching a version of that moment [a major war crisis] “faster than most Americans think.” Worse, he argues, the U.S. military is unprepared to meet the moment. After decades of underfunding, the American military lacks the strength or the equipment to deal with the wide range of new threats coming from our nation’s adversaries, including Iran, China, Russia and North Korea, he writes.
The answer to this problem, Wicker says, is a short-term “generational investment” in the U.S. military — and a national conversation on how to create a safer future for America. In a new white paper, he lays out a road map to “rebuild” the military, starting with an additional $55 billion in military spending in the 2025 fiscal year and an increase of annual military G.D.P. spending from its current projected level of around 3 percent to 5 percent over the next five to seven years.
That’s a serious amount of money that will inevitably raise big questions about where it will come from — and at the expense of what — at a moment when voices all along the political spectrum are questioning both U.S. military spending overseas and the role of the American military in the world today.
Wicker makes the case that the cost of a war with an increasingly powerful adversary like China would be far higher. “Regaining American strength will be expensive,” he writes. “But fighting a war — and worse, losing one — is far more costly.”
Readers, isn’t that inspiring? A “generational investment” in more guns, more bombs, and, as likely as not, more war? What a great idea!
Apparently, the only way to prevent a war is to prepare mightily for one, according to Senator Wicker. Wicker has apparently never heard, or read, or understood the words of Ike.
Senator Wicker is a shining example of the military-industrial-congressional complex that perpetuates war to the detriment of us all, indeed to all life on our planet. But it’s his words that are amplified by the “liberal” New York Times, not the wise words of my friends and colleagues here.
And so it goes, unless we act to put an end to it. We must be the alert and knowledgeable citizens that Ike implored us to be.
Bracing Views 
Wars are not stupid; it is the men who start them that are. You can’t teach a war to be not stupid.
Perhaps you would agree with these lines from a Martin Booth novel. “Later, (in Hiroshima) after unsuccessfully trying to rescue Mishima’s wife from his destroyed house and just before Mishima will take his own life he says to Joe, “Never forget that it is men who are mad, not nations. Men make wars. Nations do not. Leaders do — who need never fight but send others to die. Politicians are the corrupt ones. They decide but it is we, the common men — the innocent people of the race — who act for them. And suffer in their place.””[2] Indeed, it is unstable maniacal men who order their citizens to destroy cities and to arm themselves and kill the thousands seen by these madmen to be a threat to their goals. Such lunatics have insufficient wisdom and humanity to even attempt to reasonably achieve reconciliation by peaceful means. They have other goals. There can be no doubt that, those who promote the destruction and death of cities and their people, they are mad, and they can become national leaders.
[2] HIROSHIMA JOE, by Martin Booth, Picador, NY, 1985. p.361 and p.390.
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Will, I’d urge everyone to read US Marine Major General Smedley Butler’s short book “War is a Racket”. It’s as relevant now as when he wrote it in 1935 and is available to download from Amazon. Butler shows how war is big business, who the winners and losers are and who pays the real costs. After having read it, so much of the MIC’s actions make sense to me now.
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Butler was the most highly decorated US soldier when he wrote the book. I’d also recommend researching ‘Smedley Butler and the Chicken Coup’.
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Yes, Butler knew of which he spoke. He beat Ike to the punch by roughly 25 years. War is indeed a racket. And Butler, as he confessed, discovered he’d been a gangster for capitalism.
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I have read War is a Racket. It is short and pithy. That being said, I want to point out that Merchants of Death was published before it so he was publishing when anti-war feelings were part of the zeitgeist.
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Human beings can actually be perceived and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations. … It’s like an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.
With news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictating / quantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls / a renowned newsman formulated a startling equation / justly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness / —“A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus / make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.” //
According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deduced / five hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blown to bits / in the same day perhaps should take up even less space and airtime. //
So readily learned is the tiny token short story buried in the / bottom right-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief account / involving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually nothing civil; / therefore caught in the warring web are civilians most unfortunate / most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility. //
And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nations / where such severe suffering almost entirely dominates / the fractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter (plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) / mostly by means of bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices / shell shock and shrapnel wounds resulting from smart bombs dropped for the stupidest of reasons. ….
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