Guess who’s exempt from a potential government shutdown?
I saw this today at CNN.
The Pentagon has also determined that the training and support of Ukrainian forces is exempt from a potential government shutdown, and will continue even in the increasingly likely event that Congress fails to pass a spending bill in the coming days.
Isn’t it nice to know that even if the U.S. federal government shuts down, Ukraine will still get all the weapons and related military aid they need to continue to fight and kill Russians? Americans may be furloughed from their jobs or have to work for no pay, but Ukraine will get paid.
That one sentence shows you the priorities for “your” government. Guess what? You’re not a priority, but war overseas is. You’re not exempt from a government shutdown, but Ukrainian military forces are.
So, if you want to get paid, America, or enter a federal facility that may be closed due to a shutdown, just wave a blue-and-yellow flag and tell the government it’s all for the war effort in Ukraine.
Bring this flag with you and tell the government you’re exempt from the looming government shutdown
It was November 1967. The Vietnam War was at its height. His brother, the President, had been shot and killed in Dallas four years earlier. He himself would die of an assassin’s bullet within the next year. It was time for Robert F. Kennedy Sr. to “Face the Nation.”
TV was more serious back then, and very few politicians today, certainly not Donald Trump and Joe Biden, could speak with RFK’s clarity and eloquence.
It’s worth listening to Bobby Kennedy’s interview from 1967, but especially the last six minutes (beginning at the 18-minute mark) as he attempts to explicate his moral reservations and objections to America’s war against Vietnam. Such moral objections to war are rarely if ever heard today from Democrats and Republicans in DC. Bobby Kennedy wasn’t just saying the Vietnam War was dumb, that the U.S. military was employing bad strategy, that the war was too expensive, that it was a distraction from pressing domestic concerns, and so on.
Near the end of this interview, Bobby Kennedy called for serious and deep moral reflection on the use of U.S. military power overseas. He asked Americans to examine their consciences and cited the tens of thousands of civilians killed and wounded (not just U.S. troops). He said America was losing its moral position in the world due to the war. He was right.
RFK wasn’t anti-war. He recognized war was occasionally unavoidable. Yet he was willing to articulate war’s horrors. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent women and children from wanton American firepower and especially napalm. The creation of millions of war refugees. The harsh realities of war should trouble Americans, Kennedy said, especially when its awful costs are justified on dubious grounds. Was it truly the case, Kennedy asked, that America had to fight communism over there so that we didn’t have to fight it over here? Did the U.S. have the moral right to wage a ghastly war against North Vietnam on the off-chance that a communist victory there might eventually pose a threat to America?
What I heard here from Bobby Kennedy was a dramatic appeal to conscience. An appeal to Americans to look within themselves and to stop needless violence, not only in Vietnam but also here at home in America’s streets.
In November 1967, Bobby Kennedy said something truly vital. Appealing to moral conscience, he recognized we are all human. That all lives matter, not only those of U.S. troops in Vietnam. And that far too often the decision makers in Washington had forgotten this most basic of moral facts.
I can’t say what Bobby would have achieved, killed as he was by an assassin’s bullet. But I think he was a healer, a man who had matured much since the death of his brother, a man of compassion and conscience, a man willing to reject the notion that might makes right and that million of “others” can and should be killed, wounded, or made refugees simply because it could be justified in terms of “protecting America.”
Do we have that right? Bobby asks. Plainly, he believed we didn’t.
Clearly, on this 22nd anniversary of 9/11, the dogs of war have won and continue to win.
It hasn’t mattered that, over the last 16 years, after a 20-year military career, I’ve written hundreds of articles critical of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) and in support of peacemaking and diplomacy rather than war making and gargantuan military expenditures. My writing hasn’t slowed America’s collective march toward nationalism, militarism, and war.
Lately, I’ve been working more closely with antiwar groups. They mean well. America needs them. But they are losing.
There are many reasons for this, the main one being the sheer size, reach, and power of the MICC. But there’s another reason that’s become apparent to me that’s perhaps best described in metaphorical terms.
The dogs of war run in packs obedient to the alphas. They know exactly what they want: power, profit, dominance. They are usually cocksure in their confidence and think of themselves as realists and patriots. They are rewarded with loads of money.
My cat. She does not back down to the dogs of war. But she’s territorial and doesn’t play well with others. She’s been known to show me who’s boss.
Critics of war are more like cats. They tend to be territorial, prickly, and disobedient. They may be against war, but they are often at cross purposes on how best to resist it. They may be quick to take offense at perceived slights and don’t always play well together. They also have a lot less money. They are likely to see themselves as idealists and to reject patriotism as “combustible rubbish” and “the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
America is a dog country. Cats are suspect, especially antiwar ones. Especially brave cats (Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning) are locked away in cages. Meanwhile, the alpha dogs make billions barking and growling and howling for war and yet more war.
Until we change this dynamic, the alpha dogs will continue to spread havoc in America and indeed across the globe.
As a retired Air Force officer and military historian, I’m familiar with all kinds of euphemisms about killing, e.g. “precision bombing” and “collateral damage.” Just as it’s easier to kill at a distance, it’s easier to kill when we use words that provide distance from the act. Words that facilitate detachment. Words that befuddle and confuse our minds.
When writing honestly about war, it’s best to use bullet-hits-the-bone words: atrocity, murder, war crime, slaughter. Rape, pillage, burn are “old” words associated with war, and these words often most fittingly describe war and its likely effects and outcomes.
Powerful, blunt, and accurate words should remind us that war is inherently horrible and also profoundly anti-democratic. War is consistent with authoritarianism and lack of freedom, yet Americans nowadays seem to think war (and words about war) is conducive to democracy and freedom, e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine.
We used to know better. Military people are fond of the saying, “freedom isn’t free,” but neither is war. Indeed, war and its various manifestations are costing this nation more than a trillion dollars a year while weakening democracy and our constitutional freedoms. And that is a very high price to pay to keep the factories of the merchants of death humming and the generals and admirals happy.
Grisly images like this one (of a dead Iraqi soldier) were censored in America. Language is censored as well.
Fortunately, there’s a new guide and website available that alerts us to the importance of language and war. The website is wordsaboutwar.org, from which you can read and download suggestions on how best to use words to convey the horrors and costs of war to people everywhere. I urge you to visit the site and peruse the guide. (Full disclosure: I was an advisor to this effort, which was ably led by David Vine.)
Here’s a sample of a few comments I made in passing to the group:
A war on terror is truly a war of terror because war itself is terrible.
Friendly fire is being killed by one’s own, often due to the chaos of war, the sheer waste of it all, exacerbated by incompetence. “Fire” is always unfriendly.
Very few troops are “heroes,” and indeed most aren’t, because heroes are rare in all walks of life.
The word “casualty” is too benign. I much prefer killed and wounded: the victims of war.
What are “enemy noncombatants”? They are usually innocent civilians.
With respect to the “War on Terror” that the U.S. has prosecuted for 22 years and counting, I noted that:
We (the U.S.) manifested a Manichean world view; as George W. Bush said soon after 9/11, you’re either for America (and all its violence) or you’re for the terrorists (with their violence). If you wanted a non-violent approach, you were dismissed as naive or “for them.” It was good versus evil, thus the infamous “axis of evil” the U.S. allegedly faced.
This is, of course, a problem with all discourse related to war. Subtlety and nuance are thrown out the window. Language is greatly simplified. The U.S. is “doubleplusgood” and the enemy must be the opposite while simultaneously being dehumanized. We kill “cowardly” enemy troops or terrorists (by drone they’re “bugsplat”) yet our “heroic” troops “fall” in battle and are revered as “the fallen.” Violent combat is disguised as “kinetic action” in U.S. military communiques.
In my view, the dishonesty of this language captures the dishonesty of America’s wars.
General William T. Sherman (U.S. Civil War) famously said that “War is all hell.” Sherman knew the hellish and harsh realities of war; he knew, as he wrote, that “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Too many people today are using and manipulating words to refine war. They’re camouflaging war’s harshest realities. Writers should write plainly and honestly, as General Sherman did, to capture war’s hellish nature. By choosing honest words, we also help to create a better future in which the threat of war recedes precisely because we recognize more clearly its horrific nature and terrifying costs.
Other high-ranking military officers, like General Smedley Butler, for example, also wrote plainly about war. As Butler famously said, war is a racket, and he described himself as a gangster for capitalism. Now that was plain speaking about war!
The chief intent of speaking and writing plainly about war is to discourage war and save lives. Some might see it as patriotic—saving the lives of U.S. troops by helping to prevent bloody awful wars—but more broadly the goal is humanistic—to save the lives of all those on the receiving end of bullets and bombs.
Interestingly, U.S. troops at lower levels are generally blunt about what war is about. Talk to sergeants at the front and you’ll hear visceral truths, probably enhanced by choice expletives. I’ve heard U.S. Marines shout “Kill!” at graduation ceremonies. Killing, after all, is what war enables. Mass killing leads to atrocities like My Lai in Vietnam. This fact should never be sugarcoated.
Few people, however, truly want to confront war’s horrors. Gazing upon the face of war is profoundly disturbing, which is why we’re encouraged to look away. And so the face of war is airbrushed and camouflaged with euphemisms and buried under a blizzard of acronyms.
If we are to end war and prevent atrocity, we must seek to name things accurately while calling up mental images (no matter how disturbing) appropriate to the horrors of war. The guide at wordsaboutwar.org is an important step in that direction.
Update: I went on Podcast by George today to talk about all this:
As the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia grinds on (or falters?), as U.S. disaster relief for Hawaii is tied to more military aid for Ukraine, as depleted uranium shells join cluster munitions as America’s latest gift to a blasted war zone, as calls for diplomacy continue to be muted when they’re not actively discouraged and dismissed, I was reminded of the alchemy of war.
Alchemists of the early modern period were sophisticated experimenters driven by an often quasi-religious quest for perfection. We tend to remember only the most craven part of their experiments: the attempt to transmute lead into gold. This transmutation could not be effected, but alchemy itself transmuted into chemistry as its practitioners, through trial and error, developed a better understanding of the nature of the elements, reflected in part by today’s Periodic Table.
Seeking a divine spark
Yet the business of war succeeded where alchemists failed. In their alchemy, the merchants of death turned bullet lead into corporate gold. And what gold! Yearly war budgets continue to soar in the United States toward the trillion dollar mark. Weapons shipments to Ukraine continue at a pace that promises many more shattered and blasted bodies, Ukrainian and Russian.
In a sense, dead bodies are also being transmuted into corporate gold.
Transmutation, I was taught as a Catholic, is a miracle. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jesus Christ, the Son of God, of course). We have made the miraculous the mundane, and indeed the profane. We take lead and spill blood which becomes gold. And some even celebrate this as good for business in the United States.
All these weapons: they’re job-creators! So we crucify the Word and elevate the life-takers and widow-makers as gods.
We are far more deluded than the alchemists of the past.
Fourteen years ago, I wrote the following article for TomDispatch. A colleague wrote to me today saying he had saved the article, had re-read it, and still found it useful, which is just about the highest compliment you can pay an author. I continue to believe, as I wrote in 2009, that America is experiencing a form of militarism on steroids. It’s a peculiar form of militarism, since the Pentagon works hard to obscure the costs and realities of war (see the recent book by Norman Solomon, War Made Invisible), but camouflaged or not, it persists.
Gary Cooper in “High Noon”
[Written in August 2009]
I have a few confessions to make: After almost eight years of off-and-on war in Afghanistan and after more than six years of mayhem and death since “Mission Accomplished” was declared in Operation Iraqi Freedom, I’m tired of seeing simple-minded magnetic ribbons on vehicles telling me, a 20-year military veteran, to support or pray for our troops. As a Christian, I find it presumptuous to see ribbons shaped like fish, with an American flag as a tail, informing me that God blesses our troops. I’m underwhelmed by gigantic American flags — up to 100 feet by 300 feet — repeatedly being unfurled in our sports arenas, as if our love of country is greater when our flags are bigger. I’m disturbed by nuclear-strike bombers soaring over stadiums filled with children, as one did in July just as the National Anthem ended during this year’s Major League Baseball All Star game. Instead of oohing and aahing at our destructive might, I was quietly horrified at its looming presence during a family event.
We’ve recently come through the steroid era in baseball with all those muscled-up players and jacked-up stats. Now that players are tested randomly, home runs are down and muscles don’t stretch uniforms quite as tightly. Yet while ending the steroid era in baseball proved reasonably straightforward once the will to act was present, we as a country have yet to face, no less curtail, our ongoing steroidal celebrations of pumped-up patriotism.
It’s high time we ended the post-Vietnam obsession with Rambo’s rippling pecs as well as the jaw-dropping technological firepower of the recent cinematic version of G.I. Joe and return to the resolute, undemonstrative strength that Gary Cooper showed in movies like High Noon.
In the HBO series “The Sopranos,” Tony (played by James Gandolfini) struggles with his own vulnerability — panic attacks caused by stress that his Mafia rivals would interpret as fatal signs of weakness. Lamenting his emotional frailty, Tony asks, “What ever happened to Gary Cooper?” What ever happened, in other words, to quiet, unemotive Americans who went about their business without fanfare, without swagger, but with firmness and no lack of controlled anger at the right time?
Tony’s question is a good one, but I’d like to spin it differently: Why did we allow lanky American citizen-soldiers and true heroes like World War I Sgt. Alvin York(played, at York’s insistence, by Gary Cooper) and World War II Sgt. (later, 1st Lt.) Audie Murphy(played in the film “To Hell and Back,” famously, by himself) to be replaced by all those post-Vietnam pumped-up Hollywood “warriors,” with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger-style abs and egos to match?
And far more important than how we got here, how can we end our enduring fascination with a puffed-up, comic book-style militarism that seems to have stepped directly out of screen fantasy and into our all-too-real lives?
A seven-step recovery program
As a society, we’ve become so addicted to militarism that we don’t even notice the way it surrounds us or the spasms of societal ‘roid rage that go with it. The fact is, we need a detox program. At the risk of incurring some of that ‘roid rage myself, let me suggest a seven-step program that could help return us to the saner days of Gary Cooper:
1. Baseball players on steroids swing for the fences. So does a steroidal country. When you have an immense military establishment, your answer to trouble is likely to be overwhelming force, including sending troops into harm’s way. To rein in our steroidal version of militarism, we should stop bulking up our military ranks, as is now happening, and shrink them instead. Our military needs not more muscle supplements (or the budgetary version of the same), but far fewer.
2. It’s time to stop deferring to our generals, and even to their commander in chief. They’re ours, after all; we’re not theirs. When President Obama says Afghanistan is not a war of choice but of necessity, we shouldn’t hesitate to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Yet when it comes to tough questioning of the president’s generals, Congress now seems eternally supine. Senators and representatives are invariably too busy falling all over themselves praising our troops and their commanders, too worried that “tough” questioning will appear unpatriotic to the folks back home, or too connected to military contractors in their districts, or some combination of the three.
Here’s something we should all keep in mind: Generals have no monopoly on military insight. What they have a monopoly on is a no-lose situation. If things go well, they get credit; if they go badly, we do. Retired five-star Gen. Omar Bradley was typical when he visited Vietnam in 1967 and declared: “I am convinced that this is a war at the right place, at the right time and with the right enemy — the Communists.” North Vietnam’s only hope for victory, he insisted, was “to hang on in the expectation that the American public, inadequately informed about the true situation and sickened by the loss in lives and money, will force the United States to give up and pull out.”
There we have it: A classic statement of the belief that when our military loses a war, it’s always the fault of “we the people.” Paradoxically, such insidious myths gain credibility not because we the people are too forceful in our criticism of the military, but because we are too deferential.
3. It’s time to redefine what “support our troops” really means. We console ourselves with the belief that all our troops are volunteers, who freely signed on for repeated tours of duty in forever wars. But are our troops truly volunteers? Didn’t we recruit them using multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and lures of every sort? Are we not, in effect, running a poverty and recession draft? Isolated in middle- or upper-class comfort, detached from our wars and their burdens, have we not, in a sense, recruited a “foreign legion” to do our bidding?
If you’re looking for a clear sign of a militarized society — which few Americans are — a good place to start is with troop veneration. The cult of the soldier often covers up a variety of sins. It helps, among other things, hide the true costs of, and often the futility of, the wars being fought. At an extreme, as the war began to turn dramatically against Nazi Germany in 1943, Germans who attempted to protest Hitler’s failed strategy and the catastrophic costs of his war were accused of (and usually executed for) betraying the troops at the front.
The United States is not a totalitarian state, so surely we can hazard criticisms of our wars and even occasionally of the behavior of some of our troops, without facing charges of stabbing our troops in the back and aiding the enemy. Or can we?
4. Let’s see the military for what it is: a blunt instrument of force. It’s neither surgical nor precise nor predictable. What Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago remains true: when wars start, havoc is unleashed, and the dogs of war run wild — in our case, not just the professional but the “mercenary” dogs of war, those private contractors to the Pentagon that thrive on the rich spoils of modern warfare in distant lands. It’s time to recognize that we rely ever more massively to prosecute our wars on companies that profit ever more handsomely the longer they last.
5. Let’s not blindly venerate the serving soldier, while forgetting our veterans when they doff their spiffy uniforms for the last time. It’s easy to celebrate our clean-cut men and women in uniform when they’re thousands of miles from home, far tougher to lend a hand to scruffier, embittered veterans suffering from the physical and emotional trauma of the battle zones to which they were consigned, usually for multiple tours of duty.
6. I like air shows, but how about — as a first tiny step toward demilitarizing civilian life — banning all flyovers of sporting events by modern combat aircraft? War is not a sport, and it shouldn’t be a thrill.
7. I love our flag. I keep my father’s casket flag in a special display case next to the very desk on which I’m writing this piece. It reminds me of his decades of service as a soldier and firefighter. But I don’t need humongous stadium flags or, for that matter, tiny flag lapel pins to prove my patriotism — and neither should you. In fact, doesn’t the endless post-9/11 public proliferation of flags in every size imaginable suggest a certain fanaticism bordering on desperation? If we saw such displays in other countries, our descriptions wouldn’t be kindly.
Of course, none of this is likely to be easy as long as this country garrisons the planet and fights open-ended wars on its global frontiers. The largest step, the eighth one, would be to begin seriously downsizing that mission. In the meantime, we shouldn’t need reminding that this country was originally founded as a civilian society, not a militarized one. Indeed, the revolt of the 13 colonies against the King of England was sparked, in part, by the perceived tyranny of forced quartering of British troops in colonial homes, the heavy hand of an “occupation” army, and taxation that we were told went for our own defense, whether we wanted to be defended or not.
If Americans are going to continue to hold so-called tea parties, shouldn’t some of them be directed against the militarization of our country and an enormous tax burden fed in part by our wasteful, trillion-dollar wars?
Modest as it may seem, my seven-step recovery program won’t be easy for many of us to follow. After all, let’s face it, we’ve come to enjoy our peculiar brand of muscular patriotism and the macho militarism that goes with it. In fact, we revel in it. Outwardly, the result is quite an impressive show. We look confident and ripped and strong. But it’s increasingly clear that our outward swagger conceals an inner desperation. If we’re so strong, one might ask, why do we need so much steroidal piety, so many in-your-face patriotic props, and so much parade-ground conformity?
Forget Rambo and action-picture G.I. Joes: Give me the steady hand, the undemonstrative strength, and the quiet humility of Alvin York, Audie Murphy — and Gary Cooper.
The Most Fundamental Problem with the U.S. Military
“Integrity First” is the fundamental core value of the U.S. Air Force. Two other core values speak to “service before self” and “excellence in all we do.” But integrity remains the wellspring, and it’s the U.S. military’s stunning lack of integrity that has cost the American people and indeed the world so dearly over the last half-century.
Tonkin Gulf. My Lai. The Pentagon Papers. WMD in Iraq. Abu Ghraib. The Afghan War Papers. So many instances of “official” lies and distortions. So many lost wars where no senior officers were ever held accountable. Put up, shut up, fuck up, cover up, move up, seems to be the operating manual for success.
Last September, I wrote an article for TomDispatch: “Something is rotten in the U.S. military.” I suggested that integrity was now optional in that military, that lies and dishonor plagued America’s war machine. Evidently, those lies, that dishonor, is working just fine for the Pentagon as its budget continues to soar.
These thoughts occurred to me yet again as I read Seymour Hersh’s retrospective account of Major General Antonio (Tony) Taguba’s withering investigation of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Taguba, a man of integrity, conducted an official—and honest—investigation of torture and mistreatment at Abu Ghraib; his reward for his honesty, his service, his excellence was not a commendation and promotion but threats, ostracism, and the death of his career as an Army officer.
General Antonio Taguba, man of integrity, service, and excellence
Sy Hersh’s article captures the rot at the core of the Pentagon and the U.S. government. Here Hersh speaks recently to Taguba:
[Taguba] “I was not a whistleblower. I knew I was in trouble when I was given the assignment [to investigate abuse at Abu Ghraib], but when you see those photos what can you do? I was a dead man walking.
“The kids were trained as traffic cops and then were told to transport [Iraqi] detainees. That’s how they got to Abu Ghraib. They weren’t trained for that but they had vehicles and rifles, just undisciplined kids with incompetent leadership and they were on the list to go home. They had all their equipment packed in Kuwait and ready to be shipped. And then they were told to stay behind.”
I [Hersh] asked: Would he do it again? “Sure,” Tony [Taguba] said, “I was hamstrung by the thirty days I had to investigate. I do not think I fulfilled my mission. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was blaming the soldiers, but underneath they had no operational plan” for dealing with the prisoners.
“In hindsight, there was nothing I did to compromise my integrity. But integrity in the military and elsewhere is a bumper sticker. There is no reward for telling the truth.” [Emphasis added]
“There is no reward for telling the truth” in the U.S. military. That statement by retired General Taguba should move all Americans to take action against a military that has so clearly and tragically lost its way.
One suggestion: Cut the Pentagon budget in half and insist that it must pass a financial audit else forfeit all taxpayer funding. That might wake up a few generals and admirals.
In today’s New York Times send out, I saw the following story:
Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, U.S. Officials Say
American strategists say Ukraine’s troops are too spread out and need to concentrate along the counteroffensive’s main front in the south.
Listen to the U.S. military, Ukraine! Don’t be casualty-averse! Concentrate your forces. Take the fight to the Russian enemy. Use all those cluster munitions we’ve sent you. Commit your armored reserve and punch a hole in the Russian lines. Break through, break out, and drive toward Crimea. You know: just like Americans would do in your place.
One might forgive Ukrainians if they asked, When was the last war you “experts” won for America? Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? Korea? What about ongoing military commitments to Syria and Somalia? If you’re so good at winning wars, how come the U.S. military didn’t win in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam where you had overwhelming materiel and firepower superiority?
With respect to why Ukraine has its forces “too spread out”: perhaps Ukraine needs to garrison its lines so that it can fend off Russian counterattacks? If Ukraine concentrates its strategic reserve and uses it in a big counteroffensive that stalls, what’s to stop Russia from a decisive riposte? Think of Kursk for Nazi Germany in 1943. Once that huge offensive failed for Germany, using up its strategic reserve, the Red Army seized the initiative on the eastern front and never lost it.
At Kursk in 1943, the Germans committed their reserves in a desperate gamble to seize the initiative from the Soviet Union. When the offensive failed, the Red Army counterattacked and proved unstoppable.
Headlines like the one posted above from the New York Times are intended to be exculpatory for the U.S. If the war turns worse for Ukraine, U.S. “experts” can point to articles like this, casting blame on the Ukrainians for not following sage American advice.
If “we” win in Ukraine, it will be because of generous U.S. aid and especially vaunted U.S. and NATO weaponry; but if they (the Ukrainians) lose, it’s all their fault for not following the advice of America’s master strategists. And, obviously, even if Ukraine loses, plenty of weapons manufacturers in the U.S. are winning and will continue to win. Indeed, a Russian victory could be just the thing to propel even more weapons spending by NATO countries as well as even larger and more monstrous Pentagon budgets.
The Future Meets the Past as War and Militarism Thrive in America
Barbara Ehrenreich was a remarkable writer and thinker. Her book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), is one of the most original and thoughtful studies of war and its nature. She traced humanity’s affinity to war, our predilection for it, not to our vaunted status as predators but to our vulnerable status as prey to other predators in the wild. Our early human ancestors were fearful creatures, and for good reason. Humans learned to band together as a way of conquering other predators and controlling their fear; once those predators were mostly banished to fleeting memories and occasional nightmares, we could turn on each other, becoming predators (and prey) to ourselves.
If you haven’t read her book, I urge you to check it out. Stimulating it is. And so too is an afterword she wrote to the paperback edition of the book, available at TomDispatch and which I read last night. Once again, Ehrenreich doesn’t disappoint.
While she wrote about the possibility of robot war in the future, a war largely devoid of human “boots on the ground,” she also made mention of atavistic war. By atavistic war, she meant a return to the past, to the primitive, to the reassuring (reassuring to America’s conventional big-battalion military, that is). Thus the U.S. suffers a major terrorist strike launched by a relatively small band of non-state actors, and the response of the war department in Washington was to launch invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq while talking about re-creating both countries with quasi-Marshall Plans, as if we had returned to the 1940s.
Even as America today pursues AI and increasingly sophisticated robot drones and the like, there’s a desire, a yen, to return to older models as certainties. Already in Ukraine, we’re witnessing a return to the trench warfare of Word War I as the New York Times reports that Ukraine and Russia have suffered half a million killed and wounded over the last 18 months. At the same time, the U.S. and NATO seem to believe that with weaponry like tanks and fighter jets and better training, Ukraine can break through Russian defenses in a quasi-Blitzkrieg like World War II, defeating Russian forces and forcing their leader to beg for peace. Erwin Rommel’s rapid advances in France in 1940 and North Africa in 1942 might serve as models for a decisive Ukrainian counteroffensive, a friend suggested to me, despite the costly slog and disappointing results of this year’s “spring” offensive.
Speaking of atavism, U.S. leaders of the military-industrial-congressional complex have a hankering for a new Cold War, not only with Russia but with China too. It includes the re-nuclearization of America, with new ICBMs, bombers, and submarines at a cost of $2 trillion over the next thirty years. Perhaps we’ll even see new bomb shelters, new “duck and cover” drills, maybe even a new nuclear crisis akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The one future America’s self-styled warriors can’t seem to imagine is one largely free of war. We Americans remain prey, this time to our “leaders” and their passions and pursuit of profit and power through violent dominance.
Ehrenreich would understand. Our very own “blood rites” remain very much in force in our lives. The prey—that’s us—remain predators that are prey to the passions of war with all its fear, destruction, and death.
Something tells me the robots and robotic war will not free us from our blood rites. For how can creations liberate their creators?
From Boots on the Ground to Robot Assassins in the Sky
I’m proud to say I’ve been writing for TomDispatch since 2007, posting more than 100 original articles at the site. Among the many features of that remarkable site, run by Tom Engelhardt, this generation’s I.F. Stone, is its reach across political spectrums, across America, and indeed across the globe. My most recent article, for example, was translated into Portuguese (for a Brazilian site) and Swedish. Tom and I usually aren’t contacted for permission; these translations and postings just happen.
Briefly in 2010, a few of my “tomgrams” broke through to the mainstream media, being reposted by CBS News. What follows is one of them, “Seven Reasons Why We Can’t Stop Making War,” in which I refer to a disaster of that day, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Sadly, despite a little boost from CBS News, my critique went unheeded. Surprise! America is still making war (with certain entities profiting greatly from this), now with yet more robots even as U.S. boots on ground in direct combat are far fewer. It’s a formula for “low-cost” forever war that of course comes at a very high cost indeed, starting with a Pentagon budget soaring toward $900 billion a year, not including more than $120 billion already provided or promised to Ukraine for its war effort.
From CBS News in 2010, my article on why the U.S. can’t stop making war. The original title was “Operation Enduring War” at TomDispatch in July 2010.
If one quality characterizes our wars today, it’s their endurance. They never seem to end.
Though war itself may not be an American inevitability, these days many factors combine to make constant war an American near certainty. Put metaphorically, our nation’s pursuit of war taps so many wellsprings of our behavior that a concerted effort to cap itwould dwarfBP’s efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.
Our political leaders, the media, and the military interpret enduring war as a measure of our national fitness, our global power, our grit in the face of eternal danger, and our seriousness. A desire to de-escalate and withdraw, on the other hand, is invariably seen as cut-and-run appeasement and discounted as weakness. Withdrawal options are, in a pet phrase of Washington elites, invariably “off the table” when global policy is at stake, as was true during the Obama administration’s full-scale reconsideration of the Afghan war in the fall of 2009. Viewed in this light, the president’s ultimate decision to surge in Afghanistan was not only predictable, but the only course considered suitable for an American war leader. Rather than the tough choice, it was the path of least resistance.
Why do our elites so readily and regularly give war, not peace, a chance? What exactly are the wellsprings of Washington’s (and America’s) behavior when it comes to war and preparations for more of the same?
Consider these seven:
1. We wage war because we think we’re good at it — and because, at a gut level, we’ve come to believe that American wars can bring good to others (hence our feel-good names for them, like Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom). Most Americans are not only convinced we have the best troops, the best training, and the most advanced weapons, but also the purest motives. Unlike the bad guys and the barbarians out there in the global marketplace of death, our warriors and warfightersare seen as gift-givers and freedom-bringers, not as death-dealers and resource-exploiters. Our illusions about the military we “support” serve as catalyst for, and apology for, the persistent war-making we condone.
2. We wage war because we’ve already devoted so many of our resources to it. It’s what we’re most prepared to do. More than half of discretionary federal spending goes to fund our military and its war making or war preparations. The military-industrial complex is a well-oiled, extremely profitable machine and the armed forces, our favorite child, the one we’ve lavished the most resources and praise upon. It’s natural to give your favorite child free rein.
3. We’ve managed to isolate war’s physical and emotional costs, leaving them on the shoulders of a tiny minority of Americans. By eliminating the draft and relying ever more on for-profit private military contractors, we’ve made war a distant abstractionfor most Americans, who can choose to consume it as spectacle or simply tune it out as so much background noise.
4. While war and its costs have, to date, been kept at arm’s length, American society has been militarizing fast. Our media outlets, intelligence agencies, politicians, foreign policy establishment, and “homeland security” bureaucracy are so intertwined with military priorities and agendas as to be inseparable from them. In militarized America, griping about soft-hearted tactics or the outspokenness of a certain general may be tolerated, but forceful criticism of our military or our wars is still treated as deviant and “un-American.”
5. Our profligate, high-tech approach to war, including those Predator and Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles, has served to limit American casualties — and so has limited the anger over, and harsh questioning of, our wars that might go with them. While the U.S. has had more than 1,000 troops killed in Afghanistan, over a similar period in Vietnam we lost more than 58,000 troops. Improved medical evacuation and trauma care, greater reliance on standoff precision weaponry and similar “force multipliers,” stronger emphasis on “force protection” within American military units: all these and more have helped tamp down concern about the immeasurable and soaring costs of our wars.
It all seems so easy—even “clean”—from the sky. Not even a single U.S. pilot at risk.
6. As we incessantly develop those force-multiplying weapons to give us our “edge” (though never an edge that leads to victory), it’s hardly surprising that the U.S. has come to dominate, if not quite monopolize, the global arms trade. In these years, as American jobs were outsourced or simply disappeared in the Great Recession, armaments have been one of our few growth industries. Endless war has proven endlessly profitable — not perhaps for all of us, but certainly for those in the business of war.
7. And don’t forget the seductive power of beyond-worse-case, doomsday scenarios, of the prophecies of pundits and so-called experts, who regularly tell us that, bad as our wars may be, doing anything to end them would be far worse. A typical scenario goes like this: If we withdraw from Afghanistan, the government of Hamid Karzai will collapse, the Taliban will surge to victory, al-Qaeda will pour into Afghan safe havens, and Pakistan will be further destabilized, its atomic bombs falling into the hands of terrorists out to destroy Peoria and Orlando.
Such fevered nightmares, impossible to disprove, may be conjured at any moment to scare critics into silence. They are a convenient bogeyman, leaving us cowering as we send our superman military out to save us (and the world as well), while preserving our right to visit the mall and travel to Disney World without being nuked.
The truth is that no one really knows what would happen if the U.S. disengaged from Afghanistan. But we do know what’s happening now, with us fully engaged: we’re pursuing a war that’s costing us nearly $7 billion a month that we’re not winning (and that’s arguably unwinnable), a war that may be increasing the chances of another 9/11, rather than decreasing them.
Capping the Wellsprings of War
Each one of these seven wellsprings feeding our enduring wars must be capped. So here are seven suggestions for the sort of “caps” — hopefully more effective than BP’s flailing improvisations — we need to install:
1. Let’s reject the idea that war is either admirable or good — and in the process, remind ourselves that others often see us as “the foreign fighters” and profligate war consumers who kill innocents (despite our efforts to apply deadly force in surgically precise ways reflecting “courageous restraint“).
2. Let’s cut defense spending now, and reduce the global “mission” that goes with it. Set a reasonable goal — a 6-8% reduction annually for the next 10 years, until levels of defense spending are at least back to where they were before 9/11 — and then stick to it.
3. Let’s stop privatizing war. Creating ever more profitable incentives for war was always a ludicrous idea. It’s time to make war a non-profit, last-resort activity. And let’s revive national service (including elective military service) for all young adults. What we need is a revived civilian conservation corps, not a new civilian “expeditionary” force.
4. Let’s reverse the militarization of so many dimensions of our society. To cite one example, it’s time to empower truly independent (non-embedded) journalists to cover our wars, and stop relying on retired generals and admirals who led our previous wars to be our media guides. Men who are beholden to their former service branch or the current defense contractor who employs them can hardly be trusted to be critical and unbiased guides to future conflicts.
5. Let’s recognize that expensive high-tech weapons systems are not war-winners. They’ve kept us in the game without yielding decisive results — unless you measure “results” in terms of cost overruns and burgeoning federal budget deficits.
6. Let’s retool our economy and reinvest our money, moving it out of the military-industrial complex and into strengthening our anemic system of mass transit, our crumbling infrastructure, and alternative energy technology. We need high-speed rail, safer roads and bridges, and more wind turbines, not more overpriced jet fighters.
7. Finally, let’s banish nightmare scenarios from our minds. The world is scary enough without forever imagining smoking guns morphing into mushroom clouds.
There you have it: my seven “caps” to contain our gushing support for permanent war.
No one said it would be easy. Just ask BP how easy it is to cap one out-of-control gusher.
Nonetheless, if we as a society aren’t willing to work hard for actual change — indeed, to demand it — we’ll be on that military escalatory curve until we implode. And that way madness lies.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
By William J. Astore (2010)
Bonus Lesson (2023): “Enduring war” is not consistent with “enduring freedom.” Who knew? And we do seem as a society to be closer to implosion, a prediction I very much hope I’m ultimately proven wrong about.
Bracing Views 