Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Our nation has become a military empire analogous to ancient Rome, another Republic that lost its bearings because it became the mightiest fighting force of its time. That we owe this to having spectacularly won what could be called “The Last Just War”, World War II, merely ironically underlines our descent into become the World’s most bellicose nation. This bellicosity has been masked by propaganda that makes us out to be the one nation responsible for ensuring “freedom and safety”. In this strife torn Earth, that idea cannot be supported since the truth is that we are the chief threat to peace in the world today. Now in truth, the use of the United States military to intervene in this Nation and other Nation’s affairs is not simply a phenomenon that began with World War II as you can see from this timeline linked here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations . What World War II marked though was the absolute dominant position in world military power which our country attained during our participation in that war. Given the magnitude of its scope it is easy to forget that for the United States World War II lasted only a brief four years. However, the incredible mobilization of troops and the supporting materiel of war were accomplished via a total mobilization that in the end fully turned the vision of Corporate America towards the great profits and benefits to be derived by American military dominance. Indeed, for generations to come there was a fluidity of personnel between leading corporate entities and the Department of Defense.
Since 2001 our Armed Forces have been totally engaged in two major, unjustified wars and various minor “peace actions”. A child born in 1990 in the U.S. grew up in a world where there has been constant warfare and warfare’s necessary companion glorification of military service. The admixture of America’s warlike behavior and the faux glorification of the nobility of our military has become a constant in that young persons mind, only to better make them future cannon fodder for our dominant Corporate/Military Industrial Complex. Sadly, the less educated that young person is the more they are gullible to the siren call of that propaganda of military glorification. As the Great U.S. General Smedley Butler said so long ago: “War is a racket”.
In truth we honor our soldiers far more in words than in deeds. “America’s Greatest Generation” as establishment mouthpiece Tom Brokaw put it, was also the one generation of military personnel that was actually very well treated in the aftermath of their service. The World War II returning troops were educated via the generous G.I. Bill, had their homes financed through special discount programs and entered the marketplace at a time of phenomenal growth of the U.S. economy due to our country’s new position as the World’s dominant power. Every generation of returning veterans before and after World War II was treated rather shabbily in comparisons, despite the lavish praise given them for their service. The huge backlog in receiving benefits and medical treatment for our latest generation of returning veterans is masked by our presumed “honoring of the troops”, which is constantly accomplished merely in words, with a paucity of actual services delivered.
The reality is that the only real bi-partisanship that exists in our politicians today is that the overwhelming majority of both Democrats and Republicans are enthusiastic supporters of American military hegemony and bought stooges of the Corporate/Military Industrial Complex. That many beyond their corporate donors are indeed true believers in American military supremacy is no doubt true. The fact is that if you were born after let’s say 1960, your view of the world was shaped by American interventionism and American military supremacy. Barack Obama was born in 1961 and one can count him as one of those who for the most part supports America’s military interventionism. The proofs of my assertions are simple. In this time of supposed budgetary crisis, there is barely minimal support for cutting anything out of our Military and Intelligence budget. I lump Military and Intelligence together because there has been such a blurring of the lines between these two formerly discrete government entities, that today it is impossible to distinguish boundaries.
When it comes to my premise for this piece which is that this country will soon be involved in its “next” war, let me explain my reasoning. First of all there is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room of American politics that almost no one that I’m aware of talks about. We are mired in a recession with countless American unemployed. If we bring our troops home and cut our defense budget we will add hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to our jobless rolls. Truly, the military has been the escape for many with otherwise poor employment prospects into obtaining a respectable job and the semblance of a future career. By cutting the military/intelligence budget, as things now stand economically in this country, we will recede from “recession” into “depression”. However, without something to justify the existence of our military budget, the U.S. spends more on our military budget than the next thirteen countries combined military expenditures, the truth that we are squandering the riches of this country to support the profits of private corporations becomes obvious. Therefore we need something to justify this unnecessary expense and that is another war.
As I see it there are three good prospects for that coming war, though I won’t preclude that we might fight all three at once. The first prospect is that ever handy, oil rich, example Iran. The justification would be similar to that of Iraq, which is “weapons of mass destruction”. The idea is that we can’t allow a country as unstable as Iran to have nuclear capacity. Underlying this justification is that Iran has a massive supply of oil riches and so would be a prize similar to Iraq and the oil leases we forced Iraq to agree to. Naturally, a partial excuse would be its threat to Israel, but in truth that is merely a convenient overlay for Saudi Arabia’s competition with Iran for dominance in the Muslim world.
A second possibility is intervention in Syria for humanitarian reasons. The Syrian dictator Assad is no doubt a brute, but we live in a world where a great many country’s are ruled by brutes. The “humanitarian” interest in Syria is its strategic location, the presence of American military bases close by and the various economic benefits to be supplied by controlling that country.
Now a third possibility rearing its ugly head comes from the clownish dictator of North Korea. Again we find a nuclear threat involved and also this is paired with the “humanitarian” need to rid this unfortunate country of its hereditary dictator. That North Korea is a failed state, unable to feed its people and geographically located next to one of the World’s great powers China may be ignored because the silly posturing of its’ “dear Leader” can be propagandistically twisted into a “threat” to our country.
It must be noted that possibly the most unstable country to possess nuclear capability in the World today is Pakistan, yet that ill-governed country is somehow never cited as a threat to the U.S., even with its harboring of Osama Bin Laden and of the Taliban, next door to the country we are currently deeply involved in.
These are my reasons for my believing that quite shortly our country will be involved in another war. Unless thinking by both parties in Washington changes drastically, which I don’t see as likely given the gravy train our politicians are on, we will receive the same propagandist buildup as a preparation of the American people for yet another war. We will squander the lives of our troops and the wealth of this country maintaining our role as the “Leader of the World”. We will move ever closer to Rome’s example as a republic turns to empire and the empire is ruled by military heroes and so it goes.
The reader will note that I used no links to back up my suppositions and in truth this guest blog was my meditation on the militaristic character that has prevailed in our nation. However, my musings are not merely the product of a fevered brain this morning, but actually a continuation of an ongoing theme of a portion of my guest blogs. The links below supply the information and detail that have influenced my feelings and a the combination of work that both Gene Howington and myself have produced in the past year or so.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/02/09/petraeus-the-problem-with-heroic-hagiography/
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/02/02/why-they-hate-hagel-and-american-mythology/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/09/15/this-changes-everything/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/09/08/the-drum-beat-goes-on/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/08/25/lest-we-forget/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/06/23/missing-the-point-when-the-point-is-obvious/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/06/17/propaganda-102-holly-would-and-the-power-of-images/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/05/20/propaganda-101-what-you-need-to-know-and-why-or/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/04/01/defending-our-freedoms/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/17/a-real-history-of-the-last-sixty-two-years/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/02/25/hypocrisy-democracy-whats-going-on/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/07/americas-transcendent-issue/
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/09/24/as-we-careen-towards-a-dream-of-armageddon/
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/09/10/the-president-has-been-afraid-of-what/
Mike S.,
Did you have to bring up Cheney?
Kinda off topic…. But I think this new Pope as started out on the right track of corrective measure…. I’ve yet to read anything negative or even controversial in his decisions….
Bron,
You men up close and personal, not from afar in cozy leather couches… NO?
“Why even have this expensive military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” — former Secretary of State Madeleine Allbright
“We came. We saw. He died.” — former Secretary of State You-Know-Her.
And the glib, gloating women warmongers have only just started getting in their innings. .. More of that coming real soon now, courtesy of the “liberal” “humanitarian” interventionists.
Mike S.
I got home from work today and headed out to venture into the interwebs to gather up various news, comments, ideas, etc. I finished up watching Bill Maher’s “NEW RULES” and was on my feet applauding only to sit right back down and read your article echoing what got me on my feet. I’d stand and applaud while typing, however I’m not that talented… Thanks.
mike spindell:
how many in bush’s cabinet saw combat? I think it was only Powell, is that right?
nick,
Let us not forget that Christopher Hitchens was a big proponent of America starting a war with Iraq.
*****
When Hitch was wrong
He was disastrously wrong
BY ALEX PAREENE
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/when_hitch_was_wrong/
Excerpt:
The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian’s fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself. I think he would’ve been disgusted to see too much worshipful treacle being written about him upon his untimely death, so let’s remember that in addition to being a zingy writer and masterful debater, he was also a bellicose warmongering misogynist.
Upon the death of the unlamented Earl Butz, Hitchens excoriated editors who published sanitized obituaries of a man remembered solely for a vulgar racist remark made in public. Hitchens leaves a rather more varied legacy, but it’s just as important not to whitewash his role in recent history.
There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn’t really matter to Hitchens.)
And so we had the world’s self-appointed supreme defender of Orwell’s legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government’s war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz.
Once he became an unpaid administration propagandist, Hitchens, formerly a creature of left-wing magazines whose largest mainstream exposure was in Vanity Fair and occasionally on Charlie Rose, was suddenly on TV rather a lot. The lesson there, I think, is that the popular American mass media will make room for even a booze-swilling atheist Trotskyite if he’s shilling for a the latest war.
And to be honest, his post-9/11 conception of an epoch-defining clash of civilizations between the secular West and the jihadists is more than slightly ridiculous. The secular West faces any number of graver existential threats — like unaccountable too-big-to-fail financial institutions and climate change, to name two that immediately come to mind — than that posed by the less-than 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population that subscribes to Salafist jihadism. Hitchens, the old Orwell worshiper, clearly just wanted a great big generational threat to tackle fearlessly, with polemics attacking the sclerotic establishment liberals who failed to see that the world was at the brink of disaster. He was looking for his own Spanish Civil War. That’s why he insisted on arguing that “Bin Ladenism” was equivalent to fascism.
Raff and OS,
Even as I protested Viet Nam in my mind a big part of my protest was for those young soldiers who were being destroyed by a war which they were told was to protect our country. After 9/11 the government propaganda machine, lovingly abetted by the bulk of our mass media, made similar young idealists think they were joining a crusade to protect their country. It is almost always the same way with war and that is why the preferred recruits are young. Venal “old” men can vicariously satisfy their blood-lusts in the safety of their luxury and murmur platitudes of praise for those who truly suffer the consequences of these criminals misdeeds. Think Dick Cheney.
“Do not vote for your (and my) war mongering congress wimps.”
Do you realize how many of the NPRer’s here support HILLARY! 2016?
How about we insist our Congress representatives vote on any War Declaration as out Constitution so clearly says they should?
Congress, get a backbone!
Do not vote for your (and my) war mongering congress wimps.
raff,
So did a lot of young people, and some not so young. Little did they realize the level of incompetence and venality of the Administration. Or, on second thought, maybe the Administration was not really incompetent. Bush, Cheney & Company made a ton of money for their friends and family, and were able to push their right wing agenda even further right.
Now look where we are. The cost of this misadventure in Iraq and Afghanistan? There are 6,656 dead Americans as of February 2013. No one knows the exact number of civilian contractors killed, but the best estimate is about 3,000. No good data are available on casualties, because all too many have wounds that do not bleed and leave no visible scars. We know there are more than 50,000 with physical wounds.
But when vets ask the fat cats and politicians who sent them there for more money to treat them, we get……..crickets. Slogans and soaring pronouncements, but where is the money?
War on N.Korea? Wouldn’t last long enough. No big oil supply to loot. China wouldn’t approve and might call in U.S. debts.
Syria? Russia wouldn’t approve – but ISRAEL would.
Iran? Would cause too many problems…for us/ISRAEL.
The Corporate Management of the United States (CMUS) has only one enemy that it truly fears and loathes: namely, us, or (quaintly) “we the people.”
OS.
Some of the kids that signed up for the military and who lived through 9/11 felt a patriotic tug or pull to join up. Our son talked about the Marines all through college and we suggested to finish school and then decide. He went in and really gained an immense amount of confidence and leadership ability that landed him a couple of good jobs since he got out of the Marines. The hard part for us as parents was his tour in Afghanistan. But he and many of his fellow officers felt that patriotic tug following 9/11.
Preparation H is made from really crude stuff.
We have fought many wars to bring it.
Exxon gave it to people free to 354 locations in 2012.
If you like innuendo, bend over, here it comes:
C’mon Nick,
Innuendo is not Preparation H:
Bill Maher is the King of Smug. I saw the late great Christopher Hitchens rip the little twerp a new assh@ole…it was great!
Anon 1, April 13, 2013 at 5:23 pm
maybe we should talk about making the democracy around the world safe from the United States of America
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It is not united.
Haven’t you ever heard of the U.S.eh?
One of the better generals who understands what a military is for said a coup took place during or before 2001 (A Tale of Coup Cities – 2).
I kind of like Friedman. Those St. Louis Park Jews[Friedman, Cohen Bros. David Brooks] have done ok for themselves. Must be writing in that towns water instead of flouride which as we all know “Will dry up you precious bodily fluids.”
Elaine M. 1, April 13, 2013 at 3:21 pm
CheatinDog 1, April 13, 2013 at 12:01 pm
No one talks about making the world safe for Democracy anymore.
*****
Maybe we should start talking about making the United States safe for Democracy???
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Bingo.