Chiến Tranh là Lý Cớ Tồn Tại là Nguyên Lý Sống Còn của Định Chế Nhà Nước, là Trò Làm Tiền Gian Manh . Những xác định này không phải đợi đến hôm nay Glenn Greenwald mới thấy. Sự kiện này đã từng được nhà báo Mỹ Randolph Bourne (1918) vạch rõ và cảnh cáo trong tiểu luận War is the Health of the State, và cựu tướng thũy quân lục chiến Mỹ Smedley Butler, vạch rõ trong diễn văn năm 1935 War Is A Racket,
Nhà báo Glenn Greenwald lần này thu gọn "chiến tranh miên tục" vào trong chính sách của nhà nước Mỹ với những chi tiết cụ thể về lọi nhuận của các tập đàn kinh tế cũng như chính trị. Glenn chỉ thiếu phần qui kết quan trọng mà nhà báo Bourne và tướng Butler đã khẳng định: Chiến tranh chính là bản chất quyền lực của định chế Nhà nước chính phủ.
Dù thế nào, nhóm Intercept của Glenn Greenwald cũng thực hiện được những nguyên lý chính của báo chí: tường thuật và lý giải những sự kiện trung thực đến quần chúng. Quí độc giả có Anh ngữ cần tham khảo trang thông tin này The Intercept - First Look Media
Long before Americans were introduced to the new 9/11 era super-villains called ISIS and Khorasan, senior Obama officials were openly and explicitly stating that America’s “war on terror,” already 12 years old, would last at least another decade. At first, they injected these decrees only anonymously; in late 2012, The Washington Post - disclosing the administration’s secret creation of a “disposition matrix” to decide who should be killed, imprisoned without charges, or otherwise “disposed” of - reported these remarkable facts:
Listening to all this, Maine’s independent Sen. Angus King said: “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.” Former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith – himself an ardent advocate of broad presidential powers – was at the hearing and noted that nobody even knows against whom this endless war is being waged: “Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”
All of that received remarkably little attention given its obvious significance. But any doubts about whether Endless War – literally – is official American doctrine should be permanently erased by this week’s comments from two leading Democrats, both former top national security officials in the Obama administration, one of whom is likely to be the next American president.
Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”
Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.
At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.
It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).
Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?
I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.
But that is not, and never was, the purpose of the War on Terror. It was designed from the start to be endless. Both Bush and Obama officials have explicitly said that the war will last at least a generation. The nature of the “war,” and the theories that have accompanied it, is that it has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits. More significantly, this “war” fuels itself, provides its own inexhaustible purpose, as it is precisely the policies justified in the name of Stopping Terrorism that actually ensure its spread (note how Panetta said the new U.S. war would have to include Libya, presumably to fight against those empowered by the last U.S. war there just 3 years ago).
This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:
Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Nhà báo Glenn Greenwald lần này thu gọn "chiến tranh miên tục" vào trong chính sách của nhà nước Mỹ với những chi tiết cụ thể về lọi nhuận của các tập đàn kinh tế cũng như chính trị. Glenn chỉ thiếu phần qui kết quan trọng mà nhà báo Bourne và tướng Butler đã khẳng định: Chiến tranh chính là bản chất quyền lực của định chế Nhà nước chính phủ.
Dù thế nào, nhóm Intercept của Glenn Greenwald cũng thực hiện được những nguyên lý chính của báo chí: tường thuật và lý giải những sự kiện trung thực đến quần chúng. Quí độc giả có Anh ngữ cần tham khảo trang thông tin này The Intercept - First Look Media
Key Democrats, Led by Hillary Clinton, Leave No doubt that Endless War is Official U.S. Doctrine
Long before Americans were introduced to the new 9/11 era super-villains called ISIS and Khorasan, senior Obama officials were openly and explicitly stating that America’s “war on terror,” already 12 years old, would last at least another decade. At first, they injected these decrees only anonymously; in late 2012, The Washington Post - disclosing the administration’s secret creation of a “disposition matrix” to decide who should be killed, imprisoned without charges, or otherwise “disposed” of - reported these remarkable facts:
Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”In May, 2013, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether it should revise the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). A committee member asked a senior Pentagon official, Assistant Secretary Michael Sheehan, how long the war on terror would last; his reply: “At least 10 to 20 years.” At least. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed afterward “that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today — atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War,” one which – by the Obama administration’s own reasoning – has “no geographic limit.”
Listening to all this, Maine’s independent Sen. Angus King said: “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.” Former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith – himself an ardent advocate of broad presidential powers – was at the hearing and noted that nobody even knows against whom this endless war is being waged: “Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”
All of that received remarkably little attention given its obvious significance. But any doubts about whether Endless War – literally – is official American doctrine should be permanently erased by this week’s comments from two leading Democrats, both former top national security officials in the Obama administration, one of whom is likely to be the next American president.
Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”
Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.
At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.
It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).
Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?
I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.
But that is not, and never was, the purpose of the War on Terror. It was designed from the start to be endless. Both Bush and Obama officials have explicitly said that the war will last at least a generation. The nature of the “war,” and the theories that have accompanied it, is that it has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits. More significantly, this “war” fuels itself, provides its own inexhaustible purpose, as it is precisely the policies justified in the name of Stopping Terrorism that actually ensure its spread (note how Panetta said the new U.S. war would have to include Libya, presumably to fight against those empowered by the last U.S. war there just 3 years ago).
This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.
Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
- Antiwar.com Original - http://original.antiwar.com -
Why This War?
Posted By Justin Raimondo On October 9, 2014 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 15 Comments
Glenn Greenwald has a fascinating piece in The Intercept making the case that the "war on terrorism" is going to be "endless," as he puts it. From a decade to twenty years to Leon Panetta’s recent pronouncement that "I think we’re looking at kind of a thirty years war," Greenwald painstakingly documents statements by Obama administration officials essentially showing that they see the war as having no geographic or temporal limit. And that’s not the worst of it: he goes on to show that not only Panetta but also the person "likely to be the next American president" is projecting our current Middle East intervention into the indefinite future.
Whether Hillary Clinton is "likely" to occupy the White House is debatable, but it’s hard to argue with Greenwald’s conclusion. "At this point," he writes,
"It is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. US officials are now all but openly saying this. ‘Endless War’ is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy."
Indeed, all of this is indisputable, and yet it leads us to ask: Why? What are we getting out of this Sisyphean slaughter? Greenwald thinks he has the answer;
"It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the "homeland security" and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the ‘defense sector’)."
He then takes us through the details of how much the military-industrial complex has profited – and will continue to profit – from America’s wars. The piece is helpfully illustrated with graphs showing the skyrocketing gains enjoyed by stockholders in such companies as Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Greenwald concludes with the observation that the War on Terror "was designed to be endless." Power and profit will flow to the Usual Suspects, in spite of election outcomes, because the conflict "has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits."
And the motive? Material and psychological profit: not only will the politically-connected war profiteers make out like bandits, but:
"This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:
"’In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.’" [emphasis in original]
All this is true: the political class gets its kicks, as well as its stock dividends, out of America’s hegemonic position in world affairs. How else do we explain the existence of an entire community of foreign policy wonks, mostly resident in the Washington, D.C. area, who spend all their time drawing up plans for US meddling in every far corner of the globe? That hardly a single one of these ladies and gentlemen is raising so much as a mild objection to our latest incursion is entirely unsurprising: these people are like a swarm of deadly midges, moving in a cloud to descend on whatever target our leaders point to.
Yet this hardly explains enough: after all, there are limits to what the United States – or any single nation – can do to determine the course of world events. Our resources are finite. So why are they being stretched to the breaking point? Why are we flirting with economic disaster as more and more of our tax dollars are shipped overseas to prop up a constantly-threatened empire while our economy is suffering from the "vampire effect" – the draining of productive resources (capital) into the sinkhole of imperialism? Is it to feed the profit margins of Raytheon? Is it to make Eli Lake feel better?
The answer is: neither. While the economic and psychological benefits to the political class are reasons why the Washington crowd continues to support our foreign policy of endless war, this doesn’t tell us what they are supporting. That is, it doesn’t tell us what the reigning ideology of empire is all about.
American imperialism, born amid the ashes of World War II, isn’t about profits for the "defense" industry: it isn’t even about the thrill the neocons get whenever we bomb yet another defenseless Muslim country. It’s about what that thrill tells us about the dominant ideas of America’s political class.
America’s ruling elite has been "progressive" since the dawn of modernity, right before the first world war. Anticipating the social and economic changes war would bring, the editors of The New Republic exulted in the prospect of a major conflict, as Murray Rothbard pointed out in his classic essay, "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals":
"In his editorial in the magazine’s first issue in November 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war would stimulate America’s spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer to democracy. At first hesitant about the collectivist war economies in Europe, The New Republic soon began to cheer and urged the United States to follow the lead of the warring European nations and socialize its economy and expand the powers of the State.
"As America prepared to enter the war, The New Republic, examining war collectivism in Europe, rejoiced that ‘on its administrative side socialism [had] won a victory that [was] superb and compelling.’ True, European war collectivism was a bit grim and autocratic, but never fear, America could use the selfsame means for ‘democratic’ goals.
"The New Republic intellectuals also delighted in the ‘war spirit’ in America, for that spirit meant ‘the substitution of national and social and organic forces for the more or less mechanical private forces operative in peace.’ The purposes of war and social reform might be a bit different, but, after all, ‘they are both purposes, and luckily for mankind a social organization which is efficient is as useful for the one as for the other.’ Lucky indeed.
As America prepared to enter the war, the New Republic eagerly looked forward to imminent collectivization, sure that it would bring “immense gains in national efficiency and happiness.” After war was declared, the magazine urged that the war be used as “an aggressive tool of democracy.”
“’Why should not the war serve,’ the magazine asked, ‘as a pretext to be used to foist innovations upon the country?’ In that way, progressive intellectuals could lead the way in abolishing ‘the typical evils of the sprawling half-educated competitive capitalism.’"
It’s interesting that the central theme of Greenwald’s piece – and a major theme of his activities as a public intellectual – has been to underscore the warmongering of ostensible liberals, whom, one would presume, would take a default position against war. Yet this expectation is a vestige of the cold war era, when some liberals stood up against the constant state of "crisis" the global struggle against Communism provoked – or, at least, they stood up against its domestic manifestations, i.e. McCarthyism and the witch-hunting it inspired.
Yet the cold war was inaugurated by the liberal Democratic administration of Harry Truman, who presided over the creation of NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the Korean war – the first war in which the President unilaterally committed US troops to combat without a vote in Congress. And it was the so-called cold war liberals, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later to become official hagiographer to the Kennedys, who attacked their fellow liberals – and right-wing "isolationists" – for not being hard-line enough in opposing the Kremlin’s alleged plan for world domination.
In a piece for The Atlantic Monthly, Schlesinger savaged Sen. Robert A. Taft and former President Herbert Hoover for suggesting that the real threat to American liberties came not from the Kremlin but from our own political class, which was all too eager to impose crippling taxes and draconian regulations on free enterprise in the name of "national security." This "New Isolationism," Schlesinger averred, was just as dangerous and misguided as the older pre-World War II variety, a doctrine that, "without McCarthyism," is simply "appeasement."
By the way, the impetus for Schlesinger’s piece was the alleged threat of a communist takeover of Indochina – the site of what was to shortly become the graveyard of tens of thousands of American soldiers. And that war was brought to us not by conservatives – who by that time had ditched their "isolationist" coloration and taken on more belligerent hues – but by dyed-in-the-wool liberals of Schlesinger’s sort: the Kennedy administration, which upped our commitment to the Saigon regime, and the Johnson regime, which escalated the conflict until it brought down Johnson’s presidency, which ended in disaster and humiliation.
The massive effort we call the cold war wasn’t driven by the profit margins of the "defense" industry, although that was a contributing factor: nor was it made possible by the personal proclivities and psychological tics of our leading politicians, although that, too, contributed to the mix. Yes, the thrill experienced by the policy nomenklatura in knowing that their opinions can move – and blast to smithereens – mountains is palpable, but that response is elicited by a cohered ideology of domination that animates our empire-builders.
This ideology has a name: we call it "progressivism." It has a long history, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and his intellectual publicists, continuing through the Great War and the run-up to World War II – when it was the left that was screaming for US intervention in the European conflict – and its aftermath.
Based on ignorance not only of economics but of human nature itself, and imbued with religious elements that date all the way back to the post-millennial pietism of the great fundamentalist revival of the early nineteenth century, American progressivism has evolved until it has taken on all the elements of an expansionist, supremely militaristic ideology. It is a creed based on the assumption that government power must be utilized to lift up the ignorant masses: to not only feed, clothe, and educate them, but also to ensure their perfect safety.
Thus, it becomes imperative to make sure that only the State has access to guns – otherwise, someone might hurt either themselves or someone else. It becomes a requirement that we wear safety belts when driving – because the ultimate purpose of government is to wrap us all in its all-embracing cocoon. And if a band of savages bellows that they hate the United States, and are determined to destroy it – from their base in the wilds of Afghanistan – well, then, it’s fairly obvious that we have to send our armies out there to make sure they don’t have a "safe haven" in which to carry out their insidious plots.
Once our progressives had transformed the old America into an experimental laboratory for their social engineering projects, it was only natural that these crusading "idealists" would turn their sights on the rest of the world. Not content to thrust the paw of government power into every aspect of our lives here in America, the nation’s do-gooders are intent on exporting their do-goodism to the four corners of the globe.
This is why our foreign policy consists of "endless war," as Greenwald puts it: because if your goal is world domination, then the war to establish a global authority – with Washington as its capital – must be necessarily open-ended. That’s because there will always be resistance to such a project: once a rebellion is put down in the Middle East, for example, another one is more than likely to pop up in Africa, or eastern Europe, or someplace else.
Greenwald traces the policy of perpetual war only as far back as the beginning of the so-called War on Terror – roughly, September 11, 2001 – but if we look at the actual timeline of America’s wars we can see that the current series of US interventions really started with the fall of the Soviet Union. After that signal event, which left the US as the world’s sole superpower, Washington launched the Kosovo war, the first Iraq war, and the long prelude to the second Iraq war anticipated by Bill Clinton’s almost continuous bombing campaign.
With the Soviets out of the way, the United States and its allies undertook a campaign to seize as much territory as possible – and establish the hegemony of the West on a global scale. The 9/11 attacks merely gave them the domestic support they needed to carry this project through to the end.
Well-meaning liberals of Greenwald’s sort are invaluable allies in the day-to-day struggle against the Empire, and yet we should not imagine that – as long as they maintain their allegiance to this or that aspect of progressivism – they are capable of understanding the real nature of the enemy. The task of libertarians in the present epoch is to make them understand.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Whether Hillary Clinton is "likely" to occupy the White House is debatable, but it’s hard to argue with Greenwald’s conclusion. "At this point," he writes,
"It is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. US officials are now all but openly saying this. ‘Endless War’ is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy."
Indeed, all of this is indisputable, and yet it leads us to ask: Why? What are we getting out of this Sisyphean slaughter? Greenwald thinks he has the answer;
"It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the "homeland security" and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the ‘defense sector’)."
He then takes us through the details of how much the military-industrial complex has profited – and will continue to profit – from America’s wars. The piece is helpfully illustrated with graphs showing the skyrocketing gains enjoyed by stockholders in such companies as Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Greenwald concludes with the observation that the War on Terror "was designed to be endless." Power and profit will flow to the Usual Suspects, in spite of election outcomes, because the conflict "has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits."
And the motive? Material and psychological profit: not only will the politically-connected war profiteers make out like bandits, but:
"This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:
"’In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.’" [emphasis in original]
All this is true: the political class gets its kicks, as well as its stock dividends, out of America’s hegemonic position in world affairs. How else do we explain the existence of an entire community of foreign policy wonks, mostly resident in the Washington, D.C. area, who spend all their time drawing up plans for US meddling in every far corner of the globe? That hardly a single one of these ladies and gentlemen is raising so much as a mild objection to our latest incursion is entirely unsurprising: these people are like a swarm of deadly midges, moving in a cloud to descend on whatever target our leaders point to.
Yet this hardly explains enough: after all, there are limits to what the United States – or any single nation – can do to determine the course of world events. Our resources are finite. So why are they being stretched to the breaking point? Why are we flirting with economic disaster as more and more of our tax dollars are shipped overseas to prop up a constantly-threatened empire while our economy is suffering from the "vampire effect" – the draining of productive resources (capital) into the sinkhole of imperialism? Is it to feed the profit margins of Raytheon? Is it to make Eli Lake feel better?
The answer is: neither. While the economic and psychological benefits to the political class are reasons why the Washington crowd continues to support our foreign policy of endless war, this doesn’t tell us what they are supporting. That is, it doesn’t tell us what the reigning ideology of empire is all about.
American imperialism, born amid the ashes of World War II, isn’t about profits for the "defense" industry: it isn’t even about the thrill the neocons get whenever we bomb yet another defenseless Muslim country. It’s about what that thrill tells us about the dominant ideas of America’s political class.
America’s ruling elite has been "progressive" since the dawn of modernity, right before the first world war. Anticipating the social and economic changes war would bring, the editors of The New Republic exulted in the prospect of a major conflict, as Murray Rothbard pointed out in his classic essay, "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals":
"In his editorial in the magazine’s first issue in November 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war would stimulate America’s spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer to democracy. At first hesitant about the collectivist war economies in Europe, The New Republic soon began to cheer and urged the United States to follow the lead of the warring European nations and socialize its economy and expand the powers of the State.
"As America prepared to enter the war, The New Republic, examining war collectivism in Europe, rejoiced that ‘on its administrative side socialism [had] won a victory that [was] superb and compelling.’ True, European war collectivism was a bit grim and autocratic, but never fear, America could use the selfsame means for ‘democratic’ goals.
"The New Republic intellectuals also delighted in the ‘war spirit’ in America, for that spirit meant ‘the substitution of national and social and organic forces for the more or less mechanical private forces operative in peace.’ The purposes of war and social reform might be a bit different, but, after all, ‘they are both purposes, and luckily for mankind a social organization which is efficient is as useful for the one as for the other.’ Lucky indeed.
As America prepared to enter the war, the New Republic eagerly looked forward to imminent collectivization, sure that it would bring “immense gains in national efficiency and happiness.” After war was declared, the magazine urged that the war be used as “an aggressive tool of democracy.”
“’Why should not the war serve,’ the magazine asked, ‘as a pretext to be used to foist innovations upon the country?’ In that way, progressive intellectuals could lead the way in abolishing ‘the typical evils of the sprawling half-educated competitive capitalism.’"
It’s interesting that the central theme of Greenwald’s piece – and a major theme of his activities as a public intellectual – has been to underscore the warmongering of ostensible liberals, whom, one would presume, would take a default position against war. Yet this expectation is a vestige of the cold war era, when some liberals stood up against the constant state of "crisis" the global struggle against Communism provoked – or, at least, they stood up against its domestic manifestations, i.e. McCarthyism and the witch-hunting it inspired.
Yet the cold war was inaugurated by the liberal Democratic administration of Harry Truman, who presided over the creation of NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the Korean war – the first war in which the President unilaterally committed US troops to combat without a vote in Congress. And it was the so-called cold war liberals, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later to become official hagiographer to the Kennedys, who attacked their fellow liberals – and right-wing "isolationists" – for not being hard-line enough in opposing the Kremlin’s alleged plan for world domination.
In a piece for The Atlantic Monthly, Schlesinger savaged Sen. Robert A. Taft and former President Herbert Hoover for suggesting that the real threat to American liberties came not from the Kremlin but from our own political class, which was all too eager to impose crippling taxes and draconian regulations on free enterprise in the name of "national security." This "New Isolationism," Schlesinger averred, was just as dangerous and misguided as the older pre-World War II variety, a doctrine that, "without McCarthyism," is simply "appeasement."
By the way, the impetus for Schlesinger’s piece was the alleged threat of a communist takeover of Indochina – the site of what was to shortly become the graveyard of tens of thousands of American soldiers. And that war was brought to us not by conservatives – who by that time had ditched their "isolationist" coloration and taken on more belligerent hues – but by dyed-in-the-wool liberals of Schlesinger’s sort: the Kennedy administration, which upped our commitment to the Saigon regime, and the Johnson regime, which escalated the conflict until it brought down Johnson’s presidency, which ended in disaster and humiliation.
The massive effort we call the cold war wasn’t driven by the profit margins of the "defense" industry, although that was a contributing factor: nor was it made possible by the personal proclivities and psychological tics of our leading politicians, although that, too, contributed to the mix. Yes, the thrill experienced by the policy nomenklatura in knowing that their opinions can move – and blast to smithereens – mountains is palpable, but that response is elicited by a cohered ideology of domination that animates our empire-builders.
This ideology has a name: we call it "progressivism." It has a long history, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and his intellectual publicists, continuing through the Great War and the run-up to World War II – when it was the left that was screaming for US intervention in the European conflict – and its aftermath.
Based on ignorance not only of economics but of human nature itself, and imbued with religious elements that date all the way back to the post-millennial pietism of the great fundamentalist revival of the early nineteenth century, American progressivism has evolved until it has taken on all the elements of an expansionist, supremely militaristic ideology. It is a creed based on the assumption that government power must be utilized to lift up the ignorant masses: to not only feed, clothe, and educate them, but also to ensure their perfect safety.
Thus, it becomes imperative to make sure that only the State has access to guns – otherwise, someone might hurt either themselves or someone else. It becomes a requirement that we wear safety belts when driving – because the ultimate purpose of government is to wrap us all in its all-embracing cocoon. And if a band of savages bellows that they hate the United States, and are determined to destroy it – from their base in the wilds of Afghanistan – well, then, it’s fairly obvious that we have to send our armies out there to make sure they don’t have a "safe haven" in which to carry out their insidious plots.
Once our progressives had transformed the old America into an experimental laboratory for their social engineering projects, it was only natural that these crusading "idealists" would turn their sights on the rest of the world. Not content to thrust the paw of government power into every aspect of our lives here in America, the nation’s do-gooders are intent on exporting their do-goodism to the four corners of the globe.
This is why our foreign policy consists of "endless war," as Greenwald puts it: because if your goal is world domination, then the war to establish a global authority – with Washington as its capital – must be necessarily open-ended. That’s because there will always be resistance to such a project: once a rebellion is put down in the Middle East, for example, another one is more than likely to pop up in Africa, or eastern Europe, or someplace else.
Greenwald traces the policy of perpetual war only as far back as the beginning of the so-called War on Terror – roughly, September 11, 2001 – but if we look at the actual timeline of America’s wars we can see that the current series of US interventions really started with the fall of the Soviet Union. After that signal event, which left the US as the world’s sole superpower, Washington launched the Kosovo war, the first Iraq war, and the long prelude to the second Iraq war anticipated by Bill Clinton’s almost continuous bombing campaign.
With the Soviets out of the way, the United States and its allies undertook a campaign to seize as much territory as possible – and establish the hegemony of the West on a global scale. The 9/11 attacks merely gave them the domestic support they needed to carry this project through to the end.
Well-meaning liberals of Greenwald’s sort are invaluable allies in the day-to-day struggle against the Empire, and yet we should not imagine that – as long as they maintain their allegiance to this or that aspect of progressivism – they are capable of understanding the real nature of the enemy. The task of libertarians in the present epoch is to make them understand.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Read more by Justin Raimondo
- The Hermit Kingdom in Crisis – October 7th, 2014
- The ‘Bitter Truth': Empire and the Death of Liberalism – October 5th, 2014
- A Note to My Readers – October 2nd, 2014
- China Is a Paper Tiger – September 30th, 2014
- They’re Making Up Stuff – September 28th, 2014
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After Feigning Love for Egyptian Democracy, U.S. Back To Openly Supporting Tyranny
It is, of course, very difficult to choose the single most extreme episode of misleading American media propaganda, but if forced to do so, coverage of the February, 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt would be an excellent candidate. For weeks, U.S. media outlets openly positioned themselves on the side of the demonstrators, depicting the upheaval as a Manichean battle between the evil despot Hosni Mubarak’s “three decades of iron rule” and the hordes of ordinary, oppressed Egyptians inspirationally yearning for American-style freedom and democracy.
Almost completely missing from this feel-good morality play was the terribly unpleasant fact that Mubarak was one of the U.S. Government’s longest and closest allies and that his ”three decades of iron rule” — featuring murder, torture and indefinite detention for dissidents — were enabled in multiple ways by American support.
Throughout Mubarak’s rule, the U.S. fed his regime an average of $2 billion each year, most of which was military aid. The tear gas cannisters shot at protesters by Mubarak’s police bore “Made in U.S.A.” labels. A 2009 diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks noted that “Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts … are being stymied” but described the benefits received by U.S. from support for the regime: “Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace.” Another 2009 cable put it more bluntly: “the Egyptians appear more willing to confront the Iranian surrogates and to work closely with Israel.”
That same year, Hillary Clinton pronounced: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” Another WikiLeaks cable, anticipating the first meeting between Obama and Mubarak in 2009, emphasized that “the Administration wants to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership” and that “the Egyptians want the visit to demonstrate that Egypt remains America’s ‘indispensible [sic] Arab ally.’” The cable dryly noted that “[intelligence] Chief Omar Soliman and Interior Minister al-Adly keep the domestic beasts at bay, and Mubarak is not one to lose sleep over their tactics.” The Obama administration supported Mubarak right up to the point where his demise was inevitable, and even then, plotted to replace him with Soliman: an equally loyal and even more brutal autocrat, most appreciated in Washington circles for helpfully torturing people on behalf of the Americans.
During the gushing coverage of the Tahrir protests, Americans were told almost none of this (just as most Arab Spring coverage generally omitted long-standing U.S. support for most of the targeted tyrants in the region). Instead, they were led to believe that the U.S. political class was squarely on the side of democracy and freedom in Egypt, heralding Obama’s statement that Egyptians have made clear that “nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”
That pro-democracy script is long forgotten, as though it never existed. The U.S. political and media class are right back to openly supporting military autocracy in Egypt as enthusiastically as they supported the Mubarak regime. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who last year led the military coup against the democratically elected Egyptian government of the Muslim Brotherhood, is now a Washington favorite, despite (or because of) his merciless killing and imprisonment of dissidents, including Al Jazeera journalists. In June, Human Rights Watch noted the post-coup era has included the “worst incident of mass unlawful killings in Egypt’s recent history” and that “judicial authorities have handed down unprecedented large-scale death sentences and security forces have carried out mass arrests and torture that harken back to the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak’s rule.” The group documented just last week:
Egyptian authorities have, by their own count, detained 22,000 people since the July 2013 military-backed ouster of the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsy. The broad arrest sweep has caught up many people who were peacefully expressing political opposition to Morsy’s overthrow and to the al-Sisi government. The actual number of arrests is probably higher. . . . There are credible accounts that a large number of detainees are being held incommunicado in military facilities, and that dozens have died in custody under circumstances of mistreatment or negligence that warrant investigation.None of that has deterred U.S. support for the coup leaders. Months after the coup, Secretary of State John Kerry visited Cairo and praised the military regime, actions The New York Times said ”reflected the Obama administration’s determination to work with a military leadership that ruthlessly put down protesters from the Muslim Brotherhood.” In July of this year, the U.S. released $550 million to the regime. In August, Kerry seemed to praise the coup itself; as The New York Times put it: he “offered an unexpected lift to Egypt’s military leaders . . . saying they had been ‘restoring democracy’ when they deposed the country’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi.” In mid-September, the Pentagon announced “that the U.S. plans to deliver 10 AH-64 Apache helicopters to Egypt.”
That was the background for Sisi’s meeting with Bill and Hillary Clinton in New York last week (pictured above). He also met with U.S. business leaders and the Chamber of Commerce, as well as former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. Sisi then met with Obama himself (photo below), where the U.S. President “touted the longstanding relationship between the United States and Egypt as a cornerstone of American security policy in the Middle East.”
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the U.S. commitment to autocracy in Egypt as vividly as the new, coordinated attack in U.S. media and political circles on former U.S. darling Qatar. As The Intercept reported last week, much of that anti-Qatar campaign is driven by Israeli (along with Saudi, UAE and American neocon) anger over Doha’s alleged support for Hamas. But at least as significant is Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, the party that won the post-Mubarak election; that has put Doha squarely at odds with the Saudis, the Emirates, and the U.S., all of whom strongly support the military coup. A widely cited anti-Qatar article this week in Foreign Policy — entitled “The Case Against Qatar” — made this division clear:
For years, U.S. officials have been willing to shrug off Doha’s proxy network — or even take advantage of it from time to time. Qatar’s neighbors, however, have not. Over the past year, fellow Gulf countries Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have publicly rebuked Qatar for its support of political Islamists across the region. These countries have threatened to close land borders or suspend Qatar’s membership in the regional Gulf Cooperation Council unless the country backs down. After nearly a year of pressure, the first sign of a Qatari concession came on Sept. 13, when seven senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood figures left Doha at the request of the Qatari government. . . .In what universe is it morally preferable to support the Egyptian military coup regime (US/Saudi/UAE) rather than the democratically elected faction (Qatar)? That Qatar is now depicted in D.C. foreign policy circles as the Bad Actors in Cairo, while the UAE and the Saudis are the Good and Responsible Parties for Stability, underscores how deeply committed Washington is to Egyptian despotism.
Qatar’s Arab Spring strategy began to fail in the same place it was conceived, amid the masses of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. On July 3, 2013, demonstrators cheered on the Egyptian military’s ouster of Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi, whose government Qatar had backed to the tune of $5 billion. Within days, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait welcomed the new military-backed government with combined pledges of $13 billion in aid.
That is not a new development. The Obama administration has long viewed Egypt and the Saudis as the “moderates” in the region. The 2009 cable preparing for Mubarak’s visit put it this way: “The ongoing intra-Arab dispute, which pits Egypt and Saudi Arabia against Syria and Qatar and is primarily driven by Iran’s regional influence, is the current test for Mubarak. For the moment the Egyptian-Saudi moderate camp is holding.”
The U.S. has long been devoted to tyranny in the region precisely to ensure that the widespread views of the public — which overwhelmingly view the U.S. and Israel as the greatest threats to peace — remain suppressed by U.S.-loyal tyrants. That’s what made the U.S. media coverage of the Arab Spring generally and Tarhir specifically such an astounding feat of propaganda: it successfully let Americans feel good about cheering for democracy in the region while ignoring their government’s central role in suppressing it for decades. The way the U.S. political class so seamlessly and shamelessly shifted from pretending to support democracy in Egypt to reverting back to its decades-long pro-tyranny posture is equally impressive.
Correction: This post originally gave an incorrect month for when the Department of Defense announced it would deliver Apache helicopters to Egypt. The announcement was in September. Oct. 6 11:30 am ET.
Photos: Clintons with Sisi: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Obama with Sisi: Anthony Behar-Pool/Getty Images
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