đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș michael-schmidt-the-wallpaper-war.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:52:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Wallpaper War Author: Michael Schmidt Date: June 14, 2012 Language: en Topics: US foreign interventions, United States of America, 9/11, Imperialism Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/23123
As the US enters yet another election cycle (though it is hard to say
whether the US is ever not in election mode these days), it is worth
interrogating the current state of the worldâs unipolar hyperpower â and
of the foreign policy, red in tooth and claw, that affects us all.
I arrived in the USA on the eve of the 10^(th) Anniversary of the 9/11
terrorist attacks, spent just over a month there, and left just after
visiting the Occupy Wall Street sit-in on Columbus Day. Book-ended by
these two great, emotive American commemorations, my visit to the US was
the first I had made there in 27 years and I was very curious to see how
things had changed since the Wild West heyday of Reaganomics.
Visiting as a teenager, albeit one from the side aligned with the West
against the Soviet Bloc, I had been overwhelmed by the brash displays of
American consumerism. I was, after all, visiting from the grey,
razorwire-snarled frontlines, from a place not dissimilar, strangely
enough, to East Germany (with their granite faces, black Hombergs and
black suits with red lapel carnations, there was little visible or
visceral difference between Erich Honecker and PW Botha). Accustomed to
austerity, I was offended by Western waste, and by the hollow
ostentation of what we would now call the âblingâ.
But the Wall had long fallen and the world and I had changed
unalterably. Born into war â the 1961 formation of the ANCâs armed wing
having preceded my birth by five years â and having expected peace with
the end of that misnamed âCold Warâ in which South African conscripts
like myself had fought a hot war, partly a US proxy war, against Cuban,
East German and Soviet-supplied armor in Angola, I had hoped the fall of
apartheid and of the bipolar superpower world of which it was a relic to
bring peace.
But the world of 2011 was a world of permanent warfare â and the USA was
the prime progenitor, in thrall to the ascendancy of what had once been
accurately identified by warmongering US President Lyndon B Johnson as
âthe military-industrial complex,â a useful shorthand for the
agglomeration of corporations based on the oil and defence industries
which often drive US foreign policy in a protectionist and
sabre-rattling fashion.
As the days passed into weeks, I was impressed by the repeated
references in the domestic media to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and
to ongoing terrorism trials â references which, apart from a lone notice
of the combat death in Helmand of a 22-year-old Marine from Asheville,
in the mountains of North Carolina, seemed remote from the apparent calm
of everyday American life, a wallpaper war that served as a
frequently-referenced, but never quite real backdrop to daily dramas.
That calm proved deceptive, as demonstrated in particular by the
internal wars being fought over cultural issues such as the profiling of
Muslim Americans as automatic terrorist threats, President Barack
Obamaâs reversal of the donât-ask-donât-tell policy on gays in the
military, and Alabamaâs harsh new law on undocumented immigrants. This
article will interrogate that dynamic tension, between a country
perpetually at war abroad â and a voting populace at home who enable
that warmaking in a context in which they are largely untouched by its
effects.
The first thing that is important to recognise about the foreign policy
of the United States of America is that it has a very specific history,
or rather a national mythology that distinguishes it from other
countries by the explicit nature of its revolutionary aims. The
Revolutionary War established a unique republican state in the West, a
reflection in part of the values of the French Revolution, but, isolated
by the vast Atlantic, destined to pursue a path of its own. It is thus
useful to consider the US state as an explicitly revolutionary state
(albeit institutionalised in the Mexican sense of the word), with a
national mythology which endows it with a sense of mission in the world.
Comparable, though very different, states with expansionist missions
driven by revolutionary myths would include Revolutionary France, the
Soviet Union until its collapse, Nazi Germany, and post-apartheid South
Africa today, with a ruling party explicitly dedicated to a âNational
Democratic Revolutionâ. The foreign policy and thus warmaking of Britain
and the Netherlands, in contrast, despite having possessed
globe-spanning pre-war empires, were never guided by anything similar to
such political myths.
And because the US national institutional-revolutionary myth is rooted
in an armed defence of its version of democratic values, its missionary
zeal comes armed; in colonial times this would have meant Bible and
black-powder; but now it involves Hollywood/Madison Avenue and US Air
Force/CIA-operated Reaper hunter-killer drones. Despite its
institutional-revolutionary sense of mission, my term describes the USA
at the federal, collective level, and it is important to recognise that
there remain significant, deep, historically-rooted regional differences
between blocs of individual States â and not merely between the Old
North and Old South, or between the East Coast and West Coast [1].
Wherever one goes in the US, one finds evocations of the ghosts of wars
past. There are innumerable Revolutionary War statues of alert
musket-toting Minutemen, and unashamed tributes in the Southern States
to the Confederate Army (the chapel at Duke University in North Carolina
has statues of Confederate generals guarding its portico [2]). Less in
evidence, unless one looks at the US Marine Corps Museum in Washington
DC, are remembrances of American armed interventions in half of the
developing world, though a current USMC recruiting pamphlet that I found
on the Duke campus boasts: âMore than two centuries of winning battlesâ.
But ubiquitous in the form of public memorials, is World War II which
for the Baby-Boomer generation of US presidents prior to Obama was the
revolutionary myth updated for the modern era: the shining democratic
torch putting evil Nazism to flame and banishing it from the world
stage.
The National World War II Museum in New Orleans is an intriguing
installation whose curators are clearly trying to grapple honestly with
an uncomfortable set of facts. In attempting to redress the imbalances
of the past, displays examine the anti-Japanese racism of the US
military alongside Japanese anti-Americanism, and sombrely examine the
fire-bombing of Tokyo and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki â
but stop short of describing these latter as the actual crimes against
humanity they were, for it is, I assume, considered morally impossible
for an institutional-revolutionary democracy to admit to having
committed genocide.
Vietnam is of course the other war that is indelibly imprinted on the
modern American conscience, though for very different reasons: there,
the enemy was evil Communism, but the torch of democracy sputtered and
died in Saigon, a failure that continues to define the Left and haunt
the Right. A 10 October New York Times op-ed piece called Vietnam a
ghost that dogged Obamaâs war policy; meanwhile the âWall of Healingâ
Vietnam Memorial â a mobile miniature of the long black marble wall
inscribed with names of the dead at The Mall in Washington â travelled
the country, affording far-flung veterans the opportunity to mourn their
lost youth.
Any commentator on American affairs worth their salt has noted the
echoes in the American psyche of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbour in the 2001 â9/11â attacks in New York City and Washington: both
were rare, massive attacks on US soil that shook a complacent,
inward-looking populace to its core and forced them to re-examine the
world outside. Conspiracy theorists claim that Pearl Harbourâs âday that
will live in infamyâ had in fact not proven so long-lived, had faded in
the public mind, and that a cynical cabal within the military-industrial
complex orchestrated 9/11 as a pro-war motivational spectacular. Iâm not
going to pronounce on that â aside from noting that the abysmal
pseudo-documentary Zeitgeist, so beloved of the Left, in fact clearly
originates with the paranoid American Right. What is true, however, is
that the direct effect of 9/11 was to breathe new life into the American
institutional-revolutionary mission abroad.
Recognisable chunks of the aircraft engines and landing gear debris from
9/11 are displayed in shafts of light as holy relics at the Newseum in
Washington, the centerpiece of a sort of stations-of-the-cross
hagiography of the FBIâs role in American internal affairs. That very
day, the nationâs front-page news in just about every newspaper
celebrated the killing by Reaper drone of alleged Al-Qaeda leader in
Yemen, Abu Ali Al-Harithi. The socio-political aftermath of 9/11 was
ever-present.
I walked to the 9/11 Ground Zero memorial building site in New York City
â which is still partly a big construction site, a decade after the
event â and took photographs in a local diner of a score of firemen who
had lost their lives that day, a reminder of the intimate, emotional
drivers behind the Iraqi and Afghan Wars; the widening ripples of the
seemingly perpetual âWar on Terrorâ:
SEALs whose Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden last year. Interestingly
enough, former Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had admitted at a talk
that I attended at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that
the SEALs had gone into Pakistan with orders to kill not capture and
bring to trial Osama bin Laden, in line with the Nuremburg principles
which the US had such a leading role in establishing. This embrace of
extrajudicial action is more than adequately demonstrated by the
âextraordinary renditionsâ (kidnapping) of terror suspects to Guantanamo
and other detention facilities â and their treatment once there,
something that Obama promised and failed to rectify.
Press intelligence writer Kimberly Dozier, who was seriously injured in
a car-bombing in Baghdad in 2006 which killed her driver and the US
serviceman she was travelling with, speak on how investigative
journalists in the wake of 9/11 navigate the disinformation minefields
laid by intelligence agents. With the very reasons for the Iraq War
incontrovertibly shown to be bogus, investigative journalists were
increasingly called on to negotiate these minefields on behalf of a
public that prefers its information stripped down to near-meaningless
sound-bites and tweets.
for my guide, the Ombudsman, talking about how the newspaper had been
forced to adopt a sophisticated mail-handling system to neutralise
anthrax, or other attacks by mail; in some respects, the chickens had
come home to roost. Later, I visited the colourful yet calm Occupy Wall
Street sit-in in New York City on the on the contested anniversary of
âColumbus Dayâ, a foundational part of the American myth, with its
prevailing anti-war sentiment, where a former US Marine made a name for
himself on television by defending protestors attacked by the police,
saying that he had not fought abroad to defend police brutality at home.
But the characterisation by so many people I spoke to of the Occupy
Movement as ârevolutionaryâ shows how far removed from reality is their
understanding of the balance of forces in their own society.
It is clear to me that Americans, being unaccustomed to protest that
does more than merely âspeak truth to power,â with their organised
working class long since domesticated and integrated into the relative
benefits of the system (even though it is largely the poor and working
class that forms the bulk of its footsoldiers [3]), have no real notion
of how to grasp the nettle of power much beyond the ritual of voting or
abstaining. So, despite this marginal domestic dissent, with the
âbordersâ of the US now considered strategically to be located at the
frontlines in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Jamaica and elsewhere,
the war has clearly been successfully globalised by the
military-industrial complex. So the question then, was: what was the
effect of being perpetually at war with the world mean to the American
people themselves?
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Americaâs threats all
originated with foreign devils; after all, the 1995 Oklahoma Bombing was
clearly a homegrown affair, committed by outriders of the persistent
ultra-Right tendency within the American body politic which on the one
hand takes Americaâs founding documents such as the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution with its early Amendments (including
the right to bear arms) literally as the word of God, interpreted in a
racial-nativist manner, while on the other hand seditiously attempts to
strip the American Revolution of its ossified aspects (including federal
institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank), desiring a return to a
presumed purer, original Revolution in which the county sheriff is the
highest authority, taxation is abolished, and a rugged autonomous
individualism prevails [4].
In order to understand domestic terrorism, in New Orleans, I listened to
Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) intelligence project director Heidi
Beirich speak on the demographic and economic drivers behind the rise of
domestic hate groups. The SPLC was founded in 1981 and has carved out a
niche for itself as a key provider of intelligence on, and interdictor
of, hate groups ranging from Neo-Nazis and the Klan, to the Nation of
Islam and Radical Traditional Catholics, though two-thirds of them are
white-supremacist, with 602 white nationalist groups in 2000, rising to
more than 1,000 today.
Beirich said there was a âfrighteningâ proliferation of hate groups over
the past decade, since 9/11, and especially since Obamaâs election:
while the FBI claimed about 800 hate crimes were committed each year;
the Bureau of Justice Statistics put the figure at 200,000/year.
Few hate groups are specifically anti-gay, and yet the reversal of the
âdonât-ask-donât-tellâ policy on gays in the military erupted into the
mainstream during my visit, with Republican politicians in a TV debate
totally ignoring a question posed by an openly gay soldier via
video-feed from Afghanistan â despite the fact that he was clearly
serving his country on the frontline â while in North Carolina,
legislative opposition to gay marriage was the big culture-war issue of
the day. And although few hate groups are focused exclusively on the
anti-immigration cause, the drastically changed ethnic demography of the
US was a clear driver of hate: in 1970, Beirich said, the US population
was 83% white; but that figure had dropped to 66% today; and by 2050,
the white population was predicted to fall under 50%.
Fears of being culturally overwhelmed by assimilation-resistant
non-whites lay behind the controversial new immigration law, passed in
Alabama while I was there, which made it a criminal offence to be found
to be an undocumented immigrant in the state. The law was passed despite
the fact that it was targeted at a tiny population of only 130,000 out
of 4,7-million Alabama residents. The day it was passed, weird scenes
unfolded as scores of immigrant families fled the state, leaving keys to
homes with sympathetic neigbours and hungry dogs roaming the streets.
A second key driver of hate was the parlous state of the economy after
the sub-prime housing boom imploded and the banks responsible were
bailed out by the taxpayer victims; this, against a backdrop of
longer-term deindustrialisation which has seen factory capacity relocate
to under-unionised developing countries, leaving former industrial
cities such as Detroit transformed into eerie wastelands, with vacant
lots, boarded hotels, looted doctorsâ surgeries, vandalised concert
halls, and abandoned apartments with food rotting in the fridges [5].
And lastly, the election of the first black president â an initially
successful attempt by the US oligarchy to divert attention from the
bailout of the banks â provoked an ultra-Right backlash that resonated
beyond its usual backwoods militia bunkers: grade-schoolers on an
Oklahoma bus were reported recently to have chanted âAssassinate Obama!â
And yet, Beirich noted, Muslims rather than the domestic ultra-Right
have borne the brunt of investigations. An example of this Islamophobia
was an instructor at the FBI base at Quantico, Virginia, who told his
trainees that if a citizen was Muslim and religious, they were
automatically suspect, and that the Quâran had come to Mohammed in an
epileptic fit; trainees complained, the instructor was removed and all
FBI training materials on religion and culture are currently under
review. To interrogate this further, I attended debate at Duke on âthe
Radicalisation of Muslims in America.â
Setting the scene by saying that the profiling of Muslims was out of
proportion to the actual threat they represented, Prof Charles Kurzman
of the University of North Carolina, said: âAbout 20 individuals per
year are suspects, with no identifiable ethnic or citizenship profile.
Most plots are disrupted before they acquire their materials or select
their targets â and one this year was a Shiâite planning an attack on a
Sunni mosque. There have been only 35 murders [in the US] associated
with Muslims since 9/11 â out of 150,000 murders a year. Since 2008,
there have been 700,000 murders world-wide of which only 15,000 deaths
have been associated with Muslim terrorism â excluding Iraq, Afghanistan
and Pakistan. The world is safer from terrorism than at any time since
the 1970s.â
Kurzman went on to quote two recent surveys of public opinion in
America, the one on Islam, in which half the respondents had positive
attitudes, and the other on Muslims, in which 66% had positive
attitudes. This, he said, indicated that while most Americans were
ambivalent about the religion, most were also warmly disposed towards
âreal, living people,â their Muslim neighbours.
Prof David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and
Homeland Security, an institute with direct intelligence community
involvement, responded in similar vein, saying that the sample of
home-soil American Muslim terror threats was âso small that it is
difficult to do retroactive causal analysis. The fairest answer to why
Muslims are radicalising is: we donât know. There is no profile of the
âhomegrown terroristâ.â The claim that religiosity drove radicalism was
ânot true, and discredited by many studies: out of the 188 individuals
in the data-set, some never became pious at all; oneâs grievance was
related to an uncle killed in an American drone attack,â he said,
hinting that the intimate impact of US foreign policy was a factor.
Kurzman said that in recent âHomeland Security closed sessions,â it had
been noted that many radical bloggers had, in fact, little knowledge of
Islam.
Schanzer referred to a 2008 debate in the New York Times between Dr Marc
Sageman who stressed âself-radicalising individualsâ and Bruce Hoffman
who stressed organised recruitment by terrorists in the US [6], saying
âThere are many pathways to radicalisation.â Asked whether he thought
mental illness played any role, Kurzman said: âMany of these individuals
are isolated from their communities; these lone wolves are not weeded
out. But recruited terrorists weed out psychotics because they are
considered too unstable to be effective.â
Imam Abdullah Antepli, the Duke Muslim Chaplain, a fiery yet moderate
Muslim of Turkish extraction who conducts theological training for young
imams in Afghanistan, laid the blame directly at the door of the USâs
creation of proxy armed forces abroad: âThe historical roots of this lie
in Afghanistan in the 1980s. I remember the US back then idealising the
same people we are chasing now. Our tax money played an extensive role
in creating this cancer; we created this monster by our support for the
Mujaheddin and we can trace the ideological hotbed of US Muslim
extremism to our relationship to the Saudi regime⊠Religious money is
exporting poison.â Kurzman responded, however, that âin the US, only a
handful of suspects are connected to Saudi- or Middle East-funded
outfits; terrorist attacks are cheap and you donât need Saudi money.â
In terms of Muslim voting patterns, especially in the swing states of
Florida, Ohio and Michigan, where there are concentrations of Muslim
voters: studies showed a total US Muslim population, mostly Sunni, of
2.75-million â 45% of whom had entered the US in the past 25 years â of
whom about 1,5-million were of voting age; although they tended to vote
70% Democrat, 11% Republican, and the rest Independent, there was no
âMuslim voteâ per se as the putative âcommunityâ was fractured by race,
ethnicity, class and country of origin and they tended to vote in synch
with their neighbours.
So while cultural wars over gays and immigrants, homegrown hate, and
Muslim terrorism vexes Homeland Security, they should weigh very little
in the scales â and yet are accorded disproportional importance as a
threat partly justifying US gunboat diplomacy.
What will a future American-lead perpetual war look like? If the
Republicans can be believed, when (for it is only a matter of time) they
reacquire the Oval Office, it seems we are in for âIntervention Lite,â a
return to a form of 1930s isolationism, but with very targeted
penetrations abroad â not unlike, perhaps the (failed) 1927â1932 combat
in Nicaragua against Augusto Sandinoâs âLight and Truthâ liberated zone.
According to Prof Charles Hermann, of the conservative Bush School of
Government and Public Service in Texas [7], the ideal âover-the-horizonâ
military policy of a future Republican administration (and thus of NATO
as well) involved strategic support for regimes that were prepared to
hold regular elections, in order to prevent them spiraling downwards
into failed states. Hermann asked whether the NATO intervention in Libya
in 2011, nominally to prevent human rights abuses against the rebels by
the regime, had not been its last hurrah, suggesting that if British and
French defence spending continued at current levels, those two US allies
would be unable to stage a repeat of Libya.
But the US, despite itself being hit by financial crisis, recession and
a soaring national debt at 90% of GDP, driven by the Iraq and
Afghanistan Wars, the Department of Defenceâs $675-billion/year budget
had ballooned by 80% since 9/11. Hermann said that some of this defence
spending was given flight by scare-mongering over the intentions of
China, North Korea and Iran, but he felt that these were overstated: âI
see this as a management problem, as they are running countries and are
interested in staying in power.â
Hermann quoted Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary under President
George W Bush and now Dean of the Bush School, saying that âfractured or
failing states are the main security threat of our times,â adding that
Oxford economist Prof Paul Collier noted that there was a remarkable
overlap between failed states and the âbottom billionâ of the worldâs
poor, resulting in bad governments and recurrent coups (Mali in West
Africa, which has recently experienced a coup as I write this, is the
third-poorest nation on earth).
So how would a Republican-run military-industrial complex wage war, via
NATO in particular? Hermann recommended an âover-the-horizonâ support
role: âWeâre not trying to overthrow bad governments [Ă -la Iraqi âregime
changeâ]; weâre providing security for good governments â the reverse of
[NATO policy in] Bosnia-Herzegovina â if you develop and allow free and
fair elections.â So the bottom billion will be left to rot, but what
would NATO do about bad governments like Syria? âIf they donât get on
board, we leave them alone. I donât think we have the resources, and to
be honest, the political will, to overthrow the bad guys.â On the other
hand, support for âgood governments,â based on contracts with client
states which would involve grooming the younger, upwardly-mobile middle
officer castes, could embrace African states such as Nigeria and Kenya â
to prevent the spread of the Arab Spring south of the Sahara, Hermann
said.
Precisely what impact the global economic crisis will have on American
military strategy in future is far from clear, however. Take, for
instance, the remarkable way in which the Pentagon views itself. I
managed to secure access to this enormous complex of 23,500 workers
(top-heavy with brass: 70% of the military staff are officers) with its
Humvee-wide corridors and its courtyard Ground Zero Café above which any
future enemy ICBMs would detonate dead-centre, having recognised the
buildingâs unique geometry incoming from space, as a journalist, not a
civilian, which perhaps explains the following.
Bryan Whitman, the Principal Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public
Affairs [8], had just expounded on how the US military operated
globally, across all time-zones, underscoring the unusual degree of
personal latitude allowed by the Pentagon to its regional commanders,
whose six regional combatant commands divide the Earth like segments of
a giant orange: âWe plan centrally and operate decentrally, so the field
commanders have a lot of autonomy. The ambassadors [under the State
Department] focus on their own country [of posting] but the commanders
[under the Pentagon] look at regional security [9].â
I responded that seeing as how the US military had this enormous 24-hour
global presence, with its own state-like infrastructure (housing,
engineering, social services, etc), massive staff and facilities (some
ZIP codes are those floating cities called aircraft carriers), and
heavily-armed semi-autonomous regional forces, and given that the
military officer caste was largely unaffected by changes in whichever
political party rotated through the White House and therefore could
devise longer-term strategies than the State Department whose foreign
policy was bound to the incumbent Presidency â given all that, was the
US military not in fact a parallel world government?
Whitman gave me a long, penetrating look, and then said âI think you
have answered your own questionâ â which to me was a remarkably frank
admission from the senior ranks about how the military-industrial
complex viewed itself superior to the elected Presidency [10].
The implication of this in Africa, was implied by Pentagon spokesman and
legal expert David Oten who said direct military-to-military
co-operation was often one of the best ways for the US to engage
diplomatically âbecause often the [African] military is the only centre
of national power â there is no strong legislature, etc.â
In sum, I suspect that the Whitmans of the Pentagon will prevail over
the Hermanns or whoevers of the forseeable-future White House. But it
would be a mistake to cartoon the Whitmans as boorish hawks committed to
bombing-for-profit; on the contrary, his caste are sophisticated
navigators of the brave new world: âJust because CNN, etcetera asks me a
question, how should I rank that against a guy who runs a blog in
Bolivia that covers all of Latin America and that everyone reads?â
Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, former spokesman for NATOâs
International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) and now
the Pentagon spokesperson on Western Hemisphere policy, detainee affairs
(including Guantanamo) and US Southern Command (Mexico-to-Antarctica),
was even more disarming, describing ex-Marine turned Al Jazeera
journalist Josh Rushing who resigned from the military after being
ordered by the Pentagon not to speak to the media about his experiences
managing information flow during the Iraq War, as âa revolutionary, a
young, thinking officer who was engaging at a time of war. The Marines
froze him out and treated him so poorly; he quit on principle â a very
valid principle â and now runs the brilliant show Front Lines,â which
covers the impact of US foreign policy in the Americas. âNow the Marine
Corps has him speak to them about their mistakes. Thatâs progress.â
I had met Rushing the day before and he was honestly described. But
before we are too charmed, here is that language again: the
institutional-revolutionary mission of America in waging war abroad.
So, what to make of a country where the home front is so apparently
placid that walls around homes are a rarity, and car crashes rate high
on state-wide news programmes â and yet which wages war across a globe
it considers its own? For one thing, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that
treated Latin America as the back-yard of the US, providing the
rationale for interventions everywhere from Argentina to Cuba, has
clearly long been updated to embrace the whole post-Soviet world.
Regarding the American publicâs investment in this vision, Breasseale
estimated that âless than 1% have some involvement with the military,
but the American people spend a lot of money on defence. Every time we
lose someone in combat, we put out a press release, because we donât
want to ever hide the true cost â in blood.â
Thatâs all very well, but it implies a deep level of disconnection
between where and why American blood is spilled, and the populace who
politically enable their youth to go off and fight obscure battles. And
Iâm not sure I agree with Breasseale: the presence of the military is
hard to avoid in American civilian life. From the National Guard
recruiting at the Society of Professional Journalistsâ annual conference
â of all things! â to the almost unquestioned presence on college
campuses of students in uniform and of Reserve Officer Training Corps
recruiters (the 1970 Kent State Shootings are a distant memory), from a
Medal of Honor recipient opening the New York Stock Exchange, to the
returnees greeted at airports by girls wearing military-groupie
T-shirts, from the steady trickle of bodies coming home through the
giant military morgue at Dover, to the veteran-themed country fairs, it
is obvious that the military is a permanent yet strangely
under-recognised feature of American civilian consciousness.
The US just doesnât feel like a country at war. And yet,
Lieutenant-Colonel Robert âDisaster Bobâ Ditchey, a Secretary of Defense
spokesman who holds the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) portfolio
for the US, Canada and Mexico, co-ordinating DHS, US Northern Command
(US and Canada), and the North American Aerospace Defense Command
(NORAD, the joint US-Canadian aerospace defence system), told me that on
Obamaâs initiative, 1,200 National Guardsmen were now helping police the
border with Mexico; clearly even the Obama regime had felt the need to
respond militarily to the widespread domestic fears of illegal
immigration run out of control. Clearly, whether Republican or Democrat,
âkeeping things down on the farmâ by force of arms is still considered a
domestic political necessity.
It also needs to be stressed that the supposedly kinder, gentler Obama
regime (in 2007, before attaining office, Obama renounced the
first-strike use of nuclear weapons) has also embarked on the
largest-ever refurbishment and expansion of Americaâs nuclear warfare
capacity, a programme that will run for several decades after Obama
retires [11]. This is clear evidence of an incumbent president serving
the longer-range interests of the military-industrial complex rather
than even his own partyâs medium-term interests.
When I visited the US last, it was the year 1984 and many people were
throwing parties mocking George Orwellâs great dystopian novel 1984,
saying smugly to each other, âsee how wrong he was?â But they missed the
point: the totalitarian hyperpower Oceania of Orwellâs tale draws its
legitimacy from its geopolitical backdrop: a far-off, possibly fake, yet
endless war with their seamlessly alternating enemies, Eurasia and
Eastasia. I had the eerie sense on this visit, 27 years later, that a
substantial part of the US citizenry themselves had become pilotless
drones, operating against a backdrop of a far-off war that, like the
citizenry of Oceania, left them physically unaffected â but which yet
required their ideological acquiescence.
The great French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840 in his
landmark work Democracy in America: âNo protracted war can fail to
endanger the freedom of a democratic country⊠it must invariably and
immeasurably increase the powers of civil government, it must
compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of
all things in the hands of the administration. If it does not lead to
despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by
their habits.â
A unipolar hyperpower, its citizenry gently prepared by a perpetual war
that is more wallpaper to their daily habits than painful first-hand
experience, for the concentration not of the powers of civil government
â but of the powers of a military-industrial caste erudite yet far more
seditious of elected democracy than any on the political fringes, armed
with world-ending weaponry and a messianic sense of revolutionary right
and unassailable mission, such a power has as much potential to be a
long-term destabilising, as well as stabilising, factor on the world
stage.
[1] An erudite examination of the shifts in these regional dynamics
since the height of the Vietnam War is given in Jeremy Black, Altered
States: America since the Sixties, Reaktion Books, London, UK, 2006.
[2] It is 150 years since the Northâs still-controversial âRestorationâ
of the South following the Civil War, which critics call the imposition
by force of alien values on Southerners, and an argument was raging
during my visit in one North Carolina town about whether to restore to
its place of public prominence a Confederate statue damaged in a van
accident.
[3] A great cultural reference for the desperation that drives the poor
into the US military, which offers them not only employment but the
chance to get bursaries to study, is the harrowing film Winterâs Bone,
starring Jennifer Lawrence, directed by Debra Granik, screenplay by
Granik and Anne Rosellini, USA, 2010.
[4] A good exposition of the root elements and flowering of this
ultra-Right is James Coates, Armed and Dangerous: the Rise of the
Survivalist Right, Hill and Wang, New York City, USA, 1995. Coats
repeatedly mentions, but seemingly fails to appreciate, the poverty
which drove many of those he describes into extremism; perhaps this is
why many ultra-Right themes in America are shared by the ultra-Left.
Given that Coatesâs book is outdated, being a reprint of a 1987 text, an
update on the religious ultra-Right is provided by Chris Hedges,
American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America, Vintage,
London, UK, 2008. There was a restricted gathering of such ultra-Right
groups in the Appalachian Mountains during my trip.
[5] For a chilling photographic essay on Detroitâs decline, take a look
at Yves Marchand and Romain Meffreâs work online at
www.marchandmeffre.com. Detroit was where the alleged âUnderwear Bomberâ
stood trial during my visit, while Michigan state was home to a man
arrested for planning to fly radio-controlled model aircraft armed with
bombs into the Pentagon and the US Capitol.
[6] Sageman is a former CIA operative based in Pakistan in 1987â1989,
now anti-terrorism consultant, and author of Leaderless Jihad: Terror
Networks in the Twenty-First Century, University of Pennsylvania Press,
Philadelphia, USA, 2008. Hoffman is Director of the Center for Peace and
Security Studies at Georgetown University, a specialist in terrorism and
counter-insurgency, editor-in-chief of Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism, and the series editor of Columbia Studies in Terrorism and
Irregular Warfare. Their debate is outlined in âA Not Very Private Feud
Over Terrorismâ:
www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/weekinreview/08sciolino.html.
[7] Why focus on the Republicans only here? We know how a Democrat
regime currently wages war and we can expect more of the same if Obama
wins; while the recession has clearly altered Republican objectives
since the Bush era. I also met with representatives of the American
constructivist far Right, and constructivist far Left, by which I
distinguish them from the demolitionist terrorist ultras of both
stripes: the Libertarian Party on the Right is minimum-state,
minimum-war capitalist; the North-Eastern Federation of Anarchist
Communists (NEFAC) on the Left argued for an anti-war decentralist
community control of the economy. The Libertarian Party has a marginal
electoral showing (4% in the 2008 Presidential elections) and NEFAC had
just split into revolutionary and moderate projects. But despite the
intriguing arguments both sides could mount, they are both too far from
the levers of power in America to have any impact on how, let alone
whether, the US wages war.
[8] Whitmanâs official bio is online at
www.defense.gov/bios/biographydetail.aspx?biographyid=212.
[9] For instance, the new Africa Command (Africom) has now calved off
European Command (Eucom), which covers Europe and North Africa, because
Sub-Saharan Africa is geopolitically detached from North Africa and
Europe. Africom is still headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, and has
yet to find a home in Africa, though Ghana and South Africa are
contenders. Africom is the aegis for the Africa-dedicated components of
the US Air Force, US Marine Corps, and Special Operations (based in
Germany), US Navy and US Army (based in Italy), and the Combined Joint
Task Force â Horn of Africa (based at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti).
[10] Beyond the Presidencyâs considerable powers, including the
Presidentâs as commander-in-chief of all US armed forces, there exist
three large, yet less visible and mostly unaccountable and unelected
centres of power in the US: firstly the military-industrial complex
itself; secondly the state bureaucracy, one of the worldâs largest and
most powerful, which, like the military-industrial complex, has its own
strategic foreign interests separate to those of the incumbent
Presidency and which because it is likewise unelected has longer tenure
in office and thus longer-range objectives than incumbent parties; and
lastly the plutocracy, the wealthy old-boysâ club of lobbyists from
Washington, Silicon Valley, Houston and elsewhere who push their own
private agenda, including the US-supremacist âProject for an American
Century.â
[11] See Darwin Bond-Graham, âObamaâs Worst Sell-out?â, Counter-punch,
USA, September 23â25, 2011.