It’s no small thing to lodge a word or phrase of your own in our language. So give Dwight D. Eisenhower credit. In his presidential farewell address to the American people in 1961, the former five-star general of World War II warned -- and who would have known better -- of the growth of what he called “the military-industrial complex.” (“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry... We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions... Added to this, 3½ million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment... Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”)
As it turned out, Ike couldn’t have been more on target and the phrase stuck (as, of course, did the military-industrial complex). Almost six decades after he introduced the term, the national security apparatus, according to William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, now gulps down a staggering $1.25 trillion of our tax money annually, while fighting endless wars, and could hardly be more powerful. In a world in which the U.S. national security state is still expanding, however, Eisenhower’s phrase may actually be too modest for our militaristic moment. As political scientist Daniel Wirls wrote recently, “That Cold War term no longer fits. ‘Industrial’ does not capture the breadth of the activities involved. And ‘military’ fails to describe the range of government policies and interests implicated... If anything, Eisenhower’s complex has become more complex and potentially influential.” Wirls suggests instead “National Security Corporate Complex,” which may prove a bit of a mouthful, but he does catch the spirit of the new world of corporations like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics in calling them, aptly indeed, “Walmarts of war.”
As retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, blogger, and TomDispatch regular William Astore suggests today, we Americans, just as Ike feared so long ago, are now caught in a riptide of war and preparations for more of the same. And just as Ike also feared, in a Washington where little the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, or our many intelligence services ask for is ever denied them by Congress or the president, American democracy is increasingly up for grabs. Tom
The Riptide of American Militarism
Lessons from the Natural World on Washington’s Unnatural Wars
By William J. AstorePut up with me for just a moment while I wax literary. It turns out that, if French novelist Marcel Proust lived today, he might have had to retitle his Remembrance of Things Past as Remembrance of Things Present, or even more sadly, Things Future. As an ex-military man who lived through part of the Cold War in uniform, let me make my point, in terms of the Pentagon and an ever-growing atmosphere of American militarism, this way: I love used bookstores. I’ve been browsing in them since my teens. I was, then, an early fan of Stephen King, the famed horror-story writer. Admittedly, today I’m more likely to browse the history section, which has horrors enough for us all, many of which eclipse even the most fevered imaginings of King, though Pennywise the Clown in It still gives me the creeps.
A while back, speaking of things not past, I stumbled across Senator J. William Fulbright’s 1970 book The Pentagon Propaganda Machine and, out of curiosity, bought it for the princely sum of five dollars. Now, talk about creepy. Fulbright, who left the Senate in 1974 and died in 1995, noted a phenomenon then that should ring a distinct bell today. Americans, he wrote, “have grown distressingly used to war.” He then added a line that still couldn’t be more up to date: “Violence is our most important product.” Congress, he complained (and this, too, should ring a distinct bell in 2019), was shoveling money at the Pentagon “with virtually no questions asked,” while costly weapons systems were seen mainly “as a means of prosperity,” especially for the weapons makers of the military-industrial complex. “Militarism has been creeping up on us,” he warned, and the American public, conditioned by endless crises and warnings of war, had grown numb, leaving “few, other than the young, [to] protest against what is happening.”
Back then, of course, the bogeyman that kept the process going was Communism. America’s exaggerated fear of Communism then (and terrorism now) strengthened militarism at home in a myriad of ways while, as Fulbright put it, “undermining democratic procedure and values.” And doesn’t that ring a few bells, too? Complicit in all this was the Pentagon’s own propaganda machine, which worked hard “to persuade the American people that the military is good for you.”
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This site will take the long July 4th weekend off. We’ll be back on Tuesday, July 9th. Tom]
We’re Not the Good Guys
Why Is American Aggression Missing in Action?
By Tom Engelhardt
Headlined “U.S. Seeks Other Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War,” the article was tucked away on page A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention. Here's the first paragraph:
“American intelligence and military officers are working on additional clandestine plans to counter Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf, pushed by the White House to develop new options that could help deter Tehran without escalating tensions into a full-out conventional war, according to current and former officials.”
Note that “Iranian aggression.” The rest of the piece, fairly typical of the tone of American media coverage of the ongoing Iran crisis, included sentences like this: “The C.I.A. has longstanding secret plans for responding to Iranian provocations.” I’m sure I’ve read such things hundreds of times without ever really stopping to think much about them, but this time I did. And what struck me was this: rare is the moment in such mainstream news reports when Americans are the “provocative” ones (though the Iranians immediately accused the U.S. military of just that, a provocation, when it came to the U.S. drone its Revolutionary Guard recently shot down either over Iranian air space or the Strait of Hormuz). When it comes to Washington’s never-ending war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that, in the past, the present, and the future, the one phrase you’re not likely to find in such media coverage will be “American aggression.”
I mean, forget the history of the second half of the last century and all of this one so far. Forget that back in the Neolithic age of the 1980s, before Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein turned out to be the new Adolf Hitler and needed to be taken down by us (no aggression there), the administration of President Ronald Reagan actively backed his unprovoked invasion of, and war against, Iran. (That included his use of chemical weapons against Iranian troop concentrations that American military intelligence helped him target.) Forget that, in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, based on false intelligence about Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and his supposed links to al-Qaeda. Forget that the Trump administration tore up a nuclear agreement with Iran to which that country was adhering and which would indeed have effectively prevented it from producing nuclear weapons for the foreseeable future. Forget that its supreme leader (in fatwas he issued) prohibited the creation or stockpiling of such weaponry in any case.
Forget that the Trump administration, in a completely unprovoked manner, imposed crippling sanctions on that country and its oil trade, causing genuine suffering, in hopes of toppling that regime economically as Saddam Hussein’s had been toppled militarily in neighboring Iraq in 2003, all in the name of preventing the atomic weapons that the Obama-negotiated pact had taken care of. Forget the fact that an American president, who, at the last moment, halted air strikes against Iranian missile bases (after one of their missiles shot down that American drone) is now promising that an attack on "anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force... In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration.”
Provocations? Aggression? Perish the thought!
Did Donald Trump just make his first genuine mistake in the race for reelection in 2020? As I wrote during the 2016 campaign, The Donald had one striking distinction. He was the only candidate (or essentially American politician) of that moment who didn’t feel obliged to claim that the U.S. was not just great but the greatest of all powers, ever. In a single speech, his opponent Hillary Clinton managed to call the U.S. “the greatest country on Earth,” “an exceptional nation,” and “the indispensable nation” that possessed “the greatest military” ever and she was hardly atypical when it came to American politics then. Trump’s claim was that he would make the country great again; in other words, he was our first declinist candidate for president, the only one who claimed that the country wasn’t then beyond compare. And that message -- including, for instance, his claims that a “depleted” U.S. military, driven beyond its limits by its twenty-first-century forever wars, was a “disaster” and its “generals... reduced to rubble” -- rang a distinct bell in the heartland. It arguably won him the election by convincing enough white working-class voters, who already sensed their world in decline, that he was their man.
That was then, this is... well, consider the slogan the president recently tried out at the Florida rally he used to launch his reelection campaign: not “Make America Great Again,” but “Keep America Great,” or KAG. In other words, he tossed the “again” out the window and with it his declinist claim about the country. The implication, of course, was that, under his supervision, America had indeed become “great again.” As he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in a recent interview, “My economy is phenomenal. We have now the best economy, maybe in the history of our country... [W]hen I took over, this country, the economy was ready to collapse.”
Honestly, though, do you think that desperate American farmers, weighed down by the results of his tariff wars, feel that? Do you think that those in his famed “base” really feel their lives are “great” again thanks to “his” economy? I doubt it. Not in this new Gilded Age when inequality in every facet of life is the name of the game. That new slogan of his, KAG, whether he realizes it or not, may be his first true political misstep. After all, it puts him right back among all the rest of this country’s politicians, ready to deny American decline. It could be a mistake of the first order, as TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro (author of the new book Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy) makes clear today. After all, in a world of soaring inequality, that base of his will, sooner or later, be left in a ditch, as American decline, given a distinct helping hand from one Donald Trump, becomes ever more the order of the day. Tom
Keep America Great (Don’t Count on It!)
Two Years Later, Trump Has Failed to Reverse America’s Decline
By Dilip HiroMake America Great Again? Don’t count on it.
Donald Trump was partly voted into office by Americans who felt that the self-proclaimed greatest power on Earth was actually in decline -- and they weren’t wrong. Trump is capable of tweeting many things, but none of those tweets will stop that process of decline, nor will a trade war with a rising China or fierce oil sanctions on Iran.
You could feel this recently, even in the case of the increasingly pressured Iranians. There, with a single pinprick, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei effectively punctured President Trump’s MAGA balloon and reminded many that, however powerful the U.S. still was, people in other countries were beginning to look at America differently at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Of all the things I don’t remember anymore, here’s one I do. As a boy, I dreamt about being a foreign correspondent, a war reporter in particular -- and I think that Bob Shaplen must have been the reason why. He was a friend of my family’s, perhaps because, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was the New Yorker’s Far East correspondent and my mother drew for that magazine, or perhaps because of a history I’ve long forgotten or never knew. What I still remember, though, is how kind he was to the young boy who was then Tom Engelhardt. It wasn’t often in those days that a grownup, no less a grownup war reporter, would spend time with someone else’s son barely into his teens. I remember, for some reason, those hands of his, large and wrinkled, that carried pen and paper into battle. I doubt, though, that I grasped much of what he had experienced when it came to war, but here’s how the New York Times described his reportorial life in his 1988 obituary. In World War II, as Newsweek’s Asia correspondent, he had
“plunged ashore with the Marines on Leyte in the Philippines in 1944 amid withering machine-gun and mortar fire. He flew over Nagasaki hours after it was devastated by the atomic bomb in August 1945 and wrote of ‘looking over a volcano in the process of eruption.’ He was with Mao Zedong in the mountains of Yanan in 1946; reported on the rise and fall of Indonesia's President Sukarno in the 1960s; wrote strategic and battlefield pieces from Korea and Vietnam and [in 1975] provided a gripping firsthand account of the fall of Saigon as panic swept over the city of abandoned refugees.”
Who could blame me, under the circumstances, for dreaming that I might someday be like him? As it happened, I never came close, never made it to Vietnam, notepad in hand, or experienced war directly in any way. Still, he left me with a fascination about covering war and perhaps in some sense led me, a half-century later, to focus TomDispatch on America’s disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, the ones Donald Trump, whatever his impulses, hasn’t generally been able to bring himself not to fight (though he did at least ground a first wave of planes set to strike Iranian missile sites last week).
Otherwise, perhaps the closest I ever came to sensing the persona of a true war correspondent was sometime in the 1990s in what might have been the most peaceable city on the planet, Stockholm. There, I found myself at a conference with another of the great war reporters of our age, Gloria Emerson. She had covered the Vietnam War up close and personal for the New York Times and her award-winning book on that grim disaster, Winners and Losers, was a classic of the era, of perhaps any era. Little as I knew Stockholm, whenever we had free time, I found that the woman who took on Vietnam on her own was incapable of getting her bearings in a peacetime city and I had to lead her wherever we went. You could -- or so, at least, I suspected then -- sense in her confusion that a totally peaceable land felt disorienting to her.
In his bestselling book Kill Anything That Moves,TomDispatch’s own Nick Turse wrote memorably of the war Gloria Emerson covered. He then experienced (civil) war himself in South Sudan, which he captured in his book, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and again witnessed it firsthand in the Congo. He has now returned from Libya where another civil war, part of the spreading planetary chaos created by America’s never-ending war on terror, is fiercely underway. In his account today of war as a civilian hell -- from the U.S. Civil War to the present disaster in Libya -- you can feel both the strange attraction of such warscapes and just why, under the circumstances, peace might prove disorienting indeed. Tom
“What Does War Have to Do With Me?”
Combat Viewed from the Rooftops and Beyond
By Nick TurseTRIPOLI, Libya -- Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like the whisper of the wind. This early morning -- in al-Yarmouk on the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli -- it was a mix of both.
All around, shops were shuttered and homes emptied, except for those in the hands of the militiamen who make up the army of the Government of National Accord (GNA), the U.N.-backed, internationally recognized government of Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj. The war had slept in this morning and all was quiet until the rattle of a machine gun suddenly broke the calm.
Say one thing about the world of sports: in some fashion, it invariably reflects developments in the larger world. It hardly matters whether the subject is war or inequality. Take a knee for a moment and think about that or, in the age of Donald Trump, think about the president whose bone spur problems have never stopped him from cheating at golf or promoting his golf clubs while in the White House -- or, in fact, spending the odd day in the White House while he was promoting (and staying at) those golf clubs (and getting ferried from one “lock-her-up” rally to the next to denounce anyone on this planet taking a knee about more or less anything).
If only we could say goodbye to all that! Fortunately, we have TomDispatch’s jock culture correspondent (and former New York Times sports reporter and columnist) Robert Lipsyte who knows a thing or two about both sports and saying goodbye to all that. Since, in this ever-changing age of ours, there can be little question that, with the help of a group of Washington "terrarists" -- no, that's not a misspelling -- including The Donald, we are heading for a goodbye-to-all-that future, it’s none too soon to consider what Lipsyte calls the Jockpocalypse version of the same. Tom
Jockpocalypse
From the Ballpark to Team Trump
By Robert LipsyteA half-century ago, the sporting Cassandras predicted that the worst values and sensibilities of our increasingly corrupted civic society would eventually affect our sacred games: football would become a gladiatorial meat market, basketball a model of racism, college sports a paradigm of commercialization, and Olympic sports like swimming and gymnastics a hotbed of sexual predators.
Mission accomplished!
The Cassandras then forecast an even more perverse reversal: our games, now profaned, would further corrupt our civic life; winning would not be enough without domination; cheating would be justified as gamesmanship; extreme fandom would become violent tribalism; team loyalty would displace moral courage; and obedience to the coach would supplant democracy.
Okay, I think it’s time for a round of applause for those seers. Let’s hear it for Team Trump!
Even as those predictions were coming true over the past two years, as a longtime sports reporter, columnist, TV commentator, and jock culture correspondent for TomDispatch, I waited with a certain dread and expectation for the arrival of the true Jockpocalypse, the prophetic revelation that Jock Culture had indeed become The Culture. There would be three clear signs, I thought, of this American sports version of a biblical Armageddon.
World War II marked the apogee of industrialized “total war.” Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastation was catastrophic almost everywhere, with the notable exception of the United States, which exited the strife unscathed and unmatched in power and influence. The death toll of fighting forces plus civilians worldwide was staggering.
The Violent American Century addresses the U.S.-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945—beginning with brutal localized hostilities, proxy wars, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War, and ending with the asymmetrical conflicts of the present day. The military playbook now meshes brute force with a focus on non-state terrorism, counterinsurgency, clandestine operations, a vast web of overseas American military bases, and—most touted of all—a revolutionary new era of computerized “precision” warfare. In contrast to World War II, postwar death and destruction has been comparatively small. By any other measure, it has been appalling—and shows no sign of abating.
Julian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.
Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer's striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America's global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century's most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now 300-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.
As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we're already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity's last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands.
You won't see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America’s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow's Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military’s spreading secret wars in Africa.
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible.
At 73, having spent years focusing on the civilian toll from Washington’s Afghan War, Ann Jones embedded on an American forward operating base to experience what that war was like for the U.S. troops in the field. The next year, she began following grievously wounded American soldiers from the moment they came off the battlefield all the way back home. Her journey proved to be nothing short of an odyssey. Despite all the talk in this country about our “wounded warriors,” no other book gives us a more powerful sense of the genuine cost of war to Americans.
