How defense "hawks" hijacked 9-1 and the war on terror and turned us in the wrong direction

The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened
America
By Robert Scheer, Twelve
Posted on June 27, 2008, Printed on June 28, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/89628/
The following is an excerpt from Robert Scheer's new book, The
Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened
America (Twelve, 2008).

War doesn't pay, nor does imperial ambition. That should be self-
evident to anyone who has paid attention to the successful trajectory
of the American experience, both politically and commercially, since
the Republic's founding. It is a statement neither liberal nor
conservative in orientation, and until recently it would have been
accepted as a commonsense proposition by leading politicians of both
political parties.

Although some leaders took us to war, they always claimed to do so
reluctantly, as is reflected in the doubts expressed in their memoirs
and those of their closest confidants. Lyndon Johnson, musing about
the indefensibility of sacrificing even a single young American to die
in Vietnam but sacrificing 59,000 of them in order to emerge
victorious in his forthcoming election battle with Barry Goldwater, is
all too typical. What that evidence reveals is just how intense is the
political pressure to reject common sense when the specter of an enemy
is raised. Those pressures have always been with us, and to the extent
that they derive from national insecurities, political demagogues,
economic avarice, overzealous patriotism, and religious or ideological
fervor, they are a constant of the human experience in just about any
given society.

The amazing thing about the American political experiment is that our
system is the one most consciously designed to limit those risks of
foreign military adventure, and for most of our history, it has worked
out quite well. I don't intend to minimize the expansionist, indeed
rapacious conquest of our own continent, or the occasional colonial
adventures abroad, as in the Philippines and other outposts from
Hawaii to Alaska, but in the main, with few lapses, the public
remained properly suspicious of its leaders' intentions. The dominant
assumption was the importance of avoiding foreign "entanglements," to
use Thomas Jefferson's words of warning about the risks of intervening
in the affairs of others. Indeed, that policy of nonintervention was
thought by our nation's founders to be a basic demarcation between the
politics of the old and new worlds.

By nonintervention, they did not intend indifference to events in the
outside world or a narrow protectionist view of trade accompanied by a
fortress American military posture. Such a stance, often described as
isolationism, obviously is not only out of joint with our current,
highly interconnected world, but it didn't make sense at the time of
the nation's founding, even when the distance of oceans afforded far
more secure borders than today. What nonintervention meant, as was
commonly understood even on the tavern bar level, was don't go
sticking your nose into other people's business, and certainly don't
pick fights that you can't finish. That is a posture that has nothing
to do with limiting charitable concern for others beyond your borders,
missionary work abroad, humanitarian aid, and everything to do with
avoiding the military expeditions that bankrupted the most pretentious
and at times successful of empires. Not being like those empires was a
driving force in the thinking of the nation's founders, who were in
wide agreement on extreme caution as to military intervention.

That guiding idea of nonintervention -- developed by the colonists in
rebellion, espoused to great effect by the brilliant pamphleteer
Thomas Paine, and crystallized as a national treasure in the final
speech to the nation of George Washington -- is as fresh and viable a
construct as any of the great ideas that have guided our governance.
Washington's Farewell Address, actually a carefully considered letter
to the American people crafted in close consultation with Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison, is one of our great treasures, but
although read each year in the U.S. Senate to mark Washington's
legacy, it contains a caution largely ignored by those same senators
as they gleefully approve massive spending to enable international
meddling of every sort. Their failed responsibility to limit the
president's declaration of war has become a farce that as much as
anything mocks Congress' obligations as laid out in the Constitution.

Explaining why he, as our first president, followed "our true policy
to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign
World ... Taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable
establishments, on a respectably defensive posture," Washington
shunned isolation, and instead held out a vision of peaceful
international relations: "Harmony, liberal intercourse with all
Nations, are recommended by policy, humanity and interest. But even
our Commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither
seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the
natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means
the streams of commerce but forcing nothing."

What more powerful though gentle warning could be offered against the
instincts to the imperial adventures that have destroyed all great
empires? Washington knew this record of imperial folly well, and he
was well aware that his countrymen could fall as had others for that
siren song of military power coupled with economic greed that had
humbled the powers of Europe: "In offering you, my Countrymen, these
counsels of an old and affectionate friend ... to moderate the fury of
party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign Intrigue, to
guard against the Impostures of pretended patriotism ..."

What happened to us as a people that those modest yet profound
sentiments now seem so foreign to the tongues of our politicians and
the ears of their constituents? Who, be they Democrat or Republican,
among our top leaders, particularly in the aftermath of the tragedy of
9/11, dares rise to warn against the "Impostures of pretended
patriotism"? Are any of them as truly devoted as was Washington to
"the benign influence of good Laws under a free Government," or indeed
to the nurturing of what the founders well understood to be an ever
fragile experiment in representative democracy?

For democracy to work, the scale must be kept small, and that is why
the founders of the American version of that bold experiment stressed
the local over the grand, leaving the majority of power to the
individual and severely restricting the role of the state. To the
degree that the state itself was tolerable, its power was severely
curtailed, with the individual states of these United States
reluctantly ceding the bare minimum of decision-making power necessary
for the maintenance of public order to the new federal entity, one
always to be regarded with the greatest of suspicion so widely shared
and so obviously referenced in the original document that a Bill of
Rights was not considered a necessity until the final draft of the
Constitution.

If there is one thing that can be stated with absolute certainty as to
their intentions, it is that the founders believed that the concepts
of Republic and Empire represented an inevitable contradiction in
terms. It is an essential caution that in the Cold War era came to be
largely ignored. One reason is that our ambitions were never presented
with the honesty of other imperial powers proclaiming their right to
dominate others.

Our intrusions were always framed as defensive in nature, even when it
meant dropping more explosives on the small country of Vietnam than
had been dropped in all of World War II and leaving, according to
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who initiated a good portion of the
carnage, 3.4 million innocent dead in its wake. The policies were not
conducted by a War Department, as had been the case during World War
II, but rather a Department of Defense. So it has been with every U.S.
military expedition of the past half century, efforts all conducted in
the name of liberating others rather than feeding our delusions of
grandeur, insecurities, and greed.

Of course, all empires have had their pretenses justifying the
expansion of one nation's influence over others in the name of
religion, freedom, combating aggression, or exporting the standards of
higher civilization. There are elements of all that in what we do as a
nation, but the compelling rubric that protects our adventures from
internal criticism, though not necessarily from abroad, is that we
seek no advantage for ourselves but only what is obviously good for
others. Sometimes that may be the case, but it hardly works as an
explanation of our enormously contradictory and often exploitative
foreign policies.

However, it does work, at least in terms of creating a base of
domestic political support for policies that in many instances
contravene logic and fact. As Washington warned, it is extremely
difficult to unmask the "Impostures of pretended patriotism" when the
nation is frightened by enemies both real and imagined. Nor could
Washington have anticipated the sort of mass media society in which
government propaganda becomes compelling and inconvenient truths are
easily concealed behind the veil of national security requirements.
What he certainly did not anticipate is the modern militarized state,
in which, ever since the onset of the Cold War, a permanent war
footing has been the norm. …

For these reasons, the concerns of Washington expressed in his
farewell speech needed the updating provided by the parting statement
of our other great general turned president, Dwight David Eisenhower.
Ike's Farewell Address provides a perfect bookend to that of
Washington, for it marks a modern president's recognition that the
fears of our first president had been realized. The empire had come to
replace the republic. The "military-industrial complex" that
Eisenhower warned against was merely the logical extension of an
imperial reach of forward military bases throughout the world and a
stark American intervention into the affairs of nations on every
continent.

What alarmed him most is that while the enemy communism was in his
mind all too real, the system that had grown up to counter it was self-
perpetuating and disconnected from the defensive tasks at hand.
Eisenhower predicted exactly what has come to pass. Despite the end of
the Soviet Union, and with it the rationale for the Cold War, the
military-industrial complex soon found another enemy, called
terrorism.

The proof that Eisenhower's warnings were all too prescient is
provided by the 2008 federal budget in which defense spending consumes
$217 billion more than the total discretionary funding for all other
divisions of the federal government. As Eisenhower warned:


Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by
any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of
World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the
United States had no armaments industry. American makers of
ploughshares could, with time as required, make swords as well. But
now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense;
we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of
vast proportions. …


This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms
industry is new in the American experience. The total influence --
economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every
state house, and every office of the federal government. We recognize
the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to
comprehend its grave implications. …


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. We should take nothing for granted;
only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our
peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper
together.

There you have it; don't say we weren't warned. Mind you, Eisenhower
was willing to speak out against this "unwarranted influence" at a
time when he thought there was an equally powerful adversary equipped
with precisely the same sort of advanced weaponry as we possessed.
There was a high-tech arms race under way, and yet even then
Eisenhower sounded his warning. What is the excuse of politicians and
the media for not sounding that warning when we face no such adversary
but yet defense spending is at an obscene all-time high?

The disconnect between the arsenal of the terrorist enemy and that
which has been arrayed against it in the post-9/11 years more than
affirms Eisenhower's warning about the "unwarranted influence" of the
military-industrial complex. The good news, however, is that it
derives from a power base fraught with contradictions. As we have seen
in this book, much of what is demanded by the military machine is
absurdly disproportionate to the task at hand. One wonders how the
lobbyists and politicians even maintain a straight face as they argue,
as did Senator Lieberman, for $2.5 billion submarines to fight
terrorists without even a dinghy. I don't doubt that they will
continue to make their case and that the money spent toward that end
will secure political and pundit support, but it is wearing thin. So,
too, the effort to manufacture crises with "rogue nations" and to
continuously exaggerate the cohesion and power of the "terrorist"
enemy. Nor will the Chinese- or the Russians-are-coming gambit work as
both of those countries move deeper into the fray of the commercial
markets rather than serving as props in the theater of war games.

The U.S. military budget is roughly equal to that of all of the rest
of the world's nations, and it is inconceivable that any hostile state
could emerge in the next twenty years with the ability to match the
United States in a combat zone, even if no new weapons are added to
the American arsenal. It is also true that we can likely go on
building unneeded weapons systems without destroying our overall
economy. While the budget is almost twice as large as it was in
Eisenhower's last year in constant dollars, it is half of what it was
as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. The good news in that
statistic is that it should be easier to eliminate defense-related
jobs without having as much negative impact on the economy as in
Eisenhower's time.

The benefits of such a cut would be more dramatic in freeing up
government funds for other purposes, including programs in health and
education that would make the nation stronger. The reality is that
there is no will in the United States in either party to raise taxes,
and as a result, existing and new programs must compete for a fixed
pool of tax dollars. The dollars that can be allocated are further
limited because of mandatory expenditures, including the two largest
-- Social Security and Medicare -- which will not be cut because of
the voter resentment that would ensue. For these reasons, the full
range of nonmandated programs, all those items that are wrangled over
by Congress, from farm subsidies to children's health insurance and
medical research, are competing with the defense dollar, which is
almost totally discretionary.

Therefore, the essential parameter in considering how we allocate
federal funds boils down to what is available in the discretionary
spending category, where roughly six out of ten dollars go to the
military side. As a consequence, it is from cutbacks on military
spending that funding will in all likelihood have to be found for
increases in domestic spending. That is the most honest way to judge
the opportunity cost of the defense dollar, as in two unneeded
submarines versus coverage of health insurance for 4 million kids.

There is, however, a greater cost to a huge permanent military to
which Eisenhower was alluding, and that concerns the vitality of our
democracy. As we saw in the run-up to the Iraq war, the threat
inflators who seek an expanded military role are not above using their
enormous lobbying power to influence the political debate and votes in
Congress. If the military were merely a boondoggle in which defense
contractors, top military officers, and all those who work in the
defense bureaucracy and industry were simply viewed as recipients of
an enormously bountiful welfare program, the costs to society, as
measured in dollar payments, would arguably be manageable. Some, like
Colin Powell in his autobiography, even defend the armed forces as a
purveyor of enlightened social services, particularly in affording
education and job training to those who failed to obtain needed skills
from the public schools. If one could restrict the military to that
sort of function, it might be duplicitous but defensible as a needed
social program.

The problem is that the public will not support the military unless it
feels that its activities are connected with a real threat, and as a
result the military and its suppliers and other allies have a built-in
need to exaggerate the threat. That is the risk of "the total
influence -- economic, political, even spiritual" that Eisenhower
warned is "felt in every city, every state house, every office of the
federal government." It is a built-in and well-financed constituency
for stressing the military option over the diplomatic one, for
exaggerating the strength of the enemy rather than realistically
appraising it, and for finding new wars to be fought with a sense of
desperation. While it is certainly true that there are those in the
military hierarchy resistant to military engagements that cannot be
won -- Colin Powell is an example -- it is also true that warriors
need wars in order to establish their relevance. So, too, the national
security experts in the think tanks who do much to shape the national
agenda.

No need, however, to get too gloomy here, for the bottom line is that
even most of the hawks could find something else to do for a living,
and we do have examples of former imperial powers decommissioning
their military force, as we did after both World Wars, and rising to
higher levels of prosperity. That indeed was the direction in which we
were headed after the first President Bush acknowledged the end of the
Cold War, and few would deny that the economy fared far better during
the years of much lower defense spending during the Clinton
administration than as a result of the defense spending spree of the
George W. Bush presidency. It is also true that those spending levels
of the Clinton years left the United States strong enough to easily
conquer Afghanistan and Iraq, although the lengthy occupation of both
countries has proved far more burdensome.

The short answer is that we can have peace and prosperity, and we can
easily afford to cushion the fall for those who have grown dependent
on the defense dollar. It means, however, not invading countries that
we have to occupy at great cost, a lesson that the American public,
which gave Bush a blank check, now at last seems to have learned.

So, yes, there is much reason to hope that the military buildup of the
George W. Bush years is an aberration, since the objective reality out
there -- the utter lack of credible enemies with advanced weaponry --
makes it an increasingly difficult sell. Yet as I write those words, I
hear again Eisenhower's warning and wonder if I am not being overly
optimistic. Yes, the money we are spending is absurdly
disproportionate to the task at hand, the weapons are making us less
secure, not more so, powerful forces are unleashed that seek to find
excuse for war, and we are dramatically increasing a fiscal debt that
will deprive future generations of needed government services and
programs. What is going on in our name is irrational, costly, and
dangerous, but there are powerful vested interests that want to keep
it that way. Will they win? You decide.

From the book The Pornography of Power. Copyright (c) 2008 by Robert
Scheer. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Book Group USA, New York,
NY. All rights reserved.

Robert Scheer is the author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense
Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. See more of Robert Scheer's
work at TruthDig.

© 2008 Twelve All rights reserved.
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