Is America Hooked on War?

"War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984.
Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future
bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to
the United States.

Last week, for instance, a New York Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger was headlined
"Obama Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at
Issue." It offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.

"Doubts," of course, imply dissent, and in fact just the week before
there had been a major break in Washington's ranks, though not among
Democrats. The conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece
offering blunt advice to the Obama administration, summed up in its headline:
"Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." In our age of political and audience
fragmentation and polarization, think of this as the Afghan version of
Vietnam's Cronkite moment.

The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on the other
hand, represented a more typical Washington moment. Ignored, for
instance, was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's end-of-August call
for the president to develop an Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus
of the piece was instead an upcoming speech by Michigan Senator Carl
Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He was, Schmitt and
Sanger reported, planning to push back against well-placed leaks (in the Times,
among other places) indicating that war commander General Stanley
McChrystal was urging the president to commit 15,000 to 45,000 more
American troops to the Afghan War.

Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist of Levin's message about what everyone agrees
is a "deteriorating" U.S. position: "[H]e was against sending more
American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded
up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces."

Think of this as the line in the sand
within the Democratic Party, and be assured that the debates within the
halls of power over McChrystal's troop requests and Levin's proposal
are likely to be fierce this fall. Thought about for a moment, however,
both positions can be summed up with the same word: More.

The essence of this "debate" comes down to: More of them versus more of us
(and keep in mind that more of them -- an expanded training program for
the Afghan National Army -- actually means more of "us" in the form of extra trainers and advisors). In other words, however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally
the public now views the war, however much the president's war
coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices will be
between more and more.

No alternatives are likely to get a real hearing. Few alternative
policy proposals even exist because alternatives that don't fit with
"more" have ceased to be part of Washington's war culture. No serious
thought, effort, or investment goes into them. Clearly referring to
Will's column, one of the unnamed "senior officials" who swarm through
our major newspapers made the administration's position clear, saying
sardonically, according to the Washington Post,
"I don't anticipate that the briefing books for the [administration]
principals on these debates over the next weeks and months will be
filled with submissions from opinion columnists... I do anticipate they
will be filled with vigorous discussion... of how successful we've been
to date."

State of War

Because the United States does not look like a militarized country,
it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that
the United States is a war state, that it garrisons
much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere
at any moment. Similarly, we've become used to the idea that, when
various forms of force (or threats of force) don't work, our response,
as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version
of the same under a new or rebranded name -- the hot one now being
"counterinsurgency" or COIN -- in a marginally different manner. When
it comes to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally
the order of the day.

This wasn't always the case. The early Republic that the most hawkish
conservatives love to cite was a land whose leaders looked with
suspicion on the very idea of a standing army. They would have viewed
our hundreds of global garrisons, our vast network of spies, agents,
Special Forces teams, surveillance operatives, interrogators,
rent-a-guns, and mercenary corporations, as well as our staggering
Pentagon budget and the constant future-war gaming and planning that
accompanies it, with genuine horror.

The question is: What kind of country do we actually live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) lists 16
intelligence services ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the
National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency? What
could "intelligence" mean once spread over 16 sizeable, bureaucratic,
often competing outfits with a cumulative 2009 budget
estimated at more than $55 billion (a startling percentage of which is
controlled by the Pentagon)? What exactly is so intelligent about all
that? And why does no one think it even mildly strange or in any way
out of the ordinary?

What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in
our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated
Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president
who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now
submitted an even larger Pentagon budget?
What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of
non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does
it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and
two wars' worth of disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?

What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment
rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American
taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly
permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks
at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This, in turn, is part of a
taxpayer-funded $220 million upgrade of the base that includes new
"water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms, and power
generating plants." And what about the U.S. air base built at
Balad, north of Baghdad, that now has 15 bus routes, two fire stations,
two water treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two power
plants, a water bottling plant, and the requisite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago's O'Hare International?

What kind of American world are we living in when a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of private security contractors in that country?

What do you make of a world in which the U.S. has robot assassins
in the skies over its war zones, 24/7, and the "pilots" who control
them from thousands of miles away are ready on a moment's notice to
launch missiles -- "Hellfire" missiles
at that -- into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild, mountainous
borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan? What does it mean when
American pilots can be at war "in" Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote
control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then
can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is "the most dangerous part of your day"?

What does it mean when, for our security and future safety, the
Pentagon funds the wildest ideas imaginable for developing high-tech
weapons systems, many of which sound as if they came straight out of
the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example, Boeing's advanced coordinated system
of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield
surveillance equipment slated for seven Army brigades within the next
two years at a cost of $2 billion and for the full Army by 2025; or the
Next Generation Bomber, an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic bomber,
"a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along
the edge of the atmosphere," for 2035? What does it mean about our
world when those people in our government peering deepest into a
blue-skies future are planning ways to send armed "platforms" up into
those skies and kill more than a quarter century from now?

And do you ever wonder about this: If such weaponry is being endlessly
developed for our safety and security, and that of our children and
grandchildren, why is it that one of our most successful businesses
involves the sale of the same weaponry to other countries? Few
Americans are comfortable thinking about this, which may explain why
global-arms-trade pieces don't tend to make it onto the front pages of
our newspapers. Recently, the Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, for instance, wrote
a piece on the subject which appeared inside the paper on a quiet Labor
Day. "Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows" was the
headline. Perhaps Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable with his subject,
because he included the following generic description: "In the highly
competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and
political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing
nations..." The figures he cited from a new congressional study of that
"highly competitive" market told a different story: The U.S., with
$37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled
68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking,
Italy came "a distant second" with $3.7 billion. In sales to
"developing nations," the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons
agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant
second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market. In other words, with 70%
of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would
qualify as a monopoly position -- in this case, in things that go boom
in the night. With the American car industry in a ditch, it seems that
this (along with Hollywood films that go boom in the night) is what we
now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state. Is that an
American accomplishment you're comfortable with?

On the day I'm writing this piece, "Names of the Dead," a feature which
appears almost daily in my hometown newspaper, records the death of an
Army private from DeKalb, Illinois, in Afghanistan. Among the spare
facts offered: he was 20 years old, which means he was probably born
not long before the First Gulf War was launched in 1990 by President
George H.W. Bush. If you include that war, which never really ended --
low-level U.S. military actions against Saddam Hussein's regime
continued until the invasion of 2003 -- as well as U.S. actions in the
former Yugoslavia and Somalia, not to speak of the steady warfare
underway since November 2001, in his short life, there was hardly a
moment in which the U.S. wasn't engaged in military operations
somewhere on the planet (invariably thousands of miles from home). If
that private left a one-year-old baby behind in the States, and you
believe the statements
of various military officials, that child could pass her tenth birthday
before the war in which her father died comes to an end. Given the
record of these last years, and the present military talk about being
better prepared for "the next war," she could reach 2025, the age when
she, too, might join the military without ever spending a warless day.
Is that the future you had in mind?

Consider this: War is now the American way, even if peace is what most Americans experience while their proxies
fight in distant lands. Any serious alternative to war, which means our
"security," is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian terms then, war
is indeed peace in the United States and peace, war.

American Newspeak

Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever more constricted form of
English that would, sooner or later, make "all other modes of thought
impossible. It was intended," he wrote in an appendix to his novel,
"that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak
forgotten, a heretical thought... should be literally unthinkable."

When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a world of American
Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more
unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our permanent
situation, in good Orwellian fashion it has also been sundered from a
set of words that once accompanied it.

It
lacks, for instance, "victory." After all, when was the last time the
U.S. actually won a war (unless you include our "victories" over small
countries incapable of defending themselves like the tiny Caribbean
Island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing
"victory" over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a
stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades old that has proved a
catastrophe. Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and Korean Wars
and the last time the U.S. military was truly victorious was in 1945.

But achieving victory no longer seems to matter. War American-style is
now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When George W.
Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror (aka World War IV),
conceived as a "generational struggle" like the Cold War, he caught a
certain American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war system can't
absorb victory. Any such endpoint might indeed prove to be a kind of
defeat.

No longer has war anything to do with the taking of territory
either, or even with direct conquest. War is increasingly a state of
being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography.

Similarly drained of its traditional meaning has been the word
"security" -- though it has moved from a state of being (secure) to an
eternal, immensely profitable process
whose endpoint is unachievable. If we ever decided we were either
secure enough, or more willing to live without the unreachable idea of
total security, the American way of war and the national security state
would lose much of their meaning. In other words, in our world,
security is insecurity.

As for "peace," war's companion and theoretical opposite, though still
used in official speeches, it, too, has been emptied of meaning and all
but discredited. Appropriately enough, diplomacy, that part of
government which classically would have been associated with peace, or
at least with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means, has been
dwarfed by, subordinated to, or even subsumed by the Pentagon. In
recent years, the U.S. military with its vast funds has taken over, or
encroached upon, a range of activities that once would have been left
to an underfunded State Department, especially humanitarian aid
operations, foreign aid, and what's now called nation-building. (On
this subject, check out Stephen Glain's recent essay, "The American Leviathan" in the Nation magazine.)

Diplomacy itself has been militarized and, like our country, is now hidden behind massive fortifications, and has been placed under Lord-of-the-Flies-style guard. The State Department's embassies are now bunkers
and military-style headquarters for the prosecution of war policies;
its officials, when enough of them can be found, are now sent out into
the provinces in war zones to do "civilian" things.

And peace itself? Simply put, there's no money in it. Of the nearly
trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities,
nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea
that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so
discredited that it's left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves.
As in Orwell's Newspeak, while "peace" remains with us, it's largely
been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it's
just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in
Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw
our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down
the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases -- recently,
there were almost 300 of them,
macro to micro, in Iraq alone -- and bring our military home is beyond
imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an
apostate to America's true religion and addiction, which is force.
However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our
TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also -- always
-- marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.