Hi Michael,
First up I want to acknowledge the time and effort you are putting into this conversation, and simply, thank you.
Second, I also want to note that this conversation - if it hasn't already - may well go close to the bone for you, particularly given the current situation - ie your vocation, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this, I want to acknowledge your generosity at a time when you are already giving and enduring so much, and pledge to you that I am going to do everything I can to read and write thoughtfully and sincerely. If I cross a line for you, or this becomes too difficult, let me know, and please accept my apology for pushing too far, right now. I write that (I hope) not in a patronising way, but to acknowledge the simple reality of you being involved in a war right now (not least with the Dept's bureaucracy by the sounds of it), and I'm sitting pretty thousands of miles away in an office, with nowhere near the same level of stress to deal with.
Third, I want to make something as clear as I can: I do not think the USA is the root of all evil in this world. I don't think there is a single country / people on this planet that has its collective hands clean. Nor do I see this as a conversation with an implicit end of "proving" who has the cleaner / dirtier hands. While it may not be clear in the current conversation we are having, I have equally sharp criticisms and deep misgivings about my home country Australia, about my country of birth (England), about India - a country I love, get homesick for and have lived & travelled, & studied intensely. In short, on my good-to -bad days, I'm an equal-opportunity sceptic, curmudgeon, nay-sayer, misanthrope. I wanted to bring this up, because we are focussing so closely on the USA here, I know it's easy to start thinking that the hidden message is "the USA is really the most evil country ever ever ever". No, it's not, and as a fallible human, I think it's a dumb competition that I don't want anything to do with judging.
Ok, long intro, but it seemed important. read on.
I note first up that in your response our conversation has broadened from our original starting point - the nature / culture of militarism in the USA - to a broader one about the military / diplomatic role of the USA in modern times. A perfectly understandable expansion, and I'll do my best to help keep the scope of discussion here reasonable, and also respond to your excellent post. It also makes our conversation a hell of a lot more complex, so I hope others will join in and help us both out, so we don't get lost in here.
I think, if I were to summarise your post, I would say you are arguing that yes, while the US has continued military expansion since WW1, and while all its decisions haven't been anywhere near perfect, overall it has been a kindler, gentler -albeit overwhelmingly militarily superior - superpower. IOW, you have made the case for US global soft power, backed by superior military force, the long-standing status quo in global affairs. You point to the confliction between how the US funds top-end technologically advanced military applications, but conversely, and concomitantly reduces, degrades and neglects its human service men and women.
I want to quickly agree with you on a few things - no question that the USA didn't invent the military-industrial complex, although we owe Eisenhower for naming the modern manifestation of the beast. Heck, I'd go back as far as Rome for one of the first and most notable examples of an empire built around an MI complex.
Second, absolutely no doubt that while the USA has dominated in the global defence industry, it's not the only player in town, and its certainly not going around like some fallen angel, tricking all the good people of the world to buy evil toys and do evil things. You make excellent points that spear the hypocrisy of old Europe, the basket-case of the ex-Soviet Union and what terrible implications that is having globally, and the consistently questionable records of rising powers such as China. Oh, and you made me laugh my head off at Crazy Ivan. :D
What struck me as most relevant from your post is the stark contrast the info you provided drew between the spending and effort the USA puts into military R&D, and furthering its commercial interests here, and how it treats its footsoldiers. To me, that points to exactly where the best parts of the US military (heck any military) - honour, discipline, sacrifice, service, protecting the weak, defending against attack - are greatly at odds with the real motivations of the broader foreign economic and military policy.
Put as simply as I can, while guys like you are signing up to serve, to protect the weak, defend against attack and make better people of yourselves through sacrifice and an honour code, all that is being undermined by - as you say - commercial domestic interests, who have successfully lobbied your administrations time and again, to support their expansion of sales and development, domestically and worldwide.
On top of that, those interests are frequently and consistently the same interests dominating global energy markets - as you correctly pointed out, the primacy of securing fuel - and the combination of these two powerful interests has created a successful case for expanding US military control and might across the globe.
And while in military terms this has been, as you argue, a case of soft power, and a record that's certainly no worse and in many cases much better than others, I think at some point we need to bring in the even broader picture - the neo-imperialism of the USA, that has created a vicious circle between exponential consumerism, which requires resource securing, which requires a massive miiltary might to secure those resources, which in turn requirese more resources for itself to continue to bring home the bacon - and on it goes. The end result of this has been a country of 5% global population that consumes 30% of the availabel resources. Thus, the bigger picture here points to unequivocal inequity driven by US expansionism, even if all of it hasn't looked like death down the barrel of a US-designed and built rifle.
I am reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse" at the moment, and going to see him speak tomorrow night. Much of what he outkines in terms of why past societies have collapsed is so similar to the problems we face, it's chilling. I recommend it.
but back to where I was, and sorry for the digression -
These US corporate interests have had close to a stranglehold on your politicians through political donations, skeletons in the closet and outright conflict of interest (Carlyle makes on of the best and most well-known cases: who is a special consultant now to Carlyle? Why George Bush senior) for decades. And these people don't give a shit whether your pay is frozen for 2 years, your housing is falling apart and your medical assistance is slashed to pieces.
Because what this is all about is the fact that war is profit. There is, of course, profit to be made from the needs of the common soldier (look at the massive contracts to Kellogs, Brown & Root to build defence bases and supply [in a nutshell] quarter-mastering to the US army in Iraq) as well - but as you have noted by implication, the larger the handouts to corporate fat-cats does not translate into decent equipment, services and support for the men and women putting their lives on the line. But if there's one thing this current Iraq war has taught us, it's that traditional military contractors see such terrible acts of aggression as golden opportunities to further lobby the government to privatise the logistics of military operations so they can line their own pockets.
But the stand-by is the huge profits to be found in military R&D (partly because of its multiple applications), sales of military equipment, training of foreign forces, direct military arms transactions, and foreign military financing. Domestically, most of this flows from the many thousands of contracts the Pentagon authorises; and this is where I think to me, we hit the nub of why I find the militarism of the USA disturbing. Because as much as with many of your political representatives, its in the Pentagon that private commercial interests, and the best interests for the US soldier, domestic peace and world harmony clash, and I think you know who I think wins, and who loses. In short, the interests of your top military and controlling top political figures are not those of the common people, whether they are US civilians, global civilians, or US soldiers.
The Pentagon - in fact not a single major division of the DoD has ever passed a single accounting audit. Not one. The Pentagon "can't find" over $1.1 trillion dollars. Year after year, there are reports of the Pentagon books being cooked - to the tune of billions and trillions - to make the add up. Billions of dollars of items that the department didn't need have been bought, billions of dollars of equipment goes missing, the list goes on.
The US military is bought and paid for by commercial interests who's best interests lie in promulgating war, not ending it. The Pentagon is corrupt.
As you have documented, the other clear evidence for this corruption is the consistent downsizing and under-funding of the human operational parts of the US military machine. I think Vietnam is a pivotal point in this story. The willingness of your then-leaders - a bipartisan willingness - to send untrained, under-funded young men to die; to be exposed to toxic chemicals, to wage a war that was not their making, to provide booze and drugs but not training and discipline, to use and abuse and throw them on the trash-heap. Vietnam to my mind tells a story not just of ideological dogmatists, nigh-on insane leaders (hello Mr Nixon) and terrible human tragedy; it tells the story of the triumph in the USA of commercial military interests over democratic, civilian control. And it hasn't stopped.
Since then, the Pentagon has initiated and continues to run domestic schools that train individuals from favoured nations in torture, provides overseas and domestic training to military from countries such as Afghanistan, Congo, Indonesia and Rwanda and several deeply abusive regimes in Central and South America; has interpreted Leahy Law in the loosest possible terms, resulting in arms sales etc, to a multitude of regimes with serious human rights abuses. All for profit, and most of that to the powerful domestic interests that do the lobbying and the greasing of palms.
What makes this story so acute, and so drastic in its implications, is the USA's global pre-eminence. The everyday, banal facts of corruption and distortion of democratic institutions for private greed are not new or even remotely isolated to the USA; but the impact of this story in terms of global military trade has been catastrophic.
The United States supplied arms or military technology to more than 92% of the conflicts under way in 1999. In the period from 1998-2001, over 68% of world arms deliveries were sold or given to developing nations, where lingering conflicts or societal violence can scare away potential investors. The Center for International Policy estimates that around 80% of U.S. arms exports to the developing world go to non-democratic regimes. The U.S. government is training soldiers in upwards of 70 countries at any given time. After a slowing in the arms trade as a result of the end of the Cold War & collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, US defence companies lobbied US administrations successfully to do something - resulting in the U.S. share in world arms exports rose from 35% in 1990 to 50.4% in 2000. - And there's little question that the excess of military aggression we are seeing now is significantly due to the obscenely close ties between these interests and the current Bush administration; tied with a religious fundamentalism in some powerful individual cases that sees the US military as a tool to provoke and win Armageddon - "winning" being defined in "end of days" terms here. And on top of all this, the US arms industry is the second most subsidised industry the USA has, second only to agriculture.
My main source here is the Federation of American Scientists. They maintain an Arms Sales Monitoring Project - which seems to have not been updated in some instances since 2002, but that suits our timeframe here.
I acknowledge that they clearly have an anti-military bent, but I am comfortable with their credibility, given their sources (mostly official documentation). I think you'll find their links and articles on military spending by the US since 9/11 pretty interesting too, not least because we are in 100% agreement about Dubya.
Another part of your argument was around - `at least we have traditionally sold with some sort of conscience / principles; not so other nations; and if we sell we can try and influence positively; and if we don't sell, someone (like Crazy Ivan!) will.'
I can't think of better counter-points than those given by the link above, so with apologioes for being lame, here are some of them for us to think about:
If we supply the arms, we can control the use of the weapons."
Counter-Point: When anti-independence militias organized and assisted by the Indonesian armed forces went on a violent killing spree in East Timor in September 1999, they were equipped with U.S. -origin M-16 rifles and other U.S. -origin equipment. The missiles attached to the wing of the Chinese fighter that collided with a U.S. surveillance plane in April of 2001 were Israeli Python missiles; missiles designed by studying the technology of U.S. Sidewinder missiles sold to Israel years earlier.
[and I'll add my own example here - US supplied military Caterpillar 9 tonne blade bulldozers are used by the Israeli army to illegally destroy Palestinian homes, some still containing civilian occupants who have died or been seriously injured, and one was used to crush and murder American protestor Rachel Corrie.]
These are just two [three] of a multitude of scenarios in which U.S. arms exports have led to "uncontrolled" consequences."
"If we don't sell (fill in weapon) to (fill in country) someone else will."
Counter-Point:: The U.S. can use its considerable political-economic clout to encourage its allies to adopt common export criteria. With ballistic and cruise missiles and anti-personnel landmines, the U.S. government ceased exports unilaterally and then successfully encouraged others to follow suit, effectively removing these weapons from the international market.
Point: If we restrict arms exportation American jobs will be lost.
Counter-Point: When assessing the employment "benefits" of arms exportation we must take into consideration the $7 billion plus in subsidies that underwrite the arms trade. The same investment in any other industry would create as much -if not more- employment. By moving productions jobs overseas, offsets also undercut the jobs argument.
I want to end therefore, by picking up on that second counter-point, because it is such a positive, inspiration and longed-for example of US global leadership for the greater good. Not only that, it points to the presence of US political leaders who were willing to ignore and stymie the powerful commercial defence interests in favour of a safer and saner world. I'm not a believer, but I still pray for more. I also pray for a US leader who will stop the consistent undermining of the UN, and will work instead to forge it into an effective institution that will produce more and more frequent treaties such as these.
Finally, I want to end by saying that the military-industrial complex of the USA is no friend of the US soldier. It undermines your honour code, slashes your services, and makes more life-threatening work for you wherever it goes. I would go further by saying, it feeds the ugly side of all military culture by putting tools that are specifically designed to kill civilians, not soldiers, into the hands of men and women, and turns them into monsters. It dehumanises soldiers, who in turn, dehumanise the people around them. It undermines every good thing you personally work, strive and stand for. In this, US servicemen and women are not alone, but you are in the heart of the empire, so I think you suffer it - comparative to the rest of the western world - in the extreme.
This is not the most coherent thing I've ever written, and to make matters worse, I'm being sucked into the vortex of our national capital for 3 days starting now (I'm a federal public servant), so I'm not going to have any chance for most of this week to continue our conversation, which sucks the puss. I'll try and check in at airports just to see how things are going.
Ok, I've gotta dash and catch a plane. I'm really, really sorry for the huge break in our conversation. I hope we can find each other again and keep talking.
Be well Michael, and thanks again.