I am a former Cold Warrier, in that I served in the USAF during the Cold War, catching the last 7 years of it. I was an EWO (Electronic Warfare Officer) on B-52s out of Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. I sat nuclear alert on a monthly basis, babysitting B-52s loaded with gravity bomb nukes and nuclear cruise missiles, until shortly after the Berlin Wall fell which soon after resulted in the Soviet Union taking a tumble. One of the most memorable episodes I experienced after the collapse of the Wall, but before the USSR died off, was the arrival, for the first time in US history, of Soviet Tu-95 Bear bombers at Barksdale for an air show. During the week of that episode, I met with, made friends with, and drank heavily with Soviet aircrewmen who had been just couple years prior our intractable enemy.
more on the flip
I recall the concept of a "Peace Dividend" in those heady days. The incredible amounts of money expended on the military was no longer necessary so we could draw down the military to a more reasonable size. We were going to see HUGE economic dividends as taxes could be decreased and the money the government DID take in could be focused primarily on things that had always taken a back seat to military funding.
I was all for the "Peace Divident" even though I realized that it may well mean I would get the boot. I figured that the cuts were more than reasonable and necessary and that I couldn't be for them except where they might impact me in my military job. Well, I DID get cut. Shortly after the first Gulf War, when we fliers were feeling pretty secure - the Air Force would NEVER cut the fliers. WE just got out of a war so we were the guys with the actual war experience and would be expected to pass on our wisdom to the new guys.
Boy were we wrong. We got cut in waves. I entered service in 1985. It just so happened that this year group was going to get cut quite heavily, by around 75% and that was across the board for officers, regardless of whether you were a flier or not. Well, I didn't like the odds of being among the "lucky" 25% that got to stay so I took the money they offered (about $12,000 more than they'd give you if they involuntarily separated you) and went back to school. A year later they were asking many of us to come back. That didn't last long.
Where's our "Peace Dividend"? That concept sure didn't last long did it? The Pentagon wouldn't permit it. The entire Military-Industrial complex wouldn't permit such a dividend to accrue because it meant THEY'D be left without a huge flow of cash. That "Peace Dividend" disappeared with a vengence didn't it? The US is now spending at least as much money on the military as it did at the height of the Cold War, but against whom do we need to field such a monstrous military? To fight the "War on Terror"? Nonsense (though that is the public excuse). This country must radically rethink and rejigger its priorities. It must make a concerted push for a renewed "Peace Dividend" before the entire house of cards comes tumbling down on our heads.
I am writing this as I sit with a big lead ball in my gut. No, I mean a metaphorical lead ball. More and more of late I experience this feeling of dread, even helplessness, that equates to a big lead ball in my gut. What sparked it this morning were two articles I read from the Asian Times. The second article in the twofer is here It's an interview with Chalmers Johnson about his nonfiction book trilogy about "blowback" to US overuse of its bloated military might to maintain empire. The first book of the series was Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published in 2000. It was followed post-9/11 with The Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. He is now in the process of completing the final book of the unplanned trilogy, Nemesis.
The interview is fascinating and frightening. To introduce Chalmers to those who do not know of him is this bit:
Johnson, who served as a lieutenant junior grade in the US Navy in the early 1950s and from 1967-73 was a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ran the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years. He defended the Vietnam War ("In that I was distinctly a man of my times ..."), but is probably the only person of his generation to have written, in the years since, anything like this passage from the introduction to his book Blowback:
The problem was that I knew too much about the international communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense ... In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the anti-war protest movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.
Chalmers goes on to talk about his hope after the collapse of the USSR that there really would be a "Peace Dividend" and that America would do what it had done in the past after big wars: draw down significantly. Instead, as we all know and have experienced (and as I get into above) any drawdown was merely a blip. Chalmers expresses his thoughts thus:
I was flabbergasted and felt the need to understand what had happened. The chief question that came to mind almost at once, as soon as it was clear that our part of the Cold War was going to be perpetuated - the same structure, the same military Keynesianism, an economy based largely on the building of weapons - was: Did this suggest that the Cold War was, in fact, a cover for something else; that something else being an American empire intentionally created during World War II as the successor to the British Empire?.
Now that led me to say: Yes, the Cold War was not the clean-cut conflict between totalitarian and democratic values that we had claimed it to be. You can make something of a claim for that in Western Europe at certain points in the 1950s, but once you bring it into the global context, once you include China and our two East Asian wars, Korea and Vietnam, the whole thing breaks down badly, and this caused me to realize that I had some rethinking to do.
It is very much at great cost to all of us, including non-US citizens given the way we wield our military. The cost is NOT simply lives lost, as bad as that is, but cost drags on into the near future to a point where something has to give. Our economy MUST collapse given our unchanging trajectory and when it goes, the economies of countries and regions around the world will suffer but the public is largely (or entirely) blind and fully accepting of the way things are, that a HUGE portion of our "economy" has a false bottom:
I'm always amazed by the way we kid ourselves about the influence of the military-industrial complex in our society. We use euphemisms like supply-side economics or the Laffer Curve. We never say: We're artificially making work. If the WPA [Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression] was often called a dig-holes-and-fill-'em-up-again project, now we're making things that blow up and we sell them to people. Our weapons aren't particularly good, not compared to those of the great weapons makers around the world. It's just that we can make a lot of them very rapidly.
Chalmers then goes on to how all this expense IS for the purpose of maintaining Empire rather than serving some reasonable security concern:
So what kind of empire is ours? The unit is not the colony, it's the military base. This is not quite as unusual as defenders of the concept of empire often assume. That is to say, we can easily calculate the main military bases of the Roman Empire in the Middle East, and it turns out to be about the same number it takes to garrison the region today. You need about 38 major bases. You can plot them out in Roman times and you can plot them out today.
An empire of bases - that's the concept that best explains the logic of the 700 or more military bases around the world acknowledged by the Department of Defense. Now, we're just kidding ourselves that this is to provide security for Americans. In most cases, it's true that we first occupied these bases with some strategic purpose in mind in one of our wars. Then the war ends and we never give them up.
The Neocons are merely straightforward and direct that this is what it is all about and they are unapologetic. They falsely believe that it is sustainable and desireable that we be an empire, accruing the HUGE costs that are inevitable under the false belief that our borrowing can go on forever because there is "too much savings" in the world (just not in the USA) so people are more than willing to lend to us. What else are they going to do with all of it? They just can't grasp the fact that we, the USA, are not essential. Sure, we are a huge market but the world can do without it. It would hurt or slow down the growth in many countries when we collapse but the only country that will really suffer is the USA.
The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a GDP [gross domestic product] the size of the state of Louisiana and Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped us.
Militarily, we've got an incoherent, not very intelligent budget. It becomes less incoherent only when you realize the ways it's being used to fund our industries or that one of the few things we still manufacture reasonably effectively is weapons. It's a huge export business, run not by the companies but by foreign military sales within the Pentagon.
The country suffers from a collective anxiety neurosis every time we talk about closing bases, and it has nothing to do with politics.
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This illustrates what I consider the most insidious aspect of our militarism and our military empire. We can't get off it anymore. It's not that we're hooked in a narcotic sense. It's just that we'd collapse as an economy if we let it go and we know it. That's the terrifying thing.
...What we've done with our economy is very similar to what Adolf Hitler did with his. We turn out airplanes and other weapons systems in huge numbers. This leads us right back to 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. We couldn't let the Cold War come to an end. We realized it very quickly. In fact, there are many people who believe that the thrust of the Cold War even as it began, especially in the National Security Council's grand strategy document, NSC68, rested on the clear understanding of late middle-aged Americans who had lived through the Great Depression that the American economy could not sustain itself on the basis of capitalist free enterprise.
Chalmers goes on in the second part of the article to talk about the objective loss of Congress. Of how it just will not do anything to fix the system. He states that it doesn't matter if the Congress is GOP or Democratic, the overall lay fo the land will remain the same: HUGE HUGE HUGE Pentagon budgets combined with HUGE militaristic budgets for the Dept of Energy, CIA, etc. He warns that things will get to point that people will desire a "strong man" who, even in the guise of a benign reformer, would be just a dictator and the Republic would cease (essentially he argues that it is already gone). He brings up the Argentina model for the US but with the twist that we will be the first superpower to go under.
I fear that he is absolutely correct in bleak assessment and I see no out. The US has a huge historic mass imparting an immense momentum in the direction we are heading. No politician in existence, even likely among the Dems, can or will do anything to change our course. They can't. The momentum is too great and the people are settled in their ways. ANY attempt to cut the military to a reasonable size that can save us economically and socially is more than the country will accept outside a total collapse forcing the issue. What comes out of that collapse wont be the geographic US we all know today.
The fact is, our foreign creditors will not continue to pay for our spending despite the Pollyanna claims otherwise by the pro-Empire crowd. Self preservation will soon require that they, our creditors, more and more divest themselves of dollars. Once the movement starts, it will quickly snowball so that a movement away from the dollar will become a stampede. The winners are those who leave first, the loser those who stick around until the end. Interest rates here will skyrocket and the market will crash. Everything will collapse. The safety net? Bush has happily increased the spending away of that and even admitted that there will be no payout on our payin. We've been doublecrossed with a doubletax with NOTHING to show for it. Hell, Bushie admitted that what is OWED to the people isn't worth the paper the IOU is written on.
Tax time is fast approaching, as we all know. I am planning to dump a couple thousand dollars into my IRA in order to cut my payout to the government (My wife and I aren't rich enough to have benefitted from the "tax cuts"). I cannot help but think that I am wasting my money here. I dump dollars into my IRA and my mutual fund on the premise that nothing we do as a country - spend, spend, spend on empire and an unacceptably large military while at the same time actively killing off all our nonmilitary manufacturing capabilities - will hurt the market. It will just keep climbing and my IRA and mutual funds will be worth a lot when I retire.
More and more I just don't buy it but feel helpless because there is nothing else I can do. To save on a payout to the government I am tossing money into something that requires (REQUIRES) that foreign countries continue to lend us more and more money and never ever stop. The moment they do stop, poof! All that money in the market is gone.
It gets to the point that I don't really look too far into the future (I just go through the motions, like tossing good money after bad into my IRA) because I feel that there isn't much of one to speak of. No, I'm not suicidal, far from it, but I am lethargic and very bearish on the future. I find it very difficult to do much more than try to make low-key plans for dealing with massive power outages, interest rates through the roof (expensive food as just a part of it, perhaps exacerbated by droughts wrought by Global Warming), desperate victims of our out-of-control government turning a blind eye to the very real needs of the people (its sole purpose in existing) left to seek to survive by any means necessary (the protections of the 2nd Amendment look far more important to me these days compared to when things seemed rosier). Remember the end of the move, The Terminator? The bleakness of it when the Sarah Conner character looks into the distance and responds to a comment about "a storm is a comming". It was ominous...and that is exactly what I feel about the future. There is a storm a coming and most of us are walking blindly and blithely into it.
Hell, I'm quietly (not telling my wife...yet) scouting out various other countries as possible places to bolt for should things really go pearshaped in the nearish future. I am slowly collecting books and skills on making ethanol, biodiesel, electricity, how to live off small acreage, etc. I tell her it is just because I'm curious about all that stuff, but in fact I honestly fear that such information could become critical in the near future. Honestly, regardless of whether we get a Democratic Congress in the Fall or in 2008 (with or without the Presidency), the overall course will remain the same: feeding the military empire at the expense of what is truly more important and sustainable. There may be just a minor shift but the overall trajectory has been followed ever since Eisenhower gave us warning as he left about the military-industrial complex. Well, that complex is in full control and it came to be in spite of his warning. It has a momentum now that is unstoppable short of true disaster (as befalls ALL empires).
Sorry to be so grim but I am feeling this way these days.
Read the articles and you will feel likewise. Add to these the various articles and books about Peak Oil (which IS helping to feed the military beast we have set loose on the world...all to avert the inevitable) and hope becomes a distant memory from better days.