“Kill every buffalo
you can . . . every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” — Col. R.I. Dodge, Fort McPherson, 1867
“We are going to
fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture them or . . .
kill them until we have imposed law and order in this country. We dominate
the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country.” – L. Paul Bremer, U.S. administrator of
occupied Iraq, 2003
The American way of life is predicated on a permanent
war economy. Our society would collapse without perpetual violence against
weaker nations and rape of the natural world. From the beginning, our
national psyche has been occupied by warmongers and our foreign policy
dictated by war profiteers. Democratic control over the American
military/capitalist complex was always tenuous, but the beast has now put
the leash on its master. We do not control the military; it controls us. The Nigerian poet Ben Okri once wrote that a nation is
the stories it tells itself. If these stories are lies, the nation will
suffer the consequences of those lies. One of our nation’s lies is
that our military is somehow unique, that whatever American soldiers do is
by nature good and a blessing for the country they are destroying. Perhaps
the most dangerous lie of all is the belief that they are “our”
troops and that they serve “us.” The U.S. military is a state
within a state, in many ways similar to the Reichswehr of Germany’s Weimar Republic. It is a parallel
society of like-minded people whose collective worldview is far to the
right of that of the society that finances it. Politically this
organization is untouchable. Not a single politician at the national level
has the courage to challenge the Pentagon and its corporate masters. We
civilians pay for the military, but it takes its orders from ExxonMobil,
General Electric, Boeing, and a host of other corporations. And how we pay! The Pentagon’s budget for 2007
stands at a $462.7 billion, not including funding for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. This amounts to 52.7 percent of discretionary spending (not
including Social Security and Medicare) by the federal government. If one
includes funding for what is now known simply as “the long
war,” we spend more on our military than do all other nations on
Earth combined. Some more perspective: Whereas military spending
represents 52.7 percent of discretionary spending, education accounts for
6.5 percent ($57 billion) and health gets 6.1 percent ($53 billion).
According to the National Priorities Project, the $290 billion spent in
Iraq so far would have been enough to hire 5 million new public-school
teachers or provide 14 million full-ride scholarships to public
universities. This is a moral scandal, yet there is absolutely no chance
that our democratic system will address, much less correct, this problem.
The interests that own the military are the same interests that control the
American political system. Politicians who challenge the
military/capitalist complex quickly lose funding and are removed from
Washington. The Soviet Politburo was not less democratic than the system we
have now. Foreign threats have a tendency to miraculously appear
whenever the phrase “peace dividend” is tossed around in
Congress. In 1950, America was making plans to divert military spending to
social programs when the Korean War began. No sooner than that conflict had
ended was it decided that the supposed Soviet “missile gap” of
the late ’50s was cause for increased military spending. Vietnam was
wrapped up when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, once again opening the
floodgates for money to the Pentagon. The Soviet Union was falling apart
when it was decided that we absolutely had to oust Saddam Hussein from that
bastion of democracy, Kuwait. There is no civilian control over the Pentagon. Iraqi
resistance fighters have more influence over our foreign policy than we
Americans do. It appears likely that American troops will ultimately prove
to be “dead-enders” (as Donald Rumsfeld would say) in Iraq, but
the military/capitalist complex will continue to operate outside of civil
control. Short of economic collapse or complete military defeat, there is
no way that the beast can be put back in its cage. The road ahead could be rough.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2006.
