Washington is a war capital, and the United States is a war state

[eridani]

Nobody even thinks twice about whether such things as Northcom, Southcon, Centcom and Africom ought to even exist. What is the point of military hegemony over the entire planet?

http://www.truthout.org/091709I?n

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.

<snip>

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.

[ixion]

1. 'war' means the same thing it always has, the difference being

that we're not really fighting a 'war', we are, in essence, killing for fun and profit. :(

[RC]

2. Because we can.

"A piece of logic: If a country we attacked had never threatened us or our freedom, then necessarily our soldiers who die
there cannot have been defending us. They died for empire, not liberty." ~~
http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/253570/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This country is so obsessed with money and death. Overseas, we bomb and shoot innocent people who have done nothing to
deserve their fate and in this country we kill our own for profit by denying them health care or sending them to wars we
start. This nation's greatest export are arms and ammunition.

Can't we love our country without killing our soldiers? Can't we love our country without killing people around the world
for profit?

Spreading Freedom? What kind of freedom needs a gun barrel to enforce it? The wild West ended over a century ago. The mentality that accompanied it should have died then also. However the wild west mentality is still alive and well in the
minds of the paranoid, reality challenged war supporters. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Afghanistan has a few caves
and no government to speak of. With the tens of billions we spend on our military for wars and we can't find a man with
kidney disease in one of those caves? So we bomb wedding parties for something to show for the money? No wonder this
country is sliding into 3rd world status.

[Peace Patriot]

3. "...a land whose leaders looked with suspicion on the very idea of a standing army"

This article does what few others do--it busts through the delusion of our national political life to the reality of our national political life, and lays that reality bare.

It looks at the US with fresh eyes.

Most political articles shadow-box in a very confined space. Whether arguing from the left or from the right, certain assumptions are never questioned. Why we still have a "standing army" twenty years after the end of the "Cold War" (and why we had a "standing army" then) is one of those deep holes into which political commentators never look.

"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."

Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com is to be congratulated for writing something truly original, and asking the fundamental "Emperor has no clothes" questions: Why do we have a Pentagon? Why do we have this huge, utterly crippling "defense" budget? When was the last time the US military truly "defended" us? (They couldn't even defend our nation's capitol on 9/11. They couldn't even defend the Pentagon!) The once liberating army of Europe and Japan has turned color and become a dark aggressive force--indeed, a monster--that needs war and manufactures war to feed itself the flesh and blood that it lives on, and, worse yet, has become a standing temptation to our corporate tyrants to be hijacked for corporate resource wars.

The US military has become the opposite of what it once was--a citizen army mobilized to save ourselves and the world from Hitler's dreadful nazi war machine and Japan's imperialism. It has become a mercenary force in the service of imperialism with deeply disturbing and increasing strains of nazism, including the use of random torture for the purpose of terrorizing populations, the establishment of secret prisons around the world, the arrogant violation of national sovereignty in places we are not even "at war" with (the recent bombing of Sudan, the bombing of Ecuador last year using the Colombian military as the front, the snatching of citizens from the streets of foreign countries, even our allies, the assassination of foreign citizens deemed to be "terrorists"), and the conquest of entire countries and establishment of 'Vichy' governments. (And this is not confined to Iraq and Afghanistan--look at Colombia--our new 'South Vietnam'--where assets for Oil War II are being put in place.)

Not since Dwight Eisenhower warned of the threat to democracy posed by the "military-industrial complex" has anyone quite so brilliantly pointed out what the US military has become: a self-perpetuating industry. Engelhardt asks the right questions. Why do we have a "standing army"? Why is the answer to failed war (not to mention unjust, heinous war) always more war, not some other policy, say peace?

I just want to add one thought: The electronic voting machines that were fast-tracked into place during the 2002 to 2004 period had one main purpose, in my opinion, and that was to override the American peoples' opposition to the Iraq War (Feb '03, all polls--nearly 60% opposition), and to manufacture a false endorsement of that war and of other Bush/Cheney crimes such as torture, massive domestic spying, deregulation of every kind and massive looting by the rich. The vote 'counting' system that was rushed into place, all over the country, includes voting machines and central tabulators run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by a handful of far rightwing corporations--with virtually no audit/recount controls. And, to make matters worse, the e-voting corporation with the most hair-raising connections to far rightwing ideas (for instance, the death penalty for homosexuals), ES&S, just bought out Diebold and now has a monopoly over US elections. (See Bradblog for the map.)

Really, there is no question in my mind what 'TRADE SECRET' vote 'counting' was for--it was to override the American peoples' revulsion at unjust war. It is not the only thing wrong with our political system, but it is the final blockade to any reform that could curtail the use of the US military for corporate resource wars and other heinous purposes, and any other significant reform we have in mind. Our most fundamental power as a people--our vote--has been taken away and given to extremist rightwing corporations. And we cannot even begin to reform this country, and to make the question, "Why do we have a 'standing arm'?" the question of the century, on everyone's lips, until we restore transparent vote counting.

:patriot:

[evenso]

4. I'm beginning to think the US is the most dangerous country on the planet

You don't the Anglo-Americans protesting big government at the teabagger and 912 rallies talk about the growing size of our military. As they see it, this military power complex, with its 1000s of bases worldwide and foreign occupations is backing up their interests. That's big government they can believe in. You don't hear pastors at conservative christian churches and rightwing leaders like Dobson, Robertson and Reed speaking out against the abuses of their military and the increasing size of the Pentagon's budget. That is all according to their god's plan. America is infinitely good and Americanism - their true religion - is above questioning.

[bertman]

5. A BIG FAT REC for an excellent thread. This OP pretty much tells it all. But there is one

little piece of information that a lot of Americans do not know.

Our military leaders, the generals and admirals who run the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force, are not just military leaders but in many cases are corporate leaders and businessmen.

This came to my attention back in 1968 when I was stationed at Ft. Bragg. As is probably the case now, the 82nd Airborne and XVIII Corps wanted their paratroopers to be the most "strac" in the Army. "Strac" means sharp-looking and well-trained and ready for action. Part of that "strac" look was crisp, clean, neatly pressed uniforms--here I refer to "fatigues", the green work uniforms worn by soldiers at the time, not dress uniforms. So, most of the soldiers at Bragg had their uniforms laundered at one of the laundries around the base. Interestingly, I found out from a friend who was well-connected with some of the general staff that the laundries were owned by one of the high-ranking generals on base.

So, was the general just a savvy entrepeneur or was he using his authority to require starched and sharply-pressed fatigues to enrich himself by way of his personal business interests in the local community?

We also have a thriving "exchange" of talent between the civilian companies that develop and manufacture war materiel and the retired field-grade and general-grade officers who go to work for them after they leave the service. These jobs are very lucrative and provide a substantial bonanza in income and prestige for the officer corps.

Certainly it's a good thing to have the folks who use the weaponry and other materiel involved in development and testing. But what happens when the division between what's best for the military and what's best for the military contractors gets blurred to the point of being undetectable?

The other issue is the co-opting of retired military officers to serve as "consultants" and "advisors" to the corporate media. We all saw how blatantly these so-called "objective experts" skewed their analyses to match the Bush administration's propaganda needs during the runup to the invasions of Vietnamistan and Iraq.

War is BIG BUSINESS. War is a RACKET, just as General Smedley Butler said so many decades ago.

We have become THE Imperial power on the planet. Extricating ourselves from this tragic role will not be easy.