Postmodern Military & Permanent War - Douglas Kellner
Aiding & Abetting Militarism - Norman Solomon
Empire of Death & the Plague of Civic Violence - Darrell Hamamoto
The Real Axis of Evil - George Katsiaficas

excerpted from the book

Masters of War

Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire

edited by Carl Boggs

Routledge, 2003, paper

Postmodern Military and Permanent War
by Douglas Kellner

p239
Preemptive Strikes, Permanent War, and the New American Empire

In a speech to West Point cadets on June 1, 2002, George W. Bush proclaimed a new "doctrine" that the U.S. would strike first against enemies. It was soon apparent that this was a major shift in U.S. military policy, replacing the Cold War doctrine of containment and deterrence with a new policy of preemptive strikes, one that could be tried out in Iraq. U.S. allies were extremely upset with this shift in U.S. policy. In an article "Bush to Formalize a Defense Policy of Hitting First," David E. Sanger wrote in the New York Times (June 17, 2002) that: "The process of including America's allies has only just begun, and administration officials concede that it will be difficult at best. Leaders in Berlin, Paris and Beijing, in particular, have often warned against unilateralism. But Mr. Bush's new policy could amount to ultimate unilateralism, because it reserves the right to determine what constitutes a threat to American security and to act even if that threat is not judged imminent."

After a summer of limited debates on the prospects of the U.S. going to war against Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, on August 26, Cheney applied the new preemptive strike and unilateralist doctrine to Iraq, arguing: "What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness.... Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator or the two working together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action." Cheney was responding to many former generals and high-level members of the first Bush administration who had reservations about the sort of unilateralist U.S. attack against Iraq that hawks in the Bush administration were urging.

Bush and others in his circle regularly described Terror War as World War III, and Cheney, speaking like a true militarist, said it could go on for a "long long time, perhaps indefinitely." Such an Orwellian nightmare could plunge the world into a new millennium of escalating war with unintended consequences and embroil the U.S. in endless wars, normalizing war as conflict resolution and creating countless new enemies for the would-be American hegemon. Indeed, as Chalmers Johnson writes in Blowback, empire has hidden costs. Becoming hegemon breeds resentment and hostility and when the empire carries out aggression it elicits anger and creates enemies, intensifying the dangers of perpetual war.

p240
The Bush administration's language of "preemptive strikes," "regime change," and "anticipatory self-defense" is purely Orwellian, presenting euphemisms for raw military aggression. Critics assailed the new "strike first, ask questions later" policy, the belligerent unilateralism, and dangerous legitimation of preemptive strikes. Israel, Pakistan, Russia, China, and lesser powers had already used the so-called "Bush doctrine" and "war against terrorism" to legitimate attacks on domestic and external foes, and there were looming dangers that it could legitimate a proliferation of wars and make the world more unstable and violent. As William Galston states:

A global strategy based on the new Bush doctrine of preemption means the end of the system of international institutions, laws and norms that we have worked to build for more than half a century. What is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental shift in America's place in the world. Rather than continuing to serve as first among equals in the postwar international system, the United States would act as a law unto itself, creating new rules of international engagement without the consent of other nations. In my judgment, this new stance would ill serve the long-term interests of the United States.

The Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes could indeed unleash a series of wars that would plunge the world into the sort of nightmare militarism and totalitarianism sketched out in George Orwell's 1984. The Bush policy is highly barbaric, taking the global community to a Darwinian battleground where decades of international law and military prudence will be put aside in perhaps the most dangerous foreign policy doctrine in U.S. history. It portends a militarist future and an era of perpetual war in which a new militarism generates a cycle of unending violence and retribution of the sort evident in the Israel and Palestine conflict. Around the time the Bush administration was pushing its new strategic doctrine and seeking to apply it in a war against Iraq, a 2000 report circulated titled "Rebuilding American Defense: Strategies, Forces and Resources for A New American Century." Drawn up by the neoconservative think-tank Project for a New America Century (PNAC) for a group that now comprises the right wing of the Bush administration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, the document spelled out a plan for U.S. world hegemony grounded in U.S. military dominance of the world and control of the Persian Gulf region with its oil supplies. Its upfront goals were a "Pax Americana" and U.S. domination of the world during the new millennium. The document shows that core members of the Bush administration had long envisaged taking military control of the Gulf region, with the PNAC text stating: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC document argues for "maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of any great power rival, while shaping the international security order in accordance with American principles and interests."

p242
The Bush administration military doctrine of preemptive strikes and plans for world domination threatens to plunge the world into an Orwellian nightmare of perpetual wars, creating conditions for totalitarian government and a Hobbesian world in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.

Aiding and Abetting Militarism
by Norman Solomon

p245
Propaganda Machinery

"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing," Aldous Huxley observed long ago. "Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."

p245
In his book 1984, George Orwell described the mental dynamics: "The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies-all this is indispensably necessary."

p246
... media scrutiny of atrocities committed by the U.S. government is rare. Only some cruelties merit the spotlight. Only some victims deserve empathy. Only certain crimes against humanity are worth American tears.

p246
The victims of terrorism in America have been deserving of our deep compassion. So have the faraway victims of American foreign and military policies-human beings whose humanity has gone unrecognized within the U.S. media.

p247
The Committee to Protect Journalists included this assessment its "Attacks on the Press" annual report: "The actions taken by the Bush administration seemed to embolden repressive governments around the world to crack down on their own domestic media. In Russia, a presidential adviser said President Vladimir Putin planned to study U.S. limitations on reporting about terrorists in order to develop rules for Russian media."

p248
Exactly what qualifies as "terrorism"?

For this country's mainstream journalists, that turns out to be a non-question about a no-brainer. More than ever, the proper function of the "terrorist" label seems obvious. "A group of people commandeered airliners and used them as guided missiles against thousands of people," said NBC News executive Bill Wheatley. "If that doesn't fit the definition of terrorism, what does?" True enough. At the same time, it is noteworthy that American news outlets routinely define terrorism the same way that U.S. government officials define it. Editors usually assume that reporters have no need for any formal directive because the appropriate usage is simply understood. The Wall Street Journal does provide some guidelines, telling its staff that the word terrorist "should be used carefully, and specifically, to describe those people and nongovernmental organizations that plan and execute acts of violence against civilian or non combatant targets." In newsrooms across the U.S., media professionals would agree.

But, in sharp contrast, Reuters has adhered to a distinctive approach for decades. "As part of a policy to avoid the use of emotive words," the global news service says, "we do not use terms like 'terrorist' and 'freedom fighter' unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions, identity and background so that readers can make their own decision based on the facts."

p249
Evenhanded use of the "terrorist" label would mean sometimes affixing it directly on the U.S. government. During the past decade, from Iraq to Sudan to Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, Pentagon missiles have destroyed the lives of civilians just as innocent as those who perished on September 11, 2001. If journalists dare not call that "terrorism," then maybe the word should be retired from the media lexicon.

p249
In the spring of 2002, Thomas Friedman won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. The award came after many months when the syndicated New York Times columnist appeared on television more than ever, sharing his outlooks with viewers of Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Washington Week in Review, and other programs. "In the post-9/11 environment, the talk shows cannot get enough of Friedman," a Washington Post profile noted. Another media triumph came for Friedman in early 2002 with the debut of "Tom's Journal" on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. A news release from the influential PBS program described it as a "one-on-one debriefing of Friedman by Lehrer or one of the program's senior correspondents." Friedman was scheduled to appear perhaps a dozen times per year, after returning from major trips abroad. If he were as fervent about stopping wars as starting them, it is hard to imagine that a regular feature like "Tom's Journal" would be airing on the NewsHour.

Friedman has been a zealous advocate of "bombing Iraq, over and over and over again" (in the words of a January 1998 column).9 When he offered a pithy list of prescriptions for Washington's policymakers in 1999, it included: "Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who's in charge." But in an introduction to the book Iraq Under Siege, editor Anthony Arnove points out: "Every power station that is targeted means more food and medicine that will not be refrigerated, hospitals that will lack electricity, water that will be contaminated, and people who will die." Yet Friedman-style bravado goes over big with editors and network producers who share his complete disinterest in taking into account such human costs. Many journalists seem eager to fawn over their stratospheric colleague. "Nobody understands the world the way he does," NBC's Tim Russert claims.

At various times Friedman has become fixated on four words in particular. "My motto is very simple: Give war a chance," he told Diane Sawyer in late 2001 on Good Morning America. It was the same motto he had used two and a half years earlier in a Fox News interview. Different war; different enemy; different network; same solution. In the spring of 1999, as bombardment of Yugoslavia went on, Friedman recycled "Give war a chance" from one column to another. "Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around," he wrote in early April. "Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance." Another column included this gleeful approach for threatening civilians in Yugoslavia with protracted terror: "Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too." In November 2001, his column returned to a similar groove. "Let's all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war a chance. This is Afghanistan we're talking about."

Friedman seems to be crazy about wisps of craziness in high Washington places. He has a penchant for touting insanity as a helpful ingredient of U.S. foreign policy-some kind of passion for indications of derangement among those who call the military shots. During an October 13, 2001, appearance on CNBC, he said: "I was a critic of Rumsfeld before, but there's one thing . . . that I do like about Rumsfeld. He's just a little bit crazy, OK?-He's just a little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us, and I'm glad we got some guy on our bench that's our quarterback-who's just a little bit crazy, not totally, but you never know what that guy's going to do, and I say that's my guy."

And Friedman does not simply talk that way. He also writes that way. "There is a lot about the Bush team's foreign policy I don't like," a Friedman column declared in mid-February 2002, "but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right." Is Thomas Friedman clever? Perhaps. But not nearly as profound as a few words from W.H. Auden: "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."

p251

Just before 2001 ended, University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold released a report calculating that 3,767 Afghan civilians had been killed by the bombing from October 7 to December 10. (That figure was later revised to between 2,650 and 2,970 civilians.) Ignored by major U.S. media, the report got considerably more attention in Britain. "The price in blood that has already been paid for America's war against terror is only now starting to become clear. A starting to become clear," an editor at the Guardian in London wrote on December 20. Seumas Milne explained that Herold's research was "based on corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news agencies around the world." Milne added: "Of course, Herold's total is only an estimate. But what is impressive about his work is not only the meticulous cross-checking, but the conservative assumptions he applies to each reported incident. The figure does not include those who died later of bomb injuries; nor those killed in the past 10 days (December 10-20); nor those who have died from cold and hunger because of the interruption of aid supplies or because they were forced to become refugees by the bombardment."

But the civilian deaths resulting from American military action held little interest among the people in charge of major U.S.-based media outlets. After the first weeks of bombing, CNN chair Walter Isaacson sent a memo to the network's international correspondents telling them that it "seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan." Interviewed by a Washington Post reporter on October 30, Isaacson explained: "I want to make sure we're not used as a propaganda platform." He added: "We're entering a period in which there's a lot more reporting and video from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States."

p255
For a news watcher, coverage of the United Nations is liable to be confusing at times. Is the UN a vital institution or a dysfunctional relic? Are its Security Council resolutions profoundly important for international relations-or beside the point because global leadership now winds up coming from the world's only superpower?

Americans kept hearing that the United States would need to launch a full-scale attack on Iraq because Saddam Hussein had violated UN Security Council resolutions-at the same time that we were told the U.S. government must reserve the right to take military action unilaterally if the Security Council failed to make appropriate decisions about Iraq. To clarify the situation, here are three basic guidelines for understanding how to respond in sync with America's leading politicians and pundits:

* The UN resolutions approved by the five permanent members of the Security Council are hugely important, and worthy of enforcement with massive military force-if the White House says so. Otherwise, the resolutions have little or no significance, and they certainly can never be allowed to interfere with the flow of American economic, military, and diplomatic support to any of Washington's allies.

Several countries have continued to ignore large numbers of resolutions approved by the UN Security Council since the early 1990s. Morocco remains in violation of more than a dozen such resolutions. So does Israel. And Turkey continues to violate quite a few. But top officials in Rabat, Jerusalem, and Ankara are not really expecting ultimatums from Washington anytime soon.

* Some UN resolutions are sacred. Others are superfluous.

To cut through the media blather about Security Council resolutions that have been approved in past years, just keep this in mind: In the world according to American news media, the president of the United States has Midas-like powers in relation to those UN resolutions. When he confers his holy touch upon one, it turns into a golden rule that must be enforced. When he chooses not to bless other UN resolutions, they lose all value.

* The United Nations can be extremely "relevant" or "irrelevant," depending on the circumstances.

When the UN serves as a useful instrument of U.S. foreign policy, it is a vital world body taking responsibility for the future and reaffirming its transcendent institutional vision. When the UN balks at serving as a useful instrument of U.S. foreign policy, its irrelevance is so obvious that it risks collapsing into the dustbin of history while the USA proceeds to stride the globe like the superpower colossus that it truly is.

"There's a lot of lofty rhetoric here in Washington about the UN," said Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies. Pretty words function as window-dressing for warmaking. While the president claimed the right to violently enforce UN Security Council resolutions, Leaver added, "there are almost 100 current Security Council resolutions that are being ignored, in addition to the 12 or so resolutions that Iraq is ignoring. What the U.S. is saying here is that it has the right to determine which Security Council resolutions are relevant and which are not."

Leaver was outside the usual media box when he brought up a key question: "If the U.S. takes military action using the cover of the United Nations, what is to prevent other countries from launching their own military attacks in the name of enforcement of UN resolutions-against Turkey in Cyprus, or Morocco in Western Sahara, or Israel in Palestine? This is precisely the reason why the doctrine of preemptive force is a dangerous policy for the United States to pursue."

Patriarachal Militarism
by R. Claire Snyder

p261
... since September 11th, both the neoliberal and social-conservative wings within the Republican party have been deliberately fueling the forces of militarism in order to advance their long-standing political agendas-protecting corporate interests and reconsolidating male dominance-with precious little resistance from the Democratic party.

Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence
by Darrell Y Hamamoto

p281
"A Few Good Men"

The influence of the U.S. military and its allied institutions on the larger American society and culture runs deep. It began with the holocaust of forced removal and exterminationist wars against Native Americans that continued until the latter part of the nineteenth century and soon thereafter expanded overseas into Asia with the conquest and colonization of the Philippines, where an estimated 200,000 civilians were killed. Not until World War II and the period immediately following, however, did the militarization of civilian society begin in earnest, as powerful political and economic interests combined to realize the vision of a world capitalist order led by the U.S. and sustained mainly by force both at home and abroad. Since the end of World War II, more than fifty major military interventions have been staged both directly and through client states in every region of the world. The retaliatory bombing raids against Afghanistan following the terror attacks launched on U.S. homeland on September 11, 2001, are but the latest in a succession of military strikes in support of the permanent warfare state.

p289
Mass Murder Elite

A recently published indictment against Henry Kissinger offers convincing proof that the former National Security Adviser (later Secretary of State) qualifies as a "war criminal" in accordance with the principles of international human rights law. The indiscriminate bombing of neutral nations during the Vietnam War ordered by Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon had devastating consequences for the victims of their cynical political ploys. "As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns," writes Christopher Hitchens, "it has been estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in Cambodia, lost their lives." To this day bombs and land mines maim and kill those unfortunate enough to stumble across the tons of ordnance that remain undetonated thirty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War. In addition, chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange continue to plague the civilian population with serious health problems, including high rates of stillbirths and physical abnormalities among the newborn.

While the list of particulars lodged against former Harvard University professor Kissinger offers irrefutable proof of his central role in inflicting death and destruction upon sovereign states deemed to be crucial U.S. strategic assets, he is but one figure (albeit an especially evil one) within the larger system of imperial conquest and control conceived and managed by the foreign policy and defense elite. Equally culpable are the foreign policy intellectuals (recruited by President John F. Kennedy and later to work for his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson) who decided the fate of colonized Southeast Asian nations struggling to regain national independence within the postwar world order. In his memoirs, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara credits National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy with convincing Johnson to accelerate and intensify the bombing campaign in Vietnam. In three years, "Operation Rolling Thunder" was responsible for more bombs being dropped on Vietnam than on all of Europe during World War II. Yet McNamara (at the risk of playfully offending his admitted "friend" Henry Kissinger) describes his former associate Bundy as "by far the ablest national security adviser I have observed over the last forty years."

In ordering the extermination of human life with such utter callousness, elite policy intellectuals and high-level government bureaucrats such as McNamara and Bundy demonstrate that there is little indeed that separates them from the more notorious mass murderers. Only the grand scale and technocratic impersonality of the crimes conceived and directed by the ruling elite acting under cover of state authority distinguish them from garden variety killers.

The Real Axis of Evil
by George Katsiaficas

p343
No matter who sits in the White House, whether George Bush or Bill Clinton or someone else, militarism has long been and will surely remain at the center of U.S. foreign policy and economic development. The U.S. Congress has been little better than Bush: among other things, it rejected the nuclear test ban treaty signed by 164 nations and has fully endorsed Bush's foreign policy on every issue. With Congressional funding, the U.S. now has over 250,000 troops in 141 countries ...

p344
In a phrase, military madness defines the mentality of leading U.S. decision-makers.

p347
... the real axis of evil is composed of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

p350
According to the United Nations, in \ the 1990s more than 100 million children under the age of five died of unnecessary causes: diarrhea, whooping cough, tetanus, pneumonia, and measles- diseases easily preventable through cheap vaccines or simply clean water. UNICEF estimates that up to 30,000 children under the age of five die of easily preventable diseases every day in the Third World. Kofi Annan declared in 2001 that as many as 24,000 people starve to death every day. Altogether one billion people are chronically malnourished while austerity measures imposed by the IMF have resulted in a drop in real wages in the Third World and declining gross national products in many countries. While 70 percent of the world's wealth is in the hands of 20 percent of its population, one in ten human beings suffers starvation and malnutrition.

Despite-or more accurately, because of-the spatial extension of liberal values in the period after World War II, there were four times as many deaths from wars in the forty years after World War II than in the forty years before it. While the world spends something like a trillion dollars a year on its militaries, one adult in three cannot read and write, one person in four is hungry, the AIDS epidemic accelerates, and we are destroying the planet's ecological capacity to sustain life. The absurdity and tragedy of such a world is made even more absurd and tragic by the profound ignorance and insensitivity of the wealthiest planetary citizens regarding the terrible plight of human beings in the periphery.

In such a world, of course, there can be no lasting peace. As long as the wretched of the earth, those at the margins of the world system, are dehumanized, branded as terrorists, and kept out of decision-making, they have no alternative but to carry out insurrection and wage war in order to find justice. In order to remedy this irrational system, a crucial task is to redefine what civilization means. We know what it is not for the billion or more "wretched of the earth" for whom increasing planetary centralization and dependence upon transnational corporations, militarized nation-states, and the international axis of evil mean living hell. With the passing of time it becomes more obvious that this same "civilization" squanders humanity's wealth, destroys traditional cultures wholesale, and plunders the planet's natural resources.

Masters of War

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