In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, U.S.A., to be instructed in the glories of our political system.\u00a0 You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy.\u00a0 There was, Americans then thought, much to be proud of, and so for that generation of children, many Martians were instructed in the American way of life.\u00a0 These days, I suspect, not so many.<\/p>\n
Still, I wondered just what lessons might be offered to such a Martian crash-landing in Washington as 2014 begins.\u00a0 Certainly checks, balances, rights, and democracy wouldn\u2019t top any New Year\u2019s list.\u00a0 Since my childhood, in fact, that tripartite government has grown a fourth part, a national security state that is remarkably unchecked and unbalanced.\u00a0 In recent times, that labyrinthine structure of intelligence agencies morphing into war-fighting outfits, the U.S. military (with its own secret military, the special operations forces<\/a>, gestating inside it), and the Department of Homeland Security, a monster conglomeration of agencies that is an actual \u201cdefense department,\u201d as well as a vast contingent of weapons makers, contractors, and profiteers bolstered by an army of lobbyists, has never stopped growing.\u00a0 It has won the undying fealty of Congress, embraced the power of the presidency, made itself into a jobs program for the American people, and been largely free to do as it pleased with almost unlimited taxpayer dollars.<\/p>\n The expansion of Washington\u2019s national security state — let\u2019s call it the NSS — to gargantuan proportions has historically met little opposition.\u00a0 In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations<\/a>, however, some resistance has arisen, especially when it comes to the \u201cright\u201d of one part of the NSS to turn the world into a listening post<\/a> and gather, in particular, American communications of every sort.\u00a0 The debate about this — invariably framed within the boundaries of whether or not we should have more security or more privacy and how exactly to balance the two — has been reasonably vigorous.\u00a0 The problem is: it doesn\u2019t begin to get at the real nature of the NSS or the problems it poses.<\/p>\n If I were to instruct that stray Martian lost in the nation\u2019s capital, I might choose another framework entirely for my lesson.\u00a0 After all, the focus of the NSS, which has like an incubus grown to monumental proportions inside the body of the political system, would seem distinctly monomaniacal, if only we could step outside our normal way of thinking for a moment.\u00a0 At a cost of nearly a trillion dollars<\/a> a year, its main global enemy consists of thousands of lightly armed jihadis<\/em> and wannabe jihadis<\/em> scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet.\u00a0 They are capable of causing genuine damage — though far less to the United States than numerous other countries<\/a> — but not of shaking our way of life.\u00a0 And yet for the leaders, bureaucrats, corporate cronies, rank and file, and acolytes<\/a> of the NSS, it\u2019s a focus that can never be intense enough on behalf of a system that can never grow large enough or be well funded enough.<\/p>\n None of the frameworks we normally call on to understand the national security state capture the irrationality, genuine inanity, and actual madness that lie at its heart.\u00a0 Perhaps reimagining what has developed in these last decades as a faith-based system — a new national religion — would help.\u00a0 This, at least, is the way I would explain the new Washington to that wayward Martian.<\/p>\n Holy Warriors<\/strong><\/p>\n Imagine what we call \u201cnational security\u201d as, at heart, a proselytizing warrior religion.\u00a0 It has its holy orders.\u00a0 It has its sacred texts (classified).\u00a0 It has its dogma and its warrior priests.\u00a0 It has its sanctified promised land, known as \u201cthe homeland.\u201d\u00a0 It has its seminaries, which we call think tanks.\u00a0 It is a monotheistic faith in that it broaches no alternatives to itself.\u00a0 It is Manichaean in its view of the world.\u00a0 As with so many religions, its god is an eye in the sky, an all-seeing Being who knows your secrets.<\/p>\n Edward Snowden, the man who in 2013 pulled back the curtain on part of this system, revealing its true nature to anyone who cared to look, is an apostate, never to be forgiven by those in its holy orders.\u00a0 He is a Judas to be hunted down, returned to the U.S., put on trial as a \u201ctraitor<\/a>,\u201d and then — so say some retired NSS warriors (who often channel the opinions and feelings of those still in office) — hung<\/a> by the neck until dead or swung<\/a> \u201cfrom a tall oak tree.\u201d<\/p>\n Al-Qaeda is, of course, the system\u2019s Devil, whose evil seed is known to land and breed anywhere on the planet from Sana’a, Yemen, to Boston, Massachusetts, if we are not eternally and ever more on guard.\u00a0 In the name of the epic global struggle against it and the need to protect the homeland, nothing is too much, no step taken a point too far.\u00a0 (As the Devil is traditionally a shape-shifter, able to manifest himself in many forms, it is, however, possible that tomorrow\u2019s version of him may be, say, China.)<\/p>\n The leaders of this faith-based system are, not surprisingly, fundamentalist true believers.\u00a0 They don\u2019t wear long beards, wave the Koran, shout \u201cDeath to the Great Satan,\u201d or live in the backlands of the planet.\u00a0 Instead, they speak bureaucratically<\/a>, tend to sport military uniforms and medals, and inhabit high-tech government facilities.\u00a0 Fundamentalist as they are, they may not, in the normal sense, be religious at all.\u00a0 They are not obliged to believe in the importance of being \u201cborn again\u201d or fear being \u201cleft behind\u201d in a future End Times — though such beliefs don\u2019t disqualify them<\/a> either.<\/p>\n They issue the equivalent of fatwas<\/em> against those they proclaim to be their enemies.\u00a0 They have a set of Sharia-like laws, both immutable and flexible.\u00a0 Punishments for breaking them may not run to stoning to death or the cutting off of hands, but they do involve the cutting off of lives<\/a>.<\/p>\n Theirs is an implacable warrior religion, calling down retribution on people often seen only poorly<\/a> by video feed, thousands of miles distant from Washington, D.C., Langley<\/a>, Virginia, or Fort Meade<\/a>, <\/strong>Maryland.\u00a0 It\u2019s no mistake that the weapons fired by their fleet of drone aircraft are called Hellfire missiles<\/a>, since it is indeed hellfire and brimstone that they believe they are delivering to the politically sinful of the world.\u00a0 Nor is it a happenstance that the planes which fire those missiles have been dubbed Predators and Reapers (as in \u201cGrim\u201d), for they do see themselves as the annointed deliverers of Death to their enemies.<\/p>\n While they have a powerful urge to maintain the faith the American public has in them, they also believe deeply that they know best, that their knowledge is the Washington equivalent of God-given, and that the deepest mysteries and secrets of their faith should be held close indeed.<\/p>\n Until you enter their orders and rise into their secret world, there is such a thing as too-much knowledge.\u00a0 As a result, they have developed a faith-based system of secrecy<\/a> in which the deepest mysteries have, until recently, been held by the smallest numbers of believers, in which problems are adjudicated in a \u201ccourt\u201d system<\/a> so secret that only favored arguments by the national security state can be presented to its judges, in which just about any document produced, no matter how anodyne, will be classified<\/a> as too dangerous to be read by \u201cthe people.\u201d\u00a0 This has meant that, until recently, most assessments of the activities of the national security state have to be taken on faith.<\/p>\n In addition, in the service of that faith, NSS officials may — and their religion permits this — lie to and manipulate<\/a> the public, Congress, allies, or anyone else, and do so without compunction.\u00a0 They may publicly deny realities they know to exist, or offer, as Conor Friedersdorf has written<\/a>, statements \u201cexquisitely crafted to mislead.\u201d They do this based on the belief<\/a> that the deepest secrets of their world and how it operates can only truly be understood by those already inducted into their orders.\u00a0 And yet, they are not simply manipulating us in service to their One True Faith.\u00a0 Nothing is ever that simple.\u00a0 Before they manipulate us, they must spend years manipulating themselves.\u00a0 Only because they have already convinced themselves of the deeper truth of their mission do they accept the necessity of manipulating others in what still passes for a democracy.\u00a0 To serve the people, in other words, they have no choice but to lie to them.<\/p>\n Like other religious institutions in their heyday, the NSS has also shown a striking ability to generate support for its ever-growing structure by turning itself into a lucrative global operation.\u00a0 In a world where genuine enemies are in remarkably short supply (though you\u2019d never know it from the gospel according to them), it has exhibited remarkable skill in rallying those who might support it financially, whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, and ensuring, even in budgetary tough times, that its coffers will continue<\/a> to burst at the seams.<\/p>\n It has also worked hard to expand what, since 1961<\/a>, has been known as the military-industrial complex.\u00a0 In the twenty-first century, the NSS has put special effort into subsidizing warrior corporations<\/a> ready to enter the global battlefield<\/a> with it.\u00a0 In the process, it has \u201cprivatized\u201d — that is, corporatized — its global operations.\u00a0 It has essentially merged with a set of crony outfits that now do a significant part of its work.\u00a0 It has hired private contractors by the tens of thousands<\/a>, creating corporate spies<\/a>, corporate analysts<\/a>, corporate <\/a>mercenaries<\/a>, corporate builders<\/a>, and corporate providers<\/a> for a structure that is increasingly becoming the profit-center of a state within a state.\u00a0 All of this, in turn, helps to support a growing theocratic warrior class in the luxury<\/a> to which it has become accustomed.<\/p>\n Since 9\/11, the result has been a religion of perpetual conflict whose doctrines tend to grow ever more extreme.\u00a0 In our time, for instance, the NSS has moved from Dick Cheney\u2019s \u201c1% doctrine<\/a>\u201d (if there\u2019s even a 1% chance that some country might someday attack us, we should strike first) to something like a \u201c0% doctrine.\u201d\u00a0 Whether in its drone wars with their presidential \u201ckill lists\u201d<\/a> or the cyber war<\/a> — probably the first in history — that it launched<\/a> against Iran, it no longer cares to argue most of the time that such strikes need even a 1% justification.\u00a0 Its ongoing, self-proclaimed global war, whether on the ground<\/a> or in the air, in person or by drone, in space or cyberspace (where its newest military command<\/a> is already in action) is justification enough for just about any act, however aggressive.<\/p>\n Put all this together and what you have is a description of a militant organization whose purpose is to carry out a Washington version of global jihad<\/em>, a perpetual war in the name of the true faith.<\/p>\n A Practical Failure, A Faith-Based Success Story<\/strong><\/p>\n Looked at another way, the national security state is also a humongous humbug, a gigantic fraud of a belief system that only delivers because its followers never choose to look at the world through Martian eyes.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with its gargantuan side. \u00a0No matter how you cut it, the NSS is a Ripley\u2019s Believe It or Not of staggering numbers that, once you step outside its thought system, don\u2019t add up.\u00a0 The U.S. national defense budget is estimated to be larger than those of the next 13 countries combined<\/a> — that is, <\/strong>simply off-the-charts more expensive.\u00a0 The U.S. Navy has 11<\/a> aircraft carrier strike groups when no other country has more than two<\/a>.\u00a0 No other national security outfit can claim to sweep up<\/a> \u201cnearly five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world\u201d; nor, like the National Security Agency\u2019s Special Source Operations group in 2006, boast<\/a> about being capable of ingesting the equivalent of \u201cone Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds\u201d; nor does it have any competitors when it comes to constructing<\/a> \u201cbuilding complexes for top-secret intelligence work\u201d (33 in the Washington area alone between 2001 and 2010).\u00a0 And its building programs around the U.S.<\/a> and globally<\/a> are never-ending.<\/p>\n It is creating a jet fighter that will be the most expensive<\/a> weapons system in history.\u00a0 Its weapons makers controlled 78%<\/a> of the global arms market in 2012.\u00a0 When its military departed Iraq after eight years of invasion and occupation, it left with three million objects<\/a> ranging from armored vehicles to laptop computers and porta-potties (and destroyed or handed over to the Iraqis countless more).\u00a0 In a world where other countries have, at best, a handful of military bases outside their territory, it has countless hundreds<\/a>.\u00a0 In 2011 alone, it managed to classify 92,064,862<\/a> of the documents it generated, giving secrecy a new order of magnitude.\u00a0 And that\u2019s just to dip a toe in the ocean of a national security state that dwarfs the one which fought the Cold War against an actual imperial superpower.<\/p>\n Again, if you were to step outside the world of NSS dogma and the arguments that go with it, such numbers — and they are legion — would surely represent one of the worst investments in modern memory.\u00a0 If a system of this sort weren\u2019t faith-based, and if that faith weren\u2019t widespread and deeply accepted (even if now possibly on the wane<\/a>), people would automatically look at such numbers and the results they deliver and ask why, for all its promises of safety and security, the NSS so regularly fails to deliver. \u00a0And why the response to failure can always be encapsulated in one word: more.<\/p>\n After all, if the twenty-first century has taught us anything, it\u2019s that the most expensive and over-equipped military on the planet can\u2019t win<\/a> a war.\u00a0 Its two multi-trillion-dollar<\/a> attempts since 9\/11, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both against lightly armed minority insurgencies, proved disasters. (In Iraq, however, despite an ignominious U.S. pullout<\/a> and the chaos that has followed in the region, the NSS and its supporters have continued to promote the idea that General David Petraeus\u2019s \u201csurge\u201d<\/a> was indeed some kind of historic last-minute \u201cvictory.\u201d)<\/p>\n After 12 long years in Afghanistan and an Obama era surge<\/a> in that country, the latest grim National Intelligence Estimate<\/a> from the U.S. intelligence community suggests that no matter what Washington now does, the likelihood is that things there will only go from bad enough to far worse.\u00a0 Years of a drone campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has strengthened<\/a> that organization; an air intervention in Libya led to chaos, a dead ambassador<\/a>, and a growing<\/a> al-Qaeda movement in northern Africa — and so it repetitively goes.<\/p>\n Similarly, intelligence officials brag of terrorist plots — 54<\/a> of them! — that have been broken up thanks in whole or in part to the National Security Agency\u2019s metadata sweeps of U.S. phone calls; it also claims that, given the need of secrecy, only four of them can be made public.\u00a0 (The claims of success on even those four, when examined by journalists, have proved less than impressive<\/a>.)\u00a0 Meanwhile, the presidential task force charged with reviewing the NSA revelations, which had access to a far wider range of insider information, came to an even more startling conclusion<\/a>: not one instance could be found in which that metadata the NSA was storing in bulk had thwarted a terrorist plot. \u201cOur review,\u201d the panel wrote, \u201csuggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks.\u201d (And keep in mind that, based on what we do know about such terror plots, a surprising number of them were planned or sparked or made possible by FBI-inspired plants<\/a>.)<\/p>\n In fact, claims of success against such plots couldn\u2019t be more faith-based, relying as they generally do on the word of intelligence officials who have proven themselves untrustworthy or on the impossible-to-prove-or-disprove claim that if such a system didn\u2019t exist, far worse would have happened.\u00a0 That version of a success story is well summarized in the claim<\/a> that \u201cwe didn\u2019t have another 9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, in bang-for-the-buck practical terms, Washington\u2019s national security state should be viewed as a remarkable failure.\u00a0 And yet, in faith-based terms, it couldn\u2019t be a greater success.\u00a0 Its false gods are largely accepted by acclamation and regularly worshiped in Washington and beyond.\u00a0 As the funding continues to pour in, the NSS has transformed itself into something like a shadow government in that city, while precluding from all serious discussion the possibility of its own future dismantlement or of what could replace it.\u00a0 It has made other options ephemeral and more immediate dangers<\/a> than terrorism to the health and wellbeing of Americans seem, at best, secondary.\u00a0 It has pumped fear into the American soul.\u00a0 It is a religion of state power.<\/p>\n No Martian could mistake it for anything else.<\/p>\n _______________________<\/p>\n Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and author of <\/em>The United States of Fear<\/a> as well as a history of the Cold War, <\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>, runs the Nation Institute’s <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is <\/em>Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt<\/i><\/p>\n