{"id":73657,"date":"2016-05-16T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=73657"},"modified":"2016-05-15T16:52:24","modified_gmt":"2016-05-15T15:52:24","slug":"washingtons-military-addiction-and-the-ruins-still-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/washingtons-military-addiction-and-the-ruins-still-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"Washington\u2019s Military Addiction – And the Ruins Still to Come"},"content":{"rendered":"

12 May 2016 – <\/em>There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then there are the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let me concoct an example for you:<\/p>\n

\u201cTop American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up the fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly sending more U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington confirmed the second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh wait, that was actually the lead sentence in a May 3rd Washington Times<\/em> piece<\/a> by Carlo Mu\u00f1oz. \u00a0Honestly, though, it could have been written anytime in the last few months by just about anyone paying any attention whatsoever, and it surely will prove reusable in the months to come (with casualty figures altered, of course).\u00a0 The sad truth is that across the Greater Middle East and expanding parts of Africa, a similar set of lines could be written ahead of time about the use of Special Operations forces, drones, advisers, whatever, as could the sorry results of making such moves in [add the name of your country of choice here].<\/p>\n

Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing anything but worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking has become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked \u201csolutions\u201d and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking, over-armed soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.<\/p>\n

How Much, How Many, How Often, and How Destructively\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Iraq and Syria, it\u2019s been mission creep all the way.\u00a0 The B-52s<\/a> barely made it to the battle zone for the first time and were almost instantaneously in the air, attacking Islamic State militants.\u00a0 U.S. firebases are built ever closer<\/a> to the front lines.\u00a0 The number of special ops forces continues to edge up<\/a>.\u00a0 American weapons flow in (ending up in god knows whose hands<\/a>). \u00a0American trainers and advisers follow in ever increasing numbers, and those numbers are repeatedly fiddled with<\/a> to deemphasize how many of them are actually there.\u00a0 The private contractors<\/a> begin to arrive in numbers never to be counted.\u00a0 The local forces being trained or retrained<\/a> have their usual problems<\/a> in battle<\/a>.\u00a0 American troops and advisers who were never, never<\/a> going to be \u201cin combat\u201d or \u201cboots on the ground\u201d themselves now have their boots distinctly on the ground in combat situations<\/a>.\u00a0 The first American casualties are dribbling in<\/a>.\u00a0 Meanwhile, conditions in tottering Iraq and the former nation of Syria grow ever murkier, more chaotic, and less amenable by the week to any solution American officials might care for.<\/p>\n

And the response to all this in present-day Washington?<\/p>\n

You know perfectly well what the sole imaginable response can be: sending in yet more weapons, boots, air power, special ops types<\/a>, trainers, advisers, private contractors, drones, and funds to increasingly chaotic conflict zones across significant swaths of the planet.\u00a0 Above all, there can be no serious thought, discussion, or debate about how such a militarized approach to our world might have contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the very problems it was meant to solve. Not in our nation\u2019s capital, anyway.<\/p>\n

The only questions to be argued about are how much, how many, how often, and how destructively.\u00a0 In other words, the only \u201cantiwar\u201d position imaginable in Washington, where accusations of weakness or wimpishness are a dime a dozen and considered lethal to a political career, is how much less of more we can afford, militarily speaking, or how much more of somewhat less we can settle for when it comes to militarized death and destruction.\u00a0 Never, of course, is a genuine version of less or a none-at-all option really on that \u201ctable<\/a>\u201d where, it\u2019s said, all policy options are kept.<\/p>\n

Think of this as Washington\u2019s military addiction in action.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been watching it for almost 15 years<\/a> without drawing any of the obvious conclusions.\u00a0 And lest you imagine that \u201caddiction\u201d is just a figure of speech, it isn\u2019t. \u00a0Washington\u2019s attachment — financial, tactical, and strategic — to the U.S. military and its supposed solutions to more or less all problems in what used to be called \u201cforeign policy\u201d should by now be categorized as addictive.\u00a0 Otherwise, how can you explain the last decade and a half in which no military action<\/a> from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to Libya worked out half-well in the long run (or even, often enough, in the short run), and yet the U.S. military remains<\/a> the option of first, not last, resort in just about any imaginable situation?\u00a0 All this in a vast region in which failed states<\/a> are piling up, nations are disintegrating, terror insurgencies are spreading, humongous population upheavals are becoming the norm, and there are refugee flows<\/a> of a sort not seen since significant parts of the planet were destroyed during World War II.<\/p>\n

Either we\u2019re talking addictive behavior or failure is the new success.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind, for instance, that the president who came into office swearing he would end a disastrous war and occupation in Iraq is now overseeing a new war in an even wider region that includes Iraq, a country that is no longer<\/a> quite a country, and Syria, a country that is now officially kaput.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in the other war he inherited, Barack Obama almost immediately launched a military-backed \u201csurge\u201d of U.S. forces, the only real argument being over whether 40,000<\/a> (or even as many as 80,000<\/a>) new U.S. troops would be sent into Afghanistan or, as the \u201cantiwar\u201d president finally decided, a mere 30,000 (which made him an absolute wimp to his opponents).\u00a0 That was 2009.\u00a0 Part of that surge involved an announcement<\/a> that the withdrawal of American combat forces would begin in 2011.\u00a0 Seven years later, that withdrawal has once again been halted<\/a> in favor of what the military has taken to privately calling a \u201cgenerational approach<\/a>\u201d — that is, U.S. forces remaining in Afghanistan into at least the 2020s.<\/p>\n

The military term \u201cwithdrawal\u201d may, however, still be appropriate even if the troops are staying in place.\u00a0 After all, as with addicts of any sort, the military ones in Washington can\u2019t go cold turkey without experiencing painful symptoms of withdrawal.\u00a0 In American political culture, these manifest themselves in charges of \u201cweakness\u201d when it comes to \u201cnational security\u201d that could prove devastating in the next election.\u00a0 That\u2019s why those running for office compete with one another in over-the-top descriptions of what they will do to enemies and terrorists (from acts of torture<\/a> to carpet-bombing<\/a>) and in even more over-the-top promises<\/a> of \u201crebuilding<\/a>\u201d or \u201cstrengthening\u201d what\u2019s already the largest, most expensive military on the planet, a force better funded at present than those of at least the next seven<\/a> nations combined.<\/p>\n

Such promises, the bigger the better, are now a necessity if you happen to be a Republican candidate for president.\u00a0 The Democrats have a lesser but similar set of options available, which is why even Bernie Sanders only calls<\/a> for holding the Pentagon budget at its present staggering level or for the most modest<\/a> of cuts, not for reducing it significantly.\u00a0 And even when, for instance, the urge to rein in military expenses did sweep Washington as part of an overall urge to cut back government expenses, it only resulted in a half-secret slush fund<\/a> or \u201cwar budget\u201d that kept the goodies flowing in.<\/p>\n

These should all be taken as symptoms of Washington\u2019s military addiction and of what happens when the slightest signs of withdrawal set in.\u00a0 The U.S. military is visibly the drug of choice in the American political arena and, as is only appropriate for the force that has, since 2002, funded<\/a>, armed, and propped up the planet\u2019s largest supplier<\/a> of opium, once you\u2019re hooked, there\u2019s no shaking it.<\/p>\n

Hawkish Washington<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently, in the New York Times Magazine<\/em>, journalist Mark Landler offered a political portrait entitled<\/a> \u201cHow Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk.\u201d\u00a0 He laid out just how the senator and later secretary of state remade herself as, essentially, a military groupie, fawning over commanders or former commanders ranging from then-General David Petraeus to Fox analyst and retired general Jack Keane; how, that is, she became a figure, even on the present political landscape, notable for her \u201cappetite for military engagement abroad\u201d (and as a consequence, well-defended against Republican charges of \u201cweakness\u201d).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no reason, however, to pin the war-lover or \u201clast true hawk\u201d label on her alone, not in present-day Washington.\u00a0 After all, just about everyone there wants a piece of the action.\u00a0 During their primary season debates, for instance, a number of the Republican candidates spoke<\/a> repeatedly about building up the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, while making that already growing force sound like a set of decrepit barges.<\/p>\n

To offer another example, no presidential candidate these days could afford to reject the White House-run drone assassination program.\u00a0 To be assassin-in-chief<\/a> is now considered as much a part of the presidential job description as commander-in-chief, even though the drone program, like so many other militarized foreign policy operations these days, shows<\/a> little sign of reining in<\/a> terrorism despite the number of \u201cbad guys\u201d and terror \u201cleaders<\/a>\u201d it kills (along with significant numbers<\/a> of civilian bystanders<\/a>).\u00a0 To take Bernie Sanders as an example — because he\u2019s as close to an antiwar candidate as you\u2019ll find in the present election season — he recently put<\/a> something like his stamp of approval<\/a> on the White House drone assassination project and the \u201ckill list<\/a>\u201d that goes with it.<\/p>\n

Mind you, there is simply no compelling evidence that the usual military solutions have worked or are likely to work in any imaginable sense in the present conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa.\u00a0 They have clearly, in fact, played a major role in the creation of the present disaster, and yet there is no place at all in our political system for genuinely antiwar figures (as there was in the Vietnam era, when a massive antiwar movement<\/a> created space for such politics).\u00a0 Antiwar opinions and activities have now been driven to the peripheries of the political system along with a word like, say, \u201cpeace,\u201d which you will be hard-pressed to find, even rhetorically, in the language of \u201cwartime\u201d Washington.<\/p>\n

The Look of \u201cVictory\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

If a history were to be written of how the U.S. military became Washington\u2019s drug of choice, it would undoubtedly have to begin in the Cold War era.\u00a0 It was, however, in the prolonged moment of triumphalism that followed the Soviet Union\u2019s implosion in 1991 that the military gained its present position of unquestioned dominance.<\/p>\n

In those days, people were still speculating about whether the country would reap a \u201cpeace dividend\u201d from the end of the Cold War. If there was ever a moment when the diversion of money from the U.S. military and the national security state to domestic concerns might have seemed like a no-brainer, that was it.\u00a0 After all, except for a couple of rickety \u201crogue states\u201d like North Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where exactly were this country\u2019s enemies to be found?\u00a0 And why should such a muscle-bound military continue to gobble up tax dollars at such a staggering rate in a reasonably peaceable world?<\/p>\n

In the decade or so that followed, however, Washington\u2019s dreams turned out to run in a very different direction — toward a \u201cwar dividend\u201d at a moment when the U.S. had, by more or less universal agreement, become the planet\u2019s \u201csole superpower.\u201d\u00a0 The crew who entered the White House with George W. Bush in a deeply contested election in 2000 had already been mainlining<\/a> the military drug for years.\u00a0 To them, this seemed a planet ripe for the taking. \u00a0When 9\/11 hit, it loosed their dreams of conquest and control, and their faith<\/a> in a military that they believed to be unstoppable.\u00a0 Of course, given the previous century of successful anti-imperial and national independence movements, anyone should have known that, no matter the armaments at hand, resistance was an inescapable reality on Planet Earth.<\/p>\n

Thanks to such predictable resistance, the drug-induced imperial dreamscape of the Busheviks would prove a fantasy of the first order, even if, in that post-9\/11 moment, it passed for bedrock (neo)realism.\u00a0 If you remember, the U.S. was to \u201ctake the gloves off<\/a>\u201d and release a military machine so beyond compare that nothing would be capable of standing in its path.\u00a0 So the dream went, so the drug spoke.\u00a0 Don\u2019t forget that the greatest military blunder (and crime) of this century, the invasion of Iraq, wasn\u2019t supposed to be the end of something, but merely its beginning.\u00a0 With Iraq in hand and garrisoned, Washington was to take down Iran and sweep up what Russian property from the Cold War era still remained in the Middle East.\u00a0 (Think: Syria.)<\/p>\n

A decade and a half later, those dreams have been shattered, and yet the drug still courses through the bloodstream, the military bands play on, and the march to… well, who knows where… continues.\u00a0 In a way, of course, we do know where (to the extent that we humans, with our limited sense of the future, can know anything).\u00a0 In a way, we\u2019ve already been shown a spectacle of what \u201cvictory\u201d might look like once the Greater Middle East is finally \u201cliberated\u201d from the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

The descriptions of one widely hailed victory<\/a> over that brutal crew in Iraq — the liberation of the city of Ramadi by a U.S.-trained elite Iraqi counterterrorism force<\/a> backed by artillery and American air power — are devastating.\u00a0 Aided and abetted by Islamic State militants igniting or demolishing whole neighborhoods of that city, the look of Ramadi retaken should give us a grim sense of where the region is heading. Here\u2019s how the Associated Press recently described<\/a> the scene, four months after the city fell:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is what victory looks like…: in the once thriving Haji Ziad Square, not a single structure still stands. Turning in every direction yields a picture of devastation. A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream shops — reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair garages — obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The square\u2019s Haji Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats — flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger, fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile of concrete and twisted iron rods.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1 million people and now virtually empty.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Keep in mind that, with oil prices still deeply depressed, Iraq essentially has no money to rebuild Ramadi or anyplace else. Now imagine, as such \u201cvictories\u201d multiply, versions of similar devastation spreading across the region.<\/p>\n

In other words, one likely end result of the thoroughly militarized process that began with the invasion of Iraq (if not of Afghanistan) is already visible: a region shattered and in ruins,<\/strong> filled with uprooted and impoverished people.\u00a0 In such circumstances, it may not even matter if the Islamic State is defeated.\u00a0 Just imagine what Mosul, Iraq\u2019s second largest city and still in the Islamic State’s hands, will be like if, someday, the long-promised offensive to liberate it is ever truly launched.\u00a0 Now, try to imagine that movement itself destroyed, with its \u201ccapital,\u201d Raqqa, turned into another set of ruins, and remind me: What exactly is likely to emerge from such a future nightmare?\u00a0 Nothing, I suspect, that is likely to cheer up anyone in Washington.<\/p>\n

And what should be done about all this?\u00a0 You already know Washington\u2019s solution — more of the same — and breaking such a cycle of addiction is difficult even under the best of circumstances.\u00a0 Unfortunately, at the moment there is no force, no movement on the American scene that could open up space for such a possibility.\u00a0 No matter who is elected president, you already know more or less what American \u201cpolicy\u201d is going to be.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t bother to blame the politicians and national security nabobs in Washington for this.\u00a0 They\u2019re addicts.\u00a0 They can\u2019t help themselves.\u00a0 What they need is rehab.\u00a0 Instead, they continue to run our world.\u00a0 Be suitably scared for the ruins still to come.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and the author of <\/em>The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, <\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>. He is a fellow of the <\/em>Nation Institute<\/a> and runs <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But don\u2019t bother to blame the politicians and national security nabobs in Washington for this [their solution — more of the same \u2013militarism]. They\u2019re addicts. They can\u2019t help themselves. What they need is rehab. Instead, they continue to run our world. Be suitably scared for the ruins still to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}