Herman
Just
about the time George Orwell published his novel 1984, shortly after the end of
World War II, the U.S. "War Department" was renamed the "Defense Department."
This name change also coincided with the fact that the United States was then
the sole possessor of nuclear weapons and had an overwhelming military
superiority. In effect, therefore, the United States had no "defense" problem at
all. Its military establishment could be and was designed to make war and to
participate with the CIA in aggression and subversion in distant places like
Iran, Indochina, and Indonesia, in the interest of enlarging the U.S. global
domain, certainly not to protect the United States against any military threat
to its own territory.
Its
principal rival, the Soviet Union, had suffered devastating losses in World War
II, and while the Soviets had a large army they were in no position to engage in
military adventures abroad. The Soviets had to worry about defending themselves
against a U.S. attack, which was a far more serious threat in the early post
World War II years than any Soviet invasion of Western Europe. A preemptive
strike against the Soviet Union with atomic weapons was debated intensively
within the U.S. military establishment, and the secret 1950 National Security
Council Report 68 was clearly premised on the belief that the United States was
well positioned to destabilize the Soviet Union (which it was already engaged in
doing and pursued for many years). Nevertheless, the propaganda system of the
West successfully conveyed the notion that the Soviet Union posed an imminent
invasion threat to Western Europe as part of an alleged plan of world conquest.
This propaganda was known by informed officials to be false, but they welcomed
and cultivated it as a means of mobilizing the population to accept Cold War
militarization and associated policies, such as the reimposition of a rightwing
police state in Greece and support of the French recolonization of Indochina in
the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Subsequently, as the Soviet Union acquired nuclear arms, and then even obtained
a missile capability, the preemptive strike option was made more problematic,
but the United States always maintained a huge superiority in quality and
strategic location of its weaponry, and in many key sectors it had a
quantitative edge as well. Despite this, the members of the world’s finest
propaganda system reported and failed to criticize the military-industrial
complex (MIC) claim that Soviet equality or superiority in nuclear arms
justified a major arms buildup. One of the sick-comic features of the years 1958
well into the 1980s was the serial "gaps" alleged in U.S. weapons capability
relative to the menacing Soviets– missile gaps, throw-weight gaps, windows of
vulnerability, etc.– every one of them disinformation, but every one of them
effectively propagandized with the help of the mainstream media. Tom Gervasi’s
The Myth of Soviet Military Superiority, published in 1986, is still worth
reading for its demonstration of both the fraud of the gap allegations and the
mainstream media’s service in allowing these lies to be used to justify the
Reagan arms buildup of the 1980s. (Gervasi’s book was never reviewed or
mentioned in the New York Times and was hysterically trashed in the Washington
Post.)
Another closely related feature of U.S. "defense" policy from early in the post
World War II era was its aggressive pushing of the arms race. The United States
was ahead from the beginning and its leaders intended to keep it ahead by
constant innovation, at the expense of civilian welfare (resources diverted from
the civilian sector to arms), and even at the expense of national security as an
arms race featuring ever more capable nuclear armaments was dangerous. Herbert
York, selected by President Eisenhower to be the first director of Pentagon
research in the 1950s, declared in his classic Road To Oblivion (1970), that
U.S. military power had advanced steadily since 1945, "while at the same time
our national security has been rapidly and inexorably decreasing." He also
stated that the nuclear arms race had been fueled by U.S. initiatives at every
critical point (pp. 226, 231- 2).
This
arms race was also obviously costly to the rest of the world, forced to follow
in the U.S. wake, but the U.S. leadership didn’t care about this, and was
actually pleased at its effects on the Soviet Union, a poor country that could
ill afford such expenditures that were diverted from serving its civil society.
There were even explicit statements by U.S. officials dating from the mid-1950s,
suggesting that this beggaring of the Soviet Union was a real plus and aim of
the U.S.’s forcing of an arms race, a part of the long-term destabilization
effort.
So
the quest for arms superiority was useful in beggaring rivals by forcing them to
spend for what was REALLY "defense" for them. It was also useful in allowing
small rivals to be crushed militarily, ending any "threat of a good example" in
Nicaragua and the effective pursuit of a non-market-oriented development path in
Vietnam and elsewhere. Posing a security threat to them also made these rivals
more authoritarian, weakening both their flexibility and attractiveness to
others as well as to their own citizens.
Arms
superiority also facilitated control over allied regimes and independent Third
World countries, partly by the use of military alliances like NATO as a control
device, partly by cultivating relationships with military establishments that
were used as beachheads or proxies to overthrow social democratic governments
(done systematically in Latin America after World War II, as described in Penny
Lernoux’s Cry of the People [1980], and my Real Terror Network [1982]). Military
power complemented financial power in forcing countries into the global economic
system and neoliberal dependency.
Although it was estimated during the Cold War years that at least 50 percent of
the U.S. military budget was to counter Soviet power, the collapse of the Soviet
Union and reduction of the Russian GDP to the level of the Netherlands has not
produced a "peace dividend" for the U.S. public; the military budget dropped by
some 12 percent from its peak in 1989 to a trough in 1996, but has now recovered
those losses and with bipartisan help the MIC is pressing for more. It is clear
once again that this has nothing to do with "defense" but is grounded in the
ability of the MIC to command resources, and, in addition to sheer boondoggling
in the interest of profits, in its search for offensive capability to project
U.S. power across the globe. (Despite the conservatives’ devotion to giving "the
people" what they want, a rationale for major tax reductions, the fact that the
public wants a "dramatic reduction in defense spending–on the average, by 24
percent" according to public opinion analyst Steven Kull–does not affect
conservative [i.e., Republican and New Democrat] actions in actual spending
decisions; these are shaped by higher considerations.)
The
irrelevance of the public interest in such decision-making is dramatically
evident in the Bush team’s push for a National Missile Defense (NMD). This
project is deeply irresponsible and literally insane in terms of public welfare
at home and abroad. Its rationale in terms of the "rogue" threat is laughable–a
throwback to the Nixon era defense of an early missile program as needed for a
China threat, long before China even had a single missile with which it might
commit national suicide–and Bush has had to behave harshly toward North Korea
in order to preserve a rogue to do the threatening! The "China problem" today is
how to reconcile the China lobby’s interest in reaching that gigantic market and
the MIC lobby’s need for a rogue and threat big enough to justify vast and
destabilizing expenditures with a pretended "defense" need.
There
is extensive evidence in government reports that its sponsors not only know very
well that the NMD program has an offensive potential, but that this is what they
understand to be its main role (see Joseph Gerson’s "In Dark Times: The politics
and geopolitics of missile ‘defenses’," Z Magazine, July-August 2001). They are
also well aware that it will force other governments to respond in a new arms
race. So this program is not about "defense," but beyond the sheer boondoggling
aspect is rather an attempt to advance the U.S. offensive capability in order to
allow this country to impose its will on foreigners.
But
the mainstream media, while allowing moderate criticism of the rush to an NMD
and the imminent unilateral abrogation of the ABM treaty, do not stress, and
rarely even mention, that this new system will have an important offensive
capability and that its Pentagon supporters give this heavy weight in urging its
adoption. The media pretend that it is a defensive weapon and that the main
issue is whether it will be effective in this defense role. This helps make the
system seem almost reasonable, as we certainly want "national security"
protection against rogues. It is thus a kind of normalization of
irresponsibility and insanity, perfectly in line with past media performance
that failed to challenge either the fraudulent "gaps" and arms race based on
them, or the numerous boondoggles past and present.
The
corporate community, including the MIC contractors and global firms benefiting
from U.S. offensive power in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, supported
George W. Bush with enthusiasm, as he will keep those environmentalists and
peaceniks in check and aggressively push the corporate agenda. A strong offense
serves their interests, if not that of ordinary citizens. But we ordinary
citizens, left out of this corporate and lunatic military calculus, should be
fighting this agenda furiously. A first step, surely, must be to laugh at the
notion of a "defense budget." Let us call it by its right name–an "offense
budget," or even an "offense and boondoggle budget."