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As Tom Engelhardt writes on his blog TomDispatch.com, Washington has become addicted to war and the power it provides. And more military intervention — more chaos — is the only way to justify more hits from the crackpipe. Engelhardt writes:
Washington’s 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 “foreign policy” should by now be categorized as addictive.
Otherwise, how can you explain the last decade and a half in which no military action 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 the option of first, not last, resort in just about any imaginable situation?
All this in a vast region in which failed states are piling up, nations are disintegrating, terror insurgencies are spreading, humongous population upheavals are becoming the norm, and there are refugee flows of a sort not seen since significant parts of the planet were destroyed during World War II.
Either we’re talking addictive behavior or failure is the new success.
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 quite a country, and Syria, a country that is now officially kaput. Meanwhile, in the other war he inherited, Barack Obama almost immediately launched a military-backed “surge” of U.S. forces, the only real argument being over whether 40,000 (or even as many as 80,000) new U.S. troops would be sent into Afghanistan or, as the “antiwar” president finally decided, a mere 30,000 (which made him an absolute wimp to his opponents). That was 2009. Part of that surge involved an announcement that the withdrawal of American combat forces would begin in 2011.
Seven years later, that withdrawal has once again been halted in favor of what the military has taken to privately calling a “generational approach ” — that is, U.S. forces remaining in Afghanistan into at least the 2020s.
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, armed, and propped up the planet’s largest supplier of opium, once you’re hooked, there’s no shaking it.
Meanwhile, not one of our “hopefuls,” (aside from, of course, our underdogs in the Libertarian Party), have come close to suggesting that the wars will cease when the Oval Office is taken from the Obamanator. Engelhardt goes on:
… no presidential candidate these days could afford to reject the White House-run drone assassination program. To be assassin-in-chief 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 little sign of reining in terrorism despite the number of “bad guys” and terror “leaders” it kills (along with significant numbers of civilian bystanders).
To take Bernie Sanders as an example — because he’s as close to an antiwar candidate as you’ll find in the present election season — he recently put something like his stamp of approval on the White House drone assassination project and the “kill list” that goes with it.
Unfortunately, at the moment there is no force, no movement on the American scene that could open up space for such a possibility. No matter who is elected president, you already know more or less what American “policy” is going to be.
But don’t bother to blame the politicians and national security nabobs in Washington for this. They’re addicts. They can’t help themselves. What they need is rehab. Instead, they continue to run our world. Be suitably scared for the ruins still to come.
Indeed.
Until tomorrow,
Chris Campbell
Managing editor, Laissez Faire Today
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