America’s
Ongoing Imperial Scam
December 16, 2020
Biden ends speeches now with “God
Bless the Troops,” writes Karen
Kwiatkowski. He should respect their sacrifices with a more honorable
foreign policy.
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/12/16/americas-ongoing-imperial-scam/
By Karen
Kwiatkowski
Special to Consortium News
One week after the most attention-demanding election
of our lifetimes, another Veteran’s Day came and went. For the occasion,
presumed President-elect Joe Biden laid a wreath at the Korean War Memorial in Philadelphia;
whilst yet-to-conceded incumbent President Donald Trump held a ceremony at
Arlington National Cemetery.
Both
channeled and invoked the great reverence Americans still hold for veterans of
the bygone Second World War and more complicated Korean conflagration.
Only some 300,000 of the men, and women, who fought in the
former are still living. No doubt we will continue to hear how many
succumbed to Covid-19 in the past year, and whose fault that is.
Yet,
in his official statement, Biden added a personal touch — his son Beau’s
service in Iraq — and a “personal commitment:” “I will never treat you or your
families with anything less than the honor you deserve.” If he really
means it, rebalancing U.S. war-making authority and ditching the dated Second
World War analogies would be a good start.
World
War II remains the go-to conflict for commemoration almost 80 years after
America entered the fray. It marks the last time the U.S. Congress did
its constitutional duty and actually declared war before sending America’s young men off to kill and die on
foreign fields.
All
subsequent “wars,” from Korea and Vietnam to the Iraqs (1991, 2003,
2014), Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and a host of
military deployments on every continent around the world were waged at the
pleasure of the sitting president, amply funded by the Congress, yet
conveniently never rose to the level of a declared war.
Little
Wars & Presidencies
We
should consider these wars linked to the presidents themselves, or — perhaps
more accurately — to their executive staffs, and the Department of
Defense. War policy-making power has almost completely shifted from the
people’s representatives (House and Senate) to unelected
appointees often recruited from think tanks — these funded by an array of organizations interested not
in peace, but in accessing tax dollars, and gaining revenues at home and
abroad.
Biden’s incoming national security team is chock-full of
them. War spending, even in the absence of any notable war, is so
compelling that for years, a Congress often unable to come up with a budget ensured
the flow stayed strong to the Pentagon — and its cousin, the CIA — through
continuing resolutions.
So-called overseas contingency operations, or
little wars have seen their funding go “off-book,” as the Pentagon budget now covers just its
routine expenses — wars are paid for on top of that budget, so long as the
Congress can be convinced by their Pentagon liaisons. And they nearly
always are.
This obscene spending for military weapons,
training, gifts to allies, technology enhancement — for everything from
cyberwar, surveillance, data collection, AI, robotics — as well as for standard
“pocketbook” weapons systems like the F-35 fighter and aircraft carriers,
represent the Military Industrial Complex’s (MIC) mainstay.
Consider a disturbingly accurate recent diagnosis of the current situation:
“…the U.S. Presidents and their aides are quite
aware of the current state of the US military: it is a military that simply
cannot win even simple conflicts…a military whose Air Force spent absolutely
obscene amounts of money to create a supposedly “5th generation” fighter which in many ways is inferior to US 4th
generation aircraft!”
It is against this larded and incompetent backdrop
— of economic dependencies for a war machine directed by men and women who’ve
never fought a declared war and scant understanding of what defending the
nation ought to look like — that Americans await an inbound president who now
feels obliged to add the patriotic tick “May God protect our
troops” at the tail end of speeches.
Empty
Gestures
Veterans, Memorial, Independence, or even just Tuesdays —
replete with military flyovers at football games amidst an age of pandemic —
have become empty gestures. VA hospitals across the country had to be
dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and it is there
today that many of our Vietnam veterans — of another little war mainly designed
to entertain Pentagon fantasies at their expense — rot, for lack of a better
word.
Ultimately, these sacrifices, all part of a larger
Washingtonian game, hardy matter to anyone but Vietnam alumni’s wives, kids —
and this generation’s numbers now also dwindle.
What purpose then, does obligatory national
celebration — in prose or pageantry — of veterans actually serve in year 20 of
intractable and hopeless wars? Clearly, veterans and their families are
the only ones who truly sacrificed anything. Those negotiating massive
defense contracts — including built-in clauses covering delays, flaws, and
implicit corruption — won’t even sacrifice surplus profits for the good of the
country.
Money isn’t blood, and stock prices can’t
compensate limbs (to the tune of 1,645
single or multiple amputee veterans between 9/11 and 2015).
The war machine is largely about money (for select
elites) and creating new and expanding markets (benefitting the same) — the
modern veteran’s primary function is simply that of “patriotic” bait for the
public. In fact, trotting out idealized
veterans rationalize and justify MIC-corruption
— trading on the goodwill that most American have for those who served (even
if the government they served was lying about
why) is increasingly unworkable.
Military
recruitment has
long been a challenge, partly because Americans increasingly see through the
systemic scam, and are left wondering whether it’s such a great deal after
all. Despite the Pentagon’s massive data collection efforts and
widespread access to high school and college students, recruitment is becoming
more and more difficult.
he latest army and air force recruiting approach involves convincing economically-insecure
parents to encourage their kids to get out of their basements, and pursue
dreams of playing soldier in the woods or flying video game-like drones.
In an era where more young people live at home for longer, this approach may
appeal to parents, but it’s also a tell.
Despite
repeated and routine public deference to veterans, the truth is out.
There are just too many truth bombs available from potential recruits’ family
and friends; too much outrage at the increasingly exposed police militarization
in America’s streets — many of their new hires practicing what they learned
patrolling Baghdad or Kandahar, policing Baltimore and Kansas City.
There’s
scant solace in knowing top defense contractors rake in untold billions, whilst
too many American families slip further through the cracks, unsure of whence
their next thousand will come. And here’s a truth uncomfortable for far
too many privileged and polite liberals so ready for a quiet return to a
Biden-induced normalcy: both Trumpism and left-leaning progressivism was partly
fueled by that shared realization.
Our
veterans, too, have a solid sense of this truth — a truth that’s often painful,
embarrassing and sometimes shameful. The Pentagon has little intrinsic interest
in helping veterans, except to the extent that veterans, individually or
collectively, can both execute and justify profitable business-as-usual foreign
policies — which are increasingly crass, contradictory, and unconstitutional
affairs.
To truly honor our troops and veterans, Biden’s
bunch should be brutally honest about what Washingtonian “war” is and should respect
the very real sacrifices of the “other 1 percent” who actually serve—by
demanding a more honorable and restrained foreign policy. That’s going to
require more action than obligatory utterance, and admission of a final hard
truth:
The imperial scam we’ve kept calling a republic
these past 70 years is collapsing, and it will take all of us — veteran and
civilian alike — to ensure a soft landing.
Karen
Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., is a farmer, teacher, and retired USAF lieutenant colonel,
who spent years working in the Pentagon. She was a notable critic and
whistleblower in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. Karen was featured in the acclaimed documentary, “Why
We Fight” (2005), writes regularly for Lewrockwell.com and has had her work published
in Salon, The American Conservative, and The Huffington Post, among
others. She is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an
organization of independent veteran military and national security experts.
