YOU have to wonder who is Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces. If Barack Obama still thinks he is leading the armed forces he should look beyond the military coterie’s obsession with Iraq and Afghanistan and ask where does US security – and indeed world security – really lie.
The US military’s attempts to hijack the first tentative civilian inroad into their 60-year promotion of US domination and perpetual war have been fairly blatant in the past couple of months.
In June, the head of US forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal defied his boss over the Afghan war. He was justifiably fired. Then his successor, General David Patraeus, tried to rewrite President Barack Obama’s attempt to extricate the US from Afghanistan starting in July next year.
Then this week the head of the US Marine Corps, General James Conway, did the same thing.
Patraeus said that Obama’s promise to reverse the 30,000 troop “surge” was simply an attempt to increase the urgency of the international effort in Afghanistan.
“I think the president has been quite clear in explaining that it’s a process, not an event, and that it’s conditions-based,” Patraeus said.
Conway said the troops would have to stay for a few years because the deadline was “giving our enemy sustenance”.
Obama should have told both these generals to follow McChrystal through the door and showed a determination to fulfil his campaign promise to change America.
But Obama looks like joining a line of US presidents from Eisenhower on who have been duped, conned, cajoled, blackmailed or otherwise dissuaded from a sensible military policy by the top brass and by what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.
This is the military-industrial complex which has promoted almost constant war and vast unnecessary military spending since World War II – all the time making the US less, not more, secure.
The generals always exaggerated the threat. During the early days of the Cold War it was not necessary for the head of the Strategic Air Command General Curtis LeMay to build thousands of nuclear warheads. A hundred would have been enough to destroy civilisation as we know it.
Cuba was no threat until the US drove it into the Soviet camp. North Vietnam was no threat to the US in the early 1960s, just as a unified communist Vietnam is no threat to the US now.
George Bush’s “axis of evil” was no threat to the US. Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed no real threat – at least not until they were provoked, or the US was stupid enough to put its troops in harm’s way by going there.
Obama should do a total rethink of US security, not just Afghanistan and Iraq.
The threats to US security are not pathetic North Korea, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, but a debt crisis, climate change and the rise of China on the back of an America crippled by debt racked up because of unnecessary military spending.
Unlike other presidents he should learn from history. Just as the US pursued counter-insurgency and “hearts and minds” in Vietnam after the “shock and awe” of bombing failed, Patraeus has now turned again to counter-insurgency and “hearts and minds” after the failure of the shock and awe of Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. It will fail, too. It is a recipe for perpetual war or, as in Vietnam, retreat without victory or “peace with honour” — commonly called defeat.
The rethink should ask, would the US be more or less secure if Obama:
– Withdraws immediately from Iraq and Afghanistan.
– Reverses the quarantining of military spending from budgetary cuts.
– Reduces military spending from the present level of almost equivalent to the total military spending of every other country in the world to merely, say, that of China, and Russia combined.
– Removes its bases in Germany and elsewhere in Europe immediately. Hey, World War II has been over for 65 years and the Europeans are smart and rich enough to look after themselves.
– Removes the base in Okinawa which upsets the Japanese residents and is not wanted by the Japanese anyway.
– Unilaterally reduces the number of nuclear warheads from 5000 to a few hundred.
– Reduces the number of nuclear submarines to merely enough to obliterate any single nation on earth, rather than all of them.
– Removes the base of Diego Garcia and allows the residents the US expelled to return home.
– Cuts military aid to Israel which only inflames anti-US Mulsim sentiment.
– Targets a halving of military spending from $660 billion (about 4.5 per cent of GDP compared to China’s 2 per cent) to help stabilise US public debt which stands at $14,000 billion and rising and help reduce US reliance on Chinese purchases of US bonds. Surely, $330 billion is enough to spend on any one nation’s “defence”.
– Announces that the US will no longer be the policeman of the world (and, incidentally obviating the need for Australia to be deputy), but that it will just lead by example.
The people of the US would become demonstrably more secure. Certainly, there will be more violence in Iraq and Afghanistan before a withdrawal. Al-Qaida and other terrorists do not want the US to leave so they will bomb and shoot in the hope it will keep the US there. If the US left, the terrorists would lose their best recruiting agent. They would lose their raison d’etre – just as Yasser Arafat did not want peace in the Middle East. There were no Al-Qaida terrorists in Iraq before the US invasion.
Instead of winning hearts and minds and reducing poverty in Kabul and Bagdad, the US Government could embark upon community-building and poverty-reducing exercises in places like New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago.
Obama now is in a similar position as Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s. Johnson wanted his legacy to be the Great Society – his raft of reforms to help poverty and promote racial equality. Instead it is Vietnam. He fell victim to the military hawks and white-collar warriors in his administration led by Defence Secretary Robert McNamara.
Obama wants to change America. But he is now in danger of following so many presidents into the clutches of the military-industrial complex. This time, however, the US cannot afford it. Being the policeman of the world will drive it to unsustainable debt, particularly to China. That, not some exaggerated threat from the Middle East, is much more likely to cause government of the people by the people and for the people to perish from the face of the earth.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 28 August 2010.
Lots of good points there, as usual.
Senator Fulbright also voiced some concerns, about the USA cowboy approach to foreign affairs, in his book the Arrogance of Power.
My wish list for action would be re-direction of productivity dividends, away from such targets as The Australian National Botanic Gardens, and imposed upon the “War against Terror” and the “War against Drugs” at a rate of five per cent; retrospective for thirty years, and ongoing.