Bully Nation

By Yale Magrass and Charles Derber

Bullying is seen primarily as a psychological problem of individuals. The victim needs therapy, better communication or adaptation skills. Bullies are characterologically flawed and need therapy or perhaps legal punishment.

But there is little or no discussion of larger social or cultural forces in the United States and the American institutions or leaders who bully other countries or workers and citizens at home. Institutionalized bullying is endemic to a capitalist hegemonic nation like the United States and creates death and suffering on a far greater scale than personal, everyday bullying, as important and toxic as the latter might be.

Moreover, much of the everyday bullying that is the current media focus must be understood as the inevitable consequence of a militarized corporate system that requires a popular mind-set of bullying to produce profit and power. The individual bully is the creation of the bully nation.

The United States openly views itself as the world police force, a benign hegemon morally ordained to impose its interests and values on the rest of the world and justified in the name of freedom, human rights and antiterrorism to do to weaker countries what it wants. It spends more on weapons than its next 20 largest competitors combined. President Obama proclaimed "[S]o long as I'm Commander-in-Chief, we will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known." To peasants living in small countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia - where the United States has sent armed forces, used drones to bomb, and often overthrown the government - polls show that a majority of people see the United States as the greatest threat to their security, and fear it. Hegemony here seamlessly unfolds as morally sanctioned, institutionalized bullying.

America makes heroes of bomber pilots like John McCain and offers them as role models for children and adolescents to emulate. They see the media applaud the bullying behavior of their own government that dispatches police, soldiers, FBI and CIA agents into foreign nations to kill and wreak havoc - from Afghanistan to Somalia to Columbia. If you kill enough, whether in a just war or not, you may win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

If bullying brings esteem to a nation, then surely that is a behavior to strive for. Potential recruits for an aggressive military need to be immunized against scruples over violence and bullying. This becomes an implicit part of their education, whether or not it is ever publicly admitted. Accordingly, schools and adult authorities often turn a blind eye toward bullying. After two world wars, the Army lamented that a majority of combat soldiers never fired a weapon. They called for a change in the training of soldiers and the education and upbringing of children to correct that. By that measure, they have been successful. In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of combat soldiers killed.

Sports has played a vital part in preparing children for institutionalized aggression, bullying and combat. In football, the goal is to attack the opponent and knock them down, a hard hit that keeps the opponent dazed on the ground is sometimes encouraged by coaches and cheered by the crowd. In schools and campuses, the athletes are often the popular heroes and also the bullies, involved too often in sexual violence or drinking binges in bars that lead to fights or crimes.

Only recently would they expect sanctions against bullying. Indeed, the more they bullied, the more popular they would be. Even before World War I, President Theodore Roosevelt insisted that elite universities like Harvard would have to enhance their football teams if America were to dominate the world. He declared: "We cannot afford to turn out college men who shrink from physical effort or a little physical pain." For the nation needed men with "the courage that will fight valiantly against the foes of the soul and the foes of the body."

The aggression and competiveness of bullying pervades civilian life as well as military. As the beacon for the rest of the world to emulate, the culture the United States wishes to export is capitalism. Capitalism's staunchest defenders proclaim competition to be its fundamental operating principle. The monopolistic corporations and the wealthiest 1% have been the most aggressive, bullying anyone who stood in their way by outsourcing their jobs, lowering wages, stripping away benefits and firing those seeking to organize unions.

The bully demonizes their victim. In American capitalism, elites have long defined the losers in the competitive struggle with the words used by Mitt Romney to defame the 47%: undeserving "moochers." They are weak and lazy and don't have the stuff to prevail. As victims, they deserve their fate and must submit to the triumphant. Those, like the wolves on Wall Street who bully their way to the top, should be there; those who couldn't or don't, belong where they are.

Bullying is the means through which the corporate empires were built. Carnegie and Rockefeller intimidated and threatened their rival capitalists to cede them an ever-larger share of the market. They brought in Pinkerton goons to beat striking workers into submission. Workers were forced to either sign "yellow dog" contracts and pledge not to join unions, or be thrown into the street. Similar bullying practices continue today. Corporations warn entire communites they will shut down factories and undermine the local economy if they do not accept low wages and minimal regulations. Banks entice consumers to borrow through predatory loans and then raise interest rates and threaten foreclosure. The corporations are clear they have the power and will not tolerate challenges from weaklings who fail to know their place.

Bullying enhances the ideology that the strong are strong and the weak are weak, and each deserves to be where they are. This attitude pervades America's culture, government, military, corporations, media, schools, entertainment, athletics and everyday life. The first step to a solution is shifting the conversation to institutional bullying, moving beyond simply a therapeutic narrative to a political one aiming toward transformative social change. As long as the United States embraces militarism and aggressive capitalism, systemic bullying and all its impacts - abroad and at home - will persist as a major crisis.

Meddling In Other People's Business

Mehdi Hasan Goes Head To Head With Bernard-Henri Levy On The Rights and Wrongs Of Foreign Intervention.

Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

From Bosnia in 1994 to Syria today, via Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, is western military intervention ever justified?

In this episode of Head to Head at the Oxford Union, Mehdi Hasan challenges one of the world’s most renowned public intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Levy, on the rights and wrongs of liberal intervention, and the difference between humanitarian concerns and the pursuit of special interests.

Levy is France’s most famous philosopher, a journalist and bestselling author of more than 30 books, with Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism being his most recent book. He is the founder of the New Philosophers' movement and a leading thinker on humanitarian intervention.

Levy has undertaken important missions for the French government in the world's most troubled areas and was famously instrumental in getting NATO to act quickly and decisively in Libya. He now wants the same to be done in Syria: “Bashar al-Assad is a paper tiger because he’s weak, therefore it is doable,” argues Levy, “We cannot let the blood bath go on like this!”

“When I hear liberal interventionists make this case it always seem to be either we bomb or we do nothing,” replies Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan. “Is there no middle ground? Is there no coercive diplomacy?”

Joining this discussion are: Dr Rama Mani, an expert on peace, justice and human security and a senior research associate of the University of Oxford’s Centre for International Studies, she has also co-authored a book onResponsibility to Protect: Cultural Perspectives from the global South  and has formed part of peace-building missions across Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan; Peter Oborne, a broadcaster who has made documentaries on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a political commentator for The Spectatorand The Daily Telegraph , the author of The Rise of Political Lying, And A moral Duty to Act amongst others; and Salma Yaqoob, a former leader of the Respect Party, a socialist political party in the UK, and one of the founders of the Stop the War Coalition , she is also a critic of indiscriminate liberal interventionism.

Terrorism From Below and Above

By Dallas Darling


"Now, as we all know, good often proceeds from apparent evil, and the reverse." 
- Nasrudin

Unlike the British and French military forces scattered across parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including their massive and lethal weapons systems, at least the two suspected British converts to Islam that attacked and stabbed to death a British soldier in London did so by discriminating between enemy combatants and noncombatants. In Paris, surveillance showed a bearded man of North African origin and wearing an Arab-style tunic selectively stabbing a French soldier in the neck. 

It sounds cruel, but at least individualized military assassins and their "soft" weapons cause far less killing and destruction than collectivized military assassins and their "hard" weapons. 

Terrorism from below is always a consequence of terrorism from above, or when imperial armies invade and occupy foreign nations and dominate their peoples.

Although terrorism from below has emerged in many different forms and from various motivations, the earliest known examples of individualized military assassinations were the sicarii. The Jewish sicarii used a short sword (sica), which was hidden underneath their robes, to attack and kill their Roman enemies. Roman occupation soldiers which had militarily occupied Palestine, along with representatives of the Roman Empire and their religious collaborators, were specifically targeted. Their public attacks, carried out in broad daylight, were an indictment against imperial Rome which had indiscriminately slaughtered thousands through open mass executions. Their more humanized violence also served as a sign of hope against Rome's terrorism from above-systematic violence that determined the conditions of life through economic exploitation and enslavement.

The sicarii committed selective assassinations during holy festivals and special seasons. According to Josephus's account in his Jewish War: "The panic created was more alarming than the calamity itself; every one as on a battlefield, hourly expected death. Men kept watch at a distance on their enemies and would not trust even their friends when they approached."(2) Under Roman military occupation, cruelty had become the rule. When long-term injustices go unchecked, like the continued Western exploitation of resources, peoples, cultures, faiths, and military dictators in certain parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, cynical pleas of desperation arise. Faithfulness sometimes becomes fatalism. Massive secular-based violence against sacred traditions breeds faith-based violence. Counter-terrorism strategies from below are reactions to terrorism from above.

Unless terrorism from above is questioned and debated as rigorously as terrorism from below, new forms of overt and covert terrorist acts will continually evolve, especially in regards to the use of advanced weaponry. 

Whether from below or from above, there is one type of terrorism. 

But as the world observed on Sept. 11, 2001, individualized military assassins can sometimes lay down their sicas for a more powerful and technologically advanced lethal tool. 

And just as terrorism from above leads inevitably to its own next stages, so does terrorism from below. 

Left unhindered, terrorism from above and from below becomes super-terrorism, even hyper super-terrorism. 

If an effective language to critique both kinds of terrorism is not developed, then the concentration of absolute power will forever be met by inattentive acts of random helplessness.

German Military Deployments Going Global

Chancellor Angela Merkel said German deployments overseas, “will soon encompass the entire globe.”

“For decades, we Germans have benefited from the fact that our partners gave us the feeling of reliable security,” Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s defense minister, said during the debate last month. “Now we are in a position and have the duty, even, to make our impact felt.”

It was not that long ago that every German military action brought with it mass demonstrations, public hand-wringing and probing questions about the country’s militarist past. But the shadow of history continues to recede here and Germany is, for better or worse, quietly approaching a normal relationship with its armed forces.

“Europe has more responsibility for its own security, and Germany has to step up to that, particularly considering its new economic power in Europe,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

Conscription was suspended indefinitely here in 2011 as part of a drive to professionalize and modernize the armed forces. In August, the Constitutional Court ruled for the first time that the German military could be deployed at home under exceptional circumstances, like in the wake of a terrorist attack.

“Naturally, a great deal has developed further in terms of the acceptance of deployments outside of this country and outside the NATO territory,” said Col. Ulrich Kirsch, chairman of the German Federal Armed Forces Association, which represents the interests of active and former military personnel. “But the Germans are, now as before, difficult to inspire for military operations.”

Military business is another matter. Germany is the world’s third-biggest arms exporter, behind only the United States and Russia, sending weapons not only to NATO members and allies like Israel but increasingly to the Middle East and beyond. As the business grows, critics at home question sales to undemocratic countries like Saudi Arabia.

Germany’s military industry employs an estimated 80,000 people, jobs Ms. Merkel wants to protect, especially less than a year before September’s parliamentary election. In October, German opposition helped doom the proposed merger of two aerospace giants, British-based BAE Systems and the consortium EADS, in part out of concern that German jobs and influence might be lost in the new entity.

The German government approved military exports in excess of 10 billion euros, or over $13 billion, for the first time in 2011, the magazine reported.

That is an especially impressive feat considering that military expenditures in Western and Central Europe fell 1.9 percent in real terms that year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Those cuts have “prompted unease in many quarters that European countries risk losing global influence as they fall further behind the United States in military capabilities,” the institute said in its most recent annual reporton military spending, “while rising powers such as China rapidly catch up and even overtake them.”

Germany’s path forward could well determine the shape of Europe’s military affairs for years to come. Whether that is through a growing leadership role and the assumption of more responsibility for regional security or a limited, some say cynical, emphasis on protecting its own interests still remains to be seen.

“Germany is back in the game as one of the most important countries in the Western Hemisphere, but the kind of responsibility that goes with that is not really reflected in German government behavior,” said Olaf Böhnke, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “If Germany wants to be in a leadership position, you need stronger military engagement.”

“This conflict-averse basic attitude still remains, and one has to deal with it,” said Martin Kahl, a political scientist at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg. “People feel safer than before. There is no enemy on the European continent who could lead a classic conflict.”

After World War II, West German politicians rejected military force for any goal other than self-defense, and a strong pacifist streak developed in the public. The end of the cold war brought the beginning of a long period of halting change. Allies, particularly in the United States, have repeatedly called for Germany to take more responsibility and a larger share of the burden.

“I don’t think it’s healthy for the future of Europe to give Germany this refuge where Germany handles the economy and doesn’t have to deal with the dirty stuff,” Mr. Böhnke said.

The biggest turning point was probably when Germany participated in airstrikes in the Kosovo war in 1999, a break with the taboo against offensive operations.

“A country of our size,” Mr. Köhler said, “with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”

A public outcry ensued, and Mr. Köhler resigned. But the German Navy was essentially already doing what Mr. Köhler described in his comments, as part of the multinational mission to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia. The government announced plans to suspend conscription just a few months after Mr. Köhler quit.

Parliament made it official in 2011, toppling in the process another of the remaining hurdles between Germany and a normal military.

“The suspension of conscription officially recognized the fact that the German Army had become a professional army,” said Ms. Stelzenmüller from the German Marshall Fund. 

Via: "The New York Times"

Monopolizing War

What America Knows How To Do Best

By Tom Engelhardt,
Courtesy Of  "Anti-War"

Two weeks ago, 200 U.S. Marines began armed operations in…?:

a) Afghanistan
b) Pakistan
c) Iran
d) Somalia
e) Yemen
f) Central Africa
g) Northern Mali
h) The Philippines
i) Guatemala

If you opted for any answer, “a” through “h,” you took a reasonable shot at it. After all, there’s an ongoing American war in Afghanistan and somewhere in the southern part of that country, 200 armed U.S. Marines could well have been involved in an operation. In Pakistan, an undeclared, CIA-run air war has long been underway, and in the past there have been armed border crossings by U.S. special operations forces as well as U.S. piloted cross-border airstrikes, but no Marines.

When it comes to Iran, Washington’s regional preparations for war are staggering. The continual buildup of U.S. naval power in the Persian Gulf, of land forces on basesaround that country, of air power (and anti-missile defenses) in the region should leave any observer breathless. There are U.S. special operations forces near the Iranian border and CIA drones regularly over that country. In conjunction with the Israelis, Washington has launched a cyberwar against Iran’s nuclear program and computer systems. It has also established fierce oil and banking sanctions, and there seem to have been at least some U.S. cross-border operations into Iran going back to at least 2007. In addition, a recent front-page New York Times story on Obama administration attempts to mollify Israel over its Iran policy included this ominous line: “The administration is also considering … covert activities that have been previously considered and rejected.” So 200 armed Marines in action in Iran — not yet, but don’t get down on yourself, it was a good guess.

In Somalia, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, there have been far more U.S. drone flights and strikes against the Islamic extremist al-Shabab movement and al-Qaeda elements than anyone previously knew. In addition, the U.S. has at least partially funded, supported, equipped, advised, and promoted proxy wars there, involving Ethiopian troops back in 2007 and more recently Ugandan and Burundian troops (as well as an invading Kenyan army). In addition, CIA operatives and possibly other irregulars and hired guns are well established in Mogadishu, the capital.

In Yemen, as in Somalia, the combination has been proxy war and strikes by drones (as well as piloted planes), with some U.S. special forces advisers on the ground, andcivilian casualties (and anger at the U.S.) rising in the southern part of the country — but also, as in Somalia, no Marines. Central Africa? Now, there’s a thought. After all, at least 100 Green Berets were sent in there this year as part of a campaign against Joseph Kony’s Ugandan-based Lord’s Resistance Army. As for Northern Mali, taken over by Islamic extremists (including an al-Qaeda-affiliated group), it certainly presents a target for future U.S. intervention — and we still don’t know what thosethree U.S. Army commandos who skidded off a bridge to their deaths in their Toyota Land Rover with three “Moroccan prostitutes” were doing in a country with which the U.S. military had officially cut its ties after a democratically elected government was overthrown. But 200 Marines operating in war-torn areas of Africa? Not yet. When it comes to the Philippines, again no Marines, even though U.S. special forces anddrones have been aiding the government in a low-level conflict with Islamic militants in Mindanao.

As it happens, the correct, if surprising, answer is “i.” And if you chose it, congratulations!

On Aug. 29, the Associated Press reported that a “team of 200 U.S. Marines began patrolling Guatemala’s western coast this week in an unprecedented operation to beat drug traffickers in the Central America region, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.” This could have been big news. It’s a sizable enough intervention: 200 Marines sent into action in a country where we last had a military presence in 1978. If this wasn’t the beginning of something bigger and wider, it would be surprising, given that commando-style operatives from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration have been firing weapons and killing locals in a similar effort in Honduras, and that, along with U.S. drones, the CIA is evidently moving ever deeper into the drug war in Mexico.

In addition, there’s a history here. After all, in the early part of the previous century,sending in the Marines — in Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere — was the way Washington demonstrated its power in its own “backyard.” And yet other than a few straightforward news reports on the Guatemalan intervention, there has been no significant media discussion, no storm of criticism or commentary, no mention at either political convention, and no debate or discussion about the wisdom of such a step in this country. Odds are that you didn’t even notice that it had happened.

Think of it another way: in the post-2001 era, along with two disastrous wars on the Eurasian mainland, we’ve been regularly sending in the Marines or special operations forces, as well as naval, air, and robotic power. Such acts are, by now, so ordinary that they are seldom considered worthy of much discussion here, even though no other country acts (or even has the capacity to act) this way. This is simply what Washington’s National Security Complex does for a living.

At the moment, it seems, a historical circle is being closed with the Marines once again heading back into Latin America as the “drug war” Washington proclaimed years ago becomes an actual drug war. It’s a demonstration that, these days, when Washington sees a problem anywhere on the planet, its version of a “foreign policy” is most likely to call on the U.S. military. Force is increasingly not our option of last resort, but our first choice.

Now, consider question two in our little snap quiz of recent war news:

In 2011, what percentage of the global arms market did the U.S. control?

(Keep in mind that, as everyone knows, the world is an arms bazaar filled with haggling merchants. Though the Cold War and the superpower arms rivalry is long over, there are obviously plenty of countries eager to peddle their weaponry, no matter what conflicts may be stoked as a result.)

a) 37% ($12.1 billion), followed closely by Russia ($10.7 billion), France, China, and the United Kingdom.
b) 52.7% ($21.3 billion), followed by Russia at 19.3% ($12.8 billion), France, Britain, China, Germany, and Italy.
c) 68% ($37.8 billion), followed by Italy at 9% ($3.7 billion) and Russia at 8% ($3.5 billion).
d) 78% ($66.3 billion), followed by Russia at 5.6% ($4.8 billion).

Naturally, you naturally eliminated “d” first. Who wouldn’t? After all, cornering close to 80% of the arms market would mean that the global weapons bazaar had essentially been converted into a monopoly operation. Of course, it’s common knowledge that the U.S. arms giants, given a massive helping hand in their marketing by the Pentagon, remain the collective 800-pound gorilla in any room. But 37% of that market is nothing to sniff at. (At least, it wasn’t in 1990, the final days of the Cold War when the Russians were still a major competitor worldwide.) As for 52.7%, what national industry wouldn’t bask in the glory of such a figure — a majority share of arms sold worldwide? (And, in fact, that was an impressive percentage back in the dismal sales year of 2010, when arms budgets worldwide were still feeling the pain of the lingering global economic recession.) Okay, so what about that hefty 68%? It couldn’t have been a more striking achievement for U.S. arms makers back in 2008 in what was otherwise distinctly a lagging market.

The correct answer for 2011, however, is the singularly unbelievable one: the U.S. actually tripled its arms sales last year, hitting a record high, and cornering almost 78% of the global arms trade. This was reported in late August but, like those 200 Marines in Guatemala, never made onto front pages or into the top TV news stories. And yet, if arms were drugs (and it’s possible that, in some sense, they are, and that we humans can indeed get addicted to them), then the U.S. has become something close enough to the world’s sole dealer. That should be front-page news, shouldn’t it?

Okay, so here’s the third question in today’s quiz:

From a local base in which country did U.S. Global Hawk drones fly long-range surveillance missions between late 2001 and at least 2006?

a) The Seychelles Islands
b) Ethiopia
c) An unnamed Middle Eastern country
d) Australia

Actually, the drone base the U.S. has indeed operated in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean was first used only in 2009 and the drone base Washington has developed in Ethiopia by upgrading a civilian airport only became operational in 2011. As for that “unnamed Middle Eastern country,” perhaps Saudi Arabia, the new airstrip being built there, presumably for the CIA’s drones, may now be operational. Once again, the right answer turns out to be the unlikely one. Recently, the Australian media reported that the U.S. had flown early, secretive Global Hawk missions out of a Royal Australian Base at Edinburgh. These were detected by a “group of Adelaide aviation historians.” The Global Hawk, an enormous drone, can stay in the air a long time. What those flights were surveilling back then is unknown, though North Korea might be one guess. Whether they continued beyond 2006 is also unknown.

Unlike the previous two stories, this one never made it into the U.S. media and if it had, would have gone unnoticed anyway. After all, who in Washington or among U.S. reporters and pundits would have found it odd that, long before its recent, much-ballyhooed “pivot” to Asia, the U.S. was flying some of its earliest drone missions over vast areas of the Pacific? Who even finds it strange that, in the years since 2001, the U.S. has been putting together an ever more elaborate network of its own drone baseson foreign soil, or that the U.S. has an estimated 1,000-1,200 military bases scattered across the planet, some the size of small American towns (not to speak of scads of bases in the United States)?

Like those Marines in Guatemala, like the near-monopoly on the arms trade, this sort of thing is hardly considered significant news in the U.S., though in its size and scope it is surely historically unprecedented. Nor does it seem strange to us that no other country on the planet has more than a tiny number of bases outside its own territory: the Russians have a scattered few in the former SSRs of the Soviet Union and a single old naval base in Syria that has been in the news of late; the French still have some inFrancophone Africa; the British have a few leftovers from their own imperial era, including the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has essentially been transformed into an American base; and the Chinese may be in the process of setting up a couple of modest bases as well. Add up every non-American base on foreign soil, however, and the total is probably less than 2% of the American empire of bases.

Investing in War

It would, by the way, be a snap to construct a little quiz like this every couple of weeks from U.S. military news that’s reported but not attended to here, and each quiz would make the same essential point: from Washington’s perspective, the world is primarily a landscape for arming for, garrisoning for, training for, planning for, and making war. War is what we invest our time, energy, and treasure in on a scale that is, in its own way, remarkable, even if it seldom registers in this country.

In a sense (leaving aside the obvious inability of the U.S. military to actually win wars), it may, at this point, be what we do best. After all, whatever the results, it’s an accomplishment to send 200 Marines to Guatemala for a month of drug interdiction work, to get those Global Hawks secretly to Australia to monitor the Pacific, and to corner the market on things that go boom in the night.

Think of it this way: the United States is alone on the planet, not just in its ability, but in its willingness to use military force in drug wars, religious wars, political wars, conflicts of almost any sort, constantly and on a global scale. No other group of powers collectively even comes close. It also stands alone as a purveyor of major weapons systems and so as a generator of war. It is, in a sense, a massive machine for the promotion of war on a global scale.

We have, in other words, what increasingly looks like a monopoly on war. There have, of course, been warrior societies in the past that committed themselves to a mobilized life of war-making above all else. What’s unique about the United States is that it isn’t a warrior society. Quite the opposite.

Washington may be mobilized for permanent war. Special operations forces may be operating in up to 120 countries. Drone bases may be proliferating across the planet. We may be building up forces in the Persian Gulf and “pivoting” to Asia. Warrior corporations and rent-a-gun mercenary outfits have mobilized on the country’s disparate battlefronts to profit from the increasingly privatized 21st-century American version of war. The American people, however, are demobilized and detached from the wars, interventions, operations, and other military activities done in their name. As a result, 200 Marines in Guatemala, almost 78% of global weapons sales, drones flying surveillance from Australia — no one here notices; no one here cares.

War: it’s what we do the most and attend to the least. It’s a nasty combination.

Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

United States Imperialism Unleashed

By BEN SCHREINER
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

With signs of a global economic downturn mounting, US aggression across the Middle East and North Africa ratchets up.  And once again, US imperialism stands poised to swing open the gates of Hell.

The choice presently confronting humanity, then, is one between imperialism on the one hand, and the struggle against imperialism on the other.

Global Capitalism Imperiled

According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report released last week, the “risks for a serious global slowdown are alarmingly high.”  The report projects the world economy to expand just 3.3 percent this year and 3.6 percent in 2013—both projections down from the IMF’s July forecast.   As Joseph Davis, chief economist at the Vanguard Group, cautioned to the Wall Street Journal, “The odds of a global recession are not fully appreciated.”

Indeed, for as the Financial Times reports, the Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery, the Brookings Institution-Financial Timesindex of the world economy, finds severe problems “in both advanced and emerging markets.”

“The global economic recovery,” Brookings’ senior fellow and index creator Eswar Prasad warned, “is on the ropes.”

And though in its latest report the IMF continued to peddle the harsh elixir of austerity for the depressed economies of the euro zone periphery, the Fund also came to tacitly acknowledge the limits of austerity.

“The IMF now says global efforts to slash deficits and debt may have hurt growth because they occurred too quickly and too widely,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

But with the limits of austerity as a means of resolving the present crisis apparent, the last remaining card for the capitalist elite to play in their attempt to regenerate global capitalism appears to be in unleashing the forces of “creative destruction” wrought by military aggression.  As Henryk Grossman warned in his Law of Accumulation, “The destructions and devaluations of war are a means of warding off the immanent collapse [of capitalism], of creating a breathing space for the accumulation of capital.”

It is thus out of the need to renew the impetus for capital accumulation that the iron fist of US imperialism gains free rein once more across the full spectrum of what American neo-conservatives deem the “arc of instability.”

US Imperialism On The March

According to the New York Times, the Pentagon is readying military strikes in Libya in retaliation for the September attack on the US compound in Benghazi.  As the paper reports, “The top-secret Joint Special Operations Command is compiling so-called target packages of detailed information about the suspects.”

“Potential military options could include drone strikes, Special Operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden and joint missions with Libyan authorities.”

The Times goes on to report that the Pentagon is also rushing to train and equip a 500 member Libyan commando force to be used to combat “Islamic extremists” within the country.

At the same time, the Pentagon has reportedly dispatched a task force of 150 military “planners” and “specialists” (i.e., special operations troops) to a Jordanian military base along the Jordan-Syria border.  Speaking at a NATO conference in Brussels last week, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claimed that the task force was sent to help Jordan “monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria.”

The specter of chemical weapons has been increasingly used as a pretext by the Atlantic powers to threaten military intervention into Syria.  As President Obama declared in August, the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces would be a “red line,” which would force him to change his “calculus” on intervention.

“Once again, Western powers are digging deep for excuses to intervene militarily in another conflict-torn Middle East country,” an editorial in the state-run Xinhua news agency of China read in response to Obama’s threat.

Sure enough, as the New York Times reported, discussions have already taken place over using the Jordanian-stationed US task force to help establish a buffer zone within Syrian territory.

(In addition to the deployment of troops along the Jordan-Syria border, CIA operatives are presently active along the Syria-Turkey border, facilitating the flow of arms to rebel forces.  Meanwhile, a recent report in the Los Angeles Times noted that the US military is currently using aerial surveillance drones to monitor Syrian chemical weapon stockpiles.)

Of course, the stepped up targeting of Syria cannot be decoupled from the joint Israel-US campaign against Iran.  After all, as hawks Michael Doran and Max Boot argue in a New York Times op-ed, the first reason American intervention in Syria is now merited is because it “would diminish Iran’s influence in the Arab world.”

The road to Tehran, we see, may very well lead through Damascus; although, the urge to fly non-stop to Tehran may just prove too strong to resist.

Marching Toward Tehran

With Iran clearly in mind, the US and Israel are set to begin a massive three-week joint missile and air defense exercise later this month.  The exercise, Business Week reports, will include 3,500 US personnel and 1,000 members of the Israel Defense Forces, making it the largest joint military exercise held between the two nations.  The planned war game also occurs amid mounting speculation of a looming strike against Iran.

According to a report in Foreign Policy by David Rothkopf, the US and Israel are actively planning a joint “surgical strike targeting Iranian enrichment facilities.”  Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and Editor-at-Large of Foreign Policy, cites his source as stating that “the strike might take only ‘a couple of hours’ in the best case and only would involve a ‘day or two’ overall.”

The strike, Rothkopf quotes an “advocate” of an attack as stating, would have a “transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.”  This, of course, being the essence of the proverbial neo-con wet dream.

Remarkably, Rothkopf even goes as far as to triumph the idea of a “surgical strike” as a potential October Surprise Obama could use to propel himself back to the White House.

It appears now, however, that Rothkopf’s “report” may have been little more than a plant by the Israeli embassy in Washington.  A move, perhaps, intended to further coerce Obama into adopting a more hawkish stance on Iran, while simultaneously serving to downplay the risks of an attack.

Of course, peddling the notion of a so-called “surgical strike” on Iran is nothing particularly new.  In March, Jeffrey Goldberg reported forBloomberg that Israeli talk of striking Iran had assumed a rather optimistic tenor.

“One conclusion key [Israeli] officials have reached,” Goldberg wrote after a trip to Israel, “is that a strike on six or eight Iranian facilities will not lead, as is generally assumed, to all-out war.”

(One cannot help wonder if the Rothkopf and Goldberg share the same source.)

Such assessments, though, are rather dubious, given that they directly contradict numerous assessments determining that any strike against Iran would quickly spiral into a regional conflict.  A report earlier this year in the New York Times, for instance, noted a war game simulation run by the Pentagon forecast that an Israeli strike “would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead.”

Likewise, a September war game organized by Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, resulted in a dangerous escalation from both sides.  As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported, “The game showed how easy it was for each side to misread the other’s signals.”

“Misjudgment was the essence of this game,” Ignatius continued.  “Each side thought it was choosing limited options, but their moves were interpreted as crossing red lines. Attacks proved more deadly than expected; signals were not understood; attempts to open channels of communication were ignored; the desire to look tough compelled actions that produced results neither side wanted.”

“War,” as Clausewitz wrote, “is the province of danger.”

Toward Barbarism

US imperial dreams, however, are hardly confined to setting the Middle East ablaze.  Imperial ambitions—rooted in the capitalist logic of endless expansion—are inherently limitless.  Thus, we see the US today readying to propel the greater Middle East into the abyss, while simultaneously “pivoting” to the Asia-Pacific in order to “contain” a rising China.

US imperialism, however, is destined for defeat (and sooner rather than later).  The US, after all, can only use its immense military power to keep potential competitors in check for so long.  The universal law of change cannot be held at bay by the barrel of a gun in perpetuity.  As Lenin asked and answered in his pamphlet Imperialism: “Is it ‘conceivable’ that in ten or twenty years’ time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? Absolutely inconceivable.”

But imperial powers are always dangerously deluded by the strength of their power—impervious to its ultimate limits.  As a George W. Bush administration official once remarked to the journalist Ron Suskind: “’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

(One would be mistaken to believe that such hubris is not as present in the Obama White House as it was in the Bush administration.)

Such arrogance from the power elite—indicative of imperial rot—is but a byproduct of the imperialist imperative of endless expansion and conquest.  And it is this very imperative that today compels US imperialism towards igniting a military conflagration in the Middle East threatening to ensnare the global powers. “A great cemetery,” as Luxemburg warned nearly a century ago, awaits such a triumph of barbarism.

The only means with which to elude such a miserable fate is found in the revolutionary power of working people to resist.  As Luxemburg argued, escape from barbarism is only possible once the working class comes to seize “its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.”

The Myth of American Military Superiority

By WINSLOW T. WHEELER
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

You hear it routinely during congressional events involving defense issues, when a defense secretary wants to protect his budget (or his legacy), and when candidate Barack Obama or his operatives defend the administration’s national security record: The American armed forces are “the best in the world.” It has become such an unremarkable bit of conventional wisdom that the comment is usually prologue to some other point the speaker wants to make.

Many think that because the United States spends multiples of any conceivable opponent or even combinations of them, has the largest modern navy and air force, and can operate all over the world, there is no conceivable enemy or enemies that can take on America successfully. The history of warfare is full of this kind of arrogance before the fall; it has occurred from the beginnings of recorded warfare until today. Consider Xerxes and Darius against Greece in antiquity, the British in America in 1775, the Russians before their war with Japan in 1904, and the United States in 1964 facing Vietnam.

History has recorded these and numerous other conflicts when the “wrong” side won the war, and there are still more examples from campaigns and individual battles. If spending or the size and breadth of forces were the sole determinants of success, the British and French would have won in 1940, the Russians would have repelled the Germans in 1941, the British would have won in Malaysia in 1942, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been the disasters they are.

When I have suggested that America’s military might not be “the best,” the inevitable question is, “Against whom? Name an opponent who can beat us.” History is not kind to those who are so sure they know the future, and in today’s vapid culture the confident prediction of supremacy is articulated in the absence of anything beyond a superficial bean count of forces and hardware — sometimes not even that.

There are far more subtle and supremely powerful forces at play in deciding who wins in warfare than the stuff that occupies the hollow defense debates in the American political spectrum. As a nation, Americans mostly ignore those deciding elements. As American strategist John Boyd explained cogently, material elements come in a poor third in deciding which side wins in conflict — after moral and mental factors.

Instead, in the debate that today dominates the American political-military system on both sides of the political spectrum, two main props sustain the “we are the best” advocates. The first is America’s spectacular performance on the battlefield when, even after the post-Cold War budget reductions of George H.W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations, U.S. armed forces “used Saddam Hussein as a speed bump” in 2003. The second, they say, is America’s vastly superior military technology, which, while expensive, gives the country the essential winning edge that no one can match.

The example of America’s victory over Saddam is particularly inapt. Iraq’s armed forces were a speed bump: Their leadership was hopelessly politicized and grossly incompetent, and their uniformed combat personnel were demoralized and unwilling to fight even before the first bombs were dropped. They were assessed as literally the worst in the world by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and as some have noted, the performance of the U.S. military leadership — even at the field-command level — in that war was an embarrassment.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces often showed real guts and skill at the tactical level, but the heroism of soldiers and Marines notwithstanding, it should be remembered that they have fought enemies with no air force or navy and not much infantry equipment beyond home-built road mines, AK-47 rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades.

We also heard a lot of bombast after the first war with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm in 1991; then, the technologists declared a “revolution in military affairs.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) spent two years looking at that: The air campaign should more accurately becharacterized as bombing a tethered goat led by a military jackass, and even then, the air campaign did not live up to the hype. The high-cost “silver bullet” of the war, the F-117 stealth light bomber, badly underperformed its puffery. For example, in contrast to claims that “alone and unafraid” it destroyed Saddam’s air defense system in the first hours of the first night, the F-117s actually had help from 167 non-stealthy aircraft and were confirmed by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s bomb-damage assessments to have effectively destroyed only two of the 15 air defense targets assigned to them that first night. Overall, the GAO found that effectiveness did not correlate with cost and that on many dimensions the ultralow-cost A-10 close-combat attack aircraft was the top performer.

Nothing is changed today; the bluster is as frequent and hollow. Typical examples are unmanned drones, such as the MQ-9 Reaper and the Air Force’s F-22 fighter.

The real-world performance of the MQ-9 Reaper is actually rather pathetic. With a tiny payload of an extremely limited selection of weapons and very poor ability to find targets to which it is not preciselyshepherded, the Reaper is incapable of defending itself, and it is several times more expensive than manned aircraft that are more effective, such as the A-10. Also, it crashes so routinely that the Air Force appears to not even report all “mishaps” on the appropriate website. Yet, such drones are slavishly characterized as a revolution in warfare, yet again, and technologists are talking proudly about future nuclear bombers that are “optionally manned.”

The F-22 fighter is described by the Air Force as an “exponential leap in warfighting capabilities.” A review of the data shows the F-22 to be more expensive and less impressive than the hype would have you believe. For one thing, the cost for each F-22 is not the $143 million the Air Forceasserts but rather a whopping $412 million, according to the GAO. The plane was supposed to be less expensive to operate than the F-15C; instead, it is 50 percent more. For another, its radar-evading “stealth” capability is significantly limited, as we know from two F-117 “stealth”casualties in the 1999 Kosovo air war, and its ability to detect, identify, and engage enemy aircraft at very long range with radar-controlled missiles relies on a technology that has repeatedly failed in combat. Finally, the F-22 compares roughly in close-in air combat to early versions of the F-15 and F-16. This June, that unexceptional agility was on display when German pilots flew Eurofighter Typhoons successfullyagainst F-22s in mock dogfights.

Because the F-22 is so expensive to fly and difficult to maintain, its pilots get too few hours in the air to train — half of what fighter pilots got in previous decades. Worse, a controversy has raged over how safe the F-22 is to its own pilots. Powerful toxins populate the areas where the F-22 derives its oxygen for the pilot, and despite an Air Force explanation that “contamination” has nothing to do with the physiological problems pilots have experienced, some observers are deeply skeptical that the Air Force is taking the proper care to protect F-22 pilots. Already two pilotshave been killed in accidents in which those toxins are very possibly at play. Even though pilot skill is a dominating factor in air combat, the U.S. Air Force provides few in-air training hours and requires pilots to fly aircraft that are not free of potential poisons. These are not the signs of a first-rate military organization.

That it is people, not hardware, that provide the winning edge in warfare was clearly expressed at the end of the first Iraq war when the U.S. commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, stated that had the two sides switched equipment, the United States still would have won its lopsided victory. There are many veterans of other wars who agree. Indeed, Napoleon said it succinctly 200 years ago: “The moral is to the physical as three to one.”

Just as those F-22 pilots had difficulties against some highly skilled Typhoon aircrew, the United States can expect to encounter smart, skillful enemies in the future. The country has been surprised by opponents it had assumed were inferior — for example in the Vietnam War — and by crude but highly effective technology it failed to anticipate, such as handmade road mines (decorously called improvised explosive devices) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “we are the best in the world” foolishness is prologue to wars of choice making America pay dearly, just as the country discovered immediately after the arrogantlypredicted “cakewalk” against Iraq — a prediction that contemplated no “after.”

Both sides of the American political spectrum persistently cheapen this debate.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke for the right when he attacked Obama for “deep and arbitrary” cuts in the defense budget (cuts that actually were neither deep nor arbitrary) at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) on Oct. 8. He also alleged that Obama is responsible for reducing the size of the U.S. Navy to a post-World War II low and for putting the Air Force “out of business.” To fix all this, Romney will do things like spend more money and put the F-22 back into production. He ignores that Obama is spending on defense at a rate well above any other post-World War II president, and Romney doesn’t mention that Obama inherited a U.S. Navy and an Air Force from George W. Bush that were already at post-World War II lows. Most significantly, Romney is oblivious to the fact that the shrinkage has been occurring as the non-war parts of the defense budget increased by a trillion dollars from 2001 to 2010.

Romney’s proposal to put the very disappointing F-22 back into production is a classic example of “solving” the problem by making it worse: At many times the price of the F-15 it replaces, the F-22 can only be bought in such small numbers — at greatly increased total cost — that the overall inventory shrinks and ages as the Pentagon is forced to retire as few ancient F-15s as possible. The disingenuousness of Romney’s cheap shot on defense spending is exceeded only by the ignorance of his solution and silly pander to ill-informed conventional wisdom.

In his VMI speech, Romney also made a seemingly conscious attempt to walk his previously expressed adventurism into the closest; some hostile rhetorical flourishes aside, he sounded a lot like Obama. It remains entirely unclear, however, whether Romney is merely Etch-A-Sketching away the neoconservative premise that, with U.S. armed forces being the best in the world, the United States can and should use them in still more adventures, such as Iran. He may be asking for even more future trouble than does Obama.

Many on the left do not exactly distinguish themselves in the overall debate. While they are typically far more accurate in characterizing what increases or decreases have or have not occurred in the defense budget, most Democrats persist in the notion that Obama has husbanded a U.S. military that remains the best in the world. The shrinkage is OK because the newer — even if preposterously expensive — equipment is more capable, both individually and collectively. It has all the hallmarks of a political argument of convenience, and it ignores as much evidence as the right does when it asserts that the amount of money spent measures thehealth of overall U.S. forces.

Were Romney running for reelection to a second term, he too would be crowing the “best in the world” rhetoric, and it would be in the face of still further shrinkage and aging despite the heaps of extra money he would strain to pile on to America’s less-bang-for-more-bucks defenses.

The empty rhetoric that U.S. armed forces are the best masks serious problems that have been festering for decades. Obama tolerates the problems; candidate Romney would make them even worse. All of it will continue until leaders emerge who understand that more money has meant more decay, and less money can mean the start of reform.

Winslow T. Wheeler is director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, which recently moved to the Project on Government Oversight. For 31 years he worked on national security issues for U.S. senators from both political parties and for the Government Accountability Office.