[NYTr] $2 Billion a Day: The Warfare State is Part of Us

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Aug 22, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon08222007.html

How to Survive at the Pentagon on $2 Billion a Day

The Warfare State is Part of Us

By NORMAN SOLOMON

The USA's military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This
fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with
no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive
air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to
articulate a rejection of the warfare state.

While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our 
lifetimes -- and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative 
-- such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We 
hear that "the people must take back the government," but how can "the 
people" take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls 
for "returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and
democracy," we're encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that
never existed.

The warfare state didn't suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won't
disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.

Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always 
lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over 
an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse. In
recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors have been able -- and
willing -- to destroy all of humanity.

We've accommodated ourselves to this insanity. And I do mean "we" -- 
including those of us who fret aloud that the impact of our
peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don't carry
much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of
our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate and
irradiate the planet.

Maybe it's too unpleasant to acknowledge that we've been living in a 
warfare state for so long. And maybe it's even more unpleasant to 
acknowledge that the warfare state is not just "out there." It's also 
internalized; at least to the extent that we pass up countless 
opportunities to resist it.

Like millions of other young Americans, I grew into awakening as the 
Vietnam War escalated. Slogans like "make love, not war" -- and, a bit 
later, "the personal is political" -- really spoke to us. But over the 
decades we generally learned, or relearned, to compartmentalize: as if 
personal and national histories weren't interwoven in our pasts, 
presents and futures.

One day in 1969, a biologist named George Wald, who had won a Nobel 
Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- the biggest 
military contractor in academia -- and gave a speech. "Our government 
has become preoccupied with death," he said, "with the business of 
killing and being killed."

That preoccupation has fluctuated, but in essence it has persisted. 
While speaking of a far-off war and a nuclear arsenal certain to remain 
in place after the war's end, Wald pointed out: "We are under repeated 
pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled -- 
decisions that have been made."

Today, in similar ways, our government is preoccupied and we are 
pressurized. The grisly commerce of killing -- whether through carnage 
in Iraq and Afghanistan or through the deadly shredding of social 
safety-nets at home -- thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse 
realpolitik of "national security" that brandishes the Pentagon's 
weaponry against the world. At least tacitly, we accept so much that 
threatens to destroy anything and everything.

As it happened, for reasons both "personal" and "political" -- more 
accurately, for reasons indistinguishable between the two -- my own
life fell apart and began to reassemble itself during the same season
of 1969 when George Wald gave his speech, which he called "A Generation
in Search of a Future."

Political and personal histories are usually kept separate -- in how 
we're taught, how we speak and even how we think. But I've become very 
skeptical of the categories. They may not be much more than illusions 
we've been conned into going through the motions of believing.

We actually live in concentric spheres, and "politics" suffuses 
households as well as what Martin Luther King Jr. called "The World 
House." Under that heading, he wrote in 1967: "When scientific power 
outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. 
When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the 
external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. Our hope for 
creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our 
ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives in personal 
character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral 
reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own 
instruments."

While trying to understand the essence of what so many Americans have 
witnessed over the last half century, I worked on a book (titled "Made 
Love, Got War") that sifts through the last 50 years of the warfare 
state... and, in the process, through my own life. I haven't learned as 
much as I would have liked, but some patterns emerged -- persistent and 
pervasive since the middle of the 20th century.

The warfare state doesn't come and go. It can't be defeated on Election 
Day. Like it or not, it's at the core of the United States -- and it
has infiltrated our very being.

What we've tolerated has become part of us. What we accept, however 
reluctantly, seeps inward. In the long run, passivity can easily ratify 
even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, 
"It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and 
without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will
initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones,
have prepared."

The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even 
before the weapons perform as guaranteed.

[Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and 
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."]