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War Weariness, Military Heft, and
Peace Building
H. Patricia Hynes
While post-war Japan and Germany invested in peacetime education, infrastructure, capital and manpower, the United States “committed to the military establishment and especially to the developing of increasingly exotic weaponry. By some estimates as much as a third of all American engineering and scientific talent was so employed through the 1980s.”
John Kenneth Galbraith
A Journey Through Economic Time: A Firsthand View
Americans generally tune into their country’s military in times of war. Otherwise, the heft of U.S. militarism is largely unnoticed. Recent polls find that more than 50% of Americans disapprove of the nearly eight year war in Afghanistan, now spread to Pakistan. However, this ad-hoc sentiment – the wearying of a current war -- will scarcely plumb the depths of the U.S. military reach into culture, economy, global geography, and outer space. That is, unless the call to end this war also confronts the metastasis of U.S. militarism and generates peace-building efforts.
The Cultural Looking Glass of War
War mirrors the culture of a country. U.S. militarism – from its training, tactics, and logistics to its reasons for going to war and its weapons of war -- is distinctly shaped by core elements of American identity. These determining cultural forces are, according to military historian Victor Davis Hanson: manifest destiny; frontier mentality; rugged individualism and what he calls a “muscular independence”; unfettered market capitalism; the ideal of meritocracy (no matter what one’s class, one can rise to the top in the U.S. military); and a fascination with machines, modernity, and mobility. All converge to generate bigger, better and more destructive war technology. He adds that the integration of military into society is smoothed through the GI bill for housing and education and the Second Amendment right to bear arms. www.thenewatlantis.com/ publications/military-technology-and-american-culture
Popular culture is another frontier for military manifest destiny. The next time you watch a war movie, check the credits. In late December 2008, USA Today published an article on the filming of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, www.usatoday.com/life/movies/
news/2008-12-28-transformers-main_N.htm, a film which glorifies the pyrotechnics of jetfire fights, massive explosions from bombs, and the amassing of troops and armored vehicles for planetary war. Hollywood partnered with the Department of Defense, which provided resources, approved the script, and saw the film as a morale booster for enlisted soldiers. In the high-spirited, feel-good description of the war film-in-process, the writer raves about real soldiers returned from Iraq and Afghanistan who are natural actors on set because they know how to handle advanced weapons and react like warriors under attack. And as DOD hoped – the soldier actors’ morale was over the top. After all, they are on the winning side of a good guy/bad guy global war of the U.S. military against alien robots. Apparently DOD has been consulting with Hollywood on making war movies – “with generous loans of equipment, troops, consultants and weaponry in return for script ‘supervision’ – since the silent era.” www.tomdispatch.com/post/175107
Given American cultural values, what is the future of American warfare? According to Hanson, two models of war will predominate. Small-scale rapid and nimble war will involve killing from a distance with drones or unmanned aerial vehicles and, likely, robots on the battlefield (permitting war anywhere on the globe without U.S. fatalities). For larger conflicts, U.S. military power is strategically positioned on every continent and on all the seas. More than seven hundred overseas bases with about ½ million soldiers, civilian contractors and families in 130 countries are listed by the Department of Defense in its “Base Structure Report.” Others estimate the number of overseas bases to be more like 1000. (1) The bases trace an arc from the Andes to North Africa across the Middle East to Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea, sweeping over all major oil resources. Each of a dozen U.S. aircraft carriers located tactically across the globe contains more war planes than whole air forces of most countries.
The proposed U.S. 2009 DOD defense budget lines up pretty symmetrically with this military outlook for the 21st century: Military “muscular independence” for big wars and military mobility and remote battlefield technology for small wars. In a nutshell, the two models of future wars meet the American cultural preference for war: kill from a distance, kill swiftly with overkill, kill others but spare American lives, kill alone whenever possible because coalitions are messy.
The Weapons Economy: Our Biggest Export?
U.S. weapons sales abroad have soared since 2000, with arms sales to more than 100 countries many of which flagrantly abuse the human rights of their citizens. Two-thirds of the world’s conflicts and wars involve weapons supplied by the United States. “Weapons could be the single biggest export item over the next ten years,” according to an arms industry consultant. www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6222
Democrats and Republicans alike have justified and supported the export policy on weapons, cloaking it in language of regional stability, building capacity of partner countries for conflict resolution, defeating terrorism, promoting democracy and human rights, and keeping a strong domestic manufacturing base in weapons even for weapons the U.S. military does not use.
Mission and Vision Creep: In Heaven as it is on Earth
The expansion in the weapons industry parallels the massive bulk up in the Pentagon over the past 8 years, as starkly delineated by Frida Berrigan, senior program associate at The New American Foundation’s Arm and Security Initiative. The Pentagon’s core budget is about equal to the rest of the world’s military budget. Discretionary U.S. military spending exceeds spending for education, environment, housing, justice, transportation, job training and agriculture, energy and economic development. The Pentagon has 30 times the funding of the State Department for non-military foreign aid and operations, relegating diplomacy to a second tier status abroad. Since 9/11 the Pentagon dominates intelligence gathering and operations, resulting in an insular, military-minded analysis and policy. The Pentagon has a mega-military footprint on every region of the world, enlarging into disaster management and humanitarian aid while displacing civilian, NGO and local state agencies. The U.S. military is now training their counterparts in 47 African countries, Africa being the last continent to be neo-colonized with a U.S. military command center, AFRICOM. Further, AFRICOM has joined development and environmental security with military planning for Africa, auguring “the increasing militarization of our foreign relations.” www.commondreams.org/print/46323
Berrigan shrewdly notes that of all the federal agencies, only the Pentagon develops blueprints and “visions” for decades to come, a presumption of power and “colonization of the imagination” unseen elsewhere in government. To wit: The Bush administration’s 2006 national space policy called for U.S. control over space resources and for unchecked rights in space, claiming that dominance of space is as vital to security as the current military command over sea, land and air. With the metastasis in mission, money, and footprint, the U.S. military has “escaped the checks and balances of the nation.” www.tomdispatch.com/post/174936
Preconditions for Peace
Many, many social and cultural pre-conditions must take root and proliferate in our society in order for peace to become a dynamic state of action, a political platform that contends cogently with the demand-side of war—and not merely the intermezzo between acts of armed conflict. Among them are: truth telling about the full harm of war, conscientious objection to war, foregrounding models of human progress in democracy and human rights which have been won by nonviolent social movements, and public prophets of peace among us, that is, individuals who champion nonviolence on the public stage of human history. These preconditions for peace are necessary to help create the base of public opinion needed for political solutions, but they are not sufficient as a counterweight to militarism. They must be joined with public initiatives, grassroots and government action, and political movements that tackle the demand factors of war. (2)
A Short List of Peace-Building
Strategies and Initiatives
- Voice for Peace. Write letters to the editor and opinion pieces to newspapers, campus and alum publications, on-line forums, and so-on. Use points from published analysis on current wars, such as the war in Afghanistan and occupation of Iraq.
Research Resource:
http://traprock.info/focus%20areas/iraqandafghanistan.htm
Writing Resource: Louise Dunlap, Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing. www.undoingsilence.org/book.html
- Countering Military Recruitment. Organize or join initiatives to protest military entertainment centers, (e.g., www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/18-4) and work with local parents and teachers to document and publicize military recruitment tactics on junior high and high school campuses.
- Community Education. Work with local grassroots and social justice organizations to sponsor trainings on non-violence and speaker series on the roots of war and the history of non-violent movements for social change. Publicize in local press and media.
- Peace and Justice Studies. Work with teachers and community college and college faculty to initiate and build peace and justice studies programs for students.
- National Initiatives. On October 5, nonviolent civil disobedience/civil resistance to the war in Afghanistan and U.S. militarism will take place at the White House (see http://nogoodwar.org). A longer term Peaceable Assembly Campaign is in the works, organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence, which will use peaceable legal and extralegal lobbying work (contact pac@vcnv.org).
References
- Chalmers Johnson. The Sorrows of Empire.
New York: Metropolitan /Owl Book. 2004.
Chalmers Johnson. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Holt and Company. 2006.
- H. Patricia Hynes. Beyond War: Preconditions and Prophets of Peace. Women Studies International Forum. July 2007.
H. Patricia Hynes, a former Professor of Environmental Health at Boston University School of Public Health, is on the board of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice. http://traprock.info/index.shtml
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