Levees Not War

The “Crushing Weight of Military Power”

“Any person who doesn’t clearly understand that national security and national solvency are mutually dependent and that permanent maintenance of a crushing weight of military power would eventually produce dictatorship should not be entrusted with any kind of responsibility in our country.”

—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (p. 166–67)

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See also “Eisenhower on the Opportunity Cost of the War Machine.” • Click here for the text of President Eisenhower’s famous farewell address (1961) in which he warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” • Click here for a series of YouTube videos of the address.

“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli . . .”

[ also at DailyKos ]

We once made the sardonic observation that apparently the aim of the “war on terror,” rather than protecting the Homeland, was to inflame the entire Muslim world—or at least those nations possessing oil. We thought we were only being sardonic.

The U.S. has fired on Tripoli before, of course, in the First Barbary War (1801–1805)—America’s first overseas conflict as an independent nation. Then the United States had its whole future before it . . .

So now the U.S. is at war with four Muslim countries? (We’re counting the undeclared war on Pakistan, as the Afghan war, now in its 10th year, has blurred into the AfPak war, with unmanned Predator drones firing missiles that have killed countless civilians along with jihadists, particularly in Waziristan.)

In response to a request by the Arab League and pressure by France, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., the United Nations Security Council on March 17 passed a resolution demanding an end to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s excessive force against his own people as he fights furiously to crush a rebellion, and authorizing a no-fly zone and the use of military force. The Security Council measure passed with five major abstentions: Germany, Russia, China, Brazil, and India all opted not to vote. Among the Western nations, France and the United Kingdom were pushing hardest for action against Qaddafi. (Click here for a map of the conflict in Libya as of March 25.)

This blog is usually liberal/progressive (domestic policy wishers-and-dreamers), but in this case count us as foreign policy realists. The United States is in a chronic revenue crisis—while radicals in Congress are constantly threatening to shut down the government over excessive spending—and does not have the money to be firing off 110+ Tomahawk missiles at $1.4 million a pop and supporting at least 10 U.S. battleships or aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya. We already cannot afford $16 billion per month in Afghanistan (estimate by economist Joseph Stiglitz).

What Is Our Purpose in Libya? Whose Fight Is It, Anyway?

But what is the endgame? How does this play out? Now that we’re involved, the United States as the most powerful player will own the outcome (at least partly). And what will that outcome be? Who exactly are these rebels we’re supporting? (See here and here.) They are said to include the volunteers (or ideological brethren thereof) who went to Iraq to fight against “the Crusader” in the war that began in 2003—on March 19, the same day the Libya air assault began—and still has not ended. If somehow Qaddafi survives and there is an exodus of refugees from Libya, will they seek safe refuge in the United States? France? The United Kingdom? Or will the Arab League states take them in?

NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel, who is in Libya and speaks daily with rebel forces there, asks quite logically: Once the rebels feel they have an alliance with the U.S. military whose air strikes have protected them, how do you withdraw that support in a matter of “days, not weeks” without leaving them exposed to reprisals from Qaddafi if he survives in power—the very reprisals the air strikes were originally authorized to prevent? We would add: Do the rebels really have it in them to carry this fight to the finish? How much help do they need? Should outsiders assist? Can al Qaeda pitch in? If outsiders assist the Libyan rebels, what other resistance movements deserve help? Syria’s? Jordan’s? The Palestinians’, too?

What is the mission, and when will the Coalition of the Fractious know when the mission is accomplished? (The Obama administration is not exactly unanimous on the matter, either.) Are the U.S. and Europeans listening to the Arab League, or only telling them how to vote? Obama has said Qaddafi must go, yet the White House denies the U.S. is pushing for regime change. Then there’s the little matter of no congressional authorization, which has infuriated both left and right.

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“Humanity hanging from a cross of iron”

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. . . . Is there no other way the world may live?”

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

Click here for the text of President Eisenhower’s famous farewell address (1961) in which he warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Click here for a series of YouTube videos of the address.

Thoughts on Two American Traumas

[ Cross-posted at Daily Kos. ]

Between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, which do you think gets most attention, and why?

What if the national focus on 9/11 is exaggerated and the nation should focus instead on 8/29—Hurricane Katrina—as the catastrophe that signifies the greatest threat to America? The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has received high-profile attention, marked by the release of feature films (Spike Lee, Harry Shearer), hour-long special reports (Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper), and a presidential address at Xavier University, so we’re not complaining that Katrina has been ignored.

We were in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and saw men and women in dust- and debris-covered clothing walking the streets in a daze and crossing the 59th Street Bridge into Queens as from an apocalypse. We heard distraught eyewitnesses on pay phones talking about seeing the burning, falling bodies (“Look, Mommy, the birds are on fire”); we have heard first-person accounts from survivors who were just 20 feet away when their coworkers fleeing the burning towers were crushed beneath chunks of falling metal the size of garbage trucks. We’ve heard accounts from neighbors who were trapped on the E train near the World Trade Center while frantic escapees pounded on the doors to get in. The haunting stories, the anguish go on and on. Many others have experienced far worse than we can ever imagine. So, the following thoughts are by no means intended to diminish the trauma of September 11 or the necessity of dealing with al Qaeda and other extremist threats.

Anorexia of the Homeland: Making War While “Starving the Beast”

And yet we think maybe the challenges this nation faces are more accurately represented by the natural and bureaucratic/political disaster suffered on August 29, 2005, and in the following days, weeks, months, years. The United States is falling apart from a lack of funding of every kind of infrastructure—resulting from neglect, indifference, and a mean-spirited conservative agenda that seeks to roll back the progressive reforms of the 20th century. Our nation is in a downward spiral because of political unwillingness to protect the environment and our fellow citizens who are poor, jobless, homeless, in need of medical care and decent education. Our coasts and cities are vulnerable because of long-term environmental neglect and denial of the effects of industry—global warming, rising sea levels, intensified storms resulting from warming seas—and because corporate-captive politicians of both parties have put industrial and political interests ahead of what’s best for the planet, humanity, and other life forms. Even if 9/11 had never happened, all these conditions would still threaten our way of life.

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