Militarism at its Simplest

“We have to produce security, not consume security.”

It’s a statement beautiful in its simplicity, and straightforwardness. Security is desirable – we all want to be secure, let us produce some security.

In context it is also a statement horrifying in its misguidedness, because Kosovo MP Rexhep Selimi, the source of the quote, used it as an argument for creating a military and joining NATO.

This is the ultimate over-simplification of what “security” really is and where it comes from. The assumption from this statement is that the deployment of troops from abroad is “security” being consumed, and creating another army is “security” being produced, to be consumed elsewhere.

This is of course readily disproven. Iraq’s “security” demonstrably and dramatically fell with the invasion of the “coalition of the willing” despite it being, in Selimist terms, an import of huge amounts of consumable security. Afghanistan, likewise, got less and less security throughout the past decade as the Bush and Obama Administrations added troops.

On the other hand, citizens of several nations with marginal militaries enjoy dramatically better security than in nations like North Korea or Myanmar, where the military is a huge portion of the economy and massive power over day-to-day life.

The deployment of thousands of NATO troops to attack the ethnic Serbs in the north of Kosovo is not “consuming security,” and creating a proper Kosovar Albanian army to launch those attacks themselves isn’t “producing security” either. Rather NATO is an importer of militarism into Kosovo, and Selimi is hoping to turn the nation into a net exporter of NATO’s favorite commodity, war. Needless to say, the US seems supportive of the idea, as indeed they always are when other nations begin dumping money into the never-ending sinkhole that is a military. Misery, it seems, truly does love company.