Month: January 2013

Interest groups have always tried to influence the state for their own unearned benefit. Despite what idealists in this country would like to believe, going back to the founding of the United States, immediately following the end of the Revolutionary War, everyone from farmers to manufacturers scrambled get theirs from the fledgling state(s) in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and protectionist regulation.

The most pernicious and by far the most influential lobby nowadays is the military-industrial complex. The name itself denotes a recipe for big government and big business to collude in the worst ways of corruption and warfare. The military lobby is especially distinct, despite the utter normalcy it has acquired today.

Consider what American revolutionaries thought of what could arguably be deemed the country’s first military lobby. Historian Merrill Jensen, in The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781-1789, describes the founding of the Society of Cincinnati:

Americans, partly as a result of their English Heritage, and partly as a result of their experience with British troops after 1763, had a healthy dislike of anything smacking of the professional military man. Revolutionary constitutions one after another forbade standing armies in peace time. The effort to create a permanent military force at the end of the Revolution was turned down. But many Americans who served during the Revolution as officers developed a keen desire to continue a military career.

…The founding of the Society of Cincinnati as the war ended was only further proof to many Americans that military men must be feared and controlled by civil power…The purpose behind the organization was partly political and partly social. Many officers felt that they must unite in order to be effective in their appeals to Congress and the states.

…As news of [the Society’s founding] spread abroad it was denounced in the press, private letter and pamphlet. Not only was there popular opposition, but men in high places, like Jefferson, John Adams, Sam Adams, and John Jay thought it a threat to new-won liberties.

…The popular clamor was so great that legislature after legislature denounced the Society. In Massachusetts a committee of both houses declared that the Society was “unjustifiable, and if not properly discountenanced, may be dangers to the peace, liberty and safety of the United States in general, and this commonwealth in particular.”

…In 1787, John Quincy Adams said that the Society was daily acquiring strength and “will infallibly become a body dangerous, if not fatal to the Constitution.”

How far the culture and politics of America has devolved from this “healthy dislike” of a military interest group. Last week was the 52nd anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he famously warned of the creation of “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” and the burgeoning “defense establishment” that contains millions of interested parties.

“In the councils of government,” Eisenhower said, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

But it has endangered them. The federal government spends more on national security than the rest of the world combined. “Last year, in 2012,” wrote The American Prospect‘s David Callahan earlier this month, “the U.S. government spent about $841 billion on security—a figure that includes defense, intelligence, war appropriations, and foreign aid.” This means “about 80 cents of every dollar collected in traditional federal income taxes” goes to the defense establishment. That is unwarranted influence without parallel.

In a Boston Globe review conducted in 2010, it was found that “750 of the highest ranking generals and admirals who retired during the last two decades” moved “into what many in Washington call the ‘rent-a-general’ business.” “From 2004-2008,” the report found, “80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives” in our massive military-industrial complex.

Besides facilitating the constant state of war the US has been in for decades, the military-industrial complex enriches itself at the expense of ordinary Americans; it bolsters government power, which in turn bolsters the military industry itself, in a perpetual feedback that results in a global military presence abroad, unnecessary wars, appalling domestic surveillance, and an embedded martial culture.

In early America, as corrupt and immoral as the political and social culture was, the birth of a minor military lobby “was a stench in the nostrils of good democrats,” Jensen writes. But today, hardly anyone notices. It is business as usual; a staple of the status quo that goes unquestioned by virtually everyone.

Prisoners in Afghanistan continue to be tortured and abused in detention facilities under Afghan control and Afghanistan’s spy agency is operating secret prisons to avoid international scrutiny, according to a United Nations report released on Sunday.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) interviewed 635 conflict-related detainees held at 89 facilities across Afghanistan and found “credible and reliable evidence” that about a third of them were subjected to torture and abuse.

Detainees in Afghanistan have been subjected to torture at both American-controlled as well as Afghan-controlled prisons. But the US is in the process of transferring full control of all detainees to Kabul, at President Hamid Karzai’s insistence.

Despite the fact that most of the torture is now being carried out in Afghan-controlled prisons, the US is no less culpable. The Kabul government has no domestic legitimacy: the Karzai regime has remained in power through widespread election fraud, and the rest of the government is one of the most corrupt in the world. The Afghan government owes its continuing survival to exorbitant US support, and therefore the policies it carries out – in this case rampant torture – are to some extent the responsibility of Washington.

New York Times:

“The French, who are so gloomy and pessimistic about the situation in the country and the economy, have at least one reason to be proud of what their country can achieve,” Jean-David Levitte, the diplomatic adviser to former President Nicolas Sarkozy and the former ambassador to both the United States and the United Nations, told me. “We still have a foreign policy, a capacity to act beyond our borders, a capacity to make a difference.”

(h/t Matt Barganier)

Worth remembering on MLK day is his vehement opposition to the ruthless American terrorism in Indochina. He called it “the destruction of Vietnam.” Hear and read his famous speech, delivered on April 4, 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, below in its entirety.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. Continue reading “‘A Time Comes When Silence Is Betrayal’”

Interviewed by Neil Cavuto on Fox News:

Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy responds to the criticism that earlier US intervention in Syria would have prevented the hopeless bloodbath there:

Advocates of intervention frequently complain that the United States could have prevented this fiasco through earlier, more forceful action. This is easy to say, but almost certainly untrue. Last year, a wide range of serious analysts inside and outside the government, including me, looked carefully at a wide range of possible military steps: no-fly zones, safe areas, bombing campaigns, arming the opposition. None could in good faith conclude that these limited military measures would lead to a rapid end to the conflict. Far from avoiding today’s tragedy, U.S. military intervention would very likely have made things in Syria worse.

Critics of the Obama administration’s approach, such as Sen. John McCain, have taken to saying that all the things opponents of intervention warned of – militarization, tens of thousands of dead, inroads by al-Qaeda affiliates – have now come to pass. This is only partially true. The U.S. military is not bogged down in another Iraq-style quagmire, steadily slipping down the slope of intervention as each limited move fails to end the conflict. There is no Pottery Barn rule dictating that Americans must prepare for a thankless and violent occupation and reconstruction. It is of little comfort to Syrians, but for the American national interest this is not a small thing.

One consequence of intervention Lynch doesn’t emphasize here is the rather obvious fact that it would have continued the Iraq War legacy of breeding generations of anti-American sentiment and al-Qaeda extremism.

He also critiques the argument for sending arms directly to the rebels, which, given the nature of the rebel opposition now, very few people are actually arguing for anymore. One other thing I agree with Lynch on is that it might help mitigate the horror if Washington would finally pressure its Gulf allies to stop supporting even the most extremist of the Sunni rebel fighters.