America's War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts
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America's War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts
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Overview
A veteran Washington reporter reveals how years of military-slanted domestic and foreign policy have turned the U.S. into a perpetual war machine.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared to leave the White House in 1961, he did so with an ominous message for the American people about the "disastrous rise" of the military-industrial complex. Fifty years later, the complex has morphed into a virtually unstoppable war machine, one that dictates U.S. economic and foreign policy in a direct and substantial way.
Based on his experiences as an award-winning Washington-based reporter covering national security, James McCartney presents a compelling history, from the Cold War to present day that shows that the problem is far worse and far more wide-reaching than anything Eisenhower could have imagined. Big Military has become "too big to fail" and has grown to envelope the nation's political, cultural and intellectual institutions. These centers of power and influence, including the now-complicit White House and Congress, have a vested interest in preparing and waging unnecessary wars. The authors persuasively argue that not one foreign intervention in the past 50 years has made us or the world safer.
With additions by Molly Sinclair McCartney, a fellow journalist with 30 years of experience, America's War Machine provides the context for today's national security state and explains what can be done about it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466878761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
JAMES MCCARTNEY had covered every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Bill Clinton. McCartney covered the White House, the State department, the Pentagon and relevant committees on Capitol Hill. He reported from about 30 countries, including Vietnam, the Soviet Union, the Middle East and Europe. After retirement from daily journalism, he taught courses in foreign policy and politics at Georgetown University. McCartney's papers, including about 4,000 of his articles, are in the Special Collections Research Center at Georgetown University's Lauringer Library.
MOLLY SINCLAIR MCCARTNEY worked as a newspaper reporter more than 25 years, including 14 years at the Washington Post. In 2012 she was appointed a Woodrow Wilson Public Scholar in Washington D.C. to do the research and interviews needed to finish America's War Machine.
JAMES MCCARTNEY had covered every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Bill Clinton. McCartney covered the White House, the State department, the Pentagon and relevant committees on Capitol Hill. He reported from about 30 countries, including Vietnam, the Soviet Union, the Middle East and Europe. After retirement from daily journalism, he taught courses in foreign policy and politics at Georgetown University. McCartney's papers, including about 4,000 of his articles, are in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections at the Georgetown University Library.
Read an Excerpt
America's War Machine
Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts
By James McCartney, Molly Sinclair McCartney
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 Molly Sinclair McCartneyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7876-1
CHAPTER 1
MILITARY MIGHT AND MONEY: THE PENTAGON RULES
U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military, too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands. — Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you think the State Department runs American foreign policy, think again.
The primary force that controls U.S. foreign policy in most recent administrations — including the administration of Barack Obama — has been the Pentagon. In the simplest sense, the Pentagon is where the money is, and in Washington, as elsewhere, money talks.
Even Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has expressed concern about the Pentagon's overwhelming influence on foreign policy. In a March 3, 2010, speech, Mullen declared, "U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military, too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands."
Former secretary of defense Robert Gates has made the same point, noting that it seems to be much easier for Congress to vote for money for the Pentagon than for the State Department.
The September 11 terrorists understood the sources of influence that drive the American government. In targeting Washington, they crashed their hijacked airplane into the Pentagon. They ignored the State Department.
No part of the American power structure has a deeper vested interest in war than the Pentagon.
The United States emerged as a superpower in the years of the Cold War, beginning in the late 1940s, with a vast structure of sophisticated military forces, thousands of nuclear weapons, and a worldwide network of military bases. An American empire was constructed, far stronger and more extensive than any of the great empires of history.
Because of the competition with the Soviet Union, few questioned the necessity of a substantial military budget. It was inherent in America's role as a leader of the so-called Free World. But the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and elemental logic would seem to dictate a substantial change in military posture. That has not happened.
For at least the last three decades — ever since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 — and on many occasions before that, American foreign policy has had a distinct militaristic flavor that is well described by historian and former military officer Andrew Bacevich:
Today as never before in their history, Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys — and is bent on perpetuating — has become central to our national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for.
One measure of America's bent toward a militarized foreign policy is its defense budget. According to an analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based authority on military spending, the United States outspends the rest of the world on defense. The IISS reported that the United States spent $739.3 billion in 2011, compared to a total of $486.7 billion for the next nine countries, including $89.8 billion for China, $62.7 billion for the United Kingdom, and $52.7 billion for Russia.
Money talks, and in the U.S. budget it screams military.
As of 2013, the U.S. Defense Department employed more than 2 million people, including 1.4 million uniformed personnel and more than seven hundred thousand civilians, plus another 1.1 million part-time members of the National Guard and Reserves. The State Department employed about sixty-nine thousand people, including its Foreign Service, Civil Service, and overseas staff. Depending on whether you count the military's part-timers, the Department of Defense is thirty to forty-six times larger than the Department of State.
American foreign policy is meant to be run by the State Department, with its diplomatic officers on the front lines researching international affairs, negotiating with foreign governments, promoting America as a partner, and protecting U.S. citizens. But a sad clue to the real balance of power is that the U.S. government in recent years has employed more musicians in military bands than it has diplomats. As ridiculous as that may seem, it's not a joke. In 2008, a typical year, the score was seventy-five hundred military musicians versus fifty-five hundred diplomats.
Among the officials who have decried this imbalance are military leaders such as former defense secretary Robert Gates. In a lecture at Kansas State University, Gates said, "What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security — diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development. ... We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen."
For much of the past decade, the United States has struggled to help Afghanistan build a government that will meet its people's needs well enough to stabilize that country. The U.S. military established Provincial Reconstruction Teams to lead that work at the ground level. But when it needed U.S. diplomats to play key roles in working with local Afghan community leaders and officials, those jobs went unfilled because the State Department was too short on money to hire a thousand diplomats to fill vacant posts worldwide. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said in reporting that story, the State Department could have filled all those positions for the cost of just one military C-17 cargo plane.
That is one example of the dramatic imbalance between the resources the United States devotes to diplomacy and the resources it devotes to the military. In short, America channels far more money into war than into peace.
The irony is that diplomacy and negotiations are more likely to end terrorism than is war. Of 648 terrorist organizations that operated worldwide between 1968 and 2006, only 7 percent were defeated by military force, according to a 2008 study by the RAND Corporation, a U.S.-government-funded think tank. Fully 43 percent of terrorist campaigns came to an end when members of the terrorist groups decided "to adopt nonviolent tactics and join the political process," according to the RAND study. One example of a political settlement between a government and terrorist groups, RAND said, is the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, announced April 10, 1998, in which the Irish Republican Army "ended its terrorist activity following negotiations with the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland." The other major group (40 percent) of terrorists in the study were defeated by police and intelligence work — not military force — that saw their leaders killed or arrested.
In the first half of the Obama administration, the most reliable voice in articulating foreign policy was Defense Secretary Gates — not Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Chuck Hagel, who replaced Gates, appeared to have more clout than John Kerry, who succeeded Clinton.
Like most of her predecessors in recent years, Clinton's role as secretary of state was largely verbal. She publicly defended policies developed in the Pentagon or by the White House national security apparatus, where the military mind-set is well represented. There is little evidence that Kerry has had any more success in setting policy than Clinton.
The record is clear on this imbalance. The Pentagon's top generals in the Middle East orchestrated the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; so far as we know, Clinton was barely involved.
The Pentagon's domination of American foreign policy is not new. As secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, Robert McNamara was the principal architect of the war in Vietnam, acting as the agent of President Lyndon Johnson. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was little more than a salesman for the Vietnam War, a public defender of McNamara's decisions.
The most authoritative history of the Vietnam War is detailed in the Pentagon Papers, a study of U.S.-Vietnamese relations from 1945 to 1967 that McNamara had prepared within the Defense Department. McNamara didn't even bother to inform President Johnson or Secretary Rusk about the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked to The New York Times in 1971. While Rusk served as secretary of state from 1961 to 1969, he is not a major figure in the seven thousand pages of this record. There is no comparable State Department record of the war that dominated U.S. foreign policy for more than a decade.
A similar pattern played out in the decisions in the administration of President George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. In his book Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was "the driving force in American foreign policy." The invasion plans were also strongly supported by Vice President Cheney.
In the beginning, Secretary of State Colin Powell did argue against the 2003 Iraq invasion. Powell believed that sanctions against Iraq were working adequately to keep Saddam Hussein in check. In a meeting with President Bush, Powell warned that if the United States invaded Iraq and took down Saddam, "You are going to be the owner of twenty-five million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all." The president chose to ignore Powell's argument. The Pentagon won.
When President Bush felt he needed someone credible to make the case for war to the United Nations Security Council, he called upon Powell — and Powell accepted the assignment. In his infamous speech, he declared, to his everlasting shame, that the United States had proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction — which was not true. Powell, the secretary of state, like his predecessor Dean Rusk, was little more than a puppet.
An earlier sign of the Pentagon's foreign-policy dominance followed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. In response, President George H. W. Bush — Bush the elder — sent a team to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Fahd. Bush did not dispatch his secretary of state, James Baker, for that mission. Rather, the team was full of Pentagon officials, headed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and including Defense Department aide Paul Wolfowitz; General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf; and Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams, who left the Defense Department in 1993 to become a correspondent for NBC News.
Cheney had two objectives: first, persuade the king that Saddam Hussein intended to invade Saudi Arabia, and second, offer American troops for Saudi defense.
In his book The Commanders, Bob Woodward says that the Cheney group showed the king "satellite pictures of Iraqi tanks on the way to the Saudi border" and "SCUD launchers pointing menacingly south." After hearing the Cheney presentation in early August 1990, the king agreed to invite U.S. troops into his country, which has a quarter of the world's oil reserves.
But were Iraqi troops really massing on the Saudi border? Or was the government claim of an Iraqi troop buildup part of a U.S. disinformation campaign to build support for the U.S.-led invasion?
In a front-page story published January 6, 1991, The St. Petersburg Times said that it had obtained commercial satellite photographs showing "no evidence of a massive Iraqi presence in Kuwait in September" 1990. Reporter Jean Heller said that Peter Zimmerman, a George Washington University satellite-imagery expert, had examined the photos of the border between southern Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and found no Iraqi troops visible near the Saudi border.
If there had been Iraqi troops on the way to the Saudi border in August, as the Cheney group claimed, why didn't those troops appear in the September photos?
Others had the same photos and the same questions, but "cautiousness overcame curiosity," according to John R. MacArthur in his book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. The result, he wrote, was that "nothing was reported" in the media besides Heller's story. MacArthur also says that Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams admitted to the Washington Journalism Review that he discouraged ABC, CBS, and the Chicago Tribune from pursuing the story.
There have been powerful secretaries of state: George Marshall in the Truman administration, John Foster Dulles in the Eisenhower administration, and Henry Kissinger when he held that title in the Nixon administration. Marshall, although a retired general, proved to be one of the great secretaries of state. Dulles and Kissinger were hard-line conservatives, each contributing to the militarization of American policy.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, signaling the end of the Cold War, efforts were made to revamp U.S. defense policy and cut back on military spending, but they did not last. In the immediate aftermath, cuts were made in military personnel. The armed forces shrank from 2.1 million personnel in 1989 to 1.3 million in 1999. The defense budget declined from $439.6 billion in 1992 to $391.1 billion in 2000.
But that pattern changed sharply with the election of George W. Bush as president and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In the eight years of Bush's administration, from 2001 to 2008, the defense budget nearly doubled.
The numbers tell the story of the tilt to war spending. The Department of Defense base budget by 2010 was $579 billion, not counting the supplemental war budget or other defense-related expenses. The State Department budget stood at about $50 billion.
Even if the United States cut its military budget in half, it would still be far bigger than that of any conceivable rival. According to a comparison of ten countries by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S. base defense and supplemental war budget for 2011 was $739.3 billion — about fourteen times as much as Russia's, twelve and a half times as much as France's, and eight times as much as China's.
Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel provided an even more impressive comparison. In his 2012 book Red Ink, Wessel notes that the U.S. defense budget is more than the combined military budgets of the next seventeen countries: China, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India, Italy, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, and Israel.
Wessel estimates that $1 of every $5 the federal government spent in 2011 went for defense.
U.S. defense spending soars to nearly $1 trillion annually when all defense expenditures are counted, such as veterans benefits, Homeland Security, and other defense-related activities.
The size of the Pentagon budget alarmed even Secretary of Defense Gates, who described spending after the September 11 attacks as the opening of a "gusher." By Gates's own admission, he was unable to bring it under control. But he did try, triggering alarm in the neoconservative community, where the mere suggestion of defense spending cuts is anathema.
Max Boot, one of America's most prominent advocates of a militarily aggressive foreign policy, exemplifies neoconservative thinking about America's military budget. Boot has in recent years argued that America must avoid cutting military spending as U.S. troops are pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2010 column for The Washington Post, Boot said America has excessively — and wrongly — demobilized its army after every major war all the way back to the Revolution. By sending its troops home after the defeat of Lord Cornwallis, Boot wrote, "we were ill-prepared to fight the Whiskey Rebellion, the quasi-war with France, the Barbary wars and the War of 1812 — all of which might have been averted if the new republic had had an army and a navy that commanded the respect of prospective enemies, foreign and domestic."
The rule of the right wing as exemplified by Boot's arguments is that you cannot spend too much for defense. America is always too weak.
The nation's generals know how to play the Washington game and to advance their agendas. War is the name of their game. A dramatic illustration was provided by the successful campaign waged by the Pentagon and top officers in the Middle East to force President Obama's hand and obtain a substantial increase in the number of troops for the war in Afghanistan.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from America's War Machine by James McCartney, Molly Sinclair McCartney. Copyright © 2015 Molly Sinclair McCartney. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Opening Note, by Molly Sinclair McCartney,
Prologue, by James McCartney,
1. Military Might and Money: The Pentagon Rules,
2. Industry at the Wheel,
3. Congress and the White House: A Vital Part of the Problem,
4. Think-Tank Hawks and Interventionists,
5. Flawed Intelligence and Exaggerated Threats,
6. The American Empire,
7. The Vortex: The Middle East,
8. Nuclear Folly,
9. Billions for Weapons Searching for Enemies,
10. Send in the Drones,
11. The Media: Cheerleaders for War,
12. The Reckoning,
Epilogue, by Molly Sinclair McCartney,
Closing Note, by James McCartney,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Authors,
Copyright,