POCKET GOFER 18
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ON WAR, WEAPONS, AND PEACE
- NATIONAL “LEADERS” AND THE EXTERNAL THREAT
- AND SO IT’S WAR
- WEAPONS AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR
- GIVING PEACE A CHANCE
- CONCLUSIONS
It seems like there are a lot of the first two around the world these days, but not much of the third. This seems strange, because when we listen to the rhetoric of our top government officials when they wax eloquent on international affairs we would conclude that they are all for peace.
Are they that incompetent? (Don’t tempt us.) Or, are there other forces at work that they know about and that drives their behavior but we don’t? In this pocket gofer we will peel away the wool and see what lies beneath.
NATIONAL “LEADERS” AND THE EXTERNAL THREAT
H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
This section shows how a top public official can rally the citizens of his country around some terrible foreign military threat, whether that threat is real or imagined. Whenever he (usually a he) feels unsteady on the throne he is likely to call for more weapons and soldiers. It almost always works.
EVOLUTION: Where did this gimmick get its start? Historically, priestcraft ruled people, followed by armed conquest under kings/queens and dictators.
Long ago priests, shamans, and medicine men put fear of hell and the devil in their people: repent or surely be damned forever. It was this threat that rallied the flock around spiritual leaders. It kept believers under their influence, and it kept the money coming.
Later came the feudal era, in which lords reigned supreme. Serfs had no rights whatsoever outside of minimal shelter and protection from enemies.
Note that the impetus in protecting both individuals by priests and groups by lords was perceived external threats. Other types of bad guys organized into large and roving bands of barbarians. Their counterparts at sea were called pirates.
As our early ancestors learned more about their surroundings, superstitions receded. Due to growing populations demanding more resources from limited environments the emphasis changed from spiritual to military. This development created a need for a larger system, again due to external threats.
The answer was called a nation-state, or country. As exploration widened and the skill of map-making developed, political boundaries were drawn and guarded.
Eventually renegade bands were forced to respect these boundaries, so energies thus freed could be directed toward economic development, including trade. But trade was restrained by armed conflict during the era of international conquest and plunder (roughly the 14th-18th centuries).
Egotistical rulers of more advanced nations took to fighting among themselves. They needed money to finance one war after another, so their armies attacked and plundered weaker nations. No one during this period of history understood that thru capitalism new wealth could be created without violence.
Due to a perceived need for a still bigger force, nations formed alliances. No prize for guessing the reason: military threats from outside.
Unstable rulers caused 500 miserable years in Europe, as alliances were made, broken, and remade. War was almost continuous thruout that period.
We see that thruout the ages top dogs have justified repression of their citizens and denial of human rights based on this ruse. As Mencken indicated, whenever a terrible threat is lacking leaders’ imaginations work overtime to conjure one.
Ben Franklin: “They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
IT STILL WORKS: Right after the end of the Cold War a top general said in a speech that our greatest fear was now “uncertainty.” We should expect nothing else from a military man.
Friends, the kicker here lies in that word uncertainty, which indirectly suggests that the military will need mountains of our money forever. This is because uncertainty will always be with us. It is, certainly, part of life (sorry about that).
Now, if we buy the external threat argument we will be quite willing to pay and pay, so our country can have more and bigger weapons than anyone else. After a long period of acting on this impulse our economy has to get weaker as scarce money is diverted from productive enterprise in order to make more weapons and tougher soldiers.
Here is a trade-off that, as far as we know, was first Alexander Hamilton’s insight: “No nation, however strong, can afford to maintain a standing army in peacetime.” Translation: the more war and preparation for war the weaker the economy. Once revealed and thought about, this trade-off is obvious. And yet there are top officials worldwide who do not or cannot see this
If our decisions are governed by emotions (fear) rather than by rational thinking we may not see this unavoidable truth and keep shelling out (Pocket Gofer 12). President GW Bush asked us to pony up something like $600 billion annually for “defense.”
That comes to $2,200 for every man, woman and child in this country. We should pause a moment, and think rationally about whether this money is being well spent.
When he was Bush’s secretary of the treasury, Paul O’Neill said we need a nonmilitary dimension to our foreign policy, “——- where the US could start treating much of the beleaguered developing world — the source of so many threats to our security — in a way that we’d be valued and respected by them.”
The Texas gunslinger did not like that kind of thinking, so he fired the man. Bush believed in a foreign policy that guarantees a generous supply of hobgoblins.
Hedges comes at us tough from his book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. “As the battle against terrorism continues, as terrorist attacks intrude on our lives, as we feel less and less secure, the acceptance of all methods to lash out at real and perceived enemies will distort and deform our democracy.” Bush’s war on terror springs to mind.
Lapham in his book Gag Rule described the all but unlimited powers granted to the president by the Congress on September 14, 2001. The House of Representatives passed the resolution with but one dissenting vote: Barbara J. Lee (D-CA).
“—– who said that ‘as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.’ ——-. Within the hour, Lee received several thousand e-mail death threats from patriots as far away as Guam.” (Ike said roughly the same thing: “——– destroy what we are attempting to defend.” As far as we know, he received no death threats.)
This is amazing. We need patriots, all right, but let’s recruit more of the rational and thinking variety. Barbara, we salute you for expressing the courage of your convictions.
“——- Reichsmarshall Hermann Goring, who diagrammed for the judges at Nuremburg the simplicities of successful propaganda: ‘All you have to do is tell them that they’re being attacked, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.’” This was 1946. Right after 9/11 the Bush admin denounced the pacifists for the same reasons. We reveal the truth in PG17.
“Orange Alert” comes and goes. The intriguing things about Bush’s media-hyped war on terror were that he cannot defeat al-Qaeda and can do little to reduce terrorist attacks.
Al-Qaeda knows the media will not investigate every threat to see if there is any substance to it prior to publication. And with intelligence no longer credible the organization could and was keeping the entire nation cowed by tossing out one imaginary threat after another.
Members must have been laughing themselves silly as the bushies struggled to determine which threat was for real. It has been truly said that the objectives of terrorism are to spread fear and then to bring forth a change in policy. The first reaction is emotional — fear — and the second is based in reason.
An example of the capability of our vast intelligence bureaucracy came forth in August 2004. The Department of Homeland Security declared a high risk of attack on several financial institutions. But the basis for this alarm was found in a batch of computer files that was at least three years old (before 9/11).
The 9/11 Commission report generated a lot of press. The bipartisan commission stated that the only way to deal with terrorists is to destroy them or isolate them. And, get this:
“’Terrorism against American interests ‘over there,’ reads the report, ‘should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America ‘over here.’ America’s homeland is, in fact, ‘the planet.’”
This report was a best-seller? Friends, we have work ahead of us.
The Economist (8/2004) wondered why the report “—– fail(ed) to ask why several promising young men, some of them hardly religious, chose to sacrifice their lives in this way (our emphasis). It dismisses them ——- ‘a mixture of young fanatics and highly educated zealots.’”
This is just as predictable as it is unpardonable. None of the bullies in the Bush administration wanted this question asked, because the search for an accurate response would take the inquirer deep into the bowels of American foreign policy. But a British reporter named Robert Fisk scratched around and found truth: PG17.
There are today alliances of nations based more on rational economics than fear-driven military criteria. But military issues continue to dominate news coverage.
For example, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was founded in 1949 for one purpose only: to counter a specific perceived external threat. That threat vanished in 1991 with the end of the Soviet Union.
Thus NATO should logically also vanish for lack of an enemy. But what have we today? We have unsteady top officials not only keeping it alive, but even expanding it.
Conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo helped to rejuvenate it. We guess we are supposed to ignore the fact that these places are not covered in NATO’s job description. And now it’s in Afghanistan.
At the same time, the European (Economic) Union plods ahead as military issues throw stumbling blocks in its path. This organization encourages economic development, while NATO either discourages or destroys it (Kosovo, Afghanistan).
After World War II the Russians saw America and NATO as simply waiting for the right moment to attack. They hastily formed the Warsaw Pact and held onto their buffer states in the interest of simple survival.
Our ca. 1991 arguments still hold: once its mission had vanished — the USSR died — its reason for existence died with the Soviet Union. Therefore, because it was oriented toward violence and preparation for the same it should have been given a decent burial. “Violence only begets more violence.”
With all those soldiers, weapons and drills still ongoing, it was only a matter of time until someone started trouble. Jefferson argued that the presence of such resources in peacetime only sharpens the temptation to use them.
Hurst on NATO expansion (News & Observer 2/2015): “As the non-Russian republics broke free in the Soviet collapse and —— satellite countries snapped the chains of Moscow’s domination, common wisdom held that the Cold War was over. The victors: the US and its European allies, bound together in the NATO alliance to block further Soviet expansion in Europe after WWII.”
After WWII the Soviets left leaders in charge of and established satellite countries as a defensive gesture, as Stalin feared that the west, with a different ideology, would attack. He knew his economy was a basket case and in no shape to attack, so he concentrated on setting up anti-aircraft installations around Moscow.
“Since the Soviet collapse — as Moscow had feared — that alliance has spread eastward, —–.” NOW who is doing “further expansion?” “——–.
“The Kremlin claimed it had Western assurances that would not happen.” True to claim, the record shows that they did, in fact, have such. The US/West reneged on its promise.
Marshall Plan aid to western European countries was perceived as hard evidence of what they knew was coming. Historically, Russians and Soviets had had their butts kicked repeatedly. Here was the next round.
“Leaders” in western countries perceived the Soviet weapons machine at full throttle. They also sat uncomfortably on their thrones, and so they played up the external threat for all it was worth.
It turned out to be worth a lot: it undermined the economies of all member nations of NATO, and particularly our own as our government was strongest and seized the initiative.
What we find truly incredible today is expanding NATO towards Russia. George Kennan was the world’s foremost western authority on Russia; he had well over 50 years’ intimate experience in and about that country. (He died several years ago at age 101.)
Thomas Friedman interviewed Mr. Kennan (5/1998 column): “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”
What saddens us is that the congress has been getting away with deceiving us into believing that Russia still poses some kind of external threat. Or, is it China now, or North Korea? Iran, maybe, or Syria? The news media cooperate in this deception.
Citizens today can see thru the fading Russian threat, so members of the congress are going after the limited wealth of new NATO members by selling them American weapons. They should be investing this wealth in productive activities.
Friedman commented: “Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”
He referred to Mikhail Gorbachev’s bravery when he allowed his buffer states their freedom in spite of his generals’ ferocious opposition. President Eisenhower also went toe-to-toe with his generals.
Russia is the country that gave 26 million lives during World War II, so that western Europeans, we, and our descendants could live free of Hitler’s heavy hand. Not very swift, we might say.
And one last sad thought from Mr. Kennan: “This has been my life, and it pains me to see it screwed up in the end.” Sir, we feel your pain.
A book by former defense secretary William Perry and Ashton Carter is called Preventive Defense. Perry insisted in a meeting with the president, that “—— early expansion of NATO was a mistake.” He was overruled because Clintonites smelled some Polish votes to be won.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin had the courage as a leader to overrule hardliners in his government, and to reach out to the West in peace. The man has probably settled at least some of George Kennan’s deep concern, altho today his policies seem to be leading the country in the wrong direction Here is the unpardonable reason.
The Economist 7/2019: “After the fall of the Soviet Union, the dream —– fully western power was revived in full force. ‘Our principles are clear and simple: supremacy of democracy, human rights and freedoms, legal and moral standards,’ ——- Yeltsin told the UN in 1992, aligning the country with America and Europe.
“But when Mr. Putin — by no means a believer ———- rose to power he still saw the West as a model for Russia’s modernization ——— efforts to get along. ———– said all the right things after ——- 9/11.
“In return, say Russian critics —- he got nothing
but aggravation: —-.” This was the pentagon
bragging that America and the West won the cold
war and, what was unconscionable, the media
cooperated.
We wrote in 1992 that the West did not win; rather,
the USSR lost it as Russia’s communism prevented
efficient distribution of economic resources.
“In a book on Russia-China relations, Mr. (critic
Alexander) Lukin writes: ‘It was … the West that
destroyed the idea of creating a new system of global
politics based on international law.
“It was … the West that used its temporary
omnipotence to create a world in which powerful
states could seize anything that was there for the
taking, destroy any borders and violate any treaties
for the sake of a `good cause.`’” Russia’s pivot
toward China, by this logic, followed a Western
failure to accept Russia, ——- assimilate it into the
civilized world.”
Friends, this was a GIGANTIC TRAGEDY
perpetuated by a self-centered pentagon. We get
sick thinking about what we see in today’s mixed-up
world, the great opportunities foregone, the
unnecessary human misery.
Russia was our ally for two world wars. Boris Yeltsin
was president when the Soviet Union collapsed. He
wanted his native land to enjoy democracy and he
named Vladimir Putin to contact America for some
help. Instead, he was treated much like an enemy.
Resurrection of the Cold War was precisely what the warriors wanted. This sad policy conclusively demonstrates the strength of the grip that the military-industrial complex had and still has on our economy.
And on our wallets and purses. Alexander Hamilton knew precisely what he was talking about when he argued that an army, left alone in peace, may gradually change from public servants to our masters.
Ditto Jefferson when he argued that the presence of “treasure” offers top officials a temptation to use it for war. When he was president there was no treasure, no temptation, and no war.
Thus the West and the Soviets made external threats last for nearly 50 years, for a modern-day record. Mutual paranoia runs deep. We shall see what happens when this fear combines with economics and politics.
Former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs: “I never once heard Stalin say anything about preparing to commit aggression against another country.” Stalin: “Our banner is still the banner of peace. But if war breaks out we shall not be able to sit with folded arms. We shall have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so.”
In 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev invited western leaders to “get into our shoes and see how you would react.” We did this, in the several paragraphs above. But we have an advantage over a top official in that we sit comfortably upon our tiny and humble throne.
Since then, regrettably, only more of the same. TheEconomist 9/2018: “The greatest threat to Russia’s economy comes from the two proposed bills, the Defending Elections from Threats by Establishing Redlines Act of 2018 (DETER) and the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA).”
As we have argued, Putin, like all other top leaders, craves respect and dignity for himself and his nation. Slapping him down goes the wrong way, especially along with the above abuse. And not only this; Trump has slapped trade sanctions on
Russia.
Putin also has his hands full due to internal issues that have dogged him since 2000 when he first took office. Some recent published research provides graphic insights, such as The Dissidents, by Peter Reddaway. We see here a review (new book not yet available).
“A remarkable record of the struggle for freedom in the Soviet Union.
“——— Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitzyn surely did help pull down the creaking edifice of the totalitarian state by remorselessly exposing its falsehoods and speaking truth to power. Moreover, whether abroad or in internal exile or jail, the dissidents — and an array of less known heroes documented in Peter Reddaway’s remarkable memoir — did keep alive the notion of Russian decency and the flame of freedom.
Reddaway made “three visits to the Soviet Union in 1960. —listened ——- citizens —– recording their views —— detail. ————. For the next 24 years he doggedly catalogued, translated and disseminated the campaigns and experiences — often in prisons, labor camps and mental asylums — of a vast range of dissidents.
“—— flouting the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords, which it (Russia) had reluctantly signed in 1975 as a token of East-West détente, spawning the dissidents’ Helsinki Human Rights Group in Moscow a year later. This gave a fillip to Sakharov and others —–.
“—— thanks to papers smuggled out by dissidents dragged off to mental hospitals ——.
“—– and that from 1975 to 1988 some 2,438 dissidents, according to KGB records, were subjected to malign care. Thanks to extraordinarily brave medics such as Anatoly Koryagin and Alexander Podrabinek (who both served long prison sentences), this abuse was exposed in the 1960s and 1970s.
“——- General Pyotr Gregorenko, ——–. ———-. ———. Gregorenko was a general with a chestful of medals for valor. But when he started to agitate against the system, he was incarcerated in a string of mental asylums.
“Mr. Reddaway has a wealth of revealing anecdotes beyond the world of dissidents.
“——- memoir makes clear that the dissidents’ cause will live on.” Seems amazing the man is still alive. We have written that democracy thrives on dissent; top-down government officials fear it. So Vladimir Vladimirovich rules on in search of respect. To us it surely seems like there exists even today a great opportunity to overhaul our nation’s foreign policy.
Today NATO has 2.4 million soldiers, but it drags its feet when America asks for 2,200 soldiers and some equipment for Afghanistan. And these guys can go only to some places and do only some things.
Isn’t this weird? Not for top European officials, who must answer to public feelings.
What about those public feelings? Lekic, Slobodan, (News & Observer 4/2009): “Violent anti-war protests that marred the (EU) alliance’s 60th birthday anniversary celebrations were a stark reminder that much of Europe has no appetite for ———: more combat troops.”
A year later (3/2010) thousands of protestors marched thru the American capital. They wanted troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to be ordered home immediately. Has the Obama administration answered to public feelings? And now, ten more years and still counting.
After a grim history of 500 years of nearly continuous wars European citizens have had it with war. We hope they will give NATO an overdue and peaceful burial.
In early 2007 the Italian government refused to approve continuing its army in Afghanistan. Canadian leader Stephane Dion said as prime minister he would bring the nation’s 2,500 soldiers home.
Wall Street Journal 2/2007: “It is a statistical certainty that American and British soldiers will pay a price in blood this spring because their French, Spanish, Italian, German and — if Mr. Dion has his way — Canadian counterparts mean to keep their moral slates clean.” War has always been immoral as well as destructive and tragic.
President Bush was the foremost authority on the potential for making political hay and money out of the external threat. During his State of the Union speech in January 2002 he used the words “terror,” “terrorist,” and “bioterrorism” 30 times.
(Economist 10/2002): “George Bush delivered his scariest speech to date about Saddam Hussein, a murderous ‘tyrant’ who ‘on any given day’ might launch an attack on America, ——-.”
An attack on America?? Thru mid-2002 even an otherwise pussycat press had been full of protests against the notion of attacking Iraq. Bush had to do something.
But later most citizens bought this one, thus proving that even today the old external threat wheeze still works. But someone should ask, how much further can it be stretched?
Bush also said we cannot wait until threats become imminent, and so from now on we will pursue the doctrine of pre-emption. This is interesting, in that for the previous 10 years or so US policy has been to ignore UN warnings and wait until armed conflict has broken out before acting.
This policy kept the weapons trafficking business humming. So, have we a change in policy here? Nope; just politics.
Because the Soviets believed the best defense against a clearly superior enemy was much snarling, gnashing of teeth and saber rattling, this is what they did. This smokescreen hid their military and economic weaknesses while their economy went on deteriorating.
The 20-plus western spy agencies must have known years before 1991 that this was happening. The USSR was their primary job assignment.
However, the cold warriors either were kept in the dark or didn’t act on their information. Everyone in government seemed happy to keep up the illusion of the fierce external threat, so things were permitted to float along. With passing years it became a horribly expensive float.
Pundits and other Washington insiders were anxious to maintain the inertia of the external threat (Rennert 1/2000). “The next president can look forward to rocky relations with Russia and China, missile threats from rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, a defiant Saddam Hussein astride Iraq, terrorist groups on the prowl against US targets and simmering ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. And that will be just for starters ——.”
We don’t for a minute buy this baloney, but we shall defend unto death Rennert’s right to write this stuff. Relations with Russia began to improve almost right after the end of the Cold War, tho this was not publicized. Even with President Putin behaving more like Stalin in Russia, he and Bush got along okay.
Even as trade with America flourished the news media inflated a number of trivial issues with China in an attempt to hype that country as a future threat to our kids’ security. Elitists in Washington believe in keeping a generous supply of threats in the bull-pen.
For example, here we have the pentagon flogging conflict as usual (Economist 9/2007): “America’s military planners worry that China is using cyberspace not just for espionage but to prepare for a future hot war, say over Taiwan. A recent pentagon report ———— ‘first strike’ attack on enemy computers, ——.”
There may be some truth in this. But recently we saw a piece that had government techies hacking into Chinese citizen computers to identify those using porn sites. If false, this would not be the first time the pentagon was blowing smoke.
Here is another example; an Economist 6/2008 piece is titled “Be Afraid.” “—— terrorist threat to Britain. ———-. But security sources say Britain faces a spectrum of threats, ——-. ——- however relaxed Britons may currently feel, the megathreat of terrorism will be with them for many years.”
Economist, shame on you for allowing your editors to be programmed by the timeworn and outmoded external threat theory. And another of many times (11/27/10):
“Take this month’s NATO and EU summits in Lisbon. The NATO gathering was a big affair, spread over two days. ——- adopted a new ‘strategic concept,’ —- agreed to build a missile defense shield in Europe, all the while —- amity with Russia.
There is no mention of an enemy, immediate or remote, real or imaginary. How can all these warriors blow billions of the money of citizens of several nations on nothing?
The EU summit was tiny; lasted just two hours. The EU exists to stimulate trade and peace, but the big show was apparently about war.
Could someone enlighten us taxpayers? Just what the hell IS a strategic concept? Or, may we are not supposed to ask?
Need yet another one? The Economist put out a 12/4/2010 article entitled “The Dangers of a Rising China.” Enough already!
From These Truths, by Jill LePore.
Pg. 61 “Despite talk of a new cold war, there are two reasons to think that coupling, not decoupling, will remain the better description of Sino-American financial ties. The first is China’s own actions. It is pursuing what Yu Yongding, a prominent economist, has described as a ‘linking strategy; seeking to create more connections with foreign companies. Since late 2019 the govt has lifted foreign ownership caps on asset managers, securities firms and life insurers. It has belatedly allowed Mastercard and Pay Pal to enter its payments industry. And it has let foreign ratings agencies to cover more Chinese firms.”
Friends, this is info that the pentagon does not want to hear. It makes the same argument we have been flogging for months, which is contrary to the media hype.
North Korea’s economy is a basket case. Even if a missile could reach the US and destroy something, its army has no means of following up.
Iran uses what it can spare from its oil revenues to provide weapons and other support to the Palestinians. How does Israel fighting them threaten America?
In 3/2008 The Economist reviewed Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear. “Mr. Gardner analyses everything from the media’s predilection for irrational scare stories to the cynical use of fear by politicians pushing a particular agenda.”
Also reviewed was Panicology (shortened title) by Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams. “The chief paradox in both books is that anybody alive today faces far fewer risks than at any time in human history.
“Both books try to correct this irrational view of the world, reassuring readers that most of the hobgoblins by which they are menaced are unnecessarily frightening.” Without this widespread panic the burgeoning terrorism industry could not exist.
It is common knowledge among top officials in every “have” nation that no one is going to actually detonate a nuclear weapon. But they know that nuclear weapons are history’s most effective scare monger and they have huge staying power.
Their presence is wonderfully effective in keeping the peasants in any and all nations hunkered down and pleading for BIG GOVERNMENT protection against this terrible foreign threat. Hence the foot-dragging decade after decade toward elimination.
THE STABILITY MYTH: When we understand the external threat ruse a bunch of previous assumptions instantly evaporate. One of the most crucial is the one that argues that the hideously expensive arms race stabilized most of the world during the cold war.
The reality is, it destabilized it. We are just beginning to appreciate this today.
Let’s illustrate this. Whenever someone or some nation has guns poked into their faces and they lack a sufficient number of guns to poke back, the results are fear, resentment, hatred, and desire for revenge.
These emotions are obviously not conducive to stability. Due to human nature this is not nearly so easy to appreciate from the viewpoint of the man or nation or alliance of nations holding the guns. Quite the contrary, from their vantage point it looks like stability.
China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong said, “Stability comes at the point of a gun.” He was wrong too.
To learn this vital fact, all we need to do is figuratively place ourselves in front of that gun muzzle. Empathy is all it takes to do this, but again due to human nature this commodity is too often in short supply in the field of international relations.
The American government continues to accept attaboys for “leadership” in creating and maintaining a worldwide balance of power. The reality is that the pentagon has been causing instability over much of the world for 60 years with their devastating international weapons trafficking and foreign adventurism.
Even a former enemy, Vietnam (News & Observer 8/2014). We have argued repeatedly against unbalancing the trade-off between economic strength and military adventurism. But the warriors don’t listen.
“——- partner that will acquire American weapons and help offset the power of China.” Friends, this is the height of stupidity, arming a neighbor just because China is growing. This is saber rattling, a skill that the pentagon has practiced since WWII.
Our conclusion is any warrior who claims that weapons promote stability is reflecting human nature: look out for number one. These cats have been involved in war or preparation for it during their entire careers. We are not about to hear them admit that weapons cause instability.
Or, maybe we might? Very recently we have begun to hear some remarks based on rational thinking, mostly from retired military officers. So this pocket gofer may be helping along a most encouraging trend in thinking.
Apparently those warhorses who are still drawing paychecks have not yet signed aboard. Recently the Pentagon said it wants resources to fight two wars at the same time. So President Bush obliged, and got two wars going.
The enemies? Reason and common sense.
AND SO IT’S WAR
We begin this section with a thoro cussing out of The Economist, who’s editors weakly choose to go along with all the media hype flogging war and fear of same. We call all of them cold war dinosaurs.
“The Next War,” (1/2018): “Shifts in geopolitics and technology are renewing the threat of great-power conflict.” We vehemently object to this statement; this is a crock.
“In the past 35 years war has claimed too many lives. ———- clash between the world’s great powers has remained almost unimaginable. No longer. Last week the pentagon issued a new national defense strategy that put China and Russia above jihadism as the main threat to America.”
F-gosh sakes, if anyone wants information about wars to come the last resource to talk to must be the pentagon. It is only a foreign war machine dressed up to look “defensive.” More on this later; much more.
In the old days two opposing generals would exchange messages, select a clearing in a forest, and agree to meet there next Tuesday morning at 7:00 to do battle. In that way a few trees on the edge of the meadow had to take some lead, but the only destruction was young men and some weapons.
Jefferson: “Never has so much false arithmetic employed on any subject as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is in their interest to go to war. Were the money which it has cost to gain, ———– expended in improving what they already possess, —– it would render them much stronger, much wealthier and happier. This I hope will be our wisdom.”
Uh, nice try Tom. The Economist (12/2009) reported that Harry Patch, 111, and Henry Allingham, 113, were the last to die who fought on the front in World War I.
“— the cry of ‘stretcher bearer!’ from desperate men. ————-. Often they had to be ignored. The trenches had their own smell: an appalling stench of latrines, soldiers’ feet, rotting cadavers and the creosote that was applied to stop infection.
“— Mr. Allingham, billeted with a German family after the Armistice, gave them the two precious oranges he received from Dorothy for Christmas. ‘We were all victims,’ said Mr. Patch.” Both men had refused to talk about the war until they were 100 years old. The writer concluded: “It never goes away.”
And so it continues. Soldiers returning home can’t talk about the horror. We can be sure the pentagon is happy with this arrangement.
Dao (News & Observer 2/2010) reported a study in which vets were urged to open up. Friends, this one is loaded.
Should they cooperate the public would learn about what the news media are programmed by government to avoid publishing. Citizens would most probably rise up and shut war down forever. The whole world would rejoice.
Today almost all wars are domestic wars, with about 25 countries embroiled in one at any point in time. And this counts only wars with more than 1,000 violent deaths. Furthermore, the poorest one-sixth of the world’s people suffers thru four-fifths of these tragedies.
At the end of one such tragedy the government typically spends scarce cash on weapons for its army, in order to guard against the next rebellion. But this has the opposite effect on the people, who see the government preparing to smash them again.
So they gear up for it. This is why weapons cause conflict, and not the reverse.
James Carroll grew up in sight of the Pentagon, where his father was employed. His book House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power graphically reveals the horrific tragedy that results when the negative side of human nature gets full play.
1943: “Planners took for granted that once the war emergency had passed, the hulking edifice would be handed over for civilian use: —-.” A veterans’ hospital was considered.
Rosa Brooks empathized full play in her amazing book (“The Space Between,” The Economist 9/2016) Here is a review of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.
This expose seems nearly as tough as Carroll’s classic. If citizens only knew ……..But Ms. Brooks has a wider purpose, which is to examine what happened to institutions and legal process when the distinctions between war and peace become blurred and the space between becomes the norm, as has happened in “America in the decade and a half since the attacks of September 11th, 2001.”
From 1946-66 the Pentagon spent ten times the total of all federal money spent on health, education, and welfare combined. By 1965 nearly six million citizens were employed in and around the Pentagon.
“No one knew this better than the politicians whose reelections were assured by defense spending in their districts, and who became, therefore, the self-appointed and self-perpetuating guardians of the gold-spewing temple on the Potomac.”
The momentum began to build immediately after WWII. “—— with Truman only the first of the presidents to discover that his authority over the Pentagon was more theoretical than real.” We are to understand that the constitutionally-designated commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces had little real authority over the defense department?
But Harry was no pussycat. “——— pleaded with Truman, at long last, to raise the military budget ceiling to accommodate all that the joint chiefs were telling him they needed.
Again Truman refused.” Ditto Eisenhower a few years later. In May 1977, 24 years after the fighting had stopped, President Carter ordered all combat forces to leave South Korea.
But this time the congress blocked his order. So much for this commander-in-chief balderdash. Carter apparently lacked the power to stand between members of congress and their money.
Prominent scientists struggled to prevent use of the atomic bomb. “What came next, of course, was the H-bomb, yet individuals who had thought longest and hardest about the ‘Super,’ as it was called, were determined that the US not develop it (our emphasis).
“The momentum set loose by the American decision to build the Super would, in few decades, lead to the accumulation of tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs, equivalent to more than a million Hiroshimas. Eventually there existed over 100,000 nuclear weapons. And all this took place after Churchill argued that the presence of nukes makes war impossible.
The defense department estimated that the Soviets had 3,000 ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missile). In fact, at the start of 1960 the number of operational Soviet ICBMs was four, ——. ———. ——– President Kennedy began to strike the theme from every platform. ‘Missile lag,’ ——.
“Whether Kennedy knew it or not, his missile gap pronouncements were another in the long line of phony —— warnings that the Russians were coming.”
Kennedy followed Truman and Ike as he saw thru the warriors’ laundry list of requests (quoted): “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.”
“—— in a spiraling arms race, a nation’s security may well be shrinking even as its arms increase.” The trade-off again (mentioned above) .Survey results indicate that citizens today fell less safe than a few years ago.
“The Pentagon, —–, would go on adding to its massive nuclear arsenal. As always, it did this, it said, to prevent the use of the massive nuclear arsenal.” Ah, please run that one past us again.
“Carter had wanted to end the cold war, the arms race, and ‘balance of terror.’ To his humiliation, he learned that the government elites on both sides of the Iron Curtain had no interest in his program (our emphasis).”
In 1981 the Reaganites settled in. “Corporations now drove defense decisions more than ever, which was a major factor in the readiness of both the administration and congress to add billions to the pentagon budget.” While mountains of weapons piled up America changed from being the world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor. Yup; there it is again.
Panic and hype discourage reason. A thinking person could indulge in original thinking, argue that nuclear weapon proliferation is not a bad thing because the more authoritarian governments with arsenals the less likely one will be used.
With today’s ICBMs capable of flying thousands of miles any dictator would feel surrounded. He would surely think long and hard about detonating; his nation and quite possibly he himself would be annihilated.
A better approach would be foreign policies that would minimize incentives to acquire nukes. As trust builds over the medium or long term nationalist governments would lose the support of their citizens.
Furthermore as stockpiles are destroyed extremist groups would find it impossible to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. Irrational fear among citizens would give way to reason. See PG 12.
In 1985 Ron underwent an epiphany. “In his second inaugural address, ——-, Reagan boldly called for the ‘total elimination’ of nuclear weapons.” His top warriors went ballistic (ouch! Sorry about that).
Gorbachev’s warriors did precisely the same thing. “——- he told the puppet rulers of the Soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe that their regimes would no longer be propped up by Soviet power, a stunning move that Jonathan Schell characterizes as ‘nonviolence from the top down.’”
A month later he ordered all Soviet combat forces to leave Afghanistan. The Soviet Duma (congress) did not cancel this order, as happened in this country (see above).
Afghans are one tough bunch of fighters. In the 19th century they threw the British out, and the Soviet Russian soldiers in 1989 after ten years of fighting.
A 9/2009 Washington Post/ABC poll showed 51% of respondents said the war was not worth fighting. So, why are American soldiers still at it? In a democracy the majority rules.
Did President Bush learn anything from the British and Russian experiences? Landay (News & Observer 2/2009): “— Dastagir Arizad ticked off grievances against President Hamid Karzai and America that are disturbingly reminiscent of Moscow’s humiliating defeat.”
This is the typical ‘grunt’ military approach to any war in a nation with a history of wars. “Yeah, but we are tougher than those goofy Soviets, so we will show them how to win a war.” We think the war cannot be won, even with another 21,000 troops.
Economist 9/2009: “The fight against the Taliban has become harder. The more predatory and corrupt the government, the more difficult it will be to draw Afghans away from insurgents, and the harder to convince the Western public to send soldiers to die for its sake.”
No numbers available, but it surely seems that fighting creates more insurgents than it kills. Flying drones dropping bombs and hurling missiles that kill large numbers of civilians are apparently excellent recruiting tools. (Drones are guided by engineers in the pentagon, which seems to imitate violent video games except for the real people killed.)
Hundreds of innocent Afghan civilians have died in this way. The use of drones has saved the lives of perhaps 30-40 American and NATO soldiers. We can readily understand if Afghans appreciate this horrendous imbalance and therefore have great difficulty in accepting efforts to win their hearts and minds. Did the warriors in the pentagon think of this when they authorized the design, building and deployment of armed drones?
By October 2010 the US had vastly increased the frequency of drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt next to the border with Afghanistan. We can imagine how President Zardari must feel when billions in American taxpayer aid tugs him toward cooperating while American drones are simultaneously killing hundreds of his civilians.
“—- General Stanley McChrystal clearly understood ——-. ——– insurgencies can only be defeated when local communities and military forces work together.” There are two kickers here. One was just mentioned. The other is that the Taliban is not an insurgency.
By definition an insurgency is a violent uprising against the government of a nation. Rather, the Taliban are fighting to rid the fatherland of a ruthless foreign aggressor who kills hundreds of civilians.
The Economist 10/2009: “—- Rory Stewart — a British former soldier and diplomat who walked the length of Afghanistan, served as a coalition administrator in Iraq and lived in Kabul — thinks that General McChrystal is ‘trying to do the impossible.’
“Mr. Stewart told the senate foreign relations committee last month that America would succeed neither in building an effective Afghan state nor in defeating the Taliban. Deploying more troops would be a waste of money and lives; —–.”
But President Obama deployed anyway. We wonder if he had become as bull-headed as Bush was while in office.
Here is the same tired old chorus warbled once again. We recall former UN secretary-general U Thant, who has raised in the Indo-China area, say there is no military solution to the Vietnam war, but President LBJ persisted anyway. A book by Thomas Ricks titled Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq said the same. Bush ignored it. And now Rory Stewart, who obviously knew the territory, and Obama and Trump (ten years later and counting).
Or maybe the pentagon is leaning on him just as it did on his predecessors going back to Eisenhower? Withdrawal from Afghanistan would endanger the colossal money machine which is the pentagon, its lackeys in congress and the rest of the equally colossal military-industrial complex.
Friends, these are our tax dollars at work. The warriors see themselves as fighting for their careers and those of other looters.
The Economist continued: “—- it costs $250,000 a year to keep a single American soldier in Afghanistan. An Afghan soldier who speaks the language and can drink the water costs only 1/20 as much, ——-.
“With the budget in tatters, the deficit swelling and foreigners audibly fretting about the dollar, can America’s president really commit to spending vastly more —–?” And no one knows for how long.
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. But: “The much-ballyhooed ‘peace dividend’ had never come. As the Warsaw Pact disbanded, NATO expanded.”
At that time (1991) we wrote that here was one bureaucracy whose mission had evaporated completely. Surely it would be eased into history. Sadly, we were wrong.
“Russia was up to the same old game. She said so with authority. Her specialty was Russian history. She was fluent in the language. She knew what to watch for. She, too, was wrong. Her name was former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
“But war was threatened by global outbreaks of peace.” WHAT?! An end to the taxpayer-financed gravy train? As the wagons circled: “The army of lobbyists started looking for new ways to keep the money flowing.”
Here is a recent example of such stupid, eye-for-an-eye saber rattling as to make us gag. It is a response to a Russian military exercise last year, and the pentagon needs a replacement for the apparent winding down of Iraq.
The Economist (8/2010): “The Obama administration —–. —– pushed NATO to make contingency plans. This year the organization has scheduled several big military exercises in the Baltic.” This sea makes up part of Russia’s front door.
“—– full amphibious landing in Estonia ——. A land exercise, ‘Saber Strike,’ will follow, then ‘Jackal Stone,’ a special forces drill. Even bigger exercises are due in 2011 and 2012.”
Anything in here about “consent of the governed,” who must pay for this? We taxpayers would like a voice, if you please. (Also if you don’t please.)
We know how European citizens of NATO countries will respond to this, so no prize for guessing where the billions will come from. That army of lobbyists must have brought with them to the congress barrels of taxpayer bucks.
The Economist 8/2010): “—– Germany’s —– army would shrink by a third, —–. ——-. Even Britain —— likely to cut defense spending by 10-20% ——-. Spain cut defense spending by 9% this year; Italy will chop by 10% next.
“To Americans, it all looks like a dis-arms race.” We Americans for generations have prayed for peace on earth and goodwill to men and women. But, no dice.
Saddam’s timing was excellent (1990): “His worst crimes, including his gassing of Kurds and Shiites in the early 1980s, had never drawn protests from Washington, but now those crimes were run up the flagpole of American indignation as if committed yesterday.
Gorbachev pleaded with elder Bush: please don’t make war. “With Soviet troops confronted by armed crowds in Lithuania and Latvia, the Soviet leader was faced with far graver threats to the nation he was sworn to protect than anything elder Bush had faced in Panama and Iraq.
“Yet Gorbachev, just as Bush was ordering his forces to attack, ordered his soldiers to return to their barracks.” No prize for guessing which of these men was a leader (see PG 17).
A thinking citizen probably had a different view of Bush right after a 96-hour war as he basked in the limelight with the returning “hero” “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf. A journalist wrote that this was a “defining moment” for the US. Friends, this is a crock.
With the cold war all but over and with over 725 military bases overseas, the vast, multibillion-dollar military-industrial complex in effect told Bush it needed a war. Having little control over that colossus, the commander-in-chief meekly said okay.
And later we find more good timing for Gargantua. Note the logical ultimate state of mind urged on by human nature:
“All that Cheney and company needed to begin to realize their vision of world domination thru overwhelming military superiority, with special emphasis on unfettered access to oil, was an overt justification for it. —— like a gift from the gods, —- fell from the heavens (9/11).”
Why did 19 young Arab men willingly give their lives in this way? Maybe they saw Dick Cheney’s vision coming close to realization? But the American government squelched any discussion aimed at the reason for the attacks, and the pussycat news media cooperated.
And so we gratefully quote from Carroll’s (his book The House of War) conclusion: “The lesson of half a century — belligerent posturing designed to intimidate adversaries only prompts belligerent posturing in return; posturing fuels escalation — remained unlearned.”
Because the Bush administration permitted no debate on why 9/11 happened every shocked citizen did in fact go along with the zany notion of a war on terror. After, say, two years and bin Laden and al-Qaeda still alive and well, some rethinking should have occurred.
It probably did, but the government/pentagon suppressed any press coverage. Today after hundreds of deaths it is more difficult to suppress news. (We learned why anyway; see PG17.)
We quote the Marquis de Condorcet (18th century French philosopher) on war: “Once people are enlightened they will know that they have the right to dispose of their own life and wealth as they choose; they will gradually learn to regard war as the most dreadful of scourges, the most terrible of crimes.”
The Marquis wrote this in about 1790. Hmm: —- “enlightened” ——- “gradually” ——-. So it has been 230 years since. We can’t help asking: Just how “gradually” does this “enlightened” phenomenon move before it impacts our thinking?
Apparently it did indeed take a while. The Economist 1/2019 reports on an institution that, while conceived with imagination and very worthwhile, struggles.
“The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002 as a permanent tribunal that could be granted jurisdiction for conflicts anywhere in the world. Yet it has so far convicted fewer than ten suspects, all of them African.
“The ICC is broadening out beyond Africa, investigating crimes against humanity. Venal governments are bound to reject the authority of international courts. Yet the demand for them has never been stronger, argues Elizabeth Evenson of Human Rights Watch. The ICC’s acquittals show it is not a Western kangaroo court, and it helps set standards for other bodies.” Collecting evidence sufficient to convict is a major task.
Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler are Oxford University economists who looked into the costs of civil wars. In 2004 they reported that a typical conflict lasts seven years, and it takes another ten years for the economy to recover fully.
During that 17-year period the total lost output roughly equals 105% of the country’s pre-war annual GDP or total economic output. The economy shrinks and the amount of income wasted on arms and militias costs another 18% of GDP.
This is just economic output. The analysis does not include the lives wasted and maimed, plus the destruction of families. With about two new wars starting every year, the total world economic cost ranges around $128 billion a year.
WAR AND PROBLEMS: We discussed in Pocket Gofer 11 how pursuing the balance of power myth generates and maintains arms races. Therefore a policy that presumes to bring about an end to war only creates more war, as egomaniacs in charge yield to the temptation to use their big guns.
We believe that war cannot solve any international problems. Our armed forces fought in Korea in 1950-53. Sixty-seven years later the two Koreas are no longer fighting, but there is no peace treaty in force. What problems have been solved?
We took our fighting forces to Vietnam, and apparently created more problems there than we solved. (These remarks take nothing away from the sacrifices of our soldiers.)
Then there is Dominican Republic, Panama, Lebanon, Tripoli, Israel, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and many others, where the American government and taxpayers supplied weapons, training, troops or a combination.
We have had a look at all of these, and can see no problems solved by armed intervention. Today the government has some kind of military operation in about 140 countries. Did we who are paying for this ask for it? See the essay on The Futility of War.
An Economist (10/2018) article rightly questions citizens’ media-hyped attitude toward our military “—— highly romanticized view of military service, which is inaccurate and counter-productive at best.
“Meanwhile there are costs to America’s uncritical soldier worship. Most obviously, it gives the dept. of defense an outsized advantage in the battle for resources with civilian agencies. Today’s cuts to the state dept., whose officers are not noticeably less patriotic or public-spirited than America’s soldiers, are a dismal case in point.”
The Economist 7/2016): “After taking office Mr. Obama scaled up the program, authorizing over 470 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.” Was America at war with all these folks?
“Tho journalists and non-government organizations reported on the strikes, for years Mr. Obama declined to recognize that the military was using armed drones outside Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, which are considered areas of ‘active hostilities.’
To the desire for revenge. We have all heard the old saw “Don’t get mad; get even.” This doesn’t work in international conflicts, nor does it in the domestic variety (or, we might add, in domestic violence).
To Bosnia. A refugee was quoted: “They killed my husband and son. They burned our home. But they can never rest easy, because one day we will do the same to them, or worse. My children will get their revenge, or their children.”
We understand that this terrible situation can be traced back to a battle in the year 1221. Friends, there is no end to it. What a miserable life.
The only logical conclusion is that revenge is God’s privilege, not ours. Old Chinese proverb: If you seek revenge you had better dig two graves.
The Arab perception of American policy in the Middle East includes instability, trampling on Arab feelings, and a lopsided bias toward Israel. All this naturally creates an intense desire for revenge for perceived wrongs over the past 60 years. It also created al-Qaeda.
The idea that our citizens are interested in peace does not enter their thinking. Even if it does, Arab leaders are able to see thru the smoke screen: top US officials and their generals are more interested in war than in peace. It pays better.
Now we see the cause of terrorist bombings. Unless and until our foreign policy reflects this reality, we can rely on continued bomb explosions, deaths, and terrorism. To describe this situation as peace is surely a stretch.
Under today’s foreign policy the terrorist danger can never be eliminated, just as a guerrilla war can never be won (PG 12). Therefore it only makes sense to seriously consider what causes extremist behavior, and to think that these desperate people may have a point.
On the subject of revenge, we have argued that violence only begets more violence. The Palestine-Israel conflict is one of the most dramatic and tragic cases in point in the world today.
The first Arab-Israeli war took place in 1948, which was followed by another in 1967 and yet another in 1973. In 2000 the second intifada lasted about four years, and may have accomplished something: Israel has moved its settlers and soldiers out of Gaza.
If a citizen should examine the American news media for some balanced reporting on the current situation, his/her reward would be thin gruel. The media cling to government policy and are therefore seriously biased toward Israel.
We persisted, and our reward included Levine’s 2/2000 column. “The fundamental issues that divide the Israelis and the Palestinians in the so-called ‘final status’ talks involve borders, settlements, Jerusalem, and refugees. These have been the issues for over 50 years.
“In 1948, Israel pursued a policy of expanding its borders, settling quickly on captured Palestinian land, refusing to recognize the rights of refugees ——- and insisting on sovereignty over Jerusalem in the face of UN resolutions according it international status.”
This took place within months after Israel was established thru partition of Palestine, and three years after the UN Charter specified that borders changed thru force were illegal. Most of Islamic frustration, anger, and revenge seeking can be traced to this ongoing hatred and intermittent strife.
The record speaks for itself. Violence definitely causes more violence. This tragedy is a part of war everywhere and always.
The Economist 3/2011: “Bitter experience in Iraq has taught how liberators soon come to be seen as oppressors. Western troops have found that when they wage war, they own the mess they have created.” This was true centuries ago.
“You cannot fight people into behaving well.” Of course not, but this truth does not stop world history’s biggest bully. See PG11.
The nature of the primarily western interpretation of the Cold War required that nearly every nation take sides. Each was our friend or our enemy, just like the cops and robbers game that we played as kids.
This in turn required that each country caught up in this confrontation accept thousands of tons of weapons and often training, to prepare for the big showdown with those bad guys in the West or in the Communist world. This is why Somalia today is a basket case.
Many poor countries like Somalia had top officials with aspirations to the glory of personal power. They were egomaniacs.
And here came all these guns; what a beautiful opportunity dumped in their laps! Now whenever the natives get restless they can simply waste them. Today the Cold War is long over but the guns remain, and with them the temptation to use them.
It was a helluva deal. All that was needed was to keep the Cold War hot (sorry about that one), and they could see no end to it.
They bent their efforts toward that goal, playing up any disturbance, however tiny, as evidence of subversive activity. And the two superpowers dutifully kept pouring in the weapons.
As power concentrated in central governments, the citizen in the street found him/herself with fewer rights. There was that terrible external threat out there, so any repression and violation of basic human rights was clearly justified in the name of national security. (Does this sound familiar?)
This chorus has always played well in many places thruout the world. How could anyone in his/her right mind question it?
A few thinking citizens did. The first additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions outlaws attacks that ‘may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life’ which would be ‘excessive in relation to ——- direct military advantage.’”
We admit it is hard to estimate civilian deaths in modern warfare. In Iraq such estimates range well above a half million. The Pentagon calls this “collateral damage,” but we think more in terms of human beings grieving over the loss of love ones.
HW Brands reviewed a book by former ambassador Jack Matlock, Jr. titled Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended. We had better brace ourselves, lest the following quote causes us to gag.
“The most protracted, and typically the most bitter, fighting in the Cold War occurred not just between the opposing camps but within them. On each side would-be peacemakers sought to reach across the chasm that separated the superpowers, hoping to reduce the tension.
“Every time they did their own hardliners counterattacked furiously, ratcheting the tension back up. The hard-liners almost always won, with their success measured in the decades the Cold War lasted and the trillions of dollars and rubles it diverted from more constructive purposes.” Friends, warriors know how to fight.
The Cold War dragged on and it got worse and worse, especially in poor countries. Then suddenly it was over.
Almost instantly the flow of weapons, training, and aid all but stopped. Now what?
POST-COLD WAR: Well, the lid blew off. All those frustrations and resentments among citizens built up over 40+ years bubbled to the surface, and with weapons everywhere many conflicts broke loose. All was only to be expected, given the wretched conditions of the previous 40 years.
We noticed that nearly all of these conflicts were internal. Without a terrible external threat in the form of either the USSR or the western alliance, citizens began to see through the smoke screen thrown up by egotistical rulers.
The American government rightly figured that taxpayers would no longer pay for weapons, and so the flows had to be diverted to not-so-poor countries that could pay for them.
Politicians and warriors were not inclined to consider any ideas for conversion of factories to making things that could be used for building economies and not destroying them and the people in them. There was just too much money for the elites in the current arrangement.
Apparently career politicians will kill for votes. The indirect reality is that is exactly what they are doing (PG 3).
In 1949 Soviet expert George Kennan (quoted above) concluded there was a strong possibility that Soviet power “—— bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.”
There was a lesson there, but sadly no western official got the message. The magnitude of the economic waste that followed as a result is all but incomprehensible.
Building weapons provides jobs but, once built, the things either just sit there or are shipped overseas. The bucks invested in them don’t earn a return like those invested in a production line or a power plant or a computer network.
The situation is similar to government make-work systems during the 1930s, except that the pay is much better. Neither system builds an economy. Both use up resources rather than create more.
We can have a strong economy or a strong military, but not both. We have argued that the world is gradually turning economic as the merchant replaces the warrior (see below).
Which side of the trade-off to pursue is pretty obvious to us, but understandably not to a warrior. Therefore when inquiring about military resource needs without a major change in foreign policy the last people to consult are career military officers.
Remember all the hype about the West winning the Cold War? The reality is that neither the US nor the West won it. No one did.
The Soviets lost it, as their socialistic system for distributing resources was less efficient than was (and is) that of the West and so it collapsed before ours did. Kennan’s “seeds of its own decay” sprouted, grew, matured, declined, and died over a period of 42 years.
Pundits called it the end of the arms race. The real race was to determine which side could wreck its economy faster through working the wrong side of the trade-off between economic and military resources.
This logic suggests that the USSR won the Cold War, because it seized the lead in stopping it. And with this win, we suspect and fervently hope, the winning of the war against war.
PG 12 shows why prevention and diplomacy are the only way to the future. But today’s Europe has ministers well along in years who have spent their careers during the Cold War era either fighting small battles or preparing for the big one against the Soviet Union. They will marshal troops who have spent their careers in the same business.
Neither American nor European warhorses have any interest in being put out to pasture. So today it is Cold War business as usual in spite of the blatant fact that the Cold War ended 29 years ago.
Business as usual? After some 500 years of fighting and nothing to show for this protracted tragedy Europeans today have had it with wars and in spite of uncooperative news media they are saying so.
This is why European top officials are not supplying the troops that NATO wants for the war in Afghanistan. This is why the Iraq “coalition of the willing” today includes only the US. And significant numbers of us have been questioning this commitment to a war described by several retired generals and others as unwinnable.
So how about American citizens? Cities across the nation are cancelling Memorial Day parades, not due to lack of funds but because folks are no longer interested in watching.
Are folks here also jaded with wars? Maybe we are beginning to think about what top-down government is really doing.
Maybe we are beginning to think that top dogs in the congress and pentagon and giant “defense” contractors love taxpayer money so they keep the nation constantly on a war footing. (George Orwell forecasted this situation in 1949 when he wrote the book 1984.)
Maybe we are beginning to think about who is paying for these unending wars and who is being sent to fight, kill, die, destroy and get maimed in them. AH! But, we dream.
Galloway (News & Observer 3/2008): “This month marks the beginning of our country’s sixth year of war in Iraq, and still the question is: Why? The other question is: When will it end?
“President Bush —- everything he can to ensure that whoever succeeds him in January will find him or herself deeply mired in Iraqi quicksand. Bush also —— press ahead ——— bypass the untidy bit of the US Constitution which says that treaties with foreign governments must be ratified by congress.
“That’s no big deal for a white house, a president and a vice president who’ve gleefully and routinely ridden roughshod not only over the congress but also over the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, federal laws, international laws, conventions and treaties.
Only in Europe? Right after 9/11 Susan Sontag allowed as how the terrorists were only criticizing American foreign policy. Groups of protesters agreed with this conclusion, and after President Bush declared war on terrorism an anti-war movement formed.
The British newspaper The Economist disagreed (10/01). “This is woolly thinking at best. Perhaps the critics of America’s foreign policy are referring to its interventions in Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo, when it was trying to help the local Muslims? These actions were as close to altruistic as you can get in the real world —–.”
Sir, this is hawgwash. How many Muslims in these countries did you survey in order to derive your conclusion of altruism?
The real motivation was money. Each of these conflicts used up thousands of tons of weapons, which had to be replaced. Members of congress knew that fat cat defense contractors would kick back a generous slice of their fat profits into re-election war chests (see PGs 3 and 7).
Never mind thousands of innocent women and children killed and maimed, property destroyed. The priority was, is, and apparently always will be votes (unless we capture a voice).
The Economist kept foot in mouth: “—— biggest weakness of the anti-war movement. Even if things go badly for Mr. Bush, the pacifists’ lack of any plausible answer to the challenge of terrorism will surely limit this effectiveness.”
Please excuse, sir, but you are not seeing truth here. How many protesters did you interview? Did you read what you just wrote? Ms. Sontag would have told you the obvious: American foreign policy, especially when it involves Muslims, needs a 180-degree turn.
We have demonstrated the futility of big war in PG 11. How about the small ones, which in the aggregate cause the same amount of death, destruction, and misery as a big one?
The kicker here lies in the evolution over the years of guerrilla warfare tactics. The small part of this subject that we know anything about includes engage the enemy only when you can move in, do some damage and then bugger out of there before he can react.
This makes it extremely difficult for an army, even a strong one, to prevail. (Chechnya comes to mind.) Combine this trend with increased availability of lighter, cheaper, more easily concealed, and more destructive weapons, and we conclude that there can be no winner in small wars.
In a 12/1999 column Huntington, “——— many conflicts along the borders of the great Islamic bloc stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. There has been violence between Muslims and non-Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, Sudan, and Nigeria.”
That is an impressive list, even without Palestine-Israel. It covers nearly all nations in the world where there is a significant Muslim presence. Someone in a western leadership position should think about why millions of young Muslim men are joining terrorist groups.
It is a long way from Morocco to Indonesia. Tolerance between Muslims and non-Muslims would alleviate untold misery among both groups. An additional benefit would be greater understanding among Muslims of different ethnic backgrounds and outlooks.
An Economist Special Report, 2/2019 — Islam in the West — has some good news regarding Muslims. We document only a bit of this very encouraging report; wonderful to see in print some truth in the face of constant media hype that primarily emphasizes jihadism.
Concerning America with its strong economy mistreating Muslims, they are hardly at fault for being born into a region that has lots of oil. We have documented this grim trend over the past 60 years.
Small wonder there is extremism among Arabs and Muslims. Inexcusably biased American media hype stimulates this behavior.
See our recently documented book I Was Told to Come Alone, by Souad McHennet, for an incredibly deep insight into jihadism by a brave female Muslim reporter. Her father is a Sunni Muslim and her mother is Shiite, so Ms. McHennet could investigate and report on jihadists of both sects (who often don’t get along). She filed reports to the New York Times and Washington Post.
“America’s Muslims until fairly recently —– a cut above Europe’s. They were more middle class, more integrated and enjoyed a more harmonious relationship with their chosen country.” In case not recognized, this is a compliment for the USA.
A pair of ordinary Serbs was interviewed after the siege of Sarajevo. They concluded that the battle was won by no one and lost by all. “We lived in this town. We loved in this town, we dreamed in this town … many beautiful nights.” “If there is a victory, it is simply that we are alive.”
WEAPONS AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR
The external threat drives acquisition of weapons and also research aimed at designing and building bigger and “better” killing machines. The government is the only customer unless weapons are exported.
The customer has an interest in keeping “defense” contractors afloat. Furthermore, it is not the customer’s personal funds, and it is a well-known fact that no one spends someone else’s money as carefully as they spend their own.
Diversification is sound business practice, but if the money is far superior in just one area (weapons) the temptation is to focus exclusively on this. Then executives whose company misses out on several lucrative contracts can then exert pressure on the customer to throw some business their way: Jobs, Mr./Ms. Politician! Votes! And sugar coming back at you just when you need it for the next election.
Secretary of “defense” Donald Rumsfeld devised a strategy for Iraq War II that substituted sophisticated weapons for boots on the ground. The “defense” contractors loved it.
Generals in the field did not. Rummy got the boot.
RESEARCH AND NUKES: Research is an iffy business, for weapons as well as for other new products. So the customer (pentagon) awards a loose contract, where future negotiations will determine the final price. This means open season on taxpayer bucks during the 15 or so years it takes to develop a new weapon and delivery system. The F-35 joint strike fighter airplane is a case in point: miles over budget and few foreign governments wanted it.
A critic might object, saying that additional costs must be justified. He/she is right, but any accountant can assure us that the books can be easily cooked to show tremendous expenses, a substantial part of which hides inefficiency, waste, and even fraud.
“Creative accounting” is a skill that is not limited to the business sector. Also it is impractical to switch the business to another supplier part way through a contract.
So the government errs on the plus side. No problem; it is someone else’s money. The end result is that we taxpayers are subsidizing large bunches of immoral people and a few outright racketeers.
And there is no need for these sophisticated, ultrahigh-tech weapons in the first place. Inertia and lack of vigilance by those who are paying for it allow the gravy train to keep rolling.
Nuclear weapons contaminate the environment, undermine people’s health, and are horribly expensive. Land and water have been fouled in Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington State.
The estimated cost of clean-up is $300 billion. Some of the damage may be impossible to remedy at any cost.
There is lots of rhetoric about how the whole world absolutely must get together and reduce stockpiles of these things. As the US was the original developer, our government should logically assume a leader’s role.
Are officials doing this? William Hartung (6/1998 column): “—— South Asian ——. American diplomats have been scrambling to put a cap on nuclear weapons development in the region. But these efforts have been hobbled by our own long history of hypocrisy.
“During a 9/2006 meeting of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) the US and allies blocked an Arab-Iranian resolution that asked Israel to join the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Egypt’s foreign minister: “For developing and Arab countries to comprehend the concern Western powers —— Iranian nuclear issue, these —— have to convince everyone that they adhere to all that is lawful, and not pick sides.” Here is another instance of hypocrisy.
Hartung reported yet another one: “During the 1980s, US law required the president to cut off military aid and sales to any nation actively pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. The Reagan administration made an exception for Pakistan because the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) needed —— help in running guns to Reagan’s beloved ‘freedom fighters’ in neighboring Afghanistan.” (The Soviets were the enemy then.)
Pakistan and India have repeatedly fought each other in the past. We can imagine how India took to this inconsistent policy. Today it has an impressive stockpile of nukes.
Forward to 2004. The US military was developing small nuclear warheads. Critics have pointed out that governments of insecure countries are wondering why the world’s strongest nuclear power is working on still more nukes while continuing to discourage other countries from building them.
“In an imperfect world, nuclear weapons do still deter.” They don’t deter, and never did. What they actually do is strongly motivate rulers of have-not nations to acquire similar capability in order to restore an elusive balance of power.
Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times: “Proliferation occurred as a result of antagonistic ‘pairing.’ China’s bomb in 1964 was a function of her quarrel with Russia. India’s 1974 bomb was the direct result of China’s: ———–.” The balance of power myth hits us again.
“Both Israel and South Africa became hidden nuclear powers in the 1970s, largely because they were not members of reliable military pacts which included nuclear coverage. Israel’s bomb provoked an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, frustrated in 1981 when Israeli aircraft destroyed Iraq’s French-built ‘peaceful’ reactor.”
Acquiring nukes is rapidly becoming easier, and more so in the future. We heard there is a web site that provides guidelines for building an atomic bomb. Of course this adds (nuclear) fuel to the arms race.
In 2004 Abdul Qadeer Khan was caught selling inputs to nuclear weapons, apparently to anyone with the price. The news media freaked out, wailing about “nightmares.”
Possession of nukes never did mean they would be used. But just the mention strikes fear in hearts and feeds the egos of despots who can intimidate any have-not nation.
The Economist (1/1997): “Someday, —— the world will wake up to face a rogue regime or a bunch of terrorists with a nuclear bomb ——. Urgently needed are missile defenses (our emphasis) —– to protect troops sent in to do the necessary dirty work.”
This is dead wrong, as has been past actions based on this misguided attitude. The problem here is based on selective perception.
That is, any defense deployed by a “have” nation is perceived as an offense by top officials of a “have-not” nation. Their reaction is predictable, and has been described above (and in PG 11).
Surely world leaders are concerned about a nuclear arms race, and yet (The Economist 7/2001): “Just about everyone bar the culprits agrees that the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as missiles to deliver them, will pose the biggest threat to international peace and security in the 21st century.
“——- this weekend —— China and Russia will sign a new friendship treaty; next weekend Russia joins the US, Canada, Japan, and the bigger Europeans for their annual G8 summit. Yet non-proliferation is top of neither agenda. This is a pity, ——.”
This is also absolutely unpardonable. Very few citizens of any of these countries know what lies behind this willful neglect: money, great barrels of it, and egos (read power seeking; PG13). We get discouraged when we think about how long public officials have got clean away with collecting gobs of dirty money.
Say Son of Saddam acquires a bomb and a missile to deliver it. He is paranoid, of course, or he would not have bothered to get it in the first place. He sees the Great Satan as a terrible threat (the external threat theory is still around).
Suddenly he learns that Satan is deploying an effective missile defense system (star wars?). Being paranoid, he just knows an attack is imminent, simply because his ability to retaliate has been neutralized.
So he immediately launches a crash program aimed at neutralizing the enemy’s ability to attack his country. This in turn is perceived by Satan as a threat. Etc. Off we go.
It is interesting to observe the behavior of officials in nuclear “have” nations as they try to convince “have-not” nations that they should remain without. No deprived nation is about to buy this baloney, and no one should expect it to.
We proved in PG 11 that there is no such thing as a balance of power. Deprived countries will always perceive an intolerable imbalance. They will strive with all they have to rectify this imbalance (and egomaniacs will enhance their personal power at the same time).
About 20 years ago an Iranian vice-president: “Since Israel continues to possess nuclear weapons, we, the Muslims, must cooperate to produce an atom bomb, regardless of UN attempts to prevent proliferation.”
This may explain today’s Iranian stone-walling on this subject. As far as we know the news media have not seen fit to reprint this quotation.
Warriors in the USA and the West will argue that this veep has far less interest in defending the motherland than he does in foreign military adventures. What they don’t realize is that he will come right back by ticking off the USA’s track record of foreign adventurism: Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, etc.
“Oh, but those are different!” wail our generals and admirals. Therein lies the perceptual gap, as in the eyes of most of the rest of the world they are not different.
If and when the pentagon and others in the nuclear club become convinced of this unavoidable truth the world may move toward total elimination. After this happens there will be no more paranoid “have not” nations, and no incentives to acquire nukes.
Thousands of nuke-tipped missiles have been destroyed by a piece of paper. Diplomacy may not grab as many headlines as news about star wars, but it surely is cheaper and more effective.
During the 2008 campaign Obama promised to work toward eliminating nukes worldwide (The Economist 11/2008): “Enter four prominent American elder statesmen, George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, ——-. Last year (and again this) they argued in the Wall St. Journal for America to take the lead in pushing towards a nuclear-free world.
“The Economist 1/2016: “Barack Obama’s administration, which began with a vision to get rid of nuclear weapons, has a trillion-dollar plan to renew them.” No one will find a better example than this one of the pentagon running foreign policy. Hard to believe this guy accepted a Nobel peace prize.
“Pentagon Gets Biggest Budget Military has ever Seen,” News & Observer 2/2018):
Our journal entries over the past at least 25 years have shown the inherent futility of war and the negative impact on American foreign policy, not to mention the huge long-term gouging of the taxpayer.
“It’s the biggest budget the pentagon has ever seen: $700 billion. That’s far more ——– than America’s two nearest competitors, China and Russia, and will mean the military can foot the bill for thousands more troops, more training, more ships and a lot else.”
In this pocket gofer we demonstrate beyond any doubt that the pentagon is operating very expensively on the wrong side of history. If we are to have Jefferson’s “—— pursuit of happiness (Declaration of Independence) we must rein in this bloated and scare-mongering organization.
There is a new international group called Global Zero that wants to eliminate all nukes over the next 25 years. It is working on a verification and enforcement system.
In the face of these developments, today our illustrious government officials are once again talking up star wars. They want to spend still more of our money. Progress on the latest START missile reduction treaty has been stalled due to this stupid talk.
There are practically no missiles in Russia or anywhere else that are in good enough shape to launch reliably. Furthermore, although we are surely not rocket scientists we figure that even if one gets launched anyway satellites would give the alarm immediately. Then GPS (Geographic Positioning System) satellites would track it for fighter planes to intercept.
Other pocket gofers have prepared us, so we can easily guess why the government wants to spend another huge bag of bucks on star wars. Friends, it’s pork again.
Summarizing, even if America did manage to put a system up there we can be sure other countries would do the same thing. Then we would enjoy the greatest fireworks display in history, just before a lethal shower of radioactive particles kills everyone everywhere.
TRADE IN CONFLICT: Let’s explore the economic and diplomatic arguments for international trafficking in weapons. We will look at the world in general first, and then into what America is doing.
Between 1988 and 1992 the biggest six exporters shipped $133 billion in weapons. Five of these huge merchants of death are the biggest suppliers of weapons to poor countries. They are also the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the US, Russia, France, China, and Britain.
This is a towering shame. We think it is unpardonable. All this posturing about the arms race, disarmament, and world peace over the past 75 years or the whole life of the UN, and this is the result.
We recall that the United Nations was formed in 1945 to ensure that there would never be another world war and to work toward the end of warfare in general. Now we examine the behavior of the “leaders” of the organization, — key members of the Security Council — and conclude that they are undermining the very purpose of its existence.
In October 2002 The Economist stated that millions of people, Muslim and otherwise, are very unhappy with the prospect of war in Iraq. “Since you have plainly decided to topple Mr. Hussein anyway, no matter what the Security Council decides, why are you bothering to pretend that the war will be fought in order to uphold the UN’s authority?
“Isn’t this hypocrisy?” Especially in view of 50 years of America bullying of the UN, this surely is. And here comes another shot.
“You accuse Iraq of defying the UN and seeking weapons of mass destruction. But in the meantime you allow Israel, a pampered ally, to ignore the UN and hold on to the nuclear weapons it already has. Isn’t this a case of double standards?” Especially in view of the fact that the US gave or sold those nukes to Israel, this surely is.
Saddam sent his army into Kuwait in 1990, and quickly learned that America would not permit this land grab. Some Muslims got the idea that Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian lands occupied since 1967 could be done along with Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait.
This idea had the excellent potential of bringing calm to a Middle East that had been torn by strife for over 50 years. But elder President Bush would have none of it.
Ahead 12 years. Younger Bush decided to go to war, with all its death, maiming of innocents, and widespread destruction. And, get this, he waged war in the name of what Saddam might do, and with weapons that didn’t exist.
The Economist was not yet ready to quit. “Noting that Israel had not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), as Iraq had, the United Nations called on Israel to put its own nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards, as the NPT requires.
“Two decades on, Israel has still not signed the NPT. This surely tells us something.”
The writer went on to list and briefly summarize 14 UN resolutions passed from May 1968 to September 2002, each one directing that Israel lighten up on the Palestinians. These poor people are horribly and hopelessly outgunned. For every Israeli killed 50-60 Palestinians die.
We suspect that many if not most of those responsible can see the above clear truth concerning stability. But the business is lucrative and keeps jobs and votes coming, so let the developing world shoot itself to pieces. Top public officials will just go on with business as usual.
Leave aside for a moment the terrible carnage. The kicker here is that the rich countries cannot continue to grow and develop if the poor ones are buried.
The latter will simply demand more and more aid from the former instead of becoming strong, growing trading partners with western countries. With free trade every government may enable citizens to improve their living standards.
This means that the US government helps inefficiently (much foreign aid just lines the pockets of public officials) with one hand while it indirectly destroys horribly efficiently with the other. The result cannot be other than continuing deterioration of those nations’ economies and ever more widespread death, destruction, and misery.
Seems like a helluva way to treat our neighbors overseas. And then along comes the next harangue from some overstuffed rich country politician about abuses of human rights in poor countries.
“The Asia-Pacific region is at peace — The Economist 2/2016— but it is buying a lot of weapons. “—— continent has not suffered a full-scale war between countries since China’s ———- 1979. All the more striking, then, that the region now accounts for almost half of the global market for big weapons ——. The pentagon has a huge sales staff.
The Texas warmonger struggled to answer for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and suspected secret torture chambers in several countries. Friends, this is enough to make us pause and think.
Vice-president Cheney called it “enhanced interrogation. Eric Fair was there. We can see what he called it. (News & Observer 12/2014).
“I was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I tortured.” Glad to see this in print, even tho Mr. Fair may yet be prosecuted.
“Abu Ghraib dominates every minute of every day for me. In early 2004, workers inside Abu Ghraib were scrambling to cover the murals of Saddam Hussein with a coat of yellowish paint. I accidentally leaned up against one of those walls. I still wear the black fleece jacket with the faded stain. I still smell the paint. I still hear the sounds. I still see the men we called detainees.”
The Economist 12/2014: “—— contrary to what the CIA told congress, the white house and the public, interrogations produced hardly any useful intelligence.
The rich world needs trade with other countries in order to continue to progress. We cannot see how it can gain much in trade with economies that it is helping to destroy.
In the short run there are jobs to save, and votes and kickbacks to harvest. But our children are the long run. They will be obliged to live in a degraded and sick world.
Many folks here and overseas still believe America is the only true world leader after the Cold War. Our central government has set a very poor example, so it doesn’t deserve the title.
In fiscal year 1993 the US sold $32 billion of weapons abroad. This was more than twice the 1992 total, and a new record. Russia’s share of this grisly market dropped from 32 percent to 9 percent in 1993. The pentagon’s share went from 21 percent in 1989 to a whopping and embarrassing 70 percent in 1993.
We find this hard to believe, in our own country. Thousands, maybe millions of lives sacrificed on the altar of jobs for workers and votes for politicians. These shysters do kill for votes.
“Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive acquisition in military history and one of the most controversial. Currently seven years behind schedule and $167 billion over budget, the F-35 program could cost over $1 trillion over its lifetime.
“There are also concerns that the F-35 is vulnerable to being hacked, that its hull could crack, and that its design specifications have been stolen. Despite that, the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy are sticking by the F-35.”
This is TERRIBLE AND UNPARDONABLE. We peaceniks know the trend in warfare today is toward unmanned fighter airplanes. But once the pentagon gloms onto a program it does not quit in spite of overwhelming evidence that it is wasting $trillions of taxpayer money. (To be fair, we mention here that foreign warriors will probably buy some of these sophisticated killing machines, so some money will be retrieved.)
We would be derelict here if we did not mention pork and its assistance to career politicians at election time. The F-35 fiasco is of course a golden opportunity, and we do mean golden.
“Top Gun’s Topper,” (The Economist 9/2016) Our taxpayer dollars at “work.”
“’In this style, $400,000. That price tag for a hat sounds like something out of a tea party attended by Alice. It is actually, tho, the expected cost of the world’s most high-tech helmet — one to be worn by pilots of the —– F-35 —. —–. But for that amount you might expect to get something pilots are universally happy with. And they are not.
“But some think that the helmet’s ‘political engineering’ is as much a marvel as its electronics, says Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog —–. The aircraft’s research was spread around more than 300 congressional districts whose legislators were keen to support ——— fancy and expensive new features, he maintains.”
Hold it. We just found another topper. The pentagon is still hard at work with our money. The Economist 5/2015):
“Within the next few months, the biggest defense contract for what will probably be many years to come will be awarded by the US Air Force, to build a new long-range strike bomber, The B-3, ———, will be a nuclear-capable aircraft designed to penetrate the most sophisticated air defenses.
“The contract itself will be worth $50 billion-plus in revenues to the successful bidder, and there will be many billions of dollars more for work on design, support and upgrades. The plan is to build at least 80-100 of the planes at a cost of more than $550m each.”
Friends, this is stark raving CRAZY, and apparently no one asked the citizens if they were inclined to pay for this lunacy.
We’re not a devoted fan of columnist Molly Ivins. However, every now and then she kicks loose a ding-wowser. Here we quote from an August 1996 column:
“The US spends more than $450 million and employs nearly 6,500 full-time people to promote and service foreign arms sales by US companies. The pentagon has an arms sales staff of 6,395, ——.
“Since you’ve never heard anyone running for office say, ‘Vote for me, and I’ll use your tax dollars to subsidize weapons manufacturers,’ you may wonder now this charming arrangement came about. And you will not be amazed to learn that major weapons-exporting firms contributed $14.8 million to congressional candidates from 1990 to 1994.”
Friends, this has helped to put the kickback industry into the big time. Corruption is deeply ingrained into the “defense” business.
“The sheer stupidity of this piece of lunacy is nicely illustrated by the last five times we have sent our troops into conflict situations — Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. In every case, the forces on the other side had access to American weaponry, training or military technology. Does the word ‘self-defeating’ ring any bells?”
Prestowitz in his book Rogue Nation: “—– estimated that nearly one-third of all American casualties during the (Vietnam) war were caused by friendly landmines.” There is nothing friendly about a land mine.
Back to Molly: “The World Policy Institute study clearly demonstrates that many of the weapons proliferation threats cited by the CIA and our military intelligence agencies as rationales for increasing US military spending have been exacerbated by our own weapons sales.
“In other words, we have to spend more to defend against dangerous situations we ourselves have helped create. Does the word ‘dumb’ come to mind?”
GOOD SHOT, MOLLY!! Ahead to April 2004. Has the Pentagon learned anything from this grisly past record?
Doesn’t look like it. Many Iraqi policemen and their weapons have gone over to the rebel side.
A few senior officers ordered their men to hand over their weapons to the rebels. Most if not all of these were probably made in the USA and, although we can’t prove it, are probably being fired at US soldiers even as we write.
The Economist (1/2005) commented on suicide bombers making US marines trigger-happy. “’If anyone gets too close to us we f—— waste them,’ says a bullish lieutenant. ‘It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.’
“And not all of them were in cars. Since discovering that roadside bombs, —— can be triggered by mobile telephones, marines say they shoot at any Iraqi they see handling a phone near a bomb-blast.” President Bush said one reason why he sent troops into Iraq was to “—– win hearts and minds.”
We summarize an online news bulletin dated 8/22/05: “Part of the reason for the mental stress when soldiers return could be the nature of this war, in which US troops are not fighting an army. Soldiers never know whether a civilian is the enemy. ——- return home to a country less accepting of the war.” Smacks of Vietnam.
“——– Staff Sgt. Robert Davis, a mental health technician ——–. ‘There’s anxiety, battle fatigue, lack of sleep and they’re miles from home. Any of those is difficult, but all of them together is bad.’
“David Spiegel, ——– expert in PTSD, ——- brutal environment, then just dumped back home among people who don’t understand.” How can it be otherwise when the media report faked intelligence and avoid truth in publishing war news? Old saying: “Truth is the first casualty in war.”
Economist 2/3/2011: “The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, — says NATO claims are mere ‘strategic communication’ cynically designed to bolster Western public opinion. It reported that in 2010 insurgents increased attacks by nearly two-thirds, —-.”
“Many are reluctant to seek help. Veterans worry that getting counseling could hurt their careers or alter relationships, said a study ——- by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.”
On April 25, 2010 a Dao and Frosch article was reprinted from the NY Times and placed on the front page of the News & Observer. We think this is a good sign; just maybe the news media are beginning to report truth in war.
“——- intended to be sheltering way stations where injured soldiers could recuperate and return to duty or —– out of the Army. ———-. Interviews —– suggest that the units are far from being restful sanctuaries.
“For many soldiers, they have become warehouses of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills —.
No proof, but we strongly suspect that the pentagon arranged for these poor souls to be kept out of sight. It does not want news reporters interviewing them.
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs is no longer organized and as such is open to deception and fraud. The VA has proposed changes that would make deception worse.
In May 2010 we noticed that Iraq vet Troy Yocum with a drum and his dog has mapped out a 7,000-mile walk around and across the USA. He is collecting money in an ammo can that saw service in the Vietnam War for soldiers’ families. His goal is $5 million.
THE MORALITY OF WAR: If citizens knew they could change their government, the source of their frustration would vanish. They would treat their fellow citizens better, and this behavior would generalize beyond national borders. Both domestic insurrections and international wars would be consigned to the dustbin of history.
But, we dream. Today there are megabucks being passed around thruout the military-industrial complex, most of it taxpayer money. In order to keep the gravy flowing there must be ongoing conflicts somewhere.
For this to go on happening, two conditions are necessary. One is power-seeking top officials with fragile egos; the other is taxpayers who remain docile while being fleeced. The first is no problem whatever, while the second requires some effort and cunning.
The result is an America always ready to “defend our sacred freedom” by going to war. This rallying cry used to sell well, before, during, and shortly after World War II. (Our national anthem was composed during a battle.)
Gigantic, pervasive war fever in those years. Whenever hefty songbird Kate Smith boomed out “God Bless America” chills ran up and down our spine.
Patriotism flourished. But, most of us didn’t have to go over there and fight, kill, and die in it.
One who did go is Donald Murray (Veterans for Peace Journal, Summer 1994): “I found patriotism wasn’t flags and bugles. The only officer who gave us a patriotic speech was shot in the back not long afterward.
“War was constipation or diarrhea and a uniform I didn’t take off from December until March. War was the look of surprise frozen on the faces of boys — German and American — by death. It was legs and arms and heads without bodies. It was driving over the bodies of men I knew who had been ordered to attack other Americans in the night.
“—– and I came home to march in the front row of the victory parade of the 82nd Airborne Division in NY City, ticker tape and all, right shoulder arms, for five miles. It was one of the worst days of my life.
“We should have stood silent around the world mourning the generations lost on both sides, dedicating ourselves to the end of war. Instead, we had a parade.”
Beginning with the Vietnam War more thinking people are questioning the war mentality. We look to a veteran of this war for another observation on the morality of war (On the Tiger’s Back by Bernard Grady).
“This most powerful nation which proclaims ‘In God We Trust,’ does not trust its God to rightfully settle a dispute among men. The nation which purports to follow the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is doing just that.
“Therefore, the chaplain is required to legitimize the violent death, to vest mayhem with righteousness, to connect death with truth and goodness.”
Grady ran across a mortally wounded enemy soldier, whose comrades had realized this and stripped him of nearly everything before abandoning him. All that remained was a smudged photo, apparently of his wife and 4-year-old daughter.
“A medic shot him with morphine to ease the pain, and he took the photo for a look. The man was crying, not in pain, but he wanted the photo back. He got it just before he died.
“The first sergeant, who fought in WWII and Korea, came to attention and paid his respects to a fellow soldier with a salute. That old warrior who had seen too much —–. —– who himself —— would be just a memory in the minds of his wife, son, and two daughters —– asked the heavens as he walked away, ‘God, isn’t there a better way?’”
There is, Sarge; there is. May your spirit, that of the other dead soldier, and those of countless others help us on our route to that better way.
Mahedy’s book Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets, brings out in graphic detail the total immorality of war. “The veneer of civilized behavior, smug feelings of righteousness, the naïve belief that all’s well with the world, can dissolve in a single instant of mad violence. In that unforgettable moment of discovery, a person realizes that within himself lies an almost limitless capacity for violence.
“The slaughter of innocents sometimes occurred ‘because you never knew who the enemy was,’ or ‘they were all gooks.’ Sometimes it was just that ‘you had to go along with the program.’ If the ‘program’ was to shoot anything that moved, innocent people died.”
The rules of war include a restraint against harming innocent people. Here we learn why that rule, however humane in theory, cannot work on the battlefield. In Vietnam the enemy often hid among villagers. (In Iraq the same, of course.)
“Though the language appears casual, the men who told these stories years after the events had taken place were in rap groups or talking in the privacy of an office because they could not escape from the enormity of what they had done. ——-. It didn’t take more than a few immersions in mass-casualty situations for a person to realize the futility of the war.” This is the title of one of our essays.
Richtell, Matt, “When ‘Thank You’ Rankles,” News & observer 3/2015)
“To some recent vets — by no stretch all of them — the thanks comes across as shallow, disconnected, a reflexive offering from people who, while meaning well, have no clue what soldiers did over there or what motivated them to go and who would never have gone themselves or sent their own sons and daughters.” Here please find exposed the sanitized reporting by the news media, puppets with field generals pulling the strings.
At risk of sounding like a broken record, it bears repeating that those who declare war are not those who must pay for it and fight, kill, and die in it. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1790, if those who had to do these things were responsible for declaring war, “We should soon hear but little more of wars.” This would be in a democracy, where citizens speak and government listens.
Even if the body was spared, the damage to mind and spirit persists to this day. “Vietnam remained for countless vets an ‘undigested lump of life.’ Their dreams were combat nightmares —– when sleep was possible.”
Mahedy: “Wooded areas conjured up memories of patrols that cost lives. Crowds were intolerable; loud noises sent them searching for cover in parking lots and city streets. Wives, wondering what had happened to the carefree young men of prewar days, divorced them.”
Society discarded them. Naïve citizens could not understand them, and most did not want to understand. And most of these poor forgotten men are still around.
The news and movies only sandbagged their plight. “—— the TV and movie stereotyping of Vietnam vets as kill-crazed and emotionally disturbed people.” Bashing Viet vets for a buck when they are already down has to come close to a new low.
“—— ‘a delayed stress reaction’ to the Vietnam War. ——–. —– delayed rather than experienced immediately because a soldier cannot allow himself to be emotionally overcome in combat. Men who watched their closest friends die before their eyes but were unable to permit themselves to feel any grief or sorrow.
“—– the only emotions permissible in combat are those that contribute to survival. ——-. To put it bluntly, fear, grief, sorrow, and revulsion distract one from the business of killing.”
But these are natural, human reactions to high stress and death. A soldier with any sense of morality going in must suffer later on for this denial, and Mahedy assured his readers that they do indeed.
“—– largely teenagers drawn into a caldron of violence that had been planned, organized, and implemented by their own government with the endorsement of their elders. ——. Presumably the society that cut their orders to Vietnam had already made the appropriate moral decisions, so the soldiers asked no questions — at first.”
Later the protest movement made clear the lie stated here. The society did not make any moral decisions to enter the war. The commitment was made by the government and its warriors in the pentagon.
No serious effort was made to gain the public’s approval. Citizens would naturally want the military to protect them from this new and terrible external threat 10,000 miles away. Hasn’t it always been so?
Mahedy: “—— Vietcong consolidated their political base in the villages. The civilian population largely supported them ——. ——.
“At this point, the moral legitimacy of the war became questionable. Who was really the aggressor if the people who live on the land supported the ‘enemy’ cause?
“Such a war cannot be won, because the degree of civilian support that rules out alternative strategies also makes the guerrillas the legitimate rulers of the country.” In a democracy those who govern do so with “——- consent of the governed” (Jefferson).
“Rather than reexamine our policy, presidents Johnson and Nixon resorted to deceiving the public.” While protesting, our parents continued to pay for an unjust war.
“The myth of glorious war rings hollow after Vietnam. War in the cause of virtue makes as much sense now as does sex for the sake of virginity. Sergeant Stryker and Rambo still flicker across our screens, but after Vietnam, they are as real as Alice in Wonderland.”
Richard Holmes wrote a book called Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle. “Training and language are often used to portray the enemy as hateful, barbaric or subhuman, ——.
“The danger is quite literally overkill, when the awareness of a common humanity — which can paralyze soldiers — is erased by a hatred so intense that it leads to atrocities.” Is it too much of a stretch to call this brainwashing?
As a war correspondent, Chris Hedges has been right there time and again. “We do not smell rotting flesh, hear the cries of agony, or see before us blood and entrails seeping out of bodies. We view, from a distance, the rush, the excitement, but feel none of the awful gut-wrenching anxiety and humiliation that come with mortal danger.”
Nancy Smith (Wall St.Journal 8/2007) reviewed a TV program designed to show the “physical and emotional cost of war” thru the “memories of those who narrowly escaped death in Iraq.” (Was aired on HBO, probably because no network would touch this one.)
Smith: “The camera initially shows us sweet, fresh faces and what appear to be sturdy bodies. Then it shatters any initial complacency we feel as it pans back to reveal that the otherwise healthy looking body has no legs, or no shoulder and arm.”
Note that when asked to describe the actual war each demurred, because he could not bear to relive the horror. This is why the pentagon can remain in business.
“As the cause championed by the State comes to define national identity, as the myth of war entices a nation to glory and sacrifice, those who question the value of the cause and the veracity of the myth are branded internal enemies.
“The tension between those who know combat, and thus know the public lie, and those who propagate the myth, usually ends with the mythmakers working to silence the witnesses of war.” This is why government must control the information that reaches the peasants. They might start thinking, and asking embarrassing questions.
The news media are programmed to portray the rush, the excitement, and the myth, and omit or gloss over the rest. However, due to recent progress in high-tech communications (PG 5) top warriors are finding it more difficult to suppress truth. The Muslim TV station al-Jazeera has recently begun broadcasting in English.
When Plato said “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” there were no messages bouncing around the world via satellites. When truth about war gets the press it deserves, the myth of war will die. We will acquire the courage to step forth for peace.
Hedges agrees. “And until we learn once again to speak in our own voice and reject that handed to us by the State in times of war, we flirt with our own destruction.”
During WWII and the Cold War the military-industrial complex presumably served our society. Career politicians ignored Eisenhower’s warning, so now it’s the reverse.
The pentagon is the guts of the department of “defense.” Maybe it is defense, altho this requires a stretch of the imagination when we think that the last time an enemy soldier set foot on American soil was in 1814. (In 1941-45 Hawaii was a territory, not a state.)
Today we accurately describe the huge bureaucracy as a foreign war machine. Millions of folks overseas agree.
We know of no one who has compared international trafficking in weapons with the illegal drug trade. Which destroys more lives?
In Cambodia the average age is about 18, so there are many children. About 200,000 of these kids have stepped on land mines and got themselves killed or had parts of their bodies blown away.
When soldiers leave a battlefield they don’t take their land mines with them. Weapons are durable goods.
Roughly 20 years ago worldwide about 300 children each month step on one of these killers. The UN estimates that 100 million remain distributed throughout the world; each one may be patiently waiting for the next innocent child.
Illegal drugs are destroying our children right here at home. But land mines over there are okay? We are concerned about both groups of kids.
That nation which claims the moral high ground has planted more land mines than has any other. What an unpardonable harvest!!
We note that officials of the US government refused to sign an international protocol calling for the abolition of land mines throughout the world. Seems they felt they needed to retain a few hundred near the border with North Korea, because the misguided government of that nearly economically dead country might send hordes of soldiers across the border.
For 67 years that regime has had the opportunity and has not done this, even back when it was a relatively strong nation. Apparently you gotta be ready for anything, even when it doesn’t exist.
It’s 11/2010 and N and S Korea are at it again. The US with its 35,000 fighters stationed in S Korea since 1953’s cease fire combined with local soldiers to conduct yet more “war games.” Like six-year-old boys each side draws a line in the sand and dares the other to cross it.
This senseless tactic of asking for trouble typifies most instances of saber rattling. It serves to keep the rabble hunkered down in panic and dependent on BIG GOVERNMENT to keep their children safe.
This example plays directly into Kim Jong-Un’s hands. Any paranoid dictator needs this reassurance that the peasants are being kept safe from that terrible ogre lurking offshore.
The big kicker here is that the US government has the same incentive, so the two governments are acting together to keep two countries’ rabbles in perpetual panic. An even bigger kicker lies in the realization that members of said rabbles are letting them get away with this taxpayer-financed folly.
This piece refers to President Trump’s visits with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and South Korea’s leader Moon Jae-in. The News & Observer (8/2018) reports.
“South Korea’s foreign ministry: “’Rather than reading into each and every turn in the situation, it is more important to focus diplomatic efforts on the faithful execution on what has been agreed in the US-NK summit and the inter-Korean summit, while maintaining the momentum for talks on the long-term outlook,’ the ministry said —–.”
A year later The Economist (7/2019) updates this interesting show. “Yet like everything else about the hour-long get-together, —– the social-media invitation ——– while the old diplomatic rulebook was tossed aside (Kim and Trump).
“Past presidents, ——– glower across the world’s most dangerous faultline, ———.” More media hype. “—– after three meetings the despot is a firm buddy. Nor does Mr. Kim’s nuclear arsenal appear to Mr. Trump to be a threat.” In this we agree, but media hype always jumps on violence (or the threat) because it sells.
“President Moon Jae-in (South Korea) ——– who accompanied Mr. Trump to the border, ———-. But he was surely right to point out the limitations of the previous ‘diplomatic grammar’ that flowed from seven decades of mutual hostility.
“It seems unlikely that Mr. Trump has the blind faith ———-. He must know that rocket-man, ——- is hoping to keep his nukes while seeking relief from sanctions.”
Henninger reported on a Medal of Honor ceremony (Wall St. Journal 3/2007). Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey spoke: “The courage and fortitude of America’s soldiers in combat exemplified by these individuals is, without question, the highest level of human behavior. It demonstrates the basic goodness of mankind as well as the inherent kindness —— soldiers.”
Fighting in a war invariably brings forth the absolute worse of human instincts. It has been proven time and again that violence turns men into beasts. This is the highest level of human behavior?
How can anyone in his right mind equate goodness and kindness with body parts strewn over acres after a missile hits a village full of innocent civilians and children?
SELECTIVE INTERVENTION: Introducing a policy that we call selective intervention. 1,200-5,000 civilians in Kosovo were killed.
However, in Chechnya those killed were 100,000 and counting. In East Timor casualties were 100-200,000, and in Rwanda it was 800,000.
Therefore Kosovo was relatively small beer. So why shoot this place up and more or less ignore the other places?
The policy of selective intervention suggests that top warriors pick a place to shoot up that will make the shooter look like one of the good guys, minimize American casualties, and where it pays well.
Intervening in Chechnya would cause horrendous difficulties with friendly Russian officials; that place is their turf. Dropping bombs on Rwanda would have killed millions in that country and in neighboring Burundi (which would surely have been sucked into the mess). Bomb East Timor and the world’s fourth-largest nation would be seriously bent.
For Kosovo US officials had a convenient cover: NATO. They chose to ignore the fact that NATO was organized solely as a defense against a Soviet invasion. They not only transformed it into an offensive war machine; they moved the operation away from its home turf to attack a sovereign nation.
Furthermore Kosovo was part of Yugoslavia, and Slobodan Milosevic was a high-profile bad guy. Such a personage didn’t exist in the other places mentioned. Thus the selection of Kosovo.
Did it pay well? For the US military-industrial complex it was the perfect war: megatons of bombs and missiles used up, and no body bags coming back home (to the US, that is. Never mind the others).
Who would guess what NATO is up to today? In “War in a Cold Climate,” The Economist 11/2018 provides an apt title to this piece.
“NATO holds its biggest exercises since the cold war. The Spanish armored vehicles —— some 300kms north of Oslo, ——-. Their task was to defend —– from ——- ‘North Force,’ played mostly by American marines, —–. ———.
“Yellow-jacketed umpires followed the war games, ——.” This is ridiculous, and so bloody expensive even when lives are not at stake. Russia is surely no threat. So, who is the enemy? And what is the cost? Don’t ask.
“NATO’s response to the new threats ——-? Recall HL Mencken’s observation (paraphrased) “Unsteady top leaders will constantly point to some foreign ogre that, if not resisted will surely devour our children. All ogres, real and imagined. If none can be identified they will conjure one.” Here we see Mencken’s words in expensive action.
In 1997 President Clinton reversed a long-standing ban on shipping high-tech weapons to Latin American countries. This change in policy opened the possibility of a regional arms race.
Up until then we had seen encouraging progress toward democracy in many Latino countries. Dictators had been replaced by citizens voting.
“Mr. Clinton’s special adviser for Latin America, Mack McLarty, called this a natural step from the fact that the region is run almost entirely by democratic, civilian governments. It ‘deserves the same respect as the rest of the world.’” (From The Economist 8/23/97)
This is how to show respect for the world?? This and many other actions belie our government’s rhetoric. They undermine our credibility throughout the world, and along with it our capability to lead the world.
McLarty fell back on the old saw: “If we don’t sell the rest of the world will.” Former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias compared selling arms to pushing drugs. “What if Colombia refused to crack down on its traffickers, saying that if they did not meet America’s demand for cocaine, Peruvian ones would?”
Costa Rica disbanded its army in 1948. Since then its economy has done better than every other in Latin America. And no one has attacked it. Hmm.
Brazil has shocking differences between rich and poor. Government officials think spending on schools is far preferable to jet fighters. But if neighbors Argentina and Chile start buying …..
We find it intriguing that we can find no estimates of how many people have been killed or maimed by exported American-made weapons during the past 30 years or so. We can find no numbers estimating the damage to foreign economies thru destruction of their buildings, dams, bridges, power plants, etc. Surely these estimates have been prepared; why no publicity?
Ignoring signed treaties adds flexibility to the policy of selective intervention. Molly Ivins (3/1998 column): “—– when you find yourself allied with Libya, Syria, and Iraq in refusing to comply with a global treaty to eliminate chemical weapons, this should make you think about the company you keep.
“When Somalia is the only country that joins you in failing to ratify the UN convention on children’s rights, this is an indication that you should perhaps rethink your position. ——. And when you are odd man out on banning land mines —– with countries like China, Libya and Iraq for company —–.
“—— insane position of asking the UN for support against Iraq when we’re the biggest deadbeat in the organization? ——-. We may be the only superpower left, but we’re starting to look like a super-jackass.”
This is leadership? Only if the world is full of jackasses. And today the warriors are asking again.
NINE LIVES: Lawrence Korb (7/1999 column titled “Weapons Programs Just Don’t Quit”): “Defense projects have a curious way of evading the will of congress and the president.” He didn’t mention the will of citizens, who must pay the huge costs. Maybe we shouldn’t find this a bit strange?
He referred to a report which showed that even when the congress refuses to appropriate money to keep a weapons program going the Pentagon maintains it by siphoning money from other programs or by simply spending unappropriated funds.
In June 1977 President Carter decided against moving the B-1 bomber into production. He said it was unnecessary and expensive.
But the Pentagon found money to keep the program alive until Carter left office. Reagan said go ahead and build 100 of these birds.
Pork is big business. Clinton authorized two additional Seawolf nuclear attack submarines at $3 billion of our money a copy. We have been scratching around, but as yet we cannot find anyone who can tell us exactly what our military will do with these things.
Maybe they will be parked at piers and serve as attractions for tour groups? We surely hope they don’t charge admission. We “gave” at the office.
Between 1945 and 1989 the price of a destroyer increased 90 times, and that of a fighter airplane 290 times. The corresponding figures for cars and cameras are 8 and 4 times, but of course these products compete in the private marketplace and so companies producing them cannot sell to us unless they hold down price increases.
Today we find military spending around the world running at about $1 trillion a year. Does the money being spent roughly equal the severity of all those threats? The UN annual peacekeeping budget is about $5 billion.
OTHER THOUGHTS: The United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) recent Human Development Report shows that in poor countries the chances of dying from malnutrition or disease are 33 times greater than in a fight with a neighboring country. But on average these countries have 20 soldiers for every doctor.
Small wonder these countries are desperately poor. They have huge armies, and armies are trained to destroy, not build. This surely makes it difficult to build an economy with all those soldiers around, shooting up the place.
During his 1988 election campaign elder President Bush stated that power and the willingness to use it help to bring peace. We apparently bought that one, so he came right back with an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime deal on a bridge. This one we didn’t buy, so we canned him in ’92.
But he did considerable damage to our economy in the meantime. (He could not match Reagan, as we allowed him only one term.)
Bush frequently spoke with forked tongue, as he preached arms control while authorizing huge international shipments of weapons. President Carter did much the same thing: human rights in one breath, weapons with the next.
The Middle East is the most unstable region of the world, and it contains the highest concentration of weapons. There apparently is cause-and-effect here.
In fact, elder Bush’s secretary of state James Baker admitted this effect on national TV. We shouldn’t wonder why folks in that region often hate America and call us nasty names like Great Satan.
We can hear the central government attacking our arguments, stating that they sell only to friends. We have two problems with this.
One is that the customer may not remain a friend (Iraq), and as we mentioned, weapons are durable goods. The other is that many highly destructive weapons are easily portable. Resales to bad guys are a piece of cake, and come in handy when the cash account gets thin. And those same weapons may be shooting at our soldiers.
Schanzer (News & Observer 9/2016) may be a George Orwell fan. In 1949 this author predicted a nation at war all the time. Schanzer : “—– stuck in the “Forever War.”
“Violent Muslim extremist organizations are entrenched, the Middle East is an absolutely tragic mess and likely to remain that way for quite some time, and America, as well as our allies in Europe and elsewhere, will continue to be targets and victims of terrorist violence.”
Violence requires weapons. The Middle East is chock-a bloc with these killing machines. We have argued that violence begets more violence with no end in sight. But no government in the Middle East listens.
The Economist reports (8/2018): “All four Gulf states —– signing big arms deals with America and spending millions on Washington lobbyists.”
We believe this is wrong. Violence only begets more violence as resentment and hatred take over lives. We need a leader who will confront this situation and show the courage to point the nation in a peaceful direction. Any tyrant can start a war, and any tyrant can blindly continue it with no consideration given to any alternative that does not fuel the fire. The kicker here is finding that leader and drumming up support.
OUR CHILDREN AND CONFLICTING SIGNALS: PM O’Neill wrote an interesting column (4/1999): “Following his extended coverage —— about Columbine High, (Ted) Koppel told viewers to hang on just a minute longer. There had been a spectacular series of explosions in downtown Belgrade. —— and ‘Nightline’ was ready with up-to-the-minute details about military mayhem in Serbia.
“Quickly viewers had to make the transition from violence as wasteful and tragic to violence as good and necessary.” For members of the sound bite generation, this transition is a piece of cake.
The explanation is simple: bad violence is here at home; good violence is over there. All it takes is a decline in morality, and feeling for those poor souls in Serbia evaporates.
O’Neill referred to “—– violence as an American addiction. ——. Violence is unacceptable in school they are told, but military recruiters are free to set up shop in schools to recruit our children into the perfectly acceptable vocation of warrior.
“Parents and religious leaders tell children to ‘love one another’ and to live holy lives. Yet those same parents and religious leaders embrace war as a necessary evil, ——.”
We see here why central government officials don’t want children taught to think (see PG10). If most of them followed their consciences as young adults the supply of naïve grunts for combat would dry up. This trend is already under way.
GIVING PEACE A CHANCE
Here is a shocker to get us started on this section. “Go Home, Yankee,” (The Economist 8/2016). This one is long overdue. Prominent former congressman Ron Paul says “Bring them all home,” We agree wholeheartedly.
“The presence of American troops on foreign soil is growing more controversial. “—- plans to hand back 15 square miles on Okinawa to the Japanese government. ———— home to almost 30,000 ——. The decision followed the rape and murder of a local woman and big anti-America protests in June.
“America has more overseas military bases than any other nation: nearly 800 spread thru more than 70 countries. Of the roughly 150,000 troops stationed abroad, 49,000 are in Japan, 28,000 in South Korea and 38,000 in Germany; the total cost —– with war zones excluded, is up to $100 billion a year.”
The Economist Intelligence Unit has devised a Global Peace Index. It includes domestic factors like crime, prison population, trust between citizens — and external ones, like relations with neighbors, arms sales, foreign troop deployments.
Near the bottom was Israel at 119th. Canada came in 8th and — wait for it — America ranked a miserable 96th, just above Iran. Friends, there is room for improvement. See PG11, in which we discuss the notion of America as “world bully.”
Jimmy Carter: “We have become increasingly inclined to sidestep the time-tested premises of negotiation, which in most cases prevent deterioration of a bad situation and at least offer the prospect of a bloodless solution.”
In his book Retreat From Doomsday John Mueller observed that on May 15, 1984 “—– the major countries of the developed world had managed to remain at peace with each other for the longest continuous stretch of time since the days of the Roman Empire.”
The grand total of news coverage of this momentous event was absolute zero. Zilch. Apparently people prefer to read about war and watch it (as long as it’s over there).
Big Government and the news media both like violence. We noticed how the latter hyped the State Militias recently, emphasizing their weapons as they photographed them.
Big Government’s hidden agenda is to find a way to install a police state in the US of A, just as we have seen has been done in so many of the world’s less developed countries. Once installed, the elites can do anything they please, and with our money.
We will have no choice but to go on shelling out, until it gets so bad that we violently rise up in bloody revolution. We know we don’t want this, so we will execute our major reform today and in our chosen nonviolent, “pocket goferian” way. Friends, keep your pockets and mobile phones full.
Big Government knows we want peace, so in 1994 it sought around $3.2 billion in extra money for the military. Almost all of this was requested under the “Promoting Peace” title in the international affairs budget. Lora Lumpe reported (Veterans For Peace Journal Summer 1994): “It will underwrite weapons exports from America to five countries.”
She went on to state that millions in “direct training” of foreign militaries falls under the “promoting peace” and “building democracy” titles in the budget. We shall have more to say about “Washingtonspeak” in PG19.
Veterans for Peace has another contribution (Chapter 64 Newsletter, 7/1996):
“Briefing the press on the $74 billion F-22 fighter program in March, a DoD (department of defense) spokesman said, ‘We’re committed to it even though I can’t project a threat right now that justifies it.’
“Citizens don’t go along with the huge projections, according to a University of Maryland study —–.
“A majority says military spending should be reduced, and 72% support a 20% cut if savings are channeled to education, crime, and the budget deficit.
“Only 7% believe we should spend twice as much as all potential enemies combined. We currently spend more than twice as much ——.
“63% believe military spending has weakened our economy and our competitive position. 77% opposed the $7 billion in unrequested (our emphasis) money added to the 1996 budget by the congress.
“Whatever happened to democratic control of American government?” Well, the vets surely got us on that one. We’re working on it. Several gofers provide insights.
ON HEROES IN WAR: Mueller on World War I: “The war was remembered not for dashing cavalry charges or for heroic individual displays of derring-do but for a method of warfare in which masses of men swarmed out from muddy defensive trenches to slaughter each other in huge numbers with new mechanized devices like machine guns and tanks. And above all there was the war’s most ghastly innovation of all: chemical weapons.”
Wars today are not fought like that. Today missiles are thrown, mortars are lobbed, artillery fired, drones hovering and lead slung by the tons/second. No one can dodge the lead or shrapnel, so pure luck or lack of it determines who survives and who does not.
There is no place for heroism in modern wars but citizens still expect it, so the news media oblige by, say, singling out a pilot in Bosnia who happened to get shot down. In Gulf War I General Norman Schwartzkopf engineered a 96-hour battle against an enemy exhausted after an eight-year war in which it lost at least a half million men and was far from prepared for another fight.
He came home to a hero’s welcome and elder President Bush basked in the limelight with him in order to sweeten his dismal popularity rating. We have to ask: who was being fooled?
We are asking. The real heroes are the poor women, children, and old men who must suffer through hell day after day, week after week, and month after month.
All they want to do is go about their daily business in peace. Does not most of the world do this? Well, it used to ………
Then they get their answer: BLOOEY!! Another batch of children dead or maimed for the rest of their lives. We haven’t noticed any ticker-tape parades down 5th Avenue in NY City honoring these folks.
We see that peace cannot be imposed by shipping weapons all over creation. Therefore it is time to give thanks to the pentagon’s warhorses and put them out to pasture. Oh, another thing: It is damn difficult to hug children with nuclear arms.
As for the pentagon warriors and their increasingly terrible weapons: ENOUGH ALREADY!! Small wonder our Viet vets are steamed.
Charles Adams: “—– communism doesn’t work very well. If you leave it alone and don’t pester it, in time it will die — like mercantilism did 200 years ago. By brooding over communism, by giving it undue attention, by being a bully and ganging up on it, and by fearing it and attacking it, we give it a power which it does not otherwise possess.” Cuba springs to mind.
We found a different type of hero in members of Veterans for Peace who learned that Army recruiters were stretching the truth in their sales pitches. These members have started a counter-recruitment campaign in high schools and elsewhere.
A venerable patriotic group tried to stop the “tabling” at a particular school. VFP newsletter (4/2005): “Senior Matt Johnson writes that students confronted the principal and refused, despite threats of suspensions, to stop the tabling.
“They held a press conference and alerted anti-war groups all over the country. ‘We intended to show the administration that if they were going to violate the Constitution so flagrantly, they would do it over our resistance and they would do it publicly.’ Johnson said.
“The administration caved.” We salute Mr. Johnson and the heroes who stood forth with him. This story illustrates a new kind of courage that we need to cultivate. Recall Thomas Paine’s strong emphasis on courage when he wrote Common Sense in 1776.
CONTROL BY US: Skeptics will ask, how will we control the irresponsible egomaniacal dictator who is armed to the teeth? Our answer is that the open society is coming. In it there will be no secrets outside of some aspects of personal finance, the bedroom, and the voting booth (PG5).
The Economist (11/2001): “The risk from ghastly weapons in the wrong hands can never be eliminated; it can be reduced. But defenses against it will be only as good as governments make them.” We beg to differ, on two counts.
First, we have argued that all such weapons can be eliminated. To do this will involve the second point of difference: citizens. Jefferson said spread information among the people. See to it that they understand that they are the ones who can create peace and order, and they will create them.
Governments make war; only citizens can make and keep the peace. Therefore it will be up to us to eliminate all weapons of mass death and destruction, and see that no new ones are built.
Eisenhower: “I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” Has that day arrived?
Thomas Paine also believed this in 1790. Are we surprised? Hardly. Friends, these men believed in democracy, where government exists to help citizens get what they want. See PG20.
We already have millions of noncombatants who have suffered horribly through recent wars. They will surely cooperate in a bottom-up movement in poor countries. They will quickly report any activity that could be aimed at building or storing weapons and ammunition.
They know the territory. Veterans who have experienced the horror of war will lead this effort. Members of Veterans For Peace will surely be available.
A different kind of “top-down” effort can coordinate with the one on the ground and sea. Today there are satellites that can photograph objects as small as three feet in size and, we understand, even read a newspaper headline.
There will soon be enough communication satellites aloft so that anyone anywhere on the face of the earth can spot something suspicious, whip out a cell phone and contact the UN directly.
We lack details, but we can see that the technology is available. This system will be in place worldwide.
How about repressive regimes, which would severely punish any informer? Flip phones are getting smaller and cheaper. Soon amateurs will be able to build them. China recently gave up trying to ban satellite dishes for this reason.
Furthermore, there is no way to trace a call from a flip phone when it is bounced off a communications satellite that is under UN control. As amateurs build them not all will even be registered. This means ownership cannot be traced, much less a single instance of use.
Once this system is in place, the only task remaining would be a comprehensive plan to destroy all existing weapons of mass death and destruction. Citizens would be only too happy to help carry it out.
Say a warehouse full of weapons is discovered. The organization responsible would be exposed and obliged to confront pressure brought to bear by the entire world opinion. PGs 5 and 12 elaborate.
In the Middle East today the West seems to be trading weapons for oil. We could help these countries develop their economies instead of helping their destruction. We like to think of today’s horribly fragmented Middle East without weapons.
This would stimulate demand for products other than weapons, which we could supply in exchange for oil. Fossil fuels pollute and warm the earth. Oil will slowly fade away while solar and other sources of energy replace it.
Companies who make these products would need to hire workers. Some of them could well be those who were laid off when their companies got out of the weapons business. Or, former defense companies would convert to making things that help build economies instead of destroying them. (This can be done; American firms did this after the end of World War II.)
If we want to observe how feasible is conversion we need only stop paying for production of weapons. Chop contractors off at the pockets and they will find a way.
One company did convert over five years, and today it makes similar products for the private market. Managers were amazed to learn that with competition they found ways to make much the same products while using half the labor.
Unlike weapons, these products don’t just sit there. They go into making other things, and extra labor is needed to do this.
A physically strong young man lacking mature judgment due to a paternalistic government (PG4) will lay his life on the line at the drop of a hat. He figures young men are for fighting, and old men are for ordering young men to fight. His thinking often does not go beyond this.
Warriors from time immemorial have depended on strong, unthinking men to fight battles. All too often the desire to fight originates within their leaders’ egos, or due to some perceived slight or missed ambition.
Give these young men some education and the picture changes. Now they are more likely to think through the issues and derive their own conclusions concerning what is a just cause for war.
The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington is deeply involved in peaceful government. It does not accept government funds as it spreads the word.
PGs 5 and 19 show how the news media published slanted information, especially about war. It is well known that poorly informed citizens cannot form accurate opinions and make sound decisions.
But al-Jazeera and Arab newspapers are publishing info from the other side’s perspective. Somewhere in between the western and Arab biases lies truth.
Therefore today we can with some effort get much closer to truth, even about war. With enough of this priceless commodity spread around, the world’s citizens will force their cowardly rulers to shut down warfare.
In their book A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict Ackerman and Duval list successes in Russia (1905), Denmark (WWII), El Salvador (1944), Argentina and Chile (1970s) plus others.
Chile’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, asked his generals to sign a protocol. The officers read it.
Ackerman and Duval: “—— other members of the junta were transferring all their powers to Pinochet. One general tore it up right in front of the president and threw the pieces on the ground.” Guts ball, friends.
Mark Kurlansky wrote Nonviolence: 25 lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea. “——– that making war is an ego trip, it keeps the flock under his thumb, and it pays copiously.
“These three factors combine to erase any morality that might otherwise intrude upon his conscience. Therefore the only way to peace is thru citizen action.
“The true expression of nonviolence is compassion, which is not just a passive emotional response, but a rational stimulus to action.” Here we quote His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Note how this quotation moves forward from emotion to reason.
Kurlansky: “When Jesus Christ said a victim should turn the other cheek, he was preaching pacifism. But when he said that an enemy should be won over thru the power of love, he was preaching nonviolence.
“—- how often in history war is justified as a fight for freedom and how rarely that is the true goal.” President GW Bush springs to mind.
South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “I suppose human beings looking at it would say that arms are the most dangerous things that a dictator, a tyrant needs to fear. But in fact no — it is when people decide they want to be free. Once they have made up their minds to that, there is nothing that will stop them.”
Albert Einstein: “The kind of pacifism that does not actively combat the war preparations of the governments is powerless and will always stay powerless. Would that the conscience and common sense of the people awaken!”
Peter Pomerantzev’s book This is Not Propaganda. Adventures in the War Against Reality brings the issue under discussion right up to the present day.
Srdja has a permanent staff of four Serbs, ———- multiple posters of the clenched fist, which is Srdja’s brand. It is here that they compile the step-by-step manuals for nonviolent direct action campaigns that are downloaded in the tens of thousands all across the world (the largest single location is Iran), organize workshops and schedule courses for Srdja’s online training at Harvard that allow activists anywhere to overthrow dictators without firing a single shot.”
“Srdja’s belief in nonviolence doesn’t come so much from pacifism as calculation. Regimes have the upper hand when it comes to physical force; what they can’t deal with are massive, peaceful crowds out on the street.”
“’For me there are only two types of societies: places where governments are afraid of the people, which we call `democracies,` and places where people are afraid of their autocratic governments. I don’t care which dictator I’m empowering people to be free of.’” Recall Jefferson: “When government fears citizens there is liberty. When citizens fear government there is tyranny.”
“‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression but lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Sdrja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.’” Read guts/moxie/balls — any vernacular will do.
And not just these examples. The number of conflicts in the world increased from 1950 to 1992, when the number declined.
Today around 20-30 still rage, but this is down from 50-60 in 1992. The warriors and civilian war mongers are finally swimming upstream, but they will not admit it.
Trump (The Economist 4/2018) has mocked many American traditions. Now he is picking on the long-dead Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free.”
Friends, this inscription appears on the Statue of Liberty, where it has inspired untold millions of immigrants from 1886 forward who first saw our lady as their ship entered New York harbor. In addition, we recall Eisenhower’s observation when he predicted there would come a time when citizens will force government to step aside and let them have peace.
Some of today’s rulers insist on swimming upstream. Donald, do you realize that you are going against not just Emma and her millions, but also Eisenhower? (Recently we have noted some tendency by Mr. Trump to move troops out of areas of unwinnable war. This tendency will eventually spread to all such areas.)
THE MERCHANT REPLACES THE WARRIOR: The Age of Conquest and Plunder is fading, soon to be replaced by the Age of Reason. We are happy at this prospect, but it will not happen unless we organize our talents, effort, and persistence to make it happen. Thomas Paine thought we were on the cusp of this Age in 1792, but today the warhorses are not yet put out to pasture.
Having concluded that we can work toward the Age of Reason by eliminating armed conflicts, how do we get merchants to fill in the gap in international relations? Getting this done is much easier as they are busy today, mostly just off the radar screen. (Most, but not all, will prevail in post-covid-19.) Capitalism allows failure under any condition.
Here are some numbers for initial momentum. Since 1982 tariffs on goods have dropped from an average worldwide of 26% to 8.8% in 2007. Trade has grown twice as fast as world output. (Unfortunately, President Trump has yet to acknowledge this truth.)
Nonrich countries have doubled their share of world exports between 2000 and 2007. This helps the world’s poor catch up with the others.
The merchant’s motivation connects to the positive side of human nature — building economic strength —, whereas the warrior works the negative side — destroying economies and lives. (We address President Trump’s role here in PG17.)
Nevertheless only a few of us ordinary blokes understand the positive forces that drive world trade, so we will indulge the remainder here with a short discussion. As we proceed we might bear in mind Edward Everett’s observation: “Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”
“Globalization” has become a dirty word for many activists. They don’t realize that this process began around the 13th century, when Italian Marco Polo traveled to the Far East in the interest of developing mutually beneficial trade between East and West.
The Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) spectacularly increased world trade and hence living standards for millions of the world’s citizens. Exporting demanded goods to other countries brought in the foreign exchange (money) needed to import goods.
These “goods” included processes and technology that multiplied output from relatively small increases in input. This multiple enabled workers to be paid more for the same amount of effort, and therefore their living standards rose with increased productivity.
Free markets gave an entrepreneur an opportunity to risk money borrowed from savers thru banks for starting a new business. If he/she were successful more new wealth was created. But competitors saw the same opportunity and so prevented his profits from soaring.
Summarizing, this is how capitalism works to create and accumulate wealth without violence. It is the only way this can be done.
We feel a need to make a distinction here, or rather to point out a subtle lack of distinction that most of us haven’t thought about. The notion of fairness has two definitions, depending on economic philosophy.
The first definition is playing by the same rules for everyone and may the best player win. The second is making sure everybody gets equal shares. The first is bottom-up democracy; the second is top-down because it forces allocations of resources that differ from free markets. See PG4.
The two definitions oppose one another and thus rob “fairness” of any meaning. Politicians depending on our ignorance lean toward the second because those who like that one vote more often.
The kicker here is that the second definition leans against human nature: producers don’t like to be forcibly taxed to support others whom they don’t even know. Recipients feel that money received without earning it robs them of their self-esteem.
Now we can see why the benefits of capitalism need to be understood. Lacking this, we would be repeatedly fooled into believing and voting for career politicians who appear to spread taxpayer-funded goodies far and wide. See PG3.
During the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th great amounts of new wealth were created and invested in productive enterprise. International trade played a key role in this tremendous leap ahead.
The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) averaged the results of several studies. The conclusion is that the American economy is about $1 trillion a year better off thanks to its participation in world trade.
That is about $9,000 of extra annual income per household on average. With further progress against trade barriers that household could gain a further $4,500 per year. (We wish we could get Trump to read this.)
Cut to 12/99 and columnist George Will: “The Seattle protestor wore a Gap sweatshirt that undoubtedly was made somewhere across the globe, under imperfect labor laws. ——–. But the protestors oppose the most progressive force of the last two centuries.
“Trade that drives economic development — and better nutrition and health — has been, strictly speaking, progressive because the poor have gained most. ——-.
“Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago writes that in 1875 the British elite lived on average 17 years longer than the population as a whole. Today the gap is one year.
“Life expectancy increased twice as much in the last century as during the previous 200,000 years, with the poor benefiting most. In Britain at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the typical male laborer was five inches shorter at maturity than the typical male member of the elite. Today the difference is about an inch.”
Protestors against globalization point to sweatshop labor overseas, often involving children (Economist 9/2000): “—— democratic nomination for the presidency, Al Gore made a pledge to squelch child labor by setting standards for American imports.” This career politician knew that mentioning children would add weight to his words.
“Yet the conventional outrage about child labor is at odds with the orthodoxy followed ——- by non-governmental organizations that work with poor children. ——- have pointed out that children’s work can be in their own interests: a family’s survival may depend on it.”
Most do-gooders have not traveled extensively in poor countries, and so they are unfamiliar with economic and social conditions there. Massive migrations to already overcrowded cities cannot help but create labor surpluses.
The unavoidable result is less than subsistence wages and squalid work environments for those lucky enough to find any kind of job. Therefore the only way to avoid starvation is to put the kids to work.
Krugman (4/2001) reported from the field. “—– could anything be worse than having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes.
“In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped —–.
“But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to an NGO called Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets — and that significant numbers were forced into prostitution.”
Senator Harkin probably harvested many votes after he proposed such legislation. Quite possibly he cared too little to check on what happened to the poor kids; his interest was limited to votes, whether won or bought.
Krugman explained that poor countries vitally need exports in order to develop their economies. “They can’t have those export industries unless they are allowed to sell goods produced under conditions that westerners find appalling, by workers who receive very low wages. And that’s a fact the anti-globalization activists refuse to accept.”
If a ban on child work is enforced many kids still don’t go to school, as their work is absolutely necessary. So they take to the streets as pickpockets, sex slaves or beggars.
There are instances of parents breaking a child’s feet so he will be a more effective beggar. Others are sold into slavery.
Seems appropriate to remind ourselves that during the Industrial Revolution our own ancestors toiled in factories under terrible conditions. With free markets today products exported from poor countries will enable economic growth to raise living standards and thus remove children from sweatshops and put them in school.
There has begun a new policy in Brazil called conditional welfare. A poor family receives welfare assistance, but only while the children remain in school and get vaccinated. The program is working.
Democrats in 5/2007 forced inclusion of enforceable labor and environmental standards in American trade agreements. This will probably harm poor workers in poor countries more than it will help them because necessary higher import prices will cut demand and thus put many of the poor in exporting nations out of work.
The presence of these standards may make it even harder to conclude trade agreements in Doha, an Arab city where negotiators gather. Also years beforehand the WTO (World Trade Organization) had decided that labor standards should remain clear of global trade agreements.
Good outfit. We see here that it needs work (The Economist 12/2017).
“The WTO has not achieved a big breakthru in its mission of trade liberalization for more than two decades. Its last big round ——- Doha ——-; in 2015 it was quietly put out of its misery.” The kicker here is that each country sends politicians as negotiators. They should send economists and technocrats.
“America has had fraught relations with it for years; under Mr. Trump, frustration has turned to aggression. ————–. Rather than help the WTO find solutions, the administration has preferred to undermine it.”
Oxfam dedicates itself to helping the poor in poor countries. It says the cost of sugar in the European Union is six times the cost in Brazil. EU governments ding taxpayers so they can provide fat subsidies to sugar farmers, who gear up production in order to “make” more money.
This has got so bad that surplus sugar is exported into relatively poor countries like Brazil, which robs Brazilian producers of even their home market. That country loses $500 million a year, and that’s just one country.
And not just the EU. Mexican sugar workers lost their jobs as subsidized American sweeteners replaced sugar in Mexican soft drinks. Friends, this is bad, bad wrong.
It is politicking, lobbying, bribing, unearned favors, corruption. In the US in January 2010 we were struggling thru a prolonged recession. Lobbyists were working and the news media were flogging “Buy American!” presumably in order to save jobs.
The kicker here is that protectionism does not work because it always invites retaliation from other governments. Therefore while it might save a few jobs in industry A workers in industry B are losing theirs. And consumers pay more. Most seriously, protectionism sends the wrong signal to the world: the champion of free markets has abandoned ship.
Getting back to the theory of globalization, here come some numbers to support our argument that free international trade helps the poor as well as the non-poor. The Economist (5/2000) referred to a paper by David Dollar and Aart Kraay of the World Bank.
“Its findings could hardly be clearer. Growth really does help the poor: in fact, it raises their incomes by about as much as it raises the incomes of everybody else.
“—– sample of 80 countries extending over four decades. On average, incomes of the poor rise one-for-one with incomes overall. ———. The rich, the poor, and the country as a whole are all seeing their incomes rise simultaneously at about the same rate.”
Global free trade consists of millions of voluntary transactions going on daily thruout the world between willing buyers and sellers. In each instance, if both parties to a transaction don’t see benefits to each they would not cut a deal.
The seller asks for a competitive price that will return his costs, time, transportation, promotion, and some profit. The buyer knows what he will do with the product, such as changing its nature, distributing it in his country or combining it with other products, and/or cutting a profitable deal with another company.
Generally speaking, both win. But not always, as one may have misjudged the cost of some activity he has done or plans to do. In business, people must accept some risk of loss in order to make profits.
Friends, we are sad to report that the numbers of anti-globalizationists include rich country governments. (Yes, this included the younger Bush administration, as we shall see.) Politicians everywhere cannot resist the temptation to meddle in private business; see above and PG8. The unearned money is just too good.
The Economist (6/2001): “Within the OECD (the 30 richest countries in the world), annual state payments to the agricultural sector exceed Africa’s entire GDP (total value of everything produced in that entire vast continent). And domestic support in America, Europe, and Japan accounts for about 80% of the world’s total.”
This is taxpayer money being paid to often-rich farmers in order to fence out farm products coming from poor country farmers. “If rich countries were to remove the subsidies that create these price differences, poor countries would benefit by more than three times the amount of all the overseas development assistance they receive each year.” This is why we push trade and not aid.
We citizens pay for the protection, and we pay more for food than otherwise. This is because domestic farmers and food processors can charge more in the absence of foreign competition. And then we pay once again for overseas foreign aid. Uh, when do we receive something?
Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan wrote a book called The Aid Trap. They freely acknowledge that most foreign aid gets routed thru government officials who siphon off the money.
They recommend giving or lending money directly to small businesses. In addition they would encourage governments to pass reforms that make it easy to start and build companies. (They realize that this would be a challenge in a corrupt country.)
And not just us (The Economist 10/02): “How could anybody regard 40 billion (roughly, dollars) a year of direct subsidy (plus twice as much again in higher prices demanded of European consumers) as too much to pay for producing food nobody wants, keeping third-world farmers poor and wrecking Europe’s rural environment?
“Cheap at the price, say the ministers.” Bilge water.
“The Doha round of negotiations on removing barriers to world trade hinged on progress in farm-trade reform. Many developing (poor) countries believe, with reason, that they were short-changed in the (previous) Uruguay round: ——.”
The World Bank estimates that success at Doha could raise global income by $500 billion a year by 2015. Over 60 percent of that gain would go to poor countries. This would pull about 144 million people out of poverty.
On the other hand, if rich country governments refuse to stop their multi-billion-dollar taxpayer-financed assistance to mostly rich farmers, the Doha round will become a farce, which is what it eventually became. (Someone said, “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will.”)
Some good happens, primarily because no amount of top-down governments interfering in the markets can completely stop them functioning.
The Economist 9/2016: “The past 15 years have seen spectacular falls in poverty and ill health. The next 15 are unlikely to be as good.” Even if somewhat worse, we would still see good results.
“If you look beyond the rich West, most of which has been in a funk ever since the financial crisis of 2007-08, the world has had an amazing run. Fully 6m fewer children under the age of five died in 2016 than in 1990. Never before have so many people been free of grinding poverty and ill health. Never have women been so unlikely to die as a result of giving birth, or to lose a baby to illness.” We are happy to share.
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The American government pays 25 thousand farmers $4 billion of taxpayer’s money while they produce $3 billion-worth of cotton. This enables these rich farmers to force down the world market price, which ruins the market for 11 million poor farmers in West Africa. (These figures may be dated.)
GW Bush pushed for barriers for textiles, steel, and wood. When campaigning for president, Bush gave “—— ringing support to free trade as a way of alleviating poverty.”
But, the man is a politician. So he wins votes by touting free trade because people know that this will enable them to buy either better stuff or equally good stuff cheaper.
Once in office, he goes for protection so politicians and political parties can grow fatter through kickbacks and bribes and buy votes with the money. Morally wrong? Yes, but politically that is show bizz.
And even while in office. “George Bush ———— in Peru and El Salvador, preaching the virtues of free trade. The message was rather different at a regional summit to discuss the plight of America’s beleaguered textile firms in Gaston County, North Carolina.
George Will (4/2002 column) identified the threat to those workers. “The United States asked for and received extraordinary help from Pakistan in the war on terrorism. Now Pakistan has asked for something from the US.
“Pakistan (per capita [annual] income: $470) has asked this mighty republic (per capita income: $26,503), which spans a continent and bestrides the globe like a colossus, to remove the quotas on imports of Pakistani pillows and sheets. It also asked —— permit 50 percent increases in quotas for pajamas, towels, underwear, —–.
“But the United States, ——-, nevertheless flinches from some threats (our emphasis), and one of them is a potential torrent of inexpensive Pakistani pajamas.” Hmm. If the quota forces us to pay a high price and we then take to sleeping naked, will this help Gaston workers keep their jobs?
Given enough time, the market always wins. Career politicians know this, but the next election is almost upon them. In several gofers we argue that career politicians are the root cause of nearly all of Washington’s problems. PG3 elaborates.
Bush’s trade barriers caused European trade ministers to get thoroly bent, so they slapped tariffs on $4 billion of US exports. They started at 5 percent, and increased by one percent with each passing month up to 17 percent.
Clever ministers they were. The tariffs focused on production by states that Bush needs most in order to win the 2004 election. He immediately caved in on the steel tariffs, and backed away on several other barriers.
Politics and sound trade policy don’t mix. This is why we should not have allowed politicians to get near the Doha round of trade negotiations. But they were there anyway, the round died, and so we pray for citizens in the poor countries of the world.
The Economist 3/2015: Politics again. “Negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious trade agreement ————-. —– are reaching a point of no return. Without an agreement —— not be enough time —– before America is embroiled in a presidential election campaign, —–.” Any foreigner would surely see this as ridiculous; the election is some 19 months away. We are not foreigners, but we also see it as ridiculous.
The Economist 4/25/2015: “TTP’s real value is to set high new standards for world trade, and that demands the boldest possible agreement. And in the long run the world gains most if China joins.
“The rhetoric makes trade negations sound like a contest. In fact, it is a battle where the more you give away the more you win.” To repeat: trade is win-win; war is lose-lose.
The Economist 7/2015: “The most authoritative study, published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, reckons TPP will enlarge the economies of the 12 member states by $285 billion by 2025.
“It is supposed to expand, drawing in more countries. The Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand have expressed interest in joining. The hope is that it will eventually attract China.” Chalk one up for Obama — before new President Trump torpedoed it.
“Try, Persist, Persevere!” argues The Economist 11/1/2016. “America’s participation in TPP is over. But don’t give up efforts to free trade and harmonize standards in Asia.” If the agreement stays alive, American participation would always be possible (Trump notwithstanding).
“Yet the 11 should fight to keep TPP alive. Officials toiled for a decade to produce the 6,000-page agreement. That deal is worth retaining even if, without America, its economic impact is far more modest. One reason is that the signatories of TPP have won hard-fought political battles for reforms in their own countries that are beneficial in themselves, whether America joins in or not.” We hope this is done.
“Hope springs eternal in the human soul.” The Economist (11/2017) didn’t write this, but it seems very applicable. “America damaged the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Others are fixing it. Reviving the original TPP, ——– is technically impossible.
“But on November 11th, another began to rise in its place, crowned with a tongue-twisting new name: The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Ministers from its 11 members issued a joint statement saying that they had agreed on its core elements, and that it demonstrated their ‘firm commitment to open markets.’
“The political symbolism was powerful. As America retreats, others will lead instead.” This is good: a poke in Trump’s eye. Was it his other eye that so often publicly proclaimed “Make America Great Again!?”
Toomey (Wall St. Journal 8/2007): “On May 4, 1930, 1,028 economists signed a petition urging congress and President Hoover to reject the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which all but shut down world trade. Neither congress nor the president listened, but the stock market certainly did.
“—— congress hasn’t changed much over the past 90 years. Thankfully, economics hasn’t changed much either: ——.
“The Club for Growth is disseminating a petition ——. —— signed by many economists from the left and the right. —————-. Tariffs are simply a tax on American consumers, and it would be Americans, more than the Chinese, who pay the price.”
Perhaps dead but not yet buried. In general companies opening new markets tend to prevail over the best efforts of governments to keep them closed.
We argue that in the future conflicts will be between companies and not governments. The former are the nonviolent kinds of conflicts.
GW Bush announced a substantial increase in foreign aid to poor countries, because he knew citizens liked to hear these words. The late trade authority Peter Bauer (reported in The Economist 5/2002) said aid had proved “—— an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”
Public officials all too often siphon off the money before it gets a chance to help an economy develop. Human nature, we might say.
Someone suggested making all foreign aid private. The Index of Global Philanthropy records the accomplishments of volunteer groups. They know the territory and how to get aid directly to recipients. Many of these have iPhones that accept money.
Its report noted that a US government consultant in a developing country costs $300,000 per year, while the same skilled professional hired by private interests costs one third as much. Part of the difference may be attributable to bribery.
Bauer’s studies showed that wealth could be created even in the poorest countries if only market forces were allowed to work. Research done by Hernando de Soto and reported in his 1985 book The Mystery of Capital supports Bauer’s conclusion.
De Soto attempted to measure “dead capital” tied up mostly in land thruout the poor world. He estimated this total in dollar terms at $9.3 trillion. De Soto went on to describe how much of this massive potential could be resurrected and put to work in economic development: Establish judicial rights to private property so owners can borrow against it and build businesses.
“—- most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save.
“The value of savings among the poor is, in fact, immense — forty times all the foreign aid received thruout the world since 1945.” Sounds wild, but hang in there.
“But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, —– businesses with undefined liability, industries located where ——- investors cannot see them.
“Because the rights —– not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, ——.”
“So far, Western countries have been happy to take their system for producing capital entirely for granted and to leave its history undocumented. That history must be recovered.”
De Soto does this in his book, thus showing how poor countries can turn up to $9 trillion of property into useful capital. We find it amazing that there apparently has been no serious effort to explain the origins of capitalism.
Were such an explanation widely available, far fewer people would criticize it. Meanwhile, “—– two-thirds of the world’s population —– have no alternative but to live outside the law.”
CONCLUSIONS
Several come to mind.
1. The warriors would have us believe that conflict and tensions generate acquisition of weapons. We have shown here and in PG12 that the reality is the reverse.
2. If weapons are handy they will eventually be used, and this use generates hatred, resentment, and unending desire for revenge. Chris Hedges: “It is the dead who rule. They speak from beyond the grave urging a nation onward to revenge.”
3. Tin pot dictators often use acquired weapons that their poor countries cannot afford to brutally murder their own citizens who dare to speak out against oppression.
4. We appreciate the unavoidable trade-off between economic development and military “strength.”
5. Irresponsible and egotistical top officials declare war. Citizens, who must finance, fight, kill and die in it, don’t. The American Constitution specifies that only congress can declare war, but that body has handed that power to the president who “—— cannot be trusted with it.” This quote is from the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Independence Hall, Philadelphia.
6. International trafficking in weapons creates instability and arms races, primarily because there is no such thing as a balance of power.
7. Politicians who preach world peace while buying votes thru domestic and foreign sales of killing machines are not leaders. They are hypocrites.
8. “Have-not” country leaders will always try to equalize with the “haves,” unless a concerted, bottom-up effort is mounted to rid the world of all weapons of mass death and destruction. No exceptions anywhere, any time, no how, no one, no way, NEVER.
Friends, here is an interesting thought. If top-down power were not concentrated in one central location like Washington (PG15) it would be impractical for a foreign conqueror to rule.
There would be no highly centralized control mechanism in place to do this, and it would take years to set it up. Democracy is power dispersed thruout the land. See PGs16 and 20.
Meanwhile the occupying force would be obliged to fight hundreds of guerrilla wars at the same time, and spread throughout the land. As we have demonstrated, there would be no end to them. Knowing this, any potential conqueror would remain in that condition indefinitely.
Douglas Casey wrote Crisis Investing. In the epilogue he imagined a large island which embraced two countries. One had a top-down socialist government; the other was guided by capitalist tenets.
Country A’s top official learned that life in Country B was much better, so he declared war. He won easily. But when his soldiers and other parts of the occupying force (our emphasis) learned about life in B they deserted. Eventually all citizens of A migrated.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF COURAGE: Here is an intriguing paradox. Actively seeking peace requires courage.
Cowards prepare for and start wars because they know they won’t have to fight them. (We continue to salute the courage of the battlefield warrior.) So long as egotistical cowards are in charge there will be the threat of war. As weapons become ever more sophisticated and devastating, eventually cowards will “lead” the world into Armageddon.
We can readily see what kind of leaders are in charge of this country. Politicians are by definition not leaders. They bend with the political winds, make promises which they have no intention of keeping, and play to lobbyist money, polls and photo-ops.
The Cold War is over and the world is finally ready to put the Age of Conquest and Plunder behind it. In fact, capitalism with its ability to create and accumulate wealth without violence has already displaced plunder in the advanced world.
Just around the corner lies the Age of Reason. But to get us there we’ll need a different kind of leader. See PG17.
This one from the turbulent Middle East came as a surprise. We quote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran (12/2006 article in Time).
“The era for bombs and atoms and weapons has come to an end. People should be talked to with reason (our emphasis). Where are the ones who used nuclear bombs in Hiroshima?
“Their era is over. Now is the time for dialogue, logic as well as law and justice.” GW Bush called this country part of his “axis of evil.” Trump seems to be following his thinking.
Here we apparently have a peacenik going against a war monger. We continue to find no hard evidence that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. But we need to remind ourselves on which side the American media operate; they have most of us convinced that a bomb is all but completed, and maybe two.
Now, on this weapons issue President Bush got faked out of his jock by a weaponless Saddam Hussein. We wonder if his successor will be similarly flimflammed by next-door Iran? Well friends, wonder no more.
Ahmadinejad saw what happened and probably laughed just as hard as Saddam. Fortunately the media have recently backed off on broadcasting plans to attack Iran. (More recently, a violence-loving media just reversed its stance, but Trump is not enthusiastic.)
We will be taking on a huge project. But if everyone pulls together the effort required of each of us would make the project doable. Surely the reward is worth the effort: the opportunity for our children and theirs to enjoy a happy and productive “—— life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (from the Declaration of Independence).”
An excellent beginning lies in the potential of the pocket gofers to get us organized. Therefore we should strive to put a gofer in every hip pocket and purse and see that they don’t just sit there.
Then we can have a world of peace on earth and good will toward men and women. This done, we can begin to worry about keeping it that way.
“Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword!”
A small boy may have understood this old saying. Sitting in front of the TV and having a discussion with his father, Dad admitted his son had a point. “Well, okay. Except for low ratings, violence never solves anything.”
Friendship Force International’s slogan is “A world of friendship is a world of peace.” Here is its theme song called “Let There Be Peace On Earth.”
Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me:
Let there be peace on Earth, the Peace that was meant to be.
With God as our Father, Family all are we.
Let us walk with each other, in perfect harmony.
Let Peace begin with me, let this be the moment now.
With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment and live each moment in Peace eternally.
Let there be Peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.
There are hundreds of organizations that strive for peace. The kicker is that they get practically no press because the media blindly cling to BIG GOVERNMENT as it keeps pushing for conflict or threat of the same. Here are a few examples:
Private Diplomacy (Economist 1/25/20)
“Unofficial channels for diplomacy are increasingly popular (our emphasis).
Inter-Mediate, a British charity
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Swiss-based center for Humanitarian Dialogue
Berghof Foundation in Berlin
Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Laureate
Maarti Antisaari, a Nobel Peace Laureate, ——— set up Crisis Management Initiative
United States Institute of Peace
Conciliation Resources in London
Sant’Egidio, a Catholic Organization
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Pathways for Peace, a UN-World Bank study
Brussels-based European Institute of Peace
—— PUBLIUS II
TITLES OF OTHER POCKET GOFERS WHICH WE CAN DIG INTO,
DISCUSS, CRITICIZE, AND ACT ON:
PG 1 – ON HEALTH AND FITNESS IN THE USA
PG 2 – ON VOLUNTEERISM
PG 3 – ON THE CAREER POLITICIAN IN A DEMOCRACY
PG 4 – ON THE BOTTOM-UP APPROACH TO GETTING THINGS DONE
PG 5 – ON THE COMING OPEN SOCIETY
PG 6 – ON MAKING A CONTRIBUTION
PG 7 – ON CORRUPTION AND ACCOUNTABILITY
PG 8 – ON GOVERNMENT REGULATION OF BUSINESS AND THE PHANTOM
PG 9 – IT’S ALL IN THE FAMILY
PG 10 – ON EDUCATION IN THE USA
PG 11 – ON THE US AS A WORLD CITIZEN
PG 12 – ON THE UN AND POTENTIAL CONFLICTS
PG 13 – ON PERSONAL POWER AND IDEAS
PG 14 – ON RESPECT FOR TAXPAYERS’ MONEY
PG 15 – ON BIG, SMALL, AND GOOD GOVERNMENT
PG 16 – ON DEMOCRACY AND OUR CENTRAL GOVERNMENT
PG 17 – ON LEADERSHIP IN A DEMOCRACY
PG 19 – ON THE GRAND DECEPTION
PG 20 – ON LIFE IN A DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY
PG 21 – PRELIMINARY DRAFT OF A CONSTITUTION