F Y I - WHAT'S HAPPENING?
Grand Illusion:
The Costs of War and Empire
The election results of
November and the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have raised
hopes of a significant change in U.S. foreign policy.
Many blame Rumsfeld and the neoconservative idealogues for the
disaster in Iraq, while neocons protest that
Rumsfeld’s “light army” strategy is the real problem.
Some things should improve simply by virtue of the demise of
Rumsfeld and the neocon’s’ loss of credibility.
The current foreign-policy crisis, however, vastly exceeds the
mistakes of Rumsfeld and the neocons; President Bush is still making
nonsensical statements about “winning in Iraq” and “fulfilling the
mission,” and his administration is still loaded with people who want
him to stake his legacy on doing so.
The neoconservative ideology of his administration is merely an
exaggerated version of the normal politics of American empire.
Before a significant change for the better is possible, there must
be a reckoning with the costs of the U.S.’s perpetual war and military
empire. The recently approved
Pentagon budget is a good place to get a measure of the hypermilitarized
situation we are in.
The 2007 Pentagon budget, which pays for normal personnel,
procurement and operational expenses, is up to $462 billion.
The budget bill passed the Senate in September by a vote of 100 to
0, virtually with no debate. It
includes $85 billion for weapons to “reset” army and marine corps
equipment, which is wearing out six times faster than expected because of
the war. In a novel turn, the House and Senate decided to vote
simultaneously on the regular budget and the fall supplement, which came
to $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, making a total outlay for fiscal
2007 of $532.8 billion, with
the next supplemental bill – a big one – already on its way.
This budget does not include costs for nuclear weapons - set at $22
billion for next year – which are allocated to the Energy Department.
Despite these immense outlays, budget analysts are warning of a
coming financial train wreck, because the appropriations – in every
category – fall short of the true costs of the war and the empire.
Today the U.S. is spending $2 billion per week in Iraq, nearly all
of it from emergency spending bills that add up to $380 billion thus far.
The total for Afghanistan is $100 billion.
These figures do not include disability and health payments for
returning troops, inducements for soldiers to serve additional
deployments, extra pay for reservists and National Guard members, and
additional foreign aid to supportive nations.
When these costs are included, along with the Pentagon’s
unprecedented dependence on expensive private contractors, the bill for
five years of involvement in Iraq is expected to run at least $1.5
trillion, all of it added to the federal debt.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz and public finance specialist Linda
Bilmes estimate that $2 trillion is more realistic.
That comes to $18,000 per household – a far cry from what
Americans were told to expect at the outset, when Rumsfeld said the war
would cost under $50 billion, and Paul Wolfowitz said Iraq’s oil would
finance the nation’s reconstruction.
The U.S. could have fixed Social Security or provided health
insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next half-century with the
amount is it spending in Iraq. As
it is, since the U.S. is borrowing to pay nearly the entire bill, it faces
interest costs of approximately $300 billion for an offensive war of
choice.
Meanwhile the country is caught in the classic imperial dilemma of
spending immense sums on the military yet lacking enough military to cover
its foreign policy. Two
months ago Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker withheld his required 2008
budget plan as a protest against what his staff called a “disastrous”
and “unsustainable” situation in the army.
The army’s regular budget this year is $99 billion, but
Schoomaker is holding out for a 41 percent increase in 2008.
A senior army official says, “Yes, it’s incredibly huge.
These are just incredible numbers.” Another
senior Pentagon official, speaking of Schoomaker’s hardball tactics,
says, “This is unusual, but hell, we’re in unusual times.” Top
budget official Jerry Sinn explains: “It’s kind of like the ole
rancher saying, ‘I’m going to size the herd to the amount of hay that
I have.’ Schoomaker can’t
size the herd to the amount of hay that he has because he’s got to
maintain the herd to meet the current operating environment.”
By law the army has been limited to 482,400 troops, but 30,000
troops added on a temporary basis in 2004 have become more or less
permanent. The army’s current active duty force is 504,000, with a
ceiling of 512,400, of which more than 400,000 have done at least one tour
of combat duty. More than
one-third of these troops have been deployed twice or more. They are
supplemented by 346,000 troops from the Army National Guard, which were
thoroughly tapped out a year ago, although the guard has rebounded since
then, recruiting 19,000 more soldiers this year than last year.
Still, the army is struggling to sustain rotations, and it has
instituted what amounts to a back-door draft by relying on a National
Guard and extending many tours of duty.
For the past three years neocons outside the Pentagon have warned that America’s occupying force in Iraq is too small. This has also been the mantra of liberal hawks such as Thomas Friedman and Kenneth Pollack. Usually this argument proceeds to the verdict that the U.S. Army itself is too small, and that Rumsfeld’s fixation with high-tech warfare has been part of the problem. In this version of recent history, if the U.S. had occupied Iraq with 300,000 troops (as General Eric Shinseki advised in the first place), everything would be different today.
But that is a blame-game version of the same stupendously wrong
argument that got the U.S. into Iraq.
Certainly, the country is paying a terrible price for the arrogance
of the Bush team, which had a vision of the outcome in Iraq that it
allowed no one to challenge. But
even a competent U.S. occupier would not have had enough power to prevent
the insurgency or the Civil War. Iraq
exploded because it is the Arab world’s Yugoslavia and because the
American invader is radioactive in the Middle East.
The U.S.’s innocent self-image as the redeemer nation and
benevolent superpower does no resonate, to put it mildly, with most
Iraqis, and the hostility between Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites is beyond
American control. Adding more
U.S. troops to this picture would not have made it better and will not.
Rumsfeld symbolizes the contradictions of the perpetual war. He shared the neocon desire to overthrow half a dozen
governments, but tried to show that it could be done at minimal cost,
without a Colin Powell-sized fuss. Even
the U.S. didn’t have a large enough military to combine the Powell
Doctrine of only using overwhelming force with neocon ambitions, and today
the Bush administration is caught in the aftermath of this contradiction.
The U.S. ended up spending hundreds of billions anyway, but with
little to show for it. Neocons warn that all of it will be wasted if the U.S. does
not pour massive new resources into Iraq and
deal with its problems in Iran and Syria. They want a cold war-sized army,
twice as many troops in Iraq, a military strike against Iran and the next
generation of high-tech weapons – all without a draft.
Rumsfeld bitterly disappointed the neocons on issues of Iraq
strategy and army expansion, but in both cases he did so in the name of
increasing America’s global military power.
He leaves behind a substantially restructured military that
reflects his vision of how to sustain the U.S. military dominance without
instituting a draft. For six
years Rumsfeld pursued a “military transformation” that significantly
globalized America’s military reach.
In his book Imperial Grunts, Robert Kaplan celebrates this vision, which sees
the country’s expeditionary force, especially its marine corps commando
component, as the heart and soul of the new American military. Rumsfeld was infatuated with the combination of
high-technology weapons and low-technology unconventional war-fighting
that prevailed in Afghanistan. He
wants an American military that combines high technology with a leaner,
more adaptable force, restructuring the armed services around the next
generation of high-tech weapons.
He seeded the military with officials who shared his vision of a
high-the empire relying heavily on air power and rapid-force projection. Dividing the globe among regional commanders, Rumsfeld gave
new responsibilities and financing to specialized commands, shifted
regional war-fighting plans away from cold war bases in Europe, obtained
easier access to the Middle East and Central Asia and rewrote U.S. nuclear
strategy. More provocatively
and expensively, he pressed for a high-tech program called Futures Combat
Systems, an integrated structure of manned and unmanned air and ground
vehicles that communicate with each other and other units through a global
military network.
The Futures Combat Systems program includes unattended ground
sensors and munitions; an intelligent munitions system; four classes of
unmanned ground vehicles; an armed robotic vehicle; eight manned ground
vehicles; a mounted combat system; and ten other systems acting as a
unified combat force. The
army describes the program as the core of its mission of being able to
strike any region of the world quickly and powerfully.
One of the program’s boosters, GlobalSecurity.org, describes it
more vividly as a revolutionary “leap ahead” system and the
“centerpiece” of the next army: “lightweight, overwhelmingly lethal,
strategically deployable, and self-sustaining.”
The first phase of the program, covering less than one-third of the
army’s present force structure, is expected to cost
$145 million, not counting $24 billion for a communications network
or anything for the weapons and technologies needed to equip and army’s
other brigades. The
Pentagon’s 2007 budget provides $3.4 billion for this program, and the
program as a whole is expected to add over $500 billion to military
expenses.
To Rumsfeld and other advocates, this price is worth paying because
the Future Combat program will protect American forces with information
systems, not heavily armored tanks. No
individual element of the system will weigh more than 20 tons, and tanks
and mobile cannons will be light enough to be flown to war zones.
To the same end, and for similar reasons, Pentagon budgets are
getting “blacker,” to use the defense and intelligence jargon for
superclandestine operations. Over
20 percent of the Pentagon’s acquisition budget for 2 007 is devoted to
secret programs – a return to the cold war level of classified spending.
Kaplan explains the necessity of doing so, arguing that the U.S.
must bring back the pre-Vietnam rules of engagement using 21st-century
technology. Impending technologies such as warhead-like bullets and
neurobiological signature-tracking satellites will make it easier to carry
out assassinations; more important, covert war evades most of the politics
of intervention and imperialism. To the extent that the U.S. is able to
handle its global management problems with Special Forces and the CIA’s
military wing, it circumvents having to deal with domestic politics and
the UN Security Council. Kaplan,
like Rumsfeld, wants the CIA to be “greener” (increasing its uniformed
military wing) and the Special Forces to be “blacker.”
A further variation on this trend is that the 2007 Pentagon budget
funds approximately $1 billion in programs that could lead to the
development of dual-use space weapons.
Until mid-October the U.S. had no formal policy on new military
missions in outer space; now it has a stunningly imperial one.
On October 13, President Bush signed a National Space Policy that
ruled out any future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S.
operations in space. The new
policy, which was vetted quietly in Congress, asserts that the U.S. has a
right to deny access to space to any nation that the U.S. government deems
to be “hostile to the U.S. interests.”
That is the Monroe Doctrine applied to outer space.
The leading watchdog on this issue is the nonpartisan Center for
Defense Information in Washington. Director
Theresa Hitchens notes the obvious: the new policy opens the door to a
“space-war fighting strategy,” and it has a “very unilateral
tone.”
There are no codes of conduct about how military missions in outer
space would be conducted, nor any rules about how space weapons would be
operated. The Bush
administration’s position is that since there is no space arms race,
there is no need of an arms control agreement in this area.
Congress has never voted on, nor even debated, investment in space
weapons. But the Bush
administration is quietly funding programs that will create “facts in
orbit” – the development, testing and deployment of space weapon
technologies. Hitchens
remarks: “Congress must become more aware of these efforts, hidden in
plain sight within the Pentagon’s Byzantine budget request, and ensure
that such programs do not go forward until a proper, in-depth, and
intergovernmental policy-making process, including congressional and
public input, is concluded.
What is being debated is the extent of army expansion.
Neocons rail constantly that the current army is too small.
They want the U.S. to move in the direction if the cold war
standard for the army, which was 780,000 soldiers.
Democrat Jack Reed, a key player on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, wants an increase to 532,000 soldiers, and Hillary Clinton has
come out for an unspecified military expansion.
Since the American hegemon is obviously overstretched, the cause of
army expansion has become increasingly bipartisan.
As for the current barrage of obituaries for neoconservatism, it is
worth remembering that we have heard them before.
In the 1990s the neocons were written off as a political force,
usually with the assurance that they were outdated, or too ideological, or
too aggressive and controversial for the Republican Party, or all of the
above. Today it is happening
again – this time with better reason, for the catastrophe in Iraq is
colossal.
But the obituaries are premature again, because neoconservatism is
merely an exaggerated version of normal American imperialism, and the
neocons have the best network of think tanks, journals and media
connections in Washington. The
National Security Council, the vice president’s office and the Pentagon
are still loaded with neocons, and their candidate for president in 2008,
John McCain is leading the Republican field.
Most important, neoconservatism became potent in the first place
because it aggressively made the case for extending America’s global
preeminence. Beginning as an
especially militant form of anticommunism, it morphed into a vision of
global empire after communism collapsed.
It traded upon the historic American myths of innocence,
exceptionalism and manifest destiny. It offered a vision of what the United States should do with
its unrivaled global power. In
its most rhetorically seductive versions, it conflated the expansion of
American power with the dream of universal democracy;
In all of this it proclaimed that the maximal use of American power
was good for America and the world.
In other words, it defended the U.S.’s routine practices of
enoire and extended them. Neoconservatism
since the end of the cold war is defined by its doctrine of “full
spectrum dominance,” yet this doctrine is far from unique to
neoconservatives. It was a
staple of defense industry and Pentagon literature before Bush took
office. The Joint Chiefs of
Staff, in their Joint Vision
statements of 1996 and 2000, declared that the U.S. is committed to
sustaining “full spectrum dominance” on a global scale as a primary
military policy. Joint
Vision 2020 put it this way: “The overall goal of the transformation
described in this document is the creation of a force that is dominant
across the full spectrum of military operations – persuasive in peace,
decisive in war, preeminent in any form of conflict.… Full spectrum
dominance [is] the ability of U.S. forces, operating unilaterally or in
combination with multinational and interagency partners, to defeat any
adversary and control any situation across the full range of military
options.”
That put it as plainly as possible – and this was during the
Clinton administration. When
Bush took office, the U.S. was overdue for a moral and political reckoning
with the compulsive expansionism of unrivaled power. A year later Bush
squandered a precious opportunity to make a huge step toward a community
of nations. Not since the end
of World War II had there been such a moment.
If the U.S. had responded to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by
joining with NATO, sending U.S. and NATO forces after al-Qaeda and
building new structures of collective security on regional and global
bases, it would have gained the world’s gratitude. Instead the Bush administration took a course of action that
caused an explosion of anti-American hostility throughout the world,
committing the U.S. to a doctrine of perpetual war and invading Iraq.
Nearly 40 years ago, Senator William Fullbright warned that the
U.S. was well on its way to becoming an empire that exercised power for
its own sake, projected to the limit of its capacity and beyond, filling
every vacuum and extending American force to the farthest reaches of the
earth. As the power grows, he
warned, it becomes an end in itself, separated from its initial motives
(all the while denying that this is the case); governed by its own
mystique, the nation projects power merely because it has it.
Having made a terrible mistake in Iraq, the U.S. is faced with grim
choices. But some are less
bad than others, and in the past month the hope of finding the best one,
which gets the U.S. out of Iraq, got some political wind in its sails.
The massive presence of the foreign invader poisons everything that
it touches there. If the U.S.
can find its way out of Iraq, it may find another opportunity to reckon
with the moral and political consequences of its compulsive expansionism.
Copyright 2006 Christian Century, Reproduced by permission from the December 26, 2006 issue of the Christian Century. Subscriptions $49/yr. from P.O. Box 378, Mt. Morris, IL 61054. 1-800-208-4097, www.christiancentry.org.
