An
American Century of Carnage
Measuring Violence in a Single Superpower World
By John W. Dower
[This
essay is adapted from “Measuring
Violence,” the first chapter of John
Dower’s new book,
The Violent American Century: War and
Terror Since World War Two.]
March
28, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Tom
Dispatch"
- On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life
magazine carried a lengthy essay by its
publisher, Henry Luce, entitled “The
American Century.”
The son of Presbyterian missionaries, born in
China in 1898 and raised there until the age of
15, Luce essentially transposed the certainty of
religious dogma into the certainty of a
nationalistic mission couched in the name of
internationalism.
Luce
acknowledged that the United States could not
police the whole world or attempt to impose
democratic institutions on all of mankind.
Nonetheless, “the world of the 20th Century,” he
wrote, “if it is to come to life in any nobility
of health and vigor, must be to a significant
degree an American Century.” The essay called on
all Americans “to accept wholeheartedly our duty
and our opportunity as the most powerful and
vital nation in the world and in consequence to
exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence, for such purposes as we see fit and
by such measures as we see fit.”
Japan’s
attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United
States wholeheartedly onto the international
stage Luce believed it was destined to dominate,
and the ringing title of his cri de coeur
became a staple of patriotic Cold War and
post-Cold War rhetoric. Central to this appeal
was the affirmation of a virtuous calling.
Luce’s essay singled out almost every professed
ideal that would become a staple of wartime and
Cold War propaganda: freedom, democracy,
equality of opportunity, self-reliance and
independence, cooperation, justice, charity --
all coupled with a vision of economic abundance
inspired by “our magnificent industrial
products, our technical skills.” In present-day
patriotic incantations, this is referred to as
“American exceptionalism.”
The
other, harder side of America’s manifest destiny
was, of course, muscularity. Power. Possessing
absolute and never-ending superiority in
developing and deploying the world’s most
advanced and destructive arsenal of war. Luce
did not dwell on this dimension of
“internationalism” in his famous essay, but once
the world war had been entered and won, he
became its fervent apostle -- an outspoken
advocate of “liberating” China from its new
communist rulers, taking over from the
beleaguered French colonial military in Vietnam,
turning both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts
from “limited wars” into opportunities for a
wider virtuous war against and in China, and
pursuing the rollback of the Iron Curtain with
“tactical atomic weapons.” As Luce’s incisive
biographer Alan Brinkley documents, at one point
Luce even mulled the possibility of “plastering
Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs” -- a
terrifying scenario, but one that the keepers of
the U.S. nuclear arsenal actually mapped out in
expansive and appalling detail in the 1950s and
1960s, before Luce’s death in 1967.
The
“American Century” catchphrase is hyperbole, the
slogan never more than a myth, a fantasy, a
delusion. Military victory in any traditional
sense was largely a chimera after World War II.
The so-called Pax Americana itself was
riddled with conflict and oppression and
egregious betrayals of the professed catechism
of American values. At the same time, postwar
U.S. hegemony obviously never extended to more
than a portion of the globe. Much that took
place in the world, including disorder and
mayhem, was beyond America’s control.
Yet,
not unreasonably, Luce’s catchphrase persists.
The twenty-first-century world may be chaotic,
with violence erupting from innumerable sources
and causes, but the United States does remain
the planet’s “sole superpower.” The myth of
exceptionalism still holds most Americans in its
thrall. U.S. hegemony, however frayed at the
edges, continues to be taken for granted in
ruling circles, and not only in Washington. And
Pentagon planners still emphatically define
their mission as “full-spectrum dominance”
globally.
Washington’s commitment to modernizing its
nuclear arsenal rather than focusing on
achieving the thoroughgoing abolition of nuclear
weapons has proven unshakable. So has the
country’s almost religious devotion to leading
the way in developing and deploying ever more
“smart” and sophisticated conventional weapons
of mass destruction.
|
No
Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media
|
Welcome
to Henry Luce’s -- and America’s -- violent
century, even if thus far it’s lasted only 75
years. The question is just what to make of it
these days.
Counting
the Dead
We live
in times of bewildering violence. In 2013, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a
Senate committee that the world is “more
dangerous than it has ever been.” Statisticians,
however, tell a different story: that war and
lethal conflict have declined steadily,
significantly, even precipitously since World
War II.
Much
mainstream scholarship now endorses the
declinists. In his influential 2011 book,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence
Has Declined, Harvard psychologist Steven
Pinker adopted the labels “the Long Peace” for
the four-plus decades of the Cold War
(1945-1991), and “the New Peace” for the
post-Cold War years to the present. In that
book, as well as in post-publication articles,
postings, and interviews, he has taken the
doomsayers to task. The statistics suggest, he
declares, that “today we may be living in the
most peaceable era in our species’s existence.”
Clearly, the number and deadliness of global
conflicts have indeed declined since World War
II. This so-called postwar peace was, and still
is, however, saturated in blood and wracked with
suffering.
It is
reasonable to argue that total war-related
fatalities during the Cold War decades were
lower than in the six years of World War II
(1939–1945) and certainly far less than the toll
for the twentieth century’s two world wars
combined. It is also undeniable that overall
death tolls have declined further since then.
The five most devastating intrastate or
interstate conflicts of the postwar decades --
in China, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and
between Iran and Iraq -- took place during the
Cold War. So did a majority of the most deadly
politicides, or political mass killings, and
genocides: in the Soviet Union, China (again),
Yugoslavia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Sudan,
Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan/Bangladesh,
Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Cambodia,
among other countries. The end of the Cold War
certainly did not signal the end of such
atrocities (as witness Rwanda, the Congo, and
the implosion of Syria). As with major wars,
however, the trajectory has been downward.
Unsurprisingly, the declinist argument
celebrates the Cold War as less violent than the
global conflicts that preceded it, and the
decades that followed as statistically less
violent than the Cold War. But what motivates
the sanitizing of these years, now amounting to
three-quarters of a century, with the label
“peace”? The answer lies largely in a fixation
on major powers. The great Cold War antagonists,
the United States and the Soviet Union,
bristling with their nuclear arsenals, never
came to blows. Indeed, wars between major powers
or developed states have become (in Pinker’s
words) “all but obsolete.” There has been no
World War III, nor is there likely to be.
Such
upbeat quantification invites complacent forms
of self-congratulation. (How comparatively
virtuous we mortals have become!) In the United
States, where we-won-the-Cold-War sentiment
still runs strong, the relative decline in
global violence after 1945 is commonly
attributed to the wisdom, virtue, and firepower
of U.S. “peacekeeping.” In hawkish circles,
nuclear deterrence -- the Cold War’s MAD
(mutually assured destruction) doctrine that was
described early on as a “delicate balance of
terror” -- is still canonized as an enlightened
policy that prevented catastrophic global
conflict.
What
Doesn’t Get Counted
Branding the long postwar era as an epoch of
relative peace is disingenuous, and not just
because it deflects attention from the
significant death and agony that actually did
occur and still does. It also obscures the
degree to which the United States bears
responsibility for contributing to, rather than
impeding, militarization and mayhem after 1945.
Ceaseless U.S.-led transformations of the
instruments of mass destruction -- and the
provocative global impact of this technological
obsession -- are by and large ignored.
Continuities in American-style “warfighting” (a
popular Pentagon word) such as heavy reliance on
airpower and other forms of brute force are
downplayed. So is U.S. support for repressive
foreign regimes, as well as the destabilizing
impact of many of the nation’s overt and covert
overseas interventions. The more subtle and
insidious dimension of postwar U.S.
militarization -- namely, the violence done to
civil society by funneling resources into a
gargantuan, intrusive, and ever-expanding
national security state -- goes largely
unaddressed in arguments fixated on numerical
declines in violence since World War II.
Beyond
this, trying to quantify war, conflict, and
devastation poses daunting methodological
challenges. Data advanced in support of the
decline-of-violence argument is dense and often
compelling, and derives from a range of
respectable sources. Still, it must be kept in
mind that the precise quantification of death
and violence is almost always impossible. When a
source offers fairly exact estimates of
something like “war-related excess deaths,” you
usually are dealing with investigators deficient
in humility and imagination.
Take,
for example, World War II, about which countless
tens of thousands of studies have been written.
Estimates of total “war-related” deaths from
that global conflict range from roughly 50
million to more than 80 million. One explanation
for such variation is the sheer chaos of armed
violence. Another is what the counters choose to
count and how they count it. Battle deaths of
uniformed combatants are easiest to determine,
especially on the winning side. Military
bureaucrats can be relied upon to keep careful
records of their own killed-in-action -- but
not, of course, of the enemy they kill.
War-related civilian fatalities are even more
difficult to assess, although -- as in World War
II -- they commonly are far greater than deaths
in combat.
Does
the data source go beyond so-called
battle-related collateral damage to include
deaths caused by war-related famine and disease?
Does it take into account deaths that may have
occurred long after the conflict itself was over
(as from radiation poisoning after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, or from the U.S. use of Agent Orange
in the Vietnam War)? The difficulty of assessing
the toll of civil, tribal, ethnic, and religious
conflicts with any exactitude is obvious.
Concentrating on fatalities and their averred
downward trajectory also draws attention away
from broader humanitarian catastrophes. In
mid-2015, for instance, the Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported
that the number of individuals “forcibly
displaced worldwide as a result of persecution,
conflict, generalized violence, or human rights
violations” had surpassed 60 million and was the
highest level recorded since World War II and
its immediate aftermath. Roughly two-thirds of
these men, women, and children were displaced
inside their own countries. The remainder were
refugees, and over half of these refugees were
children.
Here,
then, is a trend line intimately connected to
global violence that is not heading downward. In
1996, the U.N.’s estimate was that there were
37.3 million forcibly displaced individuals on
the planet. Twenty years later, as 2015 ended,
this had risen to 65.3 million -- a 75% increase
over the last two post-Cold War decades that the
declinist literature refers to as the “new
peace.”
Other
disasters inflicted on civilians are less
visible than uprooted populations. Harsh
conflict-related economic sanctions, which often
cripple hygiene and health-care systems and may
precipitate a sharp spike in infant mortality,
usually do not find a place in itemizations of
military violence. U.S.-led U.N. sanctions
imposed against Iraq for 13 years beginning in
1990 in conjunction with the first Gulf War are
a stark example of this. An account published in
the New York Times Magazine in
July 2003 accepted the fact that “at least
several hundred thousand children who could
reasonably have been expected to live died
before their fifth birthday.” And after all-out
wars, who counts the maimed, or the orphans and
widows, or those the Japanese in the wake of
World War II referred to as the “elderly
orphaned” -- parents bereft of their children?
Figures
and tables, moreover, can only hint at the
psychological and social violence suffered by
combatants and noncombatants alike. It has been
suggested, for instance, that one in six people
in areas afflicted by war may suffer from mental
disorder (as opposed to one in ten in normal
times). Even where American military personnel
are concerned, trauma did not become a serious
focus of concern until 1980, seven years after
the U.S. retreat from Vietnam, when
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was
officially recognized as a mental-health issue.
In
2008, a massive sampling study of 1.64 million
U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq
between October 2001 and October 2007 estimated
“that approximately 300,000 individuals
currently suffer from PTSD or major depression
and that 320,000 individuals experienced a
probable TBI [traumatic brain injury] during
deployment.” As these wars dragged on, the
numbers naturally increased. To extend the
ramifications of such data to wider circles of
family and community -- or, indeed, to
populations traumatized by violence worldwide --
defies statistical enumeration.
Terror
Counts and Terror Fears
Largely
unmeasurable, too, is violence in a different
register: the damage that war, conflict,
militarization, and plain existential fear
inflict upon civil society and democratic
practice. This is true everywhere but has been
especially conspicuous in the United States
since Washington launched its “global war on
terror” in response to the attacks of September
11, 2001.
Here,
numbers are perversely provocative, for the
lives claimed in twenty-first-century terrorist
incidents can be interpreted as confirming the
decline-in-violence argument. From 2000 through
2014, according to the widely cited Global
Terrorism Index, “more than 61,000 incidents of
terrorism claiming over 140,000 lives have been
recorded.” Including September 11th, countries
in the West experienced less than 5% of these
incidents and 3% of the deaths. The Chicago
Project on Security and Terrorism, another
minutely documented tabulation based on combing
global media reports in many languages, puts the
number of suicide bombings from 2000 through
2015 at 4,787 attacks in more than 40 countries,
resulting in 47,274 deaths.
These
atrocities are incontestably horrendous and
alarming. Grim as they are, however, the numbers
themselves are comparatively low when set
against earlier conflicts. For specialists in
World War II, the “140,000 lives” estimate
carries an almost eerie resonance, since this is
the rough figure usually accepted for the death
toll from a single act of terror bombing, the
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The tally is
also low compared to contemporary deaths from
other causes. Globally, for example, more than
400,000 people are murdered annually. In the
United States, the danger of being killed by
falling objects or lightning is at least as
great as the threat from Islamist militants.
This
leaves us with a perplexing question: If the
overall incidence of violence, including
twenty-first-century terrorism, is relatively
low compared to earlier global threats and
conflicts, why has the United States responded
by becoming an increasingly militarized,
secretive, unaccountable, and intrusive
“national security state”? Is it really possible
that a patchwork of non-state adversaries that
do not possess massive firepower or follow
traditional rules of engagement has, as the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared
in 2013, made the world more threatening than
ever?
For
those who do not believe this to be the case,
possible explanations for the accelerating
militarization of the United States come from
many directions. Paranoia may be part of the
American DNA -- or, indeed, hardwired into the
human species. Or perhaps the anticommunist
hysteria of the Cold War simply metastasized
into a post-9/11 pathological fear of terrorism.
Machiavellian fear-mongering certainly enters
the picture, led by conservative and
neoconservative civilian and military officials
of the national security state, along with
opportunistic politicians and war profiteers of
the usual sort. Cultural critics predictably
point an accusing finger as well at the mass
media’s addiction to sensationalism and
catastrophe, now intensified by the
proliferation of digital social media.
To all
this must be added the peculiar psychological
burden of being a “superpower” and, from the
1990s on, the planet’s “sole superpower” -- a
situation in which “credibility” is measured
mainly in terms of massive cutting-edge military
might. It might be argued that this mindset
helped “contain Communism” during the Cold War
and provides a sense of security to U.S. allies.
What it has not done is ensure victory in actual
war, although not for want of trying. With some
exceptions (Grenada, Panama, the brief 1991 Gulf
War, and the Balkans), the U.S. military has not
tasted victory since World War II -- Korea,
Vietnam, and recent and current conflicts in the
Greater Middle East being boldface examples of
this failure. This, however, has had no impact
on the hubris attached to superpower status.
Brute force remains the ultimate measure of
credibility.
The
traditional American way of war has tended to
emphasize the “three Ds” (defeat, destroy,
devastate). Since 1996, the Pentagon’s
proclaimed mission is to maintain “full-spectrum
dominance” in every domain (land, sea, air,
space, and information) and, in practice, in
every accessible part of the world. The Air
Force Global Strike Command, activated in 2009
and responsible for managing two-thirds of the
U.S. nuclear arsenal, typically publicizes its
readiness for “Global Strike... Any Target, Any
Time.”
In
2015, the Department of Defense acknowledged
maintaining 4,855 physical “sites” -- meaning
bases ranging in size from huge contained
communities to tiny installations -- of which
587 were located overseas in 42 foreign
countries. An unofficial investigation that
includes small and sometimes impermanent
facilities puts the number at around 800 in 80
countries. Over the course of 2015, to cite yet
another example of the overwhelming nature of
America’s global presence, elite U.S. special
operations forces were deployed to around 150
countries, and Washington provided assistance in
arming and training security forces in an even
larger number of nations.
America’s overseas bases reflect, in part, an
enduring inheritance from World War II and the
Korean War. The majority of these sites are
located in Germany (181), Japan (122), and South
Korea (83) and were retained after their
original mission of containing communism
disappeared with the end of the Cold War.
Deployment of elite special operations forces is
also a Cold War legacy (exemplified most
famously by the Army’s “Green Berets” in
Vietnam) that expanded after the demise of the
Soviet Union. Dispatching covert missions to
three-quarters of the world’s nations, however,
is largely a product of the war on terror.
Many of
these present-day undertakings require
maintaining overseas “lily pad” facilities that
are small, temporary, and unpublicized. And
many, moreover, are integrated with covert CIA
“black operations.” Combating terror involves
practicing terror -- including, since 2002, an
expanding campaign of targeted assassinations by
unmanned drones. For the moment, this latest
mode of killing remains dominated by the CIA and
the U.S. military (with the United Kingdom and
Israel following some distance behind).
Counting
Nukes
The
“delicate balance of terror” that characterized
nuclear strategy during the Cold War has not
disappeared. Rather, it has been reconfigured.
The U.S. and Soviet arsenals that reached a peak
of insanity in the 1980s have been reduced by
about two-thirds -- a praiseworthy
accomplishment but one that still leaves the
world with around 15,400 nuclear weapons as of
January 2016, 93% of them in U.S. and Russian
hands. Close to two thousand of the latter on
each side are still actively deployed on
missiles or at bases with operational forces.
This
downsizing, in other words, has not removed the
wherewithal to destroy the Earth as we know it
many times over. Such destruction could come
about indirectly as well as directly, with even
a relatively “modest” nuclear exchange between,
say, India and Pakistan triggering a cataclysmic
climate shift -- a “nuclear winter” -- that
could result in massive global starvation and
death. Nor does the fact that seven additional
nations now possess nuclear weapons (and more
than 40 others are deemed “nuclear weapons
capable”) mean that “deterrence” has been
enhanced. The future use of nuclear weapons,
whether by deliberate decision or by accident,
remains an ominous possibility. That threat is
intensified by the possibility that nonstate
terrorists may somehow obtain and use nuclear
devices.
What is
striking at this moment in history is that
paranoia couched as strategic realism continues
to guide U.S. nuclear policy and, following
America’s lead, that of the other nuclear
powers. As announced by the Obama administration
in 2014, the potential for nuclear violence is
to be “modernized.” In concrete terms, this
translates as a 30-year project that will cost
the United States an estimated $1 trillion (not
including the usual future cost overruns for
producing such weapons), perfect a new arsenal
of “smart” and smaller nuclear weapons, and
extensively refurbish the existing delivery
“triad” of long-range manned bombers,
nuclear-armed submarines, and land-based
intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying
nuclear warheads.
Nuclear
modernization, of course, is but a small portion
of the full spectrum of American might -- a
military machine so massive that it inspired
President Obama to speak with unusual emphasis
in his State of the Union address in January
2016. “The United States of America is the most
powerful nation on Earth,” he declared. “Period.
Period. It’s not even close. It’s not even
close. It’s not even close. We spend more on our
military than the next eight nations combined.”
Official budgetary expenditures and projections
provide a snapshot of this enormous military
machine, but here again numbers can be
misleading. Thus, the “base budget” for defense
announced in early 2016 for fiscal year 2017
amounts to roughly $600 billion, but this falls
far short of what the actual outlay will be.
When all other discretionary military- and
defense-related costs are taken into account --
nuclear maintenance and modernization, the “war
budget” that pays for so-called overseas
contingency operations like military engagements
in the Greater Middle East, “black budgets” that
fund intelligence operations by agencies
including the CIA and the National Security
Agency, appropriations for secret high-tech
military activities, “veterans affairs” costs
(including disability payments), military aid to
other countries, huge interest costs on the
military-related part of the national debt, and
so on -- the actual total annual expenditure is
close to $1 trillion.
Such
stratospheric numbers defy easy comprehension,
but one does not need training in statistics to
bring them closer to home.
Simple arithmetic suffices. The projected bill
for just the 30-year nuclear modernization
agenda comes to over $90 million a day, or
almost $4 million an hour. The $1 trillion price
tag for maintaining the nation’s status as “the
most powerful nation on Earth” for a single year
amounts to roughly $2.74 billion a day, over
$114 million an hour.
Creating a capacity for violence greater than
the world has ever seen is costly -- and
remunerative.
So an
era of a “new peace”? Think again. We’re only
three quarters of the way through America’s
violent century and there’s more to come.
John W. Dower is professor
emeritus of history at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. He is the author of the National
Book Critics Circle Award-winning
War Without Mercy
and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing
Defeat. His new book,
The Violent American Century: War and Terror
Since World War Two
(Dispatch Books), has just been published. This
essay is adapted from chapter one of that
densely annotated book. (Sources for the
information above appear in the footnotes in
that book.)
Follow
TomDispatch
on
Twitter and
join us on
Facebook. Check
out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer's
dystopian novel
Splinterlands,
as well as Nick Turse’s Next
Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,
and Tom Engelhardt's latest book,
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 John W. Dower
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
US leads boycott of UN
talks on nuclear weapons ban;
The United States, Britain and France are among
almost 40 countries boycotting talks on a
nuclear weapons ban treaty at the United
Nations, according to Nikki Haley, the US
ambassador to the world body.
