By
Lawrence Wilkerson Col, USA (Ret)
January 30, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
“The collapse of the Libyan state
has had region-wide repercussions, with flows of
people and weapons destabilizing other countries
throughout North Africa.” This statement came from
the Soufan Group’s recent Intelbrief, entitled
“Fighting Over Access to Libya’s Energy Supplies”
(24 January 2020).
Are you listening,
Barack Obama?
“There’s a bias in
this town [Washington, DC] toward war,” President
Obama said to me and several others assembled in the
White House’s Roosevelt Room on September 10, 2015,
almost seven years into his presidency. At the time,
I thought he was thinking particularly of the tragic
mistake he made by joining the intervention in Libya
in 2011, ostensibly implementing United Nations
Security Council Resolution 1973.
Obama’s secretary of
state, John Kerry, was sitting right beside the
president as Obama spoke. I recall asking myself at
the time if he were lecturing Kerry as well as
lamenting his own decision, because Kerry had been
rather outspoken at the time about heavier U.S.
participation in yet another endless war then — and
still — transpiring in Syria. Obama however, was
apparently having none of that.
The reason is that
the Libya intervention not only lead to the grisly
death of Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi — and set
in motion a brutal and continuing military conquest
for the title of “who rules Libya,” invite outside
powers from all over the Mediterranean to join the
fray, and unleash a destabilizing refugee flow
across that inner sea — it also put the weaponry
from one of the world’s largest arms caches into the
hands of such groups as ISIS, al-Qa’ida, Lashkar e-Taibi,
and others. Additionally, many of those formerly
Libyan weapons were being used in Syria at that very
moment.
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Before we offer faint
praise for Obama having learned his lesson and thus
not deciding to intervene in Syria in a more
significant manner, we need to pose the question:
Why do presidents make such disastrous decisions
like Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and, tomorrow
perhaps, Iran?
President Dwight
Eisenhower answered this question, in large part, in
1961: “We must never let the weight of this
combination [the military-industrial complex]
endanger our liberties or democratic processes. …
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel
the proper meshing of the huge industrial and
military machinery of defense with our peaceful
methods and goals.”
Simply stated, today
America is not composed of an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry, and the Complex that
Eisenhower so precisely described is in fact, and in
ways not even Eisenhower could have imagined,
endangering our liberties and democratic processes.
The Complex creates the “bias” that President Obama
described.
Moreover, today the U.S. Congress fuels the
Complex — $738 billion this year plus an
unprecedented slush fund of almost $72 billion more
— to the extent that the Complex’s writ on war has
become inexhaustible, ever-lasting, and, as
Eisenhower also said, “is felt in every city, every
state house, every office of the Federal
government.”
With respect to the
“alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” an outcome not
only in the long-term attributable to proper
education but in the short-to-medium term
principally inculcated by a responsible and capable
“Fourth Estate,” there is an abysmal failure as
well.
The Complex for most
of its nefarious purposes owns the media that
matters, from the nation’s newspaper of record, The
New York Times, to its capital city’s modern organ,
The Washington Post, to the financial community’s
banner paper, The Wall Street Journal. All of these
papers for the most part never met a decision for
war they didn’t like. Only when the wars become
“endless” do some of them find their other voices —
and then it’s too late.
Not to be outdone by
print journalism, the mainstream TV cable media
features talking heads, some of them paid by members
of the Complex or having spent their professional
lives inside it, or both, to pontificate on the
various wars. Again, they only find their critical
voices when the wars become endless, are obviously
being lost or stalemated, and are costing too much
blood and treasure, and better ratings lie on the
side of opposition to them.
Marine General
Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient,
once confessed to having been “a criminal for
capitalism.” An apt description for Butler’s times
in the early days of the 20th century. Today,
however, any military professional worth his salt as
a citizen as well — like Eisenhower — would have to
admit that they too are criminals for the Complex —
a card-carrying member of the capitalist state, to
be sure, but one whose sole purpose, outside of
maximizing shareholder profits, is facilitating the
death of others at the hands of the state.
How else to describe
accurately men — and now women — wearing multiple
stars ceaselessly going before the people’s
representatives in the Congress and asking for more
and more taxpayer dollars? And the pure charade of
the slush fund, known officially as the Overseas
Contingency Operations (OCO) fund and supposed to be
strictly for operations in theaters of war, makes a
farce of the military budgeting process. Most
members of Congress should hang their heads in shame
at what they have allowed to happen annually with
this slush fund.
And Secretary of
Defense Mark Esper’s words at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies this week,
ostensibly spoken to illustrate “new thinking” at
the Pentagon with regard to budgeting, suggest no
indication of real change in the military’s budget,
just a new focus — one that promises not to diminish
cash outlays but to increase them. But rightfully
so, Esper does indicate where some of the blame lies
as he glibly accuses the Congress of adding to
already bloated budget requests from the Pentagon:
“I’ve been telling the
Pentagon now for two and a half years that our
budgets aren’t gonna get any better — they are where
they are — and so we have to be much better stewards
of the taxpayer’s dollar. … And, you know, Congress
is fully behind that. But then there’s that moment
in time when it hits their backyard, and you have to
work your way through that.”
“[T]hat moment in
time when it hits their backyard” is an only
slightly veiled accusation that members of Congress
often plus-up Pentagon budget requests in order to
provide pork for their home districts (no one is
better at this than the Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, who in his many years in the Senate has
provided millions of taxpayer dollars — including to
Defense — for his home state of Kentucky to ensure
his long-lived hold on power there. And he’s no
piker either in receiving money from the defense
sector into his campaign coffers. McConnell just
might be different, however, from other members of
Congress in the way he returns to Kentucky and
openly brags about the huge amounts of pork he
brings annually to his state in order to offset his
increasingly bad poll ratings).
But Esper continued
in a far more telling manner: “We’re at this moment
in time. We have a new strategy. …We have a lot of
support from Congress. … We have to bridge this gap
now between what was Cold War-era systems and the
counter-insurgency, low-intensity fight of the last
ten years, and make this leap into great power
competition with Russia and China — China
principally.”
If the old Cold War
brought sometimes record military budgets, we can
expect the new cold war with China to outstrip those
amounts by orders of magnitude. And who is it that
decided that we needed a new cold war anyway?
Look no further than
the Complex (from which Esper comes, not
coincidentally, as one of the top lobbyists for
Raytheon, a stellar member of the Complex). One of
the Complex’s sine qua nons is what it learned from
the almost half century of the cold war with the
Soviet Union: nothing on earth pays out so
handsomely and consistently than a prolonged
struggle with a major power. Thus, there is no
stronger, more powerful advocate for a new cold war
with China — and throw Russia into the mix too for
extra dollars — than the Complex.
However, at the end
of the day, the very idea that the U.S. must spend
annually more money on its military than
the next eight nations in the world
combined, most of whom are U.S. allies,
should demonstrate to an even unknowledgeable and
not-so-alert citizenry that something is seriously
wrong. Roll out a new cold war; something is still
seriously wrong.
But apparently the
power of the Complex is simply too great. War and
more war is the future of America. As Eisenhower
said, the “weight of this combination” is in fact
endangering our liberties and democratic processes.
To understand this
explicitly, we need only examine the futile attempts
in the past few years to wrest back the power to
make war from the executive branch, the branch that
when equipped with the power to make war, as James
Madison warned us, is most likely to bring tyranny.
Madison, the real
“pen” in the process of writing the U.S.
Constitution, made certain that it put the war power
in the hands of the Congress. Nonetheless, from
President Truman to Trump, almost every U.S.
president has usurped it in one way or another.
The recent attempts
by certain members of Congress to use this
constitutional power simply to remove America from
the brutal war in Yemen, have fallen to the
Complex’s awesome power. It matters not that the
bombs and missiles of the Complex fall on school
buses, hospitals, funeral processions, and other
harmless civilian activities in that war-torn
country. The dollars pour in to the coffers of the
Complex. That is what matters. That is all that
matters.
There will come a day
of reckoning; there always is in the relations of
nations. The names of the world’s imperial hegemons
are indelibly engraved in the history books. From
Rome to Britain, they are recorded there. Nowhere,
however, is it recorded that any of them are still
with us today. They are all gone into the dustbin of
history.
So shall we someday soon, led there by the
Complex and its endless wars.
Lawrence Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S.
Army, retiring as a colonel. He is the Distinguished
Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy
at the College of William & Mary.
This article was published by "Responsible
Statecraft" -
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