Addicted to War
And then there's that other twenty-first-century all-American addiction, in some ways far stranger than the Trumpian one and likely to be no less costly in the long run: addiction to war. Almost 17 years after the Global War on Terror was launched, the highs -- the invasion of Afghanistan! The taking of Kabul! The smashing of Iraq! The capture of Saddam Hussein! -- are long gone. Now exhausted and discouraged, those hooked nonetheless remain unable to stop.
In some ways, addiction may seem like a strange category when applied to this country's war-making, as for most Americans the very opposite seems to be true. Since a series of historic global antiwar protests faded out with the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, it's as if most Americans had gone cold turkey on this country's credit-card wars. Willfully demobilized by the top officials of the Bush administration, who preferred to conduct their military operations without citizen or congressional oversight, they simply turned away and went about their business. Meanwhile, America's all-volunteer military, increasingly a kind of foreign legion for much of the population, has continued to fight never-endingly and remarkably fruitlessly across a vast swath of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
The divorce of most Americans from Washington's wars and those fighting them may be less than apparent because, according to the polls, the public has a kind of blind trust and soaring "confidence" in the U.S. military, unlike any other part of the government or, for that matter, the society, and because the urge to "thank" the "warriors" is now such a basic part of American life. But all of that is, I suspect, little more than a massive compensation reaction from a public that otherwise could not care less.
When it comes to Washington's still-spreading war on terror, the media has, if anything, followed suit. Recently, for instance, Reuters correspondent Indrees Ali posted a photo on Twitter of a large, almost empty room filled with chairs, with the caption: "There are exactly four journalists at the Pentagon briefing on Afghanistan." That single image sums up the present situation vividly. Almost 17 years after the invasion of Afghanistan by a military repeatedly hailed as "the finest fighting force the world has ever known," at a moment when Taliban insurgents are again gaining ground, a Pentagon briefing on developments there is of no interest. Yes, events in such wars are still dutifully reported from time to time, but those reports, often tucked away on the inside pages of papers or deep in the nightly news, don't hold a candle to Melania's jacket, the president's latest tweet, or a Red Hen rebuff.
And yet the photo of that Pentagon briefing is deceptive. It leaves out a key group still in the room: those addicted to an American style of war-making through which, year after year, the still-theoretically dominant power on the planet only seems to induce the spread of terror movements, disorder, destruction, and the displacement of increasingly large populations (contributing to a global refugee crisis that is, in its own way, helping to remake the planet).
Missing from that photo are the characters who have OD'd on U.S. military power and yet can't stop mainlining it in ways that have become all-too-familiar since 2001. I'm thinking of the generals of the U.S. military, the men who have led an endless set of campaigns as part of what those inside the Pentagon are now grimly referring to as an "infinite war" leading nowhere. And they're strung out. As Mark Perry reported recently in Foreign Policy, Secretary of Defense James "Mad Dog" Mattis and other American generals, unlike the president's new civilian counselors, National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are not eager for the next potential war, the one with Iran that already looms on the horizon. They understand that they could launch such a conflict successfully, destroying much of Iran's military (and its nuclear facilities), and still, as with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and so on, somehow not get out.
And yet, much as they don't want a bright, shiny new war (and who could blame them under the circumstances), they can't imagine leaving the old ones behind either. And that's America's war addiction in a nutshell, one that has long had in its grip most of elite Washington and the rest of a national security state set up around a style of infinite-war-making that must always be fed with ever increasing numbers of taxpayer dollars. Thanks to those dollars, we, the taxpayers, could be thought of as so many street-level drug peddlers in this country's war equivalent of the opioid epidemic. The politicians who feed those dollars into the military maw would be the doctors who prescribe opioids, understanding full-well their ability to hook patients. And the Military-Industrial Complex -- the giant weapons companies and the warrior corporations that now go into action in lock-step with that military -- would be the drug companies that have profited so off the opioid crisis even as they stoked it.
Returning momentarily to Donald Trump, you can feel the power of that war addiction in his inability to fulfill his promise to fight those conflicts in a winning style and, if necessary, quickly extricate the country from what he termed its "$7 trillion" Greater Middle Eastern disaster. In his own fashion, he, too, has been hooked. And when the increasingly tired and distraught generals he chose to surround himself with proved unpalatable to him, Trump notably picked as replacements civilians guaranteed to keep the ball rolling when it came to America's wars from hell.
So, addiction? If you don't think this country has an addiction crisis (other than opioids), think again.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).
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Copyright 2018 Tom Engelhardt
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