A Webinar and Power Point on International Relations, Militarism, and Foreign Policy

Harry Targ

Webinar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQi3Et5ZHkE

Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action February 14, 2022

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Power Point 

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND MILITARISM TODAY.pptx

By any measure the pain and suffering caused by 21st century imperialism is staggering. Millions of  people, mostly in the Middle East and South Asia, have died or been displaced by the war on terrorism initiated in 2001. These figures include the untold thousands who have died directly from war and violence in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa and indirectly through “hybrid “wars against such countries as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba.

Concomitant to war and violence, the 2022 US military budget endorsed by both political parties will exceed $778 billion.

What is the history of US militarism, what Andrew Bacevich calls “the permanent war economy”?

What are connections between the military/industrial complex and the global needs of capitalism?

What are the current sources of international tensions and possible war today?

What is behind US policy towards countries including China, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba?

How should the peace movement respond to militarism and imperialism today?

UKRAINE: PREPARING FOR WAR AGAIN

Harry Targ 

                                                    January 20, 2020

We live in a World of Cognitive Warfare

 A recent document prepared by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)  suggested that “in cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield. The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviors to favor an aggressor's tactical or strategic objectives.”

https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/05/20/countering-cognitive-warfare-awareness-and-resilience/index.html)

This NATO document, of course, is addressing the world of international relations but the concept of “cognitive warfare” seems to parallel efforts “to change not only what people think, but how they think and act.” This project animates the efforts of media conglomerates-print, electronic, social media platforms. Changing how people think and act has its historic roots in campaigns to convince citizens to support wars, consume cigarettes, forget climate disasters, and to find flaws in populations because of class, race, gender, sexual preference, and/or religion. The processes of “branding” are similar in all realms of human experience.

Perhaps challenging the process of “branding” should be on the agenda for all those who seek a more humane society. Break up “branding machines.” Democratize the ability to describe and express experiences. And, in the educational sphere, teach students to analyze brands and to evaluate their relative accuracy.

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In August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression.

Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted "no." Over the next three years the U.S. sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.

Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.

President Johnson's lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.

Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq- imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.

The American people must insist that their leaders tell the truth about the U.S. role in the world.

JOHN MCCARTNEY KNEW IDEAS CAN INSPIRE ACTIVISM

 Harry Targ

 OrIGINALLY POSTED ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2013

 “I am trying to carry students on a ‘voyage’ in which they transcend their immediate experiences and impressions, and encounter in the process a ‘new’ world of ideas, values, and aspirations.” (quote from a letter Professor McCartney wrote to the Provost, Lafayette College).

John McCartney was a colleague of mine, a political comrade, and a long-time friend, even though we had not been in touch in recent years. He was on the faculty at Purdue University from 1970 to 1979, serving as Assistant Professor of Political Science, and the first director of a new program in African American Studies. He returned to Purdue University in January 2003 to participate in a conference sponsored by Purdue’s Committee on Peace Studies. He gave a lecture on “Martin Luther King Jr. and the Question of Peace.” We in Peace Studies shared our ideas about social change at this conference with McCartney, labor leader Noel Beasley, and peace researcher Betty Reardon.

At that time John invited me to an upcoming conference on “Paul Robeson: His History and Development” at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, where he was Department Chair. In April, 2005, John and I gave presentations at that gathering on “Marx and Engels’ Influences on the Development of Robeson’s Intellect.”

While clearing my desk sometime later, I came across the Robeson paper and decided to seek its publication in The Journal of African American Studies. I started to submit the paper online. The journal’s application required the prospective author to submit names and e-mail addresses of three possible article reviewers. So I typed in John’s name and then searched the internet to secure his e-mail address when I found the entry, “Memorial Resolution for John T. McCartney.”

My first reaction was emotional devastation. For me, John was always out there even though we did not keep in touch. On reflection I began to realize how important he was to me as an educator and activist and I decided to share some remembrances. I do so not to celebrate McCartney nor to provide an emotional release for me, but to underscore the power of ideas, the importance of the educational process, and the obligation of us in educational institutions to link our work to political practice.

John came to the Department of Political Science at Purdue University from the University of Iowa, where he was completing a Ph.D. Our department head reported that John would teach urban politics, because that was what people assumed scholars of African descent would teach. But no, to the department’s surprise John was a political theorist, specializing in medieval political thought. Along with teaching a course on the history of political theory, John taught courses on St. Augustine. He was such a wonderful teacher that one would see lots of students carrying around with them The City of God, not the usual political science text being studied in the early 1970s.

John met philosophy professor Kermit Scott, another medievalist and dear friend of mine. Kermit and I worked with other activist faculty on a variety of student, anti-racism, and anti-war activities in those days. John and Kermit decided to team-teach an undergraduate seminar on medieval philosophy. Both were brilliant and had a small but determined following among students.

John led a mysterious life outside the classroom. Always kind, gentle, and caring he lived alone in a small apartment across the river in Lafayette and spent his free time talking with working folks who hung out downtown. At some point, Kermit and John started talking about post-medieval politics and to our surprise Kermit and I learned that John McCartney was the leader of the Vanguard Nationalist and Socialist Party of the Bahamas. Every summer he would return home and walk the streets of Nassau with his comrades talking with virtually every resident of the main island. His name would appear regularly in articles on the front page of the Nassau newspaper referring to “Dr. John McCartney, Purdue University Professor and Chairman of the Vanguard Nationalist and Socialist Party.”

It turns out that John, the oldest of 10 children, received a first-rate British colonial public school education, worked as an officer of the British Customs Service, received a bachelor’s degree at Drake University in Iowa, and his Ph. D at the University of Iowa.

Meanwhile John and a small coterie of comrades were constructing a Socialist party designed to challenge the elected leadership of the post-colonial government of the Bahamas. He was struggling to build a socialist movement to take power from many of those opportunistic Bahamian nationalists who were John’s school mates years earlier. So John, teaching St. Augustine, in Indiana, was sending his salary back home to support his nine siblings and the new Vanguard Party.

John and Kermit, who himself was increasingly drawn to the Marxist tradition, decided to put their copies of The City of God back on the bookshelf and rework their seminar into an in-depth study of Marxism. In addition to a small but dedicated group of students several faculty would sit in on the seminar. I did so three times.

John was a hard driver as a teacher. Our first seminar assignment was to go through volume one of Das Capital. We would read the text line by line. Through most of the class John read a critical passage, explained it, and read it again. Over the three classes I took with John and Kermit we read theorists including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Lukacs, Gramsci, and Euro Communists.

John organized several of us into a reading group that met on Sunday nights. We read Nkrumah, Cabral, Che, and some of the women in our group insisted we add some feminist voices to our readings and discussion. John needed to be brought along on “the woman question,” but of course he was not alone.

Kermit and I, mostly Kermit, began to do some work for the Vanguard Party, writing short essays for study groups that members engaged in back home and Kermit wrote a thorough history of the Bahamas for the party called “The Struggle for Freedom in the Bahamas.” Kermit visited the Bahamas often and I did so once.

During one meeting in the party office, which Kermit and I attended, some young ultra-left members pulled a revolver demanding that the party march “over the hill” and seize state power. John stood up to the leader of the revolt, a gun inches from his face, and asked, “What next?” We could not hold power he added primarily because not enough people would support a violent “revolution.” Fortunately, the rebel withdrew his gun and the next day party members resumed their work, walking the streets, talking to people, explaining socialism, and asking for the people’s support. Most importantly, the regular work in the community was done with respect for different views. John, the medieval scholar, was as much a man of the people as any revolutionary one could think of.

By the middle of the 1980s, the party fell on hard times and John, who had left Purdue and academia in 1979, returned to the United States to take an academic position. He taught for the rest of his life at Lafayette College, a well-known and expensive liberal arts college in Eastern Pennsylvania. In that powerful memorial statement about John, it was pointed out that both the college and John were taking a big risk. Neither the Department of Government and Law nor John were sure that he could adapt to teaching students from wealthy families. But on reflection the decision was a “no-brainer.” John loved people. He could hang out with the guys on the stoop in downtown Lafayette, walk the streets among the people he grew up with, and work hard to teach young people of all kinds the ideas that he valued so much.

When my wife and I attended the conference John McCartney organized in 2005 we caught up on our many years apart only some of which we were able to discuss when he attended the Peace Studies conference at Purdue in 2003. He spoke about how wonderful Lafayette College was, how open and tolerant the students were, and how important it was to communicate ideas to them. He admitted on the side, however, that “I teach a course in the local prison every year to keep in touch with the working class.” A former student reported that when John got sick and did not stop by the local Wawa food market, workers there would say: “Where’s Doc?”

"Doc” knew that ideas mattered; that young people needed to study hard; that ideas had to be put to work changing the world.

Students, teachers, and political activists will miss John McCartney.

https://www.jbhe.com/2012/04/in-memoriam-james-t-mccartney-1938-2012/

 And now, with the rise of the right, escalating racism, the pain and suffering working people face in the Global North and the Global South, and threats educators face when they communicate critical thought, I remember our debt to scholar/activists like John McCartney.

BUILDING A NEW SOCIETY

Harry Targ 

 A powerful concept animated the vision of young people in the 1960s, the idea of community. Many of us came to that decade with little interest in politics. We were not “red diaper” babies but we became outraged by Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and war. Our education had communicated an early version of Margaret Thatcher’s admonition, “there is no alternative,” and our impulses told us then that “another world was possible.” 

 New and old ideas about a better world began to circulate from college campuses, the streets, some churches, and popular culture. A whole body of engaging literature caught the fancy of young people. 

For me Paul Goodman’s description of youth growing up in the sterile 1950s, Growing Up Absurd, resonated. He wrote about alternative possibilities in such books as Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals. Perhaps most startling to a young reader was the earlier analysis Goodman published with his brother Percival, Communitas. In that book the Goodman brothers argued that societies, big and small, were products of values. Architecture and the organization of space, social and political forms, and the ease with which people could communicate and interact with each other varied. And the variations created in space and social forms affected whether communities valued life and sociability or consumption and profit maximization. 

The Goodman’s opened up new intellectual doors for me. I looked at earlier anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, who argued that humans-if not separated by time, space, and power structures-often lived in solidarity with their neighbors. A “mutual aid” principle was natural to human existence. And, as a result “the state" sought to stamp it out and replace it with top-down authority. 

Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, identified a “centralistic political principle” that emerged when groups and states sought control of markets and natural resources and “the most valuable of all goods,” the lives of people who lived with each other changed as “…the autonomous relationships become meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit of…” being human “…hires itself out as a functionary.” The alternative for Buber was what he called a decentralized social principle, or community which is “…never a mere attitude of mind” but of “…tribulation and only because of that community of spirit; community of toil and only because of that community of salvation….” 

In 1974, I wrote in summation about these theorists and many others that “the architectural forms and social structures of the Goodmans can profitably be blended with the spiritualism and socialism of Buber to construct a synthesis of all that the utopians and anarchists set out to achieve. The Goodmans show how community can be created in the industrial age and Buber illustrates how the best features of the entire community tradition fit together.” 

The ideas of community, empowerment, and social justice spread from these and other sources. They were articulated for the sixties in The Port Huron Statement, written by founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. While written by and for a relatively privileged sector of disenchanted youth in a period of booming economic growth and military expansion, the document spoke to the passion for justice, participation, and community; “…unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” It called for the creation of “human interdependence” replacing “…power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance…” by “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.” 

By the late sixties many of us were identifying a new society that must be built on core principles. These included; - local control and participatory democracy - racial justice - gender equality - equitable distribution of resources and the collective product of human labor - commitments to the satisfaction of minimal basic needs for all of humankind - the development of an ethic that connects survival to human existence not to specific jobs - human control over technology - a new “land ethic” that conceives of humankind as part of nature, not in conflict with it.

Many of us began to explore the impediments to the construction of a society based on human scale that celebrated both individual creativity and community. Growing familiarization with the critique of capitalism suggested that the capitalist mode of production, dominant over two-thirds of the world, was based upon the exploitation, oppression, dehumanization, and repression of the vast majority of humankind. Incorporating an understanding of the workings of capitalism did not contradict the vision that Buber called the decentralized social principle and the many eloquent calls by others for “community.” It did suggest that building a new society entailed class struggle which would manifest itself in factories and fields, in rich and poor countries, and in political venues from the ballot box to the streets.

Bringing about positive change was a much more complicated affair than activists originally thought but the sustained and sometimes brutal opposition to our visions validated the general correctness of them. Today, new generations of activists, along with older ones, are reflecting and participating in diverse social movements in our cities and towns. They observe with enthusiasm the mobilizations, the militancy, and the passion for justice still unfolding in the Middle East. The efforts of Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and the Cubans who inspired us so much over the years are applauded. Important debates about social market economies, workers’ management of large enterprises, this or that candidate or political party are occurring on the internet and in the streets. 

Although the times are so different from the 1960s, perhaps the vision of community that animated our thinking then (which we in turn learned from those who preceded us) may still be relevant for today. Without creating new documents or dogmas perhaps it can be proclaimed that we remain committed to the sanctity of human life, to equality, to popular control of all our institutions, to a reverence for the environment, and to the idea that the best of society comes from our communal efforts to make living better for all.

Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War: 1964, 2003, 2022(?)

 

                                                            January 20, 2020        

                                  
On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression.

Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted "no." Over the next three years the U.S. sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.

Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.

President Johnson's lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.

Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq- imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.

The American people must insist that their leaders tell the truth about the U.S. role in the world.

The Permanent War Economy: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same (Unless We Organize)

 Harry Targ

https://masspeaceaction.org/event/international-relations-and-militarism-today/

(Revised Excerpts from a presentation at the Deerfield Progressive Forum, Deerfield Beach, Florida, January 17, 2009 and an essay posted on January 30, 2009)

 

In the Beginning

After suffering the greatest economic depression in United States history, this country participated in a war-time coalition with Great Britain and the former Soviet Union to defeat fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism in Asia. As a result of the economic mobilization for war, the United States economy grew to become the most powerful one by war’s end. By 1945, Americans were responsible for three-fourths of the world’s invested capital and controlled two-thirds of its industrial capacity. Near the end of World War II, General Electric CEO Charles Wilson recommended that the U.S. continue the wartime partnership between the government, the corporate sector, and the military to maintain what he called a “permanent war economy.” He and others feared the possibility of return to depression.

To justify a permanent war economy-ever increasing military expenditures, bases all around the world, periodic military interventions, and the maintenance of a large land army, navy, and air force-an external threat was needed. In 1947 President Truman told the American people that there was such a threat, “international communism.”

Many liberals and conservatives remained skeptical about high military expenditures. But, just before the Korean War started, permanent war economy advocates threw their support behind recommendations made in a long- time classified document, National Security Council Document 68, which recommended a dramatic increase in military spending. NSC-68 also recommended that military spending from that point on should be the number one priority of the national government. When presidents sit down to construct a federal budget they should first allocate all the money requested by military and corporate elites and lobbyists concerned with military spending. Only after that should government programs address education, health care, roads, transportation, housing and other critical domestic issues.

When the United States entered the Korean War, Truman committed the nation to a permanent war economy. Each subsequent president did likewise. According to Chalmers Johnson (Blowback, Sorrows of Empire), between 1947 and 1990, the permanent war economy cost the American people close to $9 trillion. Ruth Sivard (World Military Expenditures) presented data to indicate that over 100,000 U.S. military personnel died in wars and military interventions during this period. And, in other countries, nearly 10 million people died directly or indirectly in wars in which the United States was a participant.

Some influential Americans raised criticisms of the new permanent war economy. For example, while he subsequently complied with many of the demands for more military spending, President Eisenhower declared in one of his first speeches in office that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” After eight years in the White House Eisenhower gave a prescient farewell address in which he warned of a “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” which was new in American history. And, he proclaimed; “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Incidentally, his original draft spoke of a “military-industrial-academic complex.”

Seven years later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.”

The Permanent War Economy Today

And in the current century the United States launched two wars: in Iraq and Afghanistan costing more than any war except World War II, against an enemy magnified, demonized, and mythologized as much or more than the cold war enemy. The demonization was used to justify a $3 trillion price tag for the Iraq War, the deaths of more than 4,000 soldiers, ten times that number of disabled veterans, and casualties and deaths of Iraqis (and Afghanis) probably approaching a million people. 9/11 afforded the Bush Administration the opportunity to launch a “war on terrorism” and the justification of preemptive war on any human target defined as a possible threat to the United States. The “terrorists” became the post-Cold War “international communists.” This is what the permanent war economy has come to. And now the new threats are Russia and China.

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Summary of Findings From the Cost of War Project

Over 929,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war

• Over 387,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting
• 38 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons
• The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion 
• The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 85 countries
• The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the U.S. and abroad
• https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

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Did the vision of Charles Wilson and the framers and advocates of NSC 68 bear fruit in terms of the domestic economy? The answer to this question is complicated, but in the end clear. The U.S. economy is subject to cycles of growth and decay; expansion and recession; and periods of increased consumerism and low unemployment versus periods of declining product demand, lower wages, and high unemployment.

Looking at the period since World War II, bursts of increased military spending brought the U.S. economy out of the recessions of the late 1940s and 50s. The 60s economy boomed as the Vietnam war escalated before the economic crises of the 1970s. The so-called Reagan recovery was driven by dramatic increases in military spending. 1980s military spending equaled the total value of such spending between the founding of the nation and 1980.

In addition, military spending has benefited those industries, communities, and universities which have been the beneficiaries of such largesse. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Halliburton, Bechtel, and Kellogg, Brown, and Root did quite well. For example, when Dick Cheney left his post as Secretary of Defense in 1993 to become the CEO of Halliburton, its subsidiary, KBR jumped from the 73rd ranked Pentagon contractor to the 18th.

Military spending pumped money into the economy to the advantage of selected multinational corporations and some communities. Usually recipients of defense dollars were part of what C. Wright Mills called, “the power elite,” those powerful individuals who, at the apex of government, corporate, and military institutions, influence policy. On the other hand, most citizens were not beneficiaries of military spending.

                                        
                               

“Indirect effects” of military spending, usually overwhelm the short-term stimulative effects of such spending. Military spending is “capital intensive,” that is the investment of dollars in military goods and services require less labor power to produce than the investment of comparable dollars in other sectors of the economy. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier referred to spending on Iraq as a “job killer.” They estimated that $1 billion spent on investments in education, healthcare, energy conservation, and infrastructure would have created anywhere from 50 to 100 percent more jobs than comparable spending on the war. They said; “Taking the 2007 Iraq war budget of $138 billion, this means that upward of one million jobs were lost because the Bush Administration chose the Iraq sinkhole over public investment” (The Nation, March 31, 2008).

Further, military spending requires government to borrow money from private sources. Consequently, the more borrowing for the military, the less funds are available for non-military economic activity. Non-military spending gets “crowded out” by investment in arms.

Paralleling this, expanding investments in military reduce the resources of society that can be allocated for the production of goods and services that have use values. Military spending constitutes waste in that the resources that go into armies, navies, air forces, and weapons of human destruction cannot be put to constructive use. Looking at government spending alone, the 2008 federal budget increased by $35 billion in military spending, bringing the total to $541 billion. At the same time federal aid to state and local governments fell by $19.2 billion. The war on Iraq cost $522.5 billion and it was projected by distinguished economists that the total cost for the war, including paying debts, veterans' benefits, and replacing destroyed equipment, would top $3 trillion (Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, Washington Post, March 9, 2008, p.B01).

Andrew Bacevich summed up this tradition of permanent war in reviewing a biography of 1940s Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in The Nation (April 23, 2007):

“From Forrestal's day to the present, semi-warriors have viewed democratic politics as problematic. Debate means delay. To engage in give-and-take or compromise is to forfeit clarity and suggests a lack of conviction. The effective management of national security requires specialized knowledge, a capacity for clear-eyed analysis and above all an unflinching willingness to make decisions, whatever the cost. With the advent of semiwar, therefore, national security policy became the preserve of experts, few in number, almost always unelected, habitually operating in secret, persuading themselves that to exclude the public from such matters was to serve the public interest. After all, the people had no demonstrable ‘need to know.’ In a time of perpetual crisis, the anointed role of the citizen was to be pliant, deferential and afraid.”

It is the task of the peace and justice activists today (again in 2022) to build a mass movement, mobilizing the citizenry to reject the role of “pliant, deferential,” and fearful citizens. The people must insist that our politicians say “no” to the semi-warriors.

For example, The New Poor Peoples Campaign compares prospective impacts of military spending with spending on social and economic needs.

 https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/PPC-BBB-fact-sheet.pdf

 

 

"THIS MADNESS MUST CEASE"

(an earlier version was posted on January 15, 2010)

Harry Targ

President Biden is considering deploying several thousand U.S. troops, as well as warships and aircraft, to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, an expansion of American military involvement amid mounting fears of a Russian incursion into Ukraine, according to administration officials. Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, January 23, 2022.

At a critical juncture in the escalation of the Vietnam War, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 describing the fundamental connections between war overseas and poverty at home:

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.”

It is useful to reflect on the historic motivation for United States foreign policy, what Dr. King called "this madness," yesterday and today. And, in the spirit of Dr. King, it is incumbent upon us to continue to reflect also on its impacts on people abroad and at home. Such reflections should encompass venues such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Palestine where the contemporary impacts are the result of war and countries like Haiti where the structure of economic and political relations have been as devastating to the people as military occupation (though marines occupied Haiti from 1917 to 1934).

First, according to historian William Appleman Williams, the United States has pursued dominant influence in the world ever since the 1890s. After conquering the North American continent and all but exterminating its inhabitants, U.S. policy has been shaped by the pursuit of markets, investment opportunities, cheap labor, and vital natural resources. With the expansion of industrial capitalism, securing access to cheap oil became particularly important. Oil figured prominently in agreements with the ruling oligarchy in Saudi Arabia during World War II, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, the severing of relations with a radical Iraqi regime in 1958, and the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

Historian Loren Baritz has argued that U.S. policymakers have defined these economically driven global and interventionist policies in moral terms. For example, President Truman spoke of the threat of totalitarian communism to the free world in his famous Truman Doctrine speech of March 12, 1947. However, one week earlier, in a less familiar speech at Baylor University, he asserted that economics and foreign policy were inextricably connected and that the United States was committed to creating a global market economy in the post-war world. Thirty-five years later President Reagan repeatedly referred to the Soviet Communist system as an historical aberration and at the same time borrowed from our Puritan ancestors, declaring that the United States was a “city on a hill.” We were destined by God to transform the world. President Clinton also mixed economics and morality repeatedly reiterating his commitment to create “market democracies” around the world. Now the US wishes to protect “democracy” in Ukraine.

The impacts of this century-long search for what Williams called, “the Open Door,” the drive to economically penetrate the globe has meant pain, suffering, and waste for peoples everywhere including the United States. The U.S. sent marines to invade Central American and the Caribbean 25 times between 1900 and 1933. During the fifty years since World War 11 the U.S. threatened to use force or sent troops on at least 40 occasions, spent $3 trillion on the military, participated in wars between 1945 and 1995 in which 10 million people died, and lost at least 100,000 of its own soldiers killed in action with 10 times that number becoming casualties.

It was in this historical context that President Bush responded to the terrorist attack on 9/11 by launching a new global crusade, replacing communism with a “war on terrorism.” He justified “preemptory” attacks on any country or people we would define as a possible threat to U.S. national security. The Pentagon defined an “arc of instability” running from the northern parts of South America through North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and East Asia. They said the United States had to develop small, mobile military bases all across the globe (Chalmers Johnson estimated that some 700 bases existed in 60 countries in 2010) with new technologies that would make the U.S. fighting force more capable of quickly intervening in self-defined trouble spots. “Successful operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq would solidify the presence, power, and control of strategic resources and institutionalize this strategy of “the last remaining superpower.”

Clinton Administration policies toward Iraq differed in tactics but not in substance from his successor. Clinton sought to increase the U.S. presence in the Gulf by starving the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Economic sanctions led to a 60 percent decline in the GDP of the country and the economic embargo cost the lives of about one million Iraqis, mostly children under the age of five.

However, supporters of the lobby group, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, and other Bush policymakers, demanded that Clinton do more. As soon as 9/11 happened, these neo-conservatives convinced President Bush to attack Iraq even though the latter had nothing to do with 9/11 and everyone knew that Iraq, after a decade of US and British bombing, economic sanctions, and rigorous inspections, had no weapons of mass destruction.

The war on Afghanistan began in October,2001 and the war in Iraq in March 2003. And the impacts have been devastating on these war-torn countries, even after US troops withdrew.

What can be done about this “madness?" Progressives should continue to demand that the United States deescalate and withdraw all U.S. troops from its global presence. U.S. military bases all across the globe must be shut down. This process should be done in conjunction with negotiations with relevant nations and peoples to transform international relations. And today we must say “no to war in Ukraine. No to war in the South China Sea. Abolish NATO.”

Americans must pressure their leaders to embrace foreign and domestic policies that promote peace and justice. At the time of his assassination Dr. King was organizing a Poor People’s Campaign, a mass movement to end war, racism, and economic misery. Today, in 2022, a New Poor People’s Campaign is organizing around these issues. Campaigns in cities such as New York have advocated “move the money” from military to social spending, These projects still need our attention.