The expression self-licking ice cream cone was first used in 1992 to describe a hidebound bureaucracy at NASA. Yet, as an image, it is even more apt for Americas military-industrial complex, an institution far vaster than NASA and thoroughly dedicated to working for its own perpetuation and little else.

Thinking about that led me to another phrase based on Americas seemingly endless string of victory-less wars: the self-defeating military. The U.S., after all, has not won a major conflict since World War II, when it was aided by a grand alliance that included Soviet dictator Josef Stalins godless communists. And yet here is the wonder of it all: despite such a woeful 75-year military record, including both the Korean and Vietnam wars of the last century and the never-ending war on terror of this one, the Pentagons coffers are overflowing with taxpayer dollars.

The lack of results should not surprise anyone who has been paying the slightest attention, since the present military establishment has been designed less to protect this country than to protect itself, its privileges, and its power. That rarely discussed reality has, in turn, contributed to practices and mindsets that make it a force truly effective at only one thing: defeating any conceivable enemy in Washington as it continues to win massive budgets and the cultural authority to match. That it loses most everywhere else is, it seems, just part of the bargain.

The list of recent debacles should be as obvious as it is alarming: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen (and points around and in between). And even if it is a reality rarely focused on in the mainstream media, none of this has been a secret to the senior officers who run that military. Look at the Pentagon Papers from the Vietnam War era or the Afghanistan Papers recently revealed by the Washington Post. In both cases, prominent U.S. military leaders admitted to fundamental flaws in their war-making practices, including the lack of a coherent strategy, a thorough misunderstanding of the nature and skills of their enemies, and the total absence of any real progress in achieving victory, no matter the cost.

Of course, such honest appraisals of this countrys actual war-making prowess were made in secret, while military spokespeople and American commanders laid down a public smokescreen to hide the worst aspects of those wars from the American people. As they talked grimly (and secretly) among themselves about losing, they spoke enthusiastically and openly to Congress and the public about winning. In case you had not noticed, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq that military was, year after endless year, making progress and turning corners. Such happy talk (a mixture of lies and self-deception) may have served to keep the money flowing and weapons sales booming, but it also kept the body bags coming in (and civilians dying in distant lands)and for nothing, or at least nothing by any reasonable definition of national security.

Curiously, despite the obvious disparity between the militarys lies and reality, the American people, or at least their representatives in Congress, have largely bought those lies in bulk and at astronomical prices. Yet this countrys refusal to face the facts of defeat has only ensured ever more disastrous military interventions. The result: a self-defeating military, engorged with money, lurching toward yet more defeats even as it looks over its shoulder at an increasingly falsified past.

The Future Is What It Used to Be

Long ago, New York Yankee catcher and later manager Yogi Berra summed up what was to come this way: The future aint what it used to be. And it was not. We used to dream, for example, of flying cars, personal jetpacks, liberating robots, and oodles of leisure time. We even dreamed of mind-bending trips to Jupiter, as in Stanley Kubricks epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like so much else we imagined, those dreams have not exactly panned out.

Yet here is an exception to Berras wisdom: strangely enough, for the U.S. military, the future is predictably just what it used to be. After all, the latest futuristic vision of Americas military leaders ishold onto your Kevlar helmetsa new cold war with its former communist rivals Russia and China. Add in one other aspect of that militarys future vision: wars, as they see it, are going to be fought and settled with modernized and ever more expensive versions of the same old weapons systems that carried us through much of the mid-twentieth century: ever more pricey aircraft carriers, tanks, and top of the line jet fighters and bombers withhey!maybe a few thoroughly destabilizing tactical nukes thrown in, along with plenty of updated missiles carried by planes of an ever more stealthy and far more expensive variety. Think: the F-35 fighter, the most expensive weapons system in history and the B-21 bomber.

For such a future, of course, todays military hardly needs to change at all, or so our generals and admirals argue. For example, yet more ships will, of course, be needed. The Navy high command is already clamoring for 355 of them, while complaining that the record-setting $738 billion Pentagon budget for 2020 is too tight to support such a fleet.

Not to be outdone when it comes to complaints about tight budgets, the Air Force is arguing vociferously that it needs yet more billions to build a fleet of planes that can wage two major wars at once. Meanwhile, the Army is typically lobbying for a new armored personnel carrier (to replace the M2 Bradley) that is so esoteric insiders joke it will have to be made of unobtainium.

In short, no matter how much money the Trump administration and Congress throw at the Pentagon, it is a guarantee that the military high command will only complain that more is needed, including for nuclear weapons to the tune of possibly $1.7 trillion over 30 years. But doubling down on more of the same, after a record 75 years of non-victories (not to speak of outright losses), is more than stubbornness, more than grift. It is obdurate stupidity.

Why, then, does it persist? The answer would have to be because this country does not hold its failing military leaders accountable. Instead, it applauds them and promotes them, rewarding them when they retire with six-figure pensions, often augmented by cushy jobs with major defense contractors. Given such a system, why should Americas generals and admirals speak truth to power? They are power and they will keep harsh and unflattering truths to themselves, thank you very much, unless they are leaked by heroes like Daniel Ellsberg during the Vietnam War and Chelsea Manning during the Iraq War, or pried from them via a lawsuit like the one by the Washington Post that recently led to those Afghanistan Papers.

My Polish mother-in-law taught me a phrase that translates as, Dont say nothin to nobody. When it comes to Americas wars and their true progress and prospects, consider that the official dictum of Pentagon spokespeople. Yet even as Americas wars sink into Vietnam-style quagmires, the money keeps flowing, especially to high-cost weapons programs.

Consider my old service, the Air Force. As one defense news site put it, Congressional appropriators gave the Air Force [and Lockheed Martin] a holiday gift in the 2019 spending agreement $1.87 billion for 20 additional F-35s and associated spare parts. The new total just for 2020 is 98 aircraft62 F-35As, 16 F-35Bs, and 20 F-35Csat the whopping cost of $9.3 billion, crowning the F-35 as the biggest Pentagon procurement program ever.

And that is not all. The Air Force (and Northrop Grumman) got another gift as well: $3 billion more to be put into its new, redundant, B-21 stealth bomber. Even much-beleaguered Boeing, responsible for the disastrous 737 MAX program, got a gift: nearly a billion dollars for the revamped F-15EX fighter, a much-modified version of a plane that first flew in the early 1970s. Yet, despite those gifts, Air Force officials continue to claim with straight faces that the service is getting the short straw in todays budgetary battles in the Pentagon. What does this all mean? One obvious answer would be: the only truly winning battles for the Pentagon are the ones for our taxpayer dollars.

Dopes and Babies Galore

I cannot claim that I ever traveled in the circles of generals and admirals, though I met a few during my military career. Still, no one can question that our commanders are dedicated. The only question is: dedication to what exactlyto the Constitution and the American people or to their own service branch, with an eye toward a comfortable and profitable retirement? Certainly, loyalty to service (and the conformity that goes with it), rather than out-of-the-box thinking in those endlessly losing wars, helped most of them win promotion to flag rank.

Perhaps this is one reason why, back in July 2017, the militarys current commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, reportedly railed at his top national security people in a windowless Pentagon room known as the Tank. He called themincluding then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, Jr.a bunch of dopes and babies. As the president put it, Americas senior military leaders do not win anymore and, as he made clear, nothing is worse than being a loser. He added, I want to win. We do not win any wars anymore We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we are not winning anymore. (And, please note, that has not changed a whit in the year and a half since that moment.)

Sure, Trump threw a typical tantrum, but his comments about losing at a strikingly high cost were (and remain) absolutely on the mark, not that he had any idea how to turn Americas losing wars and their losing commanders into winners. In many ways, his strategy has proven remarkably like those of the two previous presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Send more troops to the Middle East. Drone and bomb ever more, not just in Afghanistan and Iraq but even in places like Somalia and Libya. Prolong our commitment to loser wars like the Afghan one, even while talking ceaselessly about ending them and bringing the troops home. And continue to rebuild that same military, empowering those same dopes and babies, with yet more taxpayer dollars.

The results have been all-too predictable. Americas generals and admirals have so much money that they do not ever have to make truly tough choices. They hardly have to think. The Air Force, for example, just keeps planning for and purchasing more ultra-expensive stealth fighters and bombers to fight a future Cold War that we allegedly won 30 years ago. Meanwhile, actual future national security threats like climate-related catastrophes or pandemics go largely unaddressed. Who cares about them when this country will clearly have the most stealth fighters and bombers in the world?

For the Pentagon, the future is the past and the past, the future. Why should military leaders have to think when the president and Congress keep rewarding them for lies and failures of every sort?

Trump believes America does not win anymore because we are not ruthless enough. Take the oil! The real reason: because Americas wars are unwinnable from the git-go, something the last 18 years should have proved in no uncertain way. And the irony of all ironies is that the wars are completely unnecessary from the standpoint of true national defense. There is no way for the U.S. military to win hearts and minds across the Greater Middle East and Africa with salvos of Hellfire missiles. In fact, there is only one way to win such wars: end them. And there is only one way to keep winning: by avoiding future ones.

With a system that could not work better in Washington, Americas military refuses to admit this. Instead, our generals just keep saluting smartly while lying in public the details of which we will find out about only when the next set of papers is released someday. In the meantime, when it comes to demanding and getting tax dollars, they could not be more skilled. In that sense, and that alone, they are the ultimate winners.

Dopes and babies, Mister President? No, just men who are genuinely skilled in the art of the deal. Small wonder Americas leader is upset. For when it comes to the military-industrial complex and its power and prerogatives, even Trump has met his match. He has been out-conned. And if the rest of us remain silent on the subject, then so have we.

Read this article:
The Pentagon's Art of the Deal: Wars without victories and weapons without end - Milwaukee Independent

War/Peace February 17, 2020 Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

February 15 marked the day, 17 years ago, when global demonstrations against the pending Iraq invasion were so massive that the New York Times called world public opinion the second superpower. But the US ignored it and invaded Iraq anyway. So what has become of the momentous hopes of that day?

The US military has not won a war since 1945, unless you count recovering the tiny colonial outposts of Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, but there is one threat it has consistently outmaneuvered without firing more than a few deadly rifle shots and some tear gas. Ironically, this existential threat is the very one that could peacefully cut it down to size and take away its most dangerous and expensive weapons: its own peace-loving citizens.

During the Vietnam War, young Americans facing a life-and-death draft lottery built a powerful anti-war movement. President Nixon proposed ending the draft as a way to undermine the peace movement, since he believed that young people would stop protesting the war once they were no longer obligated to fight. In 1973, the draft was ended, leaving a volunteer army that insulated the vast majority of Americans from the deadly impact of Americas wars.

Despite the lack of a draft, a new anti-war movement this time with global reach sprung up in the period between the crimes of 9/11 and the illegal US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The February 15, 2003, protests were the largest demonstrations in human history, uniting people around the world in opposition to the unthinkable prospect that the US would actually launch its threatened shock and awe assault on Iraq. Some 30 million people in 800 cities took part on every continent, including Antarctica. This massive repudiation of war, memorialized in the documentary We Are Many, led New York Times journalist Patrick E. Tyler to comment that there were now two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

The US war machine demonstrated total disdain for its upstart rival, and unleashed an illegal war based on lies that has now raged on through many phases of violence and chaos for 17 years. With no end in sight to US and allied wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Yemen and West Africa, and Trumps escalating diplomatic and economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela and North Korea threatening to explode into new wars, where is the second superpower now, when we need it more than ever?

Since the US assassination of Irans General Soleimani in Iraq on January 2, the peace movement has reemerged onto the streets, including people who marched in February 2003 and new activists too young to remember a time when the US was not at war. There have been three separate days of protest, one on January 4, another on January 9 and a global day of action on January 25. The rallies took place in hundreds of cities, but they did not attract nearly the numbers who came out to protest the pending war with Iraq in 2003, or even those of the smaller rallies and vigils that continued as the Iraq war spiraled out of control until at least 2007.

Our failure to stop the US war on Iraq in 2003 was deeply discouraging. But the number of people active in the US anti-war movement shrank even more after the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Many people did not want to protest the nations first black president, and many, including the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, really believed he would be a peace president.

While Obama reluctantly honored Bushs agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw US troops from Iraq and he signed the Iran nuclear deal, he was far from a peace president. He oversaw a new doctrine of covert and proxy war that substantially reduced US military casualties, but unleashed an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, a campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria that destroyed entire cities, a tenfold increase in CIA drone strikes on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and bloody proxy wars in Libya and Syria that rage on today. In the end, Obama spent more on the military and dropped more bombs on more countries than Bush did. He also refused to hold Bush and his cronies responsible for their war crimes.

Obamas wars were no more successful than Bushs in restoring peace or stability to any of those countries or improving the lives of their people. But Obamas disguised, quiet, media-free approach to war made the US state of endless war much more politically sustainable. By reducing US casualties and waging war with less fanfare, he moved Americas wars farther into the shadows and gave the American public an illusion of peace in the midst of endless war, effectively disarming and dividing the peace movement.

Obamas secretive war policy was backed up by a vicious campaign against any brave whistleblowers who tried to drag it out into the light. Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, Edward Snowden and now Julian Assange have been prosecuted and jailed under unprecedented new interpretations of the WWI-era Espionage Act.

With Donald Trump in the White House, we hear Republicans making the same excuses for Trump who ran on an anti-war platform that Democrats made for Obama. First, his supporters accept lip service about wanting to end wars and bring troops home as revealing what the president really wants to do, even as he keeps escalating the wars. Second, they ask us to be patient because, despite all the real-world evidence, they are convinced he is working hard behind the scenes for peace. Third, in a final cop-out that undermines their other two arguments, they throw up their hands and say that he is only the president, and the Pentagon or deep state is too powerful for even him to tame.

Obama and Trump supporters alike have used this shaky tripod of political unaccountability to give the man behind the desk where the buck used to stop an entire deck of get out of jail free cards for endless war and war crimes.

Obama and Trumps disguised, quiet, media-free approach to war has inoculated Americas wars and militarism against the virus of democracy, but new social movements have grown up to tackle problems closer to home. The financial crisis led to the rise of the Occupy Movement, and now the climate crisis and Americas entrenched race and immigration problems have all provoked new grassroots movements. Peace advocates have been encouraging these movements to join the call for major Pentagon cuts, insisting that the hundreds of billions saved could help fund everything from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal to free college tuition.

A few sectors of the peace movement have been showing how to use creative tactics and build diverse movements. The movement for Palestinians human and civil rights includes students, Muslim and Jewish groups, as well as black and indigenous groups fighting similar struggles here at home. Also inspirational are campaigns for peace on the Korean peninsula led by Korean Americans, such as Women Cross the DMZ, which has brought together women from North Korea, South Korea and the United States to show the Trump administration what real diplomacy looks like.

There have also been successful popular efforts pushing a reluctant Congress to take anti-war positions. For decades, Congress has been only too happy to leave war-making to the president, abrogating its constitutional role as the only power authorized to declare war. Thanks to public pressure, there has been a remarkable shift.

In 2019, both houses of Congress voted to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, although President Trump vetoed both bills. Now Congress has passed bipartisan bills to explicitly prohibit an unauthorized war on Iran. These bills prove that public pressure can move Congress, including a Republican-dominated Senate, to reclaim its constitutional powers over war and peace from the executive branch.

Another bright light in Congress is the pioneering work of first-term Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who recently laid out a series of bills called Pathway to PEACE that challenge our militaristic foreign policy. While her bills will be hard to get passed in Congress, they lay out a marker for where we should be headed. Omars office, unlike many others in Congress, actually works directly with grassroots organizations that can push this vision forward.

The presidential election offers an opportunity to push the anti-war agenda. The most effective and committed anti-war champion in the race is Bernie Sanders. The popularity of his call for getting the US out of its imperial interventions and his votes against 84 per cent of military spending bills since 2013 are reflected not only in his poll numbers but also in the way other Democratic candidates are rushing to take similar positions. All now say the US should rejoin the Iran nuclear deal; all have criticized the bloated Pentagon budget, despite regularly voting for it; and most have promised to bring US troops home from the greater Middle East.

So, as we look to the future in this election year, what are our chances of reviving the worlds second superpower and ending Americas wars?

Absent a major new war, we are unlikely to see big demonstrations in the streets. But two decades of endless war have created a strong anti-war sentiment among the public. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 62 per cent of Americans said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting and 59 per cent said the same for the war in Afghanistan.

On Iran, a September 2019 University of Maryland poll showed that a mere one-fifth of Americans said the US should be prepared to go to war to achieve its goals in Iran, while three-quarters said that US goals do not warrant military intervention. Along with the Pentagons assessment of how disastrous a war with Iran would be, this public sentiment fueled global protests and condemnation that have temporarily forced Trump to dial down his military escalation and threats against Iran.

So, while our governments war propaganda has convinced many Americans that we are powerless to stop its catastrophic wars, it has failed to convince most Americans that we are wrong to want to. As on other issues, activism has two main hurdles to overcome: first to convince people that something is wrong; and second to show them that, by working together to build a popular movement, we can do something about it.

The peace movements small victories demonstrate that we have more power to challenge US militarism than most Americans realize. As more peace-loving people in the US and across the world discover the power they really have, the second superpower we glimpsed briefly on February 15, 2003, has the potential to rise stronger, more committed and more determined from the ashes of two decades of war.

A new president like Bernie Sanders in the White House would create a new opening for peace. But as on many domestic issues, that opening will only bear fruit and overcome the opposition of powerful vested interests if there is a mass movement behind it every step of the way. If there is a lesson for peace-loving Americans in the Obama and Trump presidencies, it is that we cannot just walk out of the voting booth and leave it to a champion in the White House to end our wars and bring us peace. In the final analysis, it really is up to us. Please join us!

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Read more from the original source:
Can the World's Second Superpower Rise From the Ashes of 20 Years of War? - The Bullet - Socialist Project