Former USAF lieutenant colonel William Astore has a good piece on how Americans have come increasingly to accept the militarization of their society:
But here's the question to ponder: At what price virtuosity? In World War I and World War II, the Germans were the best soldiers because they had trained and fought the most, because their societies were geared, mentally and in most other ways, for war, because they celebrated and valued feats of arms above all other contributions one could make to society and culture.
Being "the best soldiers" meant that senior German leaders—whether the Kaiser, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, that Teutonic titan of World War I, or Hitler—always expected them to prevail. The mentality was: "We're number one. How can we possibly lose unless we quit—or those [fill in your civilian quislings of choice] stab us in the back?"
If this mentality sounds increasingly familiar, it's because it's the one we ourselves have internalized in these last years. German warfighters and their leaders knew no limitations until it was too late for them to recover from ceaseless combat, imperial overstretch, and economic collapse.
The article really is a lament for the loss in America of the citizen army which has given way to the volunteer professional army second to none--or to mercenaries like those who work for Blackwater. In theory, I'm for the restoration of a drafted citizen military--I think it is far healthier for the preservation of a healthy republic. But is that in fact what we are--a healthy republic? I don't think so.
I have an almost eighteen-year-old son, and so long as decisions about war and peace are driven by the agenda of the elite powers behind the military-industrial complex, I don't want my son's life put on the line to serve its endless-war interests. I don't want any kid impressed into service to put his or her life on the line to serve such an agenda.
So would such an agenda be more likely resisted by a citizenry that more broadly felt the pain of war's casualties? Maybe. But if we've learned anything in the last eight years, elite power does pretty much what it wants regardless of public opinion. And elite power has every reason to believe that it can confuse and manipulate public opinion on the big issues that really matter to it. It's easy to get public opinion behind a war at the beginning, and if public opinion changes, it doesn't matter.
We forget that a lot of people voted for Nixon in '68 because he promised to end the war. It went on for another seven years. So despite all the hooplah about the confluence of Obama's and Maliki's wanting the troops out of Iraq by 2010, I'll believe it when I see it. And will whatever troops pulled out of Iraq come home, or will they just be shifted into the quagmire in Afghanistan?
The question is not whether we stay in Iraq or not; it's whether or not we maintain a military presence and bases anywhere in the Middle East. The idea that a military presence there is necessary for our prosecution of the GWOT is absurd. Our presence there has hardly anything to do with that and everything to do with oil. Elite power gets what elite power wants, and elite power does not want to give up its military presence in the heart of the Middle East. It doesn't want to concede that it has been consistently manipulated and outsmarted by Iran, and it does not want to create a power vacuum that will be filled by China or a resurgent Russia.
From power's point of view, I suspect moving into Afghanistan is Plan B. It would have been better to set up shop in oil-rich Iraq as the neocons fantasized about it, but if you're still deployed in Afghanistan, it will be easy enough to shift back into Iraq if "conditions on the ground" worsen there. And since conditions will inevitably worsen as soon as there is any significant withdrawal of American troops, there will always be a reason to stay or go back in. I'll be very surprised if the ongoing war in the Middle East isn't still an issue by the time the '12 elections roll around.
I hope I'm wrong, but I'm convinced that the way power is structured in this country makes it unlikely that I am. You don't have to be some Beltway insider to understand this; you just need to observe how power operates here as it has always and everywhere operated. What most people think or say doesn't matter. It's not what public opinion wants; it's not even what influential people like Obama might sincerely want that matters; it only matters what the system that serves elite power wants.
And that will aways be true until some potent counterbalance arises to resist it. Can anybody point to such a counterbalance? And even if such a counterbalance were to develop, power knows how to co-opt it, whether crudely or subtly, if it isn't broad-based, highly motivated, and well-organized. No such threat to entrenched power interests exists in this country even to the slightest degree. Lots of people understand what's going on, and they can squawk about it all they want, and they will be tolerated because they have no power and pose no threat. Everyone else will buy into power's self-justifying propaganda because it's in the interests of the MSM to promote it and to reject alternative narratives critical of elite power's agenda as extremist.
I'm certain that Obama didn't want to vote for the latest FISA legislation, but he's just an individual. So I don't blame him really. As I wrote before, I suspect it was not possible for him to do otherwise. What is his power base, really? To whom is he ultimately accountable? The voters? Or is it rather that now he has graduated to the next level in the ecology of Beltway power, he understands that if he is to thrive in his new station, he must do what power requires of him. He is accountable not to the people who vote for him, but to the interests of the power elite whose ranks he is now joining.
He may not consciously think of himself that way--he would think of himself rather as a realist--but to at least some degree he has been co-opted. It remains to be seen to what degree, but that's why his FISA vote was so disturbing: it showed that he couldn't even put up even symbolic resistance to something that was so clearly wrong that power wanted . Why should we think he will resist the agenda of elite power in anything else of central importance to it? The FISA vote signaled how limited is the change we can hope for.
Bottom line: we're kidding ourselves if we think the endless war is going to end anytime soon, even if Obama is elected. At this point it doesn't matter if we have a mercenary army or a citizen army. Things have progressed beyond such a thing mattering anymore.