War Is the New Normal: 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist

Miriam and All,
In framing our aggressions as War on Terror, we do have a different
feel about it. But I contend that this change in the language is what
makes it appear different from activities that have been on going from
the day Christopher Columbus cried, "Land Ho!" in 1492. This "Free
Land" of ours was taken through violence. We warred against the
Occupants of this Land, just as the Israelis have taken through
violence, their "Promised Land". We warred among ourselves, and
finally against our British Masters. We continued warring against
Canadians and Mexicans, as we pushed across this continent,
slaughtering innocent Indians at every turn. Upon reaching the
Pacific Ocean, we warred with Spain and England, carving out what we
now call the United States of America. But we did not stop at the
ocean's edge. We pushed Cuba around, driving Spain out of the entire
area. We continued to the Philippines. And while we proclaimed to be
peaceful folk, spreading democracy across the planet, we sent our
spies and secret agents into nearly every country on the globe. At
least every country that had something we wanted. And all the while
the Empire's media told us we were at peace. We went to our churches
and Sunday Schools and thanked our God for "giving" us this most
glorious nation. We gathered at Thanksgiving and gave thanks, never
ever wondering how thankful the ancestors of Native Americans felt
about this most Thankful day. Nor how they felt about our celebrating
Columbus Day.
The war has never stopped. Empires can not rest on their laurels.
But Empires can, and do fool their subjects into believing they are
part of something wonderful.
I have two grandsons who are serving in the US Air force. They
believe they are keeping our nation free. I have a son-in-law who is
a deputy sheriff. He believes he is protecting all citizens in his
county. But all three are actually serving our Masters in the on
going War. The war that protects the Empire and its right to rule.
Whenever I feel like shutting down and closing my computer and simply
letting the world go by, I stop and ask myself why I am planning to
join the Empire. By doing nothing, we endorse the Empire. By
speaking out, we most likely will make no great dent in the Empire's
Armour. But by speaking out, we do ensure that one small candle still
burns at midnight. One small voice crying out in the wilderness.
Remember, every so often Empires crash and burn. They do not change
their ways just because their subjects demand change. It is always a
small, dedicated minority that brings the Empire down. Where we fail
is not in belonging to that small voice, but in not having a better
plan for self governing when the inevitable crash occurs.

Carl Jarvis


On 2/6/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> But I think the "war on terror" or whatever Obama calls it now, has brought
> us to a new level. And in the past, the president has had to present a
> statement to congress as to why each war was necessary, at least, up until
> the late 20th century. But now we have this law that gets renewed which
> gives the administration carte blanche to carry out war without even
> calling
> it war. It's happened in degrees like putting the frog in the pot and
> slowly
> heating the water.Now where did that example come from? Some book or poem
> or
> saying?
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Blind-Democracy [mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On
> Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Friday, February 06, 2015 11:57 AM
> To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
> Subject: War Is the New Normal: 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist
>
> Actually I disagree with this subject title. War is not the new normal. I
> went to, "List of all American wars", in Google, thinking I could find a
> simple list to post here. There are far too many wars, conflicts and
> skirmishes to list. But if you go to the links you will discover that
> this
> Peace Loving Nation has been involved in one battle after another. If it
> weren't the British, it was the Indians.
> If it weren't the North against the South, it was White against Black.
> We invaded Mexico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Central America and South
> America. We sent troops into Russia and into Africa. Has there ever been
> a
> decade where we were not shoving someone else around? All in the name of
> defending our free, peace loving nation. Sort of brings a lump to the
> throat.
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
> On 2/2/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > War Is the New
>> Normal: 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist
>> ________________________________________
>> War Is the New Normal: 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist By
>> William Astore [1] / TomDispatch [2] February 1, 2015 To stay on top
>> of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest
>> updates from TomDispatch.com here [3].
>> It was launched immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when I was still
>> in the military, and almost immediately became known as the Global War
>> on Terror, or GWOT. Pentagon insiders called it "the long war [4],"
>> an open-ended, perhaps unending, conflict against nations and terror
>> networks mainly of a radical Islamist bent. It saw the revival of
>> counterinsurgency doctrine, buried in the aftermath of defeat in
>> Vietnam, and a reinterpretation [5] of that disaster as well. Over
>> the years, its chief characteristic became ever
>> clearer: a "Groundhog Day [6]" kind of repetition. Just when you
>> thought it was over (Iraq [7], Afghanistan [8]), just after victory
>> (of a sort) was declared, it began again [9].
>> Now, as we find ourselves enmeshed in Iraq War 3.0, what better way to
>> memorialize the post-9/11 American way of war than through repetition.
>> Back
>> in July 2010, I wrote an article for TomDispatch on the seven reasons
>> [10] why America can't stop making war. More than four years later,
>> with the war on terror still ongoing, with the mission eternally
>> unaccomplished, here's a fresh take on the top seven reasons why
>> never-ending war is the new normal in America. In this sequel, I make
>> only one promise: no declarations of victory (and mark it on your
>> calendars, I'm planning to be back with seven new reasons in 2019).
>> 1. The privatization of war: The U.S. military's recourse to private
>> contractors [11] has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and
>> prolonged wars as well. Unlike the citizen-soldiers of past eras, the
>> mobilized warrior corporations [12] of America's new mercenary moment
>> -- the Halliburton [13]/KBRs (nearly $40 billion [14] in contracts for
>> the Iraq War alone), the DynCorps [15] ($4.1 billion to train 150,000
>> Iraqi police), and the Blackwater/Xe/Academis [16] ($1.3 billion in
>> Iraq, along with boatloads of controversy [17]) -- have no incentive
>> to demobilize. Like most corporations, their business model is based
>> on profit through growth, and growth is most rapid when wars and
>> preparations for more of them are the favored options in Washington.
>> "Freedom isn't free," as a popular conservative bumper sticker puts
>> it, and neither is war. My father liked the saying, "He who pays the
>> piper calls the tune," and today's mercenary corporations have been
>> calling for a lot of military marches piping in $138 billion in
>> contracts for Iraq alone, according to [18] the Financial Times. And
>> if you think that the privatization of war must at least reduce
>> government waste, think again:
>> the
>> Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated in
>> 2011 that fraud, waste, and abuse accounted for up to $60 billion [19]
>> of the money spent in Iraq alone.
>> To corral American-style war, the mercenaries must be defanged or
> deflated.
>> European rulers learned this the hard way during the Thirty Years' War
>> of the seventeenth century. At that time, powerful mercenary captains
>> like Albrecht von Wallenstein [20] ran amok. Only Wallenstein's
>> assassination and the assertion of near absolutist powers by monarchs
>> bent on curbing war before they went bankrupt finally brought the
>> mercenaries to heel, a victory as hard won as it was essential to
>> Europe's survival and eventual expansion.
>> (Europeans then exported their wars to foreign shores, but that's
>> another
>> story.)
>> 2. The embrace of the national security state by both major
>> parties:Jimmy Carter was the last president to attempt to exercise any
>> kind of control over the national security state. A former Navy
>> nuclear engineer who had served under the demanding Admiral Hyman
>> Rickover [21], Carter cancelled the
>> B-1 bomber and fought for a U.S. foreign policy based on human rights.
>> Widely pilloried for talking about [22] nuclear war with his young
>> daughter Amy, Carter was further attacked for being "weak" on defense.
>> His defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 inaugurated 12 years of dominance
>> by Republican presidents that opened the financial floodgates for the
>> Department of Defense. That taught Bill Clinton and the Democratic
>> Leadership Council [23] a lesson when it came to the wisdom of
>> wrapping the national security state in a welcoming embrace, which
>> they did, however uncomfortably. This expedient turn to the right by
>> the Democrats in the Clinton years served as a temporary booster shot
>> when it came to charges of being "soft" on defense
>> -- until Republicans upped the ante by going "all-in" on military
>> crusades in the aftermath of 9/11.
>> Since his election in 2008, Barack Obama has done little to alter the
>> course set by his predecessors. He, too, has chosen not to challenge
>> Washington's prevailing catechism of war [24]. Republicans have
>> responded, however, not by muting their criticism, but by upping the
>> ante yet again. How else to explain House Speaker John Boehner's
>> invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a
>> joint session of Congress in March [25]?
>> That address promises to be a pep talk for the Republicans, as well as
>> a smack down of the Obama administration and its "appeasenik [26]"
>> policies toward Iran and Islamic radicalism.
>> Serious oversight, let alone opposition to the national security state
>> by Congress or a mainstream political party, has been missing in
>> action [27] for years and must now, in the wake of the Senate Torture
>> Report fiasco (from which the CIAemerged [28] stronger, not weaker), be
> presumed dead.
>> The recent midterm election triumph of Republican war hawks and the
>> prospective lineup of candidates for president in 2016 does not bode
>> well when it comes to reining in the national security state in any
>> foreseeable future.
>> 3. "Support Our Troops" as a substitute for thought. You've seen them
>> everywhere: "Support Our Troops [29]" stickers. In fact, the
>> "support" in that slogan generally means acquiescence when it comes to
>> American-style war. The truth is that we've turned the all-volunteer
>> military into something like aforeign legion [30], deploying it again
>> and again to our distant battle zones and driving it into the ground
>> [31] in wars that amount to strategic folly. Instead of admitting
>> their mistakes, America's leaders have worked to obscure them by
>> endlessly overpraising [32] our "warriors"
>> as
>> so many universal heroes [33]. This may salve our collective national
>> conscience, but it's a form of cheap grace [34] that saves no lives --
>> and wins no wars.
>> Instead, this country needs to listen more carefully to its troops,
>> especially the war critics who have risked their lives while fighting
>> overseas. Organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War [35] and
>> Veterans for Peace [36] are good places to start.
>> 4. Fighting a redacted war. War, like the recent Senate torture
>> report [37], is redacted in America. Its horrors and mistakes are
>> suppressed [38], its patriotic whistleblowers punished [39], even as
>> the American people are kept in a demobilized state. The act of going
>> to war no longer represents the will of the people [40], as
>> represented by formal Congressional declarations of war as the U.S.
>> Constitution demands. Instead, in these years, Americans were told
>> togo to Disney World [41] (as George W. Bush suggested in the wake of
>> 9/11) and keep shopping. They're encouraged not to pay too much
>> attention [42] to war's casualties and costs, especially when those
>> costs involve foreigners with funny-sounding names (after all, they
>> are, as American sniper [43] Chris Kyle so indelicately put it in his
>> book, just "savages").
>> Redacted war hides the true cost of a permanent state of killing from
>> the American people, if not from foreign observers. Ignorance and
>> apathy reign, even as a national security state [44] that is
>> essentially a shadow government [45]equates its growth with your safety.
>> 5. Threat inflation: There's nothing new about threat inflation. We
>> saw plenty of it during the Cold War (nonexistent missile [46] and
>> bomber gaps [47], for example). Fear sells and we've had quite a dose
>> [48] of it in the twenty-first century, from ISIS to Ebola. But a
>> more important truth is that fear is a mind-killer, a debate-stifler.
>> Back in September, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham warned that
>> ISIS and its radical Islamic army was coming to America to kill us all
>> [49]. ISIS, of course, is a regional power with no ability to mount
>> significant operations against the United States. But fear is so
>> commonplace, so effectively stoked in this country that Americans
>> routinely and wildly [50] exaggerate the threat posed by al-Qaeda or ISIS
> or the bogeyman du jour.
>> Decades ago, as a young lieutenant in the Air Force, I was hunkered
>> down inCheyenne Mountain [51] during the Cold War. It was the
>> ultimate citadel-cum-bomb-shelter, and those in it were believed to
>> have a 70% likelihood of surviving a five-megaton nuclear blast.
>> There, not surprisingly, I found myself contemplating the very real
>> possibility of a thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, a war
>> that would have annihilated life as we knew it, indeed much of life on
>> our planet thanks to the phenomenon of nuclear winter. You'll excuse
>> me for not shaking in my boots at the threat of ISIS coming to get me.
>> Or of Sharia Law coming to my local town hall. With respect to such
>> fears, America needs, as Hillary Clinton said in an admittedly
>> different context, to "grow a pair [52]."
>>
>> 6. Defining the world as a global battlefield: In fortress America
>> [53], all realms have by now become battle spheres. Not only much of
>> the planet, the seas, air, and space [54], as well as the country's
>> borders [55] and its increasingly up-armored police forces [56], but
>> the world of thought, the insides of our minds. Think of the 17 [57]
>> intertwined intelligence outfits in "the U.S. Intelligence Community"
>> and their ongoing "surge" for information dominance across every mode
>> of human communication, as well as the surveillance of everything.
>> And don't forget the national security state's leading role in making
>> cyberwar [58] a reality. (Indeed, Washington launched the first
>> cyberwar in history by deploying the Stuxnet computer worm [59]
>> against Iran.) Think of all this as a global matrix that rests on war,
>> empowering disaster capitalism [60] and the corporate complexes that
>> have formed around the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security,
>> and that intelligence community. A militarized matrix doesn't blink at
>> $1.45 trillion dollars devoted to the F-35 [61], a single
>> under-performing jet fighter, nor at projections of $355 billion [62]
>> over the next decade for "modernizing" the U.S. nuclear arsenal,
>> weapons that Barack Obama vowed [63] to abolish in 2009.
>> 7. The new "normal" in America is war: The 9/11 attacks happened more
>> than
>> 13 years ago, which means that no teenagers in America can truly
>> remember a time when the country was at peace. "War time" is their
>> normal; peace, a fairy tale.
>> What's truly "exceptional" in twenty-first-century America is any
>> articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other
>> nations might be like. Instead, war, backed by a diet of fear, is the
>> backdrop against which the young have grown to adulthood. It's the
>> background noise of their world, so much a part of their lives that
>> they hardly recognize it for what it is. And that's the most insidious
> danger of them all.
>> How do we inoculate our children against such a permanent state of war
>> and the war state itself? I have one simple suggestion: just stop it.
>> All of it. Stop making war a never-ending part of our lives and stop
>> celebrating it, too. War should be the realm of the extreme, of the
>> abnormal. It should be the death of normalcy, not the dreary norm.
>> It's never too soon, America, to enlist in that good fight!
>>
>> Share on Facebook Share
>> Share on Twitter Tweet
>> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [64]
>> [65]
>> ________________________________________
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/world/war-new-normal-7-deadly-reasons-why-amer
>> icas-w
>> ars-persist
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/william-astore
>> [2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/
>> [3]
>> http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f
>> 828c73
>> &amp;id=1e41682ade
>> [4] http://www.thenation.com/article/kilcullens-long-war
>> [5] http://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-book-club
>> [6] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/
>> [7]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175920/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_i
>> raq_an
>> d_the_battle_of_the_potomac/
>> [8]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175914/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_genuine
>> %2C_ha
>> ndcrafted%2C_man-made_government
>> [9]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175927/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_iraq_w
>> ar_4.0
>> /
>> [10] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175271/
>> [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_company
>> [12]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175507/tom_engelhardt_the_arrival_o
>> f_the_
>> warrior_corporation
>> [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton
>> [14]
>> http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/308-12/16561-focus-cheney
>> s-hall
>> iburton-made-395-billion-on-iraq-war
>> [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp
>> [16]
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater:_The_Rise_of_the_World%27s_Mo
>> st_Pow
>> erful_Mercenary_Army
>> [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Baghdad_shootings
>> [18]
>> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7f435f04-8c05-11e2-b001-00144feabdc0.ht
>> ml#axz
>> z3PaMtnGcI
>> [19]
>> http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/business/iraq-war-contractors/index.
>> html [20] http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/army/p/wallenstein.htm
>> [21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
>> [22]
>> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/27/carter_my_daughter_a
>> my_say s_nuclear_weapons_was_most_important_issue.html
>> [23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
>> [24] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175290/
>> [25]
>> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/22/netanyahu-to-address-congre
>> ss-on-
>> march-3-boehner-says/
>> [26]
>> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/21/boehner-invites-israeli-lea
>> der-to
>> -address-congress-on-iran/
>> [27]
>> https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-triumph-of-the-military-industria
>> l-cong
>> ressional-complex-a27d6e5fb1a8
>> [28]
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/us/politics/after-scrutiny-cia-manda
>> te-is-
>> untouched-.html
>> [29]
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-astore/support-our-troops-what-i
>> _b_832
>> 030.html
>> [30] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175034
>> [31] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175178
>> [32] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175337/
>> [33] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175276
>> [34]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175423/andrew_bacevich_ballpark_lit
>> urgy
>> [35] http://www.ivaw.org/
>> [36] http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
>> [37]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175934/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_th
>> e_tort
>> ure_wars/
>> [38]
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/bradley-manning-leaks_n_37881
>> 26.htm
>> l
>> [39] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175526
>> [40]
>> http://contraryperspective.com/2015/01/12/why-america-keeps-losing-its
>> -wars/
>> [41]
>> http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872229
>> _18722
>> 30_1872236,00.html
>> [42] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175314
>> [43] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sniper_(film)
>> [44] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175542/
>> [45] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
>> [46] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
>> [47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap
>> [48]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_inside_t
>> he_ame
>> rican_terrordome
>> [49] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYAfQURHROI
>> [50] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175904/
>> [51] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174920
>> [52]
>>
> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2009/07/hillary_told_obama_to_grow_a_p.
>> html
>> [53] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175855
>> [54] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174928
>> [55] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175947
>> [56] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175881
>> [57] http://www.intelligence.gov/mission/member-agencies.html
>> [58] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174940
>> [59]
>> http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/2014/0225/Exclusive-New-
>> thesis -on-how-Stuxnet-infiltrated-Iran-nuclear-facility
>> [60] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175762/
>> [61]
>> http://contraryperspective.com/2014/02/18/the-f-35-fighter-program-ame
>> rica-g
>> oing-down-in-flames/
>> [62]
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-ramping-up-major-renewal-in-nu
>> clear-
>> arms.html
>> [63]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175933/tomgram%3A_james_carroll,_the_p
>> entago n_as_president_obama%27s_great_white_whale/
>> [64] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on War Is the New
> Normal:
>> 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist [65]
>> http://www.alternet.org/ [66] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > War Is the New
>> Normal: 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist
>>
>> War Is the New Normal: 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist By
>> William Astore [1] / TomDispatch [2] February 1, 2015 To stay on top
>> of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest
>> updates from TomDispatch.com here [3].
>> It was launched immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when I was still
>> in the military, and almost immediately became known as the Global War
>> on Terror, or GWOT. Pentagon insiders called it "the long war [4]," an
>> open-ended, perhaps unending, conflict against nations and terror
>> networks mainly of a radical Islamist bent. It saw the revival of
>> counterinsurgency doctrine, buried in the aftermath of defeat in
>> Vietnam, and a reinterpretation [5] of that disaster as well. Over the
>> years, its chief characteristic became ever
>> clearer: a "Groundhog Day [6]" kind of repetition. Just when you
>> thought it was over (Iraq [7], Afghanistan [8]), just after victory
>> (of a sort) was declared, it began again [9].
>> Now, as we find ourselves enmeshed in Iraq War 3.0, what better way to
>> memorialize the post-9/11 American way of war than through repetition.
>> Back in July 2010, I wrote an article for TomDispatch on the seven
>> reasons [10] why America can't stop making war. More than four years
>> later, with the war on terror still ongoing, with the mission
>> eternally unaccomplished, here's a fresh take on the top seven reasons
>> why never-ending war is the new normal in America. In this sequel, I
>> make only one promise: no declarations of victory (and mark it on your
>> calendars, I'm planning to be back with seven new reasons in 2019).
>> 1. The privatization of war: The U.S. military's recourse to private
>> contractors [11] has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and
>> prolonged wars as well. Unlike the citizen-soldiers of past eras, the
>> mobilized warrior corporations [12] of America's new mercenary moment
>> -- the Halliburton [13]/KBRs (nearly $40 billion [14] in contracts for
>> the Iraq War alone), the DynCorps [15] ($4.1 billion to train 150,000
>> Iraqi police), and the Blackwater/Xe/Academis [16] ($1.3 billion in
>> Iraq, along with boatloads of controversy [17]) -- have no incentive
>> to demobilize. Like most corporations, their business model is based
>> on profit through growth, and growth is most rapid when wars and
>> preparations for more of them are the favored options in Washington.
>> "Freedom isn't free," as a popular conservative bumper sticker puts
>> it, and neither is war. My father liked the saying, "He who pays the
>> piper calls the tune," and today's mercenary corporations have been
>> calling for a lot of military marches piping in $138 billion in
>> contracts for Iraq alone, according to [18] the Financial Times. And
>> if you think that the privatization of war must at least reduce
>> government waste, think again:
>> the
>> Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated in
>> 2011 that fraud, waste, and abuse accounted for up to $60 billion [19]
>> of the money spent in Iraq alone.
>> To corral American-style war, the mercenaries must be defanged or
> deflated.
>> European rulers learned this the hard way during the Thirty Years' War
>> of the seventeenth century. At that time, powerful mercenary captains
>> like Albrecht von Wallenstein [20] ran amok. Only Wallenstein's
>> assassination and the assertion of near absolutist powers by monarchs
>> bent on curbing war before they went bankrupt finally brought the
>> mercenaries to heel, a victory as hard won as it was essential to
>> Europe's survival and eventual expansion.
>> (Europeans then exported their wars to foreign shores, but that's
>> another
>> story.)
>> 2. The embrace of the national security state by both major
>> parties:Jimmy Carter was the last president to attempt to exercise any
>> kind of control over the national security state. A former Navy
>> nuclear engineer who had served under the demanding Admiral Hyman
>> Rickover [21], Carter cancelled the
>> B-1 bomber and fought for a U.S. foreign policy based on human rights.
>> Widely pilloried for talking about [22] nuclear war with his young
>> daughter Amy, Carter was further attacked for being "weak" on defense.
>> His defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 inaugurated 12 years of dominance
>> by Republican presidents that opened the financial floodgates for the
>> Department of Defense. That taught Bill Clinton and the Democratic
>> Leadership Council [23] a lesson when it came to the wisdom of
>> wrapping the national security state in a welcoming embrace, which
>> they did, however uncomfortably. This expedient turn to the right by
>> the Democrats in the Clinton years served as a temporary booster shot
>> when it came to charges of being "soft" on defense
>> -- until Republicans upped the ante by going "all-in" on military
>> crusades in the aftermath of 9/11.
>> Since his election in 2008, Barack Obama has done little to alter the
>> course set by his predecessors. He, too, has chosen not to challenge
>> Washington's prevailing catechism of war [24]. Republicans have
>> responded, however, not by muting their criticism, but by upping the
>> ante yet again. How else to explain House Speaker John Boehner's
>> invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a
>> joint session of Congress in March [25]?
>> That address promises to be a pep talk for the Republicans, as well as
>> a smack down of the Obama administration and its "appeasenik [26]"
>> policies toward Iran and Islamic radicalism.
>> Serious oversight, let alone opposition to the national security state
>> by Congress or a mainstream political party, has been missing in
>> action [27] for years and must now, in the wake of the Senate Torture
>> Report fiasco (from which the CIAemerged [28] stronger, not weaker), be
> presumed dead.
>> The
>> recent midterm election triumph of Republican war hawks and the
>> prospective lineup of candidates for president in 2016 does not bode
>> well when it comes to reining in the national security state in any
> foreseeable future.
>> 3. "Support Our Troops" as a substitute for thought. You've seen them
>> everywhere: "Support Our Troops [29]" stickers. In fact, the "support"
>> in that slogan generally means acquiescence when it comes to
>> American-style war. The truth is that we've turned the all-volunteer
>> military into something like aforeign legion [30], deploying it again
>> and again to our distant battle zones and driving it into the ground
>> [31] in wars that amount to strategic folly. Instead of admitting
>> their mistakes, America's leaders have worked to obscure them by
>> endlessly overpraising [32] our "warriors"
>> as
>> so many universal heroes [33]. This may salve our collective national
>> conscience, but it's a form of cheap grace [34] that saves no lives --
>> and wins no wars.
>> Instead, this country needs to listen more carefully to its troops,
>> especially the war critics who have risked their lives while fighting
>> overseas. Organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War [35] and
>> Veterans for Peace [36] are good places to start.
>> 4. Fighting a redacted war. War, like the recent Senate torture report
>> [37], is redacted in America. Its horrors and mistakes are suppressed
>> [38], its patriotic whistleblowers punished [39], even as the American
>> people are kept in a demobilized state. The act of going to war no
>> longer represents the will of the people [40], as represented by
>> formal Congressional declarations of war as the U.S. Constitution
>> demands. Instead, in these years, Americans were told togo to Disney
>> World [41] (as George W. Bush suggested in the wake of 9/11) and keep
>> shopping. They're encouraged not to pay too much attention [42] to
>> war's casualties and costs, especially when those costs involve
>> foreigners with funny-sounding names (after all, they are, as American
>> sniper [43] Chris Kyle so indelicately put it in his book, just
> "savages").
>> Redacted war hides the true cost of a permanent state of killing from
>> the American people, if not from foreign observers. Ignorance and
>> apathy reign, even as a national security state [44] that is
>> essentially a shadow government [45]equates its growth with your safety.
>> 5. Threat inflation: There's nothing new about threat inflation. We
>> saw plenty of it during the Cold War (nonexistent missile [46] and
>> bomber gaps [47], for example). Fear sells and we've had quite a dose
>> [48] of it in the twenty-first century, from ISIS to Ebola. But a more
>> important truth is that fear is a mind-killer, a debate-stifler.
>> Back in September, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham warned that
>> ISIS and its radical Islamic army was coming to America to kill us all
>> [49]. ISIS, of course, is a regional power with no ability to mount
>> significant operations against the United States. But fear is so
>> commonplace, so effectively stoked in this country that Americans
>> routinely and wildly [50] exaggerate the threat posed by al-Qaeda or
>> ISIS or the bogeyman du jour.
>> Decades ago, as a young lieutenant in the Air Force, I was hunkered
>> down inCheyenne Mountain [51] during the Cold War. It was the ultimate
>> citadel-cum-bomb-shelter, and those in it were believed to have a 70%
>> likelihood of surviving a five-megaton nuclear blast. There, not
>> surprisingly, I found myself contemplating the very real possibility
>> of a thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, a war that would
>> have annihilated life as we knew it, indeed much of life on our planet
>> thanks to the phenomenon of nuclear winter. You'll excuse me for not
>> shaking in my boots at the threat of ISIS coming to get me. Or of
>> Sharia Law coming to my local town hall. With respect to such fears,
>> America needs, as Hillary Clinton said in an admittedly different
>> context,
> to "grow a pair [52]."
>> 6. Defining the world as a global battlefield: In fortress America
>> [53], all realms have by now become battle spheres. Not only much of
>> the planet, the seas, air, and space [54], as well as the country's
>> borders [55] and its increasingly up-armored police forces [56], but
>> the world of thought, the insides of our minds. Think of the 17 [57]
>> intertwined intelligence outfits in "the U.S. Intelligence Community"
>> and their ongoing "surge" for information dominance across every mode
>> of human communication, as well as the surveillance of everything. And
>> don't forget the national security state's leading role in making
>> cyberwar [58] a reality. (Indeed, Washington launched the first
>> cyberwar in history by deploying the Stuxnet computer worm [59]
>> against Iran.) Think of all this as a global matrix that rests on war,
>> empowering disaster capitalism [60] and the corporate complexes that
>> have formed around the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security,
>> and that intelligence community. A militarized matrix doesn't blink at
>> $1.45 trillion dollars devoted to the F-35 [61], a single
>> under-performing jet fighter, nor at projections of $355 billion [62]
>> over the next decade for "modernizing" the U.S. nuclear arsenal,
>> weapons that Barack Obama vowed [63] to abolish in 2009.
>> 7. The new "normal" in America is war: The 9/11 attacks happened more
>> than
>> 13 years ago, which means that no teenagers in America can truly
>> remember a time when the country was at peace. "War time" is their
>> normal; peace, a fairy tale.
>> What's truly "exceptional" in twenty-first-century America is any
>> articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other
>> nations might be like. Instead, war, backed by a diet of fear, is the
>> backdrop against which the young have grown to adulthood. It's the
>> background noise of their world, so much a part of their lives that
>> they hardly recognize it for what it is. And that's the most insidious
> danger of them all.
>> How do we inoculate our children against such a permanent state of war
>> and the war state itself? I have one simple suggestion: just stop it.
>> All of it.
>> Stop making war a never-ending part of our lives and stop celebrating
>> it, too. War should be the realm of the extreme, of the abnormal. It
>> should be the death of normalcy, not the dreary norm.
>> It's never too soon, America, to enlist in that good fight!
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [64]
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[65]
>>
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/world/war-new-normal-7-deadly-reasons-why-amer
>> icas-w
>> ars-persist
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/william-astore
>> [2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/
>> [3]
>> http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f
>> 828c73
>> &amp;id=1e41682ade
>> [4] http://www.thenation.com/article/kilcullens-long-war
>> [5] http://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-book-club
>> [6] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/
>> [7]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175920/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_i
>> raq_an
>> d_the_battle_of_the_potomac/
>> [8]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175914/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_genuine
>> %2C_ha
>> ndcrafted%2C_man-made_government
>> [9]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175927/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_iraq_w
>> ar_4.0
>> /
>> [10] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175271/
>> [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_company
>> [12]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175507/tom_engelhardt_the_arrival_o
>> f_the_
>> warrior_corporation
>> [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton
>> [14]
>> http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/308-12/16561-focus-cheney
>> s-hall
>> iburton-made-395-billion-on-iraq-war
>> [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp
>> [16]
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater:_The_Rise_of_the_World%27s_Mo
>> st_Pow
>> erful_Mercenary_Army
>> [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Baghdad_shootings
>> [18]
>> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7f435f04-8c05-11e2-b001-00144feabdc0.ht
>> ml#axz
>> z3PaMtnGcI
>> [19]
>> http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/business/iraq-war-contractors/index.
>> html [20] http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/army/p/wallenstein.htm
>> [21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
>> [22]
>> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/27/carter_my_daughter_a
>> my_say s_nuclear_weapons_was_most_important_issue.html
>> [23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
>> [24] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175290/
>> [25]
>> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/22/netanyahu-to-address-congre
>> ss-on-
>> march-3-boehner-says/
>> [26]
>> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/21/boehner-invites-israeli-lea
>> der-to
>> -address-congress-on-iran/
>> [27]
>> https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-triumph-of-the-military-industria
>> l-cong
>> ressional-complex-a27d6e5fb1a8
>> [28]
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/us/politics/after-scrutiny-cia-manda
>> te-is-
>> untouched-.html
>> [29]
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-astore/support-our-troops-what-i
>> _b_832
>> 030.html
>> [30] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175034
>> [31] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175178
>> [32] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175337/
>> [33] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175276
>> [34]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175423/andrew_bacevich_ballpark_lit
>> urgy
>> [35] http://www.ivaw.org/
>> [36] http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
>> [37]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175934/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_th
>> e_tort
>> ure_wars/
>> [38]
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/bradley-manning-leaks_n_37881
>> 26.htm
>> l
>> [39] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175526
>> [40]
>> http://contraryperspective.com/2015/01/12/why-america-keeps-losing-its
>> -wars/
>> [41]
>> http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872229
>> _18722
>> 30_1872236,00.html
>> [42] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175314
>> [43] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sniper_(film)
>> [44] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175542/
>> [45] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
>> [46] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
>> [47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap
>> [48]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_inside_t
>> he_ame
>> rican_terrordome
>> [49] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYAfQURHROI
>> [50] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175904/
>> [51] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174920
>> [52]
>>
> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2009/07/hillary_told_obama_to_grow_a_p.
>> html
>> [53] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175855
>> [54] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174928
>> [55] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175947
>> [56] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175881
>> [57] http://www.intelligence.gov/mission/member-agencies.html
>> [58] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174940
>> [59]
>> http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/2014/0225/Exclusive-New-
>> thesis -on-how-Stuxnet-infiltrated-Iran-nuclear-facility
>> [60] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175762/
>> [61]
>> http://contraryperspective.com/2014/02/18/the-f-35-fighter-program-ame
>> rica-g
>> oing-down-in-flames/
>> [62]
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-ramping-up-major-renewal-in-nu
>> clear-
>> arms.html
>> [63]
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175933/tomgram%3A_james_carroll,_the_p
>> entago n_as_president_obama%27s_great_white_whale/
>> [64] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on War Is the New
> Normal:
>> 7 Deadly Reasons Why America's Wars Persist [65]
>> http://www.alternet.org/ [66] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
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