The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes:
Washington Court Culture and Its Endless Wars
The killing of Osama bin Laden, “a testament to the greatness of our country”
according to President Obama, should not be allowed to obscure a central reality of our post-9/11 world.
Our conflicts
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya remain instances of
undeclared war, a fact that contributes to their remoteness from our
American world. They are remote geographically, but also remote from
our day-to-day interests and, unless you are in the military or have a
loved one who serves, remote from our collective consciousness (not to
speak of our consciences).
And this remoteness is no accident. Our wars and their impact are kept in
remarkable isolation
from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most
Americans with little knowledge and even less say about whether they
should be, and how they are, waged.
In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European
monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried
out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the
whim of what we might now call a
unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite.
Tomgram: William Astore, A New Age of "Enlightened" War
In case you hadn’t noticed, they are -- no kidding around
-- absolutely the niftiest non-humans on Earth. I’m speaking about the
special operations force of Navy SEALs that took out Osama bin Laden.
They and their special ops colleagues are “supermen” (ABC News), “X-men” (Jon Stewart), “America’s Jedi Knights” (the New York Times), and that’s just to pick the odd example in a sea of churning hyperbole. For the last week, while the bin Laden operation swallowed
almost 69% of all news space according to the Project for Excellence in
Journalism, they have been the most reported upon Xtra Special
Soldiers anywhere, possibly of all time -- from the “square-jawed admiral from Texas” who commanded them right down to the dog (oops... “possible war hero”) they reportedly took along.
In an era when U.S. troops have become little short of American idols,
seldom have the media gone quite so nuts as over those SEALs and the
other military and CIA “teams” that make up our counterterrorism
forces. You couldn’t pay for this sort of publicity. It would, in
fact, hardly be an exaggeration to say that all of American society has,
for the last 10 days, been “embedded” with them. But here’s the
strange thing (or perhaps I mean the strangest thing of all): if you
read most of the over-the-top press about America’s special ops troops,
you probably think that they are tiny crews of elite forces divided
into even tinier teams trained to dispel global darkness and take out
the bin Ladens of the world.
No such thing. Almost a year ago, the Washington Post reported
that there were at least 13,000 U.S. special operations troops deployed
overseas in (no, this is not a typo) 75 countries, a significant
expansion of these forces in the Obama era. Since thousands of them
remain in the U.S. at any moment, Washington may now have up to 20,000
special operations troops on hand and the odds are that there will be
even more after the bin Laden publicity blitz has had a chance to work
its charms. In the latest Pentagon budget, the Obama administration had
already asked for $10.5 billion to pay for special forces, a tripling of their budget since 2001 -- and that figure is sure to rise in the years to come, as media slavering turns into congressional slavering.
Keep in mind that this growing set of secret forces cocooned inside
the U.S. military, along with the missile-armed pilotless drones
fighting the CIA’s semi-secret war in Pakistan (which also got a modest publicity boost
from the bin Laden operation), add up to the newly dominant form of
American conflict: presidential war fought on the sly and beyond any
serious kind of accountability to the American people. In return for
ponying up the necessary dough, for instance, Congress is now
practically begging just to be updated on the executive’s counterterror operations four times a year.
As TomDispatch regular
and retired Lieutenant Colonel William Astore makes clear, “remote war”
on the imperial peripheries of the planet is a direct danger to this
country, to us, and it’s growing by the day. Tom
The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes:
Washington Court Culture and Its Endless Wars
by William J. Astore
Cynics might say it has always been thus in the United States. After
all, the War of 1812 was known to critics as “Mr. Madison’s War” and
the Mexican-American War of the 1840s was “Mr. Polk’s War.” The
Spanish-American War of 1898 was a naked war of expansion vigorously
denounced by American anti-imperialists. Yet in those conflicts there was at least genuine national debate, as well as formal declarations of war by Congress.
Today’s ruling class in Washington no longer bothers to make a
pretense of following the letter of our Constitution -- and they
sidestep its spirit as well, invoking hollow claims of executive privilege or higher callings of humanitarian service
(as in Libya) or of exporting democracy (as in Afghanistan). But Libya
is still torn by civil war, and Afghanistan has yet to morph into
Oregon.
“Enlightened” War, Then and Now
History does not simply repeat itself, yet realities of power,
privilege, and pride ensure certain continuities from the past.
Consider how today’s remote wars and the ways they reinforce existing
power relations for a privileged and prideful elite echo a style of
European warfare more than three centuries old.
Surveying the wreckage of the devastating Thirty Years’ War
(1618-1648), fought feverishly across Germanic territories by most of
Europe, monarchs like Louis XIV of France began to seek to fight
“limited” wars. These they considered more consistent with the spirit
of a rational and “enlightened” age. In their hands, such wars became
the sport of kings, the real-life equivalents of elaborate chess matches
in which foot soldiers drawn from the lower orders served as expendable
pawns, while the second or lesser sons of the nobility, fulfilling
their duty as officers, proved hardly less expendable knights, bishops,
and rooks.
As
much as possible, the monarch and his retinue tried to keep war-making
and its disruptions at a distance from thriving economic and
manufacturing concerns. In many cases, in the centuries to follow, this
would essentially mean exporting war to faraway, “barbaric” realms or
colonies. In the process, death and destruction were outsourced to
places and peoples remote from European metropoles.
In fact, this was precisely what enraged our founders: that the
colonies in America had become a never-ending battleground for French
and British imperial ambitions from which the colonists themselves
reaped the whirlwind of war while gaining few of its benefits. A close
reading of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, reveals a
proto-republic’s contempt for wars fought at a king’s whim and
guaranteed to reduce the colonists to so much cannon fodder.
Refusing to surrender the hard-fought right as British men to have a
say in how they were taxed, how their families and lands were defended,
and especially for what purposes they themselves fought and died, the
founders forged a new nation. Given this history, it’s not surprising
that they granted to Congress, and not to the President, the power to
declare and fund war.
In this way, a noble experiment was born, and it worked, however
imperfectly, until the devastation of a new thirty years’ war in Europe
(better known as World Wars I and II) propelled the United States to
superpower status with all its accompanying ambitions stoked by
existential fears, whether of yesterday’s godless communists or today’s
god-crazed terrorists.
Inside the Washington Beltway: The New Court of Versailles
In the eighteenth century, France was the superpower of Europe with a
military that dwarfed those of its neighbors. And who dictated
France’s decisions to go to war? The answer: the king, his generals,
and his courtiers at the Court of Versailles. In the
twenty-first-century, the U.S. celebrates its status as the world’s
“sole superpower” with a military second to none. And who dictates its
decisions to go to war? Considering the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan,
and now Libya, the answer is no less obvious: the president, his
generals, and his courtiers within the vast edifice of Washington’s
national security state.
France’s “enlightened” wars were fought by professional armies and
mercenaries, directed by a unitary executive who did as he pleased, and
endured by the lower orders who had no say (even though they provided
the brawn and blood). Similarly, our twenty-first century masters
plunge us into their version of enlightened wars and play their version
of global chess matches.
The analogy can be pushed further. In pre-revolutionary France, the
First and Second Estates (the clergy and the nobility) constituted less
than 2% of the population but controlled nearly all of France’s wealth
and power. Their unholy alliance kept the Third Estate (everyone who
wasn’t a churchman or a noble) under their collective thumb.
Now, consider the United States today. Our equivalent to the First
Estate would be the clergy of finance and banking (the religion of the
almighty dollar). Look for them in their houses of worship on Wall
Street. Our Second Estate equivalent would be the movers and shakers
inside Washington’s Beltway. Look for them in the White House, the
Pentagon, Congress, and on K Street where the lobbyists for the First
Estate tend to congregate. The unholy alliance of these two estates
leaves the American Third Estate -- you and me -- with the deck stacked
against us.
When it comes to war, the American ruling class has relegated the members of its Third Estate alternately to the role of “foreign legionnaires”
in overseas service, or silent spectators passively watching moves on
the big board. These, in turn, are continually interpreted for us by
retired members of the Second Estate: generals and admirals in mufti, hired by the corporate media to provide color commentary on Washington’s wars.
Small wonder that today’s Beltway elite is as imperious and detached
as yesterday’s Court of Louis XIV. A colleague of mine recently endured
a short audience with some members of our Second Estate near Dupont
Circle in Washington. In his words: “They were at once condescending
and puzzled by ‘tea party types,’ as they referred to them, which was to
say that they inadvertently admitted to being out of touch and were
pretty okay with that. ‘Look,’ I finally said, ‘you cannot continue to
pick someone’s pocket while hectoring him about how stupid and
uninformed he is and then be surprised that he gets angry.’”
Whether it be unwashed “tea party types,” “retarded” (according to
ex-courtier Rahm Emanuel) progressives, or other members of a
disgruntled American Third Estate, the Washington elites who wage war in
our name simply couldn’t care less what we think, just as Louis XIV and
his court couldn’t have cared less about their subjects’ desires.
Endless “limited” wars fought for the interests of the ruling class,
massive deficit spending on those wars, a refusal to recognize (or even
understand) the people’s growing disgruntlement, a “let them eat cake”
mentality: all of this is familiar to a historian. And like those old
French masters of limited war, our new masters of war are hemorrhaging
legitimacy.
The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes
In isolating the American Third Estate from war -- indeed, in
disengaging it from any meaningful public debate about this nation’s
perpetual war-making -- our rulers have conspired to advance their own
interests. Yet in deciding everything of importance out of view, they
have unwisely eliminated any check on their folly.
Consider
again the example of pre-revolutionary Versailles. A top-heavy,
remarkably dissolute, and openly parasitic bureaucracy plundered the
commonweal of France in its pursuit of power and privilege. Can we not
say the same of Washington today? In its kleptocratic tendency
to enrich itself and its accountability-free deployment of military
power globally, the American ruling class bears a certain resemblance to
French kings and their courts which, in the end, drove their country to
economic ruin and violent revolution.
Fed up with its prodigal and prideful rulers, France saw the tumbrels
roll and the guillotine blades drop. How many more undeclared
“enlightened” wars, how many more trillions of dollars in war-driven
debt, how many more dead and wounded will it take for the American
people to reclaim their power over war? Or are we content to remain
deferential to our ruling class and court -- and to their
less-than-liberty-loving overseas creditors -- until such a time as
their prideful wars and prodigal trillion-dollar-plus “defense” budgets bring our great democratic experiment crashing down?
Copyright 2011 William J. Astore
