After almost 18 years of the war (or rather wars) on (or
perhaps of) terror, there's some good news! The Washington Post reports that
American troops are finally coming home from Afghanistan! Actually, let me
amend that slightly. They will only come home if Taliban and U.S. negotiators
complete a deal by September that leads to a countrywide ceasefire (and if the
Taliban agrees to certain other conditions as well). In fact, let me amend that
one more time: “they” turns out to refer to the withdrawal of just about 5,000
U.S. military personnel, leaving 8,000-9,000 U.S. troops still in place after
“peace” breaks out.
For Donald Trump who, years ago,
repeatedly demanded that the
Afghan War be ended and all American troops brought home, only to agree in
mid-2017 to dispatch another 4,000 of
them to that land, such a peace pact would just return U.S. troop levels to
more or less what they were at that moment two years ago. In the age of Trump,
that, I suppose, is the definition of “progress” in America’s never-ending
wars. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to also learn that, according to the Post,
the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, is “open” to such a
peace proposal precisely “because he believes it would protect U.S. interests
by maintaining a counterterrorism force that can strike the Islamic State and
al-Qaeda.” If one were to turn this into a riddle, it might go something like: When is a Trumpian withdrawal hardly
a withdrawal at all?
On the
other hand, don’t let any of this worry you. The troops may not be coming home,
but the wars have been on their way here for a long time. That should have been obvious at least since, in 2014,
local police, using equipment off America's distant battlefields, made such
a public splash in
responding to protests in Ferguson, Missouri. From thousands of troops sent to the
U.S.-Mexican border to the Pentagon spy drones that have long flown over
parts of the U.S., further examples of the growing militarization of this
country abound. Perhaps the most recent, as reported by
the Guardian, is the news that the military is now “conducting
wide-area surveillance tests across six Midwest states using experimental
high-altitude balloons... Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to
65,000 feet, the balloons are intended to ‘provide a persistent surveillance
system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats,’
according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an
aerospace and defense company. The balloons are carrying hi-tech radars
designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through
any kind of weather.”
As it
happens, almost unnoticed, America’s twenty-first-century wars have been coming
home in another way as well: in the increasingly worshipful attitudes of so
many Americans (especially those in the seats of power in Washington, D.C.)
toward the Pentagon and the U.S. military, as vividly described today by
retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore. Tom
In Wars and Weapons We Trust
America’s Militarized Profession of Faith
By William J. Astore
America’s Militarized Profession of Faith
By William J. Astore
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I looked
to the heavens: to God and Christianity (as arbitrated by the Catholic Church)
and to the soaring warbirds of the U.S. military, which I believed kept us
safe. To my mind then, they were classic manifestations of American
technological superiority over the godless Communists.
With all its scandals, especially when it
came to priestly sexual abuse, I lost my
faith in the Catholic Church. Indeed, I would later learn that there had been a
predatory priest in my own parish when I was young, a grim man who made me
uneasy at the time, though back then I couldn’t have told you why. As for those
warbirds, like so many Americans, I thrilled to their roar at air shows, but
never gave any real thought to the bombs they were
dropping in Vietnam and elsewhere, to the lives they were
ending, to the destruction they
were causing. Nor, at that age, did I ever consider their enormous cost in
dollars or just how much Americans collectively sacrificed to have “top cover,”
whether of the warplane or godly kind.
There were good and devoted priests in my Catholic
diocese. There were good and devoted public servants in the U.S. military.
Admittedly, I never seriously considered the priesthood, but I did sign up for
the Air Force, surprising myself by serving in it for 20 years. Still, both
institutions were then, and remain, deeply flawed. Both seek, in a phrase the
Air Force has long used, “global reach, global power.”
Both remain hierarchies that regularly promote true believers to positions of
authority. Both demand ultimate obedience. Both sweep their sins under the rug.
Neither can pass an audit.
Both are characterized by secrecy. Both seem remarkably immune to serious
efforts at reform. And both, above all, know how to preserve their own power,
even as they posture and proselytize about serving a higher one.
However, let me not focus here on the one
“holy catholic and apostolic church,” words taken from the “profession of
faith” I recited during Mass each week in my youth. I’d prefer to focus instead
on that other American holy church, the U.S. military, with all its wars and
weapons, its worshipers and wingmen, together with its vision of global dominance that just
happens to include end-of-world scenarios as apocalyptic as those of any
imaginable church of true believers. I’m referring, of course, to our country’s
staggeringly large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, just now being
updated -- the term seems to be “modernized” -- to the
tune of something like $1.7 trillion over
the decades to come.
A Profession of Twenty-First-Century
All-American Faith
“Show me your budget and I will tell you
what you value” is a telling phrase linked to Joe Biden. And in those same terms, there’s no
question what the American government values most: its military, to the tune of
almost $1.5 trillion over
the next two years (although the real number may well exceed $2 trillion).
Republicans and Democrats agree on little these days, except support for
spending on that military, its weaponry, its wars to come, and related national
security state outlays.
In that context, I’ve been wondering what
kind of “profession of faith” we might have to recite, if there were the
equivalent of Mass for what has increasingly become our military church. What
would it look like? Whom and what would we say we believed in? As a lapsed
Catholic with a lot of practice in my youth professing my faith in the Church,
as well as a retired military officer and historian, I have a few ideas about
what such a “profession” might look like:
* We believe in wars. We may no longer
believe in formal declarations of war (not since December 1941 has Congress
made one in our name), but that sure hasn’t stopped us from waging them. From
Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, the Cold War to the War on Terror, and
so many military interventions in between, including Grenada, Panama, and
Somalia, Americans are always fighting somewhere as if we saw great utility in
thumbing our noses at the Prince of Peace. (That’s Jesus Christ, if I remember
my Catholic catechism correctly.)
* We believe in weaponry, the more expensive
the better. The underperforming F-35
stealth fighter may cost $1.45 trillion over
its lifetime. An updated nuclear triad (land-based missiles, nuclear
submarines, and strategic bombers) may cost that already mentioned $1.7 trillion. New
(and malfunctioning) aircraft
carriers cost us more than $10 billion each. And all such weaponry requests get
funded, with few questions asked, despite a history of their redundancy,
ridiculously high price, regular cost overruns, and mediocre performance.
Meanwhile, Americans squabble bitterly over a few hundred million dollars for
the arts and humanities.
* We believe in weapons of mass destruction. We believe in
them so strongly that we’re jealous of anyone nibbling at our near monopoly. As
a result, we work overtime to ensure that infidels and atheists (that is, the
Iranians and North Koreans, among others) don’t get them. In historical terms,
no country has devoted more research or money to deadly nuclear, biological,
and chemical weaponry than the United States. In that sense, we’ve truly put
our money where our mouths are (and where a devastating future might be).
* We believe with missionary zeal in our
military and seek to establish our “faith” everywhere. Hence, our global network of
perhaps 800 overseas military bases. We don’t hesitate to deploy our elite
missionaries, our equivalent to the Jesuits, the Special
Operations forces to more than 130 countries annually.
Similarly, the foundation for what we like to call foreign assistance is often
military training and foreign military sales. Our present supreme leader, Pope
Trump I, boasts of military
sales across the globe, most notably to the infidel Saudis. Even when Congress
makes what, until recently, was the rarest of attempts to rein in this deadly
trade in arms, Pope Trump vetoes it. His
rationale: weapons and profits should rule all.
* We believe in our college of cardinals,
otherwise known as America’s generals and admirals. We sometimes appoint them
(or anoint them?) to the highest positions in the land. While Trump’s generals --
Michael Flynn, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly -- have fallen from
grace at the White House, America’s generals and admirals continue to rule
globally. They inhabit proconsul-like positions in sweeping geographical commandsthat
(at least theoretically) cover the planet and similarly lead commands aimed at
dominating the digital-computer realm and special operations. One
of them will head a new force meant to dominate space through time eternal. A
“strategic” command (the successor to the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, so
memorably satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) continues to ensure that,
at some future moment, the U.S. will be able to commit mass genocide by quite
literally destroying the world with nuclear weapons. Indeed, Pope Trump
recently boasted that he could end America’s Afghan War in a week, apparently
through the mass nuclear genocide of (his figure) 10 million Afghans. Even as
he then blandly dismissed the idea of wiping that country “off the face of the
earth,” he openly reflected the more private megalomania of those military
professionals funded by the rest of us to think about “the unthinkable.” In
sum, everything is -- theoretically at least -- under the thumbs of our
unelected college of cardinals. Their overblown term for it is “full-spectrum dominance,”
which, in translation, means they grant themselves god-like powers over our
lives and that of our planet (though the largely undefeated enemies in their
various wars don’t seem to have acknowledged this reality).
* We believe that freedom comes through
obedience. Those who break ranks from our militarized church and protest, like
Chelsea Manning, are treated as heretics and literally tortured.
* We believe military spending brings wealth
and jobs galore, even when it measurably doesn’t.
Military production is both increasingly automated and increasingly outsourced,
leading to far fewer good-paying American jobs compared to spending on education,
infrastructure repairs of and improvements in roads, bridges, levees, and the
like, or just about anything else for that matter.
* We believe, and our most senior leaders
profess to believe, that our military represents the very best of us, that we have
the “finest” one in human
history.
* We believe in planning for a future marked
by endless wars, whether against terrorism or “godless” states like China and
Russia, which means our military church must be forever strengthened in the
cause of winning ultimate victory.
* Finally, we believe our religion is the
one true faith. (Just as I used to be taught that the Catholic Church was the
one true church and that salvation outside it was unattainable.) More pacific
“religions” are dismissed as weak, misguided, and exploitative. Consider, for
example, the denunciation of
NATO countries that refuse to spend more money on their militaries. Such a path
to the future is heretical; therefore, they must be punished.
Blessed Are the Peacemakers
Keep in mind that the beginning of wisdom is the
fear of God, or so I was taught as a boy anyway. One might say that the
beginning of U.S. militarism is simply fear, whether of terrorists,
immigrants, Muslims, Communists, or other enemies of the moment. If Americans
continue to be wracked with such fears, they’ll undoubtedly continue to profess
their faith in the military as our country’s noblest protectors, too.
Where
does such a profession of faith in wars and weapons end? Is there even a
terminus of any sort other than destruction?
Those of us who endured war games and
hair-trigger nuclear alerts during the Cold War have long had apocalyptic fears
of such endings in the back of our minds. Under Donald Trump, they’ve come back
with a vengeance. Unlike many Christians, I don’t envision Christ returning to
pick up the irradiated Elect after a nuclear version of Armageddon. But that,
of course, is a true worst-case scenario. A more likely ending is a slow-motion collapse of
America’s imperial empire and the church of the military that goes with it, the
resulting chaos possibly leading to a Second Coming, not of Christ but of
medieval levels of meanness and misery.
Or, maybe, just maybe, we might start
anew by questioning our militarized profession of faith. We might begin to
realize that our warrior-church isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We might begin
to seek meaning and salvation not through wars and weaponry, not through generals and their
admirers, not through impossible dreams of total dominance, but through
compassion and a desire for global justice.
I confess that I long ago turned my back on
the Catholic Church of my youth, but I haven’t turned my back on Christianity
and the wisdom it can offer. For what does it profit a country if it gains the
whole world yet loses its soul? (In our case, of course, it might be more
appropriate to say: For what does it profit a country if it gains nothing from
its wars and military mindset yet loses its soul?) The more we Americans
profess our faith in warriors, weapons, and wars, the more we endanger our
nation’s collective soul. There’s a reason, after all, that Jesus placed the
peacemakers, not the warriors, among the children of God.
A TomDispatch regular,
William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), historian, and
recovering Catholic. His personal blog is Bracing
Views.
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John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in
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Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2019 William J. Astore