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How does the [Republican] War Party get away with it?
(Robert Higgs, Online Journal, October 15, 2003)
The death, destruction, and misery that the war has caused cannot be erased. On the contrary, for many of the victims, that misery will only fester, despoiling the other lives it touches, just as it did in the aftermath of earlier, similarly mistaken wars. Think of all the former soldiers with parts of their bodies missing, or parts of their minds gone askew. In this country, veterans' institutions brim with these enduring casualties, and big-city alleys harbor no small number of them. In Iraq the innocent victims of this year's war are counted in the tens of thousands, and their number continues to mount. . . . While the architects of war, the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, and Wolfowitzs who sleep every night between clean sheets, deem these terrible costs to be worth bearing�as well they might, because they personally bear not an ounce of them . . . When the president and his coterie of top advisers decide to go to war, they just go, and nobody can stop them. The "intelligence" agencies, the diplomatic corps, and the armed forces do as they are told. Members of Congress cower and speak in mealy-mouthed phrases framed to ensure that no matter how the war turns out, they can share any credit and deny any blame. No one has effective capacity to block the president, and few officials care to do so in any event, even if they object. Rarely does anyone display the minimal decency of resigning his military commission or his appointment in the bureaucracy. In short, in our system the president has come to hold the power of war and peace exclusively in his hands, notwithstanding anything to the contrary written in the Constitution or the laws. He might as well be Caesar. . . . Presidents decide to go to war in the context of a favorably disposed mass culture. Painful as it is for members of the Peace Party to admit, many Americans take pleasure in "kicking ass," and they do not much care whose ass is being kicked or why. So long as Americans are dishing out death and destruction to a plausible foreign enemy, the red-white-and-blue jingos are happy. . . . An eagerness to spill blood and guts extends, however, well beyond the rednecks. Highly literate, albeit sophistic, expressions of this proclivity appear nearly every day on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, a Likud Party megaphone whose motto might well be "all wars all the time." Establishment think thanks, most notably the American Enterprise Institute, trot out well-spoken intellectuals in squads to trumpet the necessity of wreaking global death and destruction. . . . No one should be surprised by the cultural proclivity for violence, of course, because Americans have always been a violent people in a violent land. . . . Public ignorance compounds the inclinations fostered by the mass culture. Study after study and poll after poll have confirmed that most Americans know next to nothing about public affairs. Of course, the intricacies of foreign policy are as alien to them as the dark side of the moon, but their ignorance runs much deeper. They can't explain the simplest elements of the political system; they don't know what the Constitution says or means; and they can't identify their political representatives or what those persons ostensibly stand for. They know scarcely anything about history, and what they think they know is usually incorrect. People so densely ignorant that they have no inkling of how their forebears were bamboozled and sacrificed on the altar of Mars the last time around are easily bamboozled and readily sacrificed the next time around. . . . So long as war is something that happens "out there" somewhere, most likely in a place that few Americans have ever visited and most can't even locate on a map, and not too many body bags are delivered with sons and husbands inside, then the masses tend to find sufficient bliss in their ignorance and childlike trust in their rulers. Flag-waving and other symbolic displays bring them a cheap solidary identification with the great nation-state, but few have any immediate contact with events in the empire. As an issue, war remains foreign to them in the literal sense�always somebody else's problem. . . . Cooperative news media help the rulers to market their warmaking. The big media, enjoying entrenched positions in the established order, are reluctant to challenge the government's foreign aggressiveness. At the working level, reporters do not want to be cut off from privileged access to inside sources of information. At the upper level, owners and producers do not wish to seem unpatriotic, as the government might label them if pushed too hard. Of course, in any event, profit-seeking media are bound to tailor their product to the sort of readers, listeners, or viewers to whom they cater. Thus, among the bottom feeders, Fox News quite rationally aims to entertain the bloodthirsty yahoos; and in the upper reaches, the New York Times knows better than to offend strong supporters of the state of Israel. . . . Finally, we must recognize that for many persons and institutions, war is a good deal. Hence, each foreign adventure provides a splendid opportunity for many to gain personal, political, or economic profit. The so-called war on terror has been a godsend for everybody who purports to be in the security business, from data-management specialists to security-personnel-training firms to the manufacturers of surveillance machinery, not to mention all those new hires at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. At Oracle, a company with roots in service to the CIA, Larry Ellison is gunning to equip the government with software that will allow the authorities to track your every move . . . For all those associated with the Bushies and their cronies in the military-industrial complex and other pet industries and professions, these are happy days indeed. . . . To cover their tracks, the leaders of the War Party are relying on Machiavelli's wisdom, which tells them: "It is necessary . . . to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived."

posted by LoZo 1:17 PM