The permanent war economy

President Biden took a predictable hit on the Afghan crisis, but the war’s flawed beginnings and mis-guided execution were caused by many of his current critics who were pitchmen for deepening our involvement. This fiasco lasted twenty years because all presidents and power players were vested in this atrocity, willing to cover up its failure with deceptions and bureaucratic lies, insulating Americans from casualties in order to continue the war indefinitely.

Ross Douthat contends that this failure has been known for some time, its irredeemable nature especially evident during the early Obama years when a decent political settlement couldn’t be reached despite the troop surge; when our forces “blunted but did not reverse the Taliban’s recovery.” And subsequent efforts were devoted to merely managing stalemate versus pursuing victory.

The targeting of the Obama years is telling not only because of the surge. Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize as he entered office, giving him the defaulted moniker as the “Peace President.” His acceptance speech mimicked the reasons the committee gave for granting him the prize. It voted to affirm his desire to achieve peace, likely swayed by the impact of his pre-election speeches, masterful pieces of rhetoric against war (and against neoliberalism as well, though effectively nullified after the election). The speech itself then was an embarrassing justification for the potential of war to produce peace. If the committee had voted after his decision to boot up the Afghan War, he would probably have gotten the prize anyway since the war’s material subsidies indentured a host of players and interests and bolstered support for it. So, the rhetoric of the speech and the decision soon after to expand the war, mesh efficiently into a saleable message that nicely smooths over an embarrassing contradiction.

The power players know it’s a contradiction and their role, realized through their media influence, is too make the peace-though-war message seem uncontradictory, convince citizens who have little interest in foreign policy anyway (they typically defer to elites), to accept this as natural. Their endless repetition of this message through official venues converts falsity into “truth.” An effect of this overkill is the cultivation of support for a permanent war economy, not just the hot war of the moment. We’re told over and over that achieving peace is a long-term, tasking endeavor, requiring many sacrifices. And of course, it helps to say that our goal is to bring democracy to the targeted land, even rebuild its institutions. This sweetens the pot, driving home to citizens that our institutions are credible so they will overlook our democracy’s flaws and become more patriotic. Patriotism of a certain kind, one that commands conformity to scripts, securing the kind of deference and support that gives the power players a free hand.

George Orwell demonstrated how this works in 1984, published in 1948 (the title an inversion of this date), the very moment when the Cold War military buildup began in earnest. In its society three empires control the globe, each roughly corresponding to the post-WWII power blocs. They are perpetually at war. In fact, no one living in this society can remember when war began. Their lives have only known hostilities with another empire. The telescreens repeat ad nauseam the positive results of the current campaign, presenting little else (on domestic issues only lies about increased output and the expanded production of desirable goods), and emphasizing the light-at-the-end-of-the tunnel delusion. Suddenly, during the telescreen’s babble, announcements assault viewers with the news that the society is now at war with the other empire (through alleged transgressions on their part), and that they’ve conquered the previous one. To supplement this barrage, it requires attendance at the daily “five minutes of hate” performances where the fictitious reasons why the current enemy deserves to be labeled evil are belabored. And Orwell makes clear that one of the major purposes of this attention to war and focus on external issues is to deflect from the already quite starved domestic agenda (the lower Party members and workers live as virtual slaves).

This kind of conditioning doesn’t happen here—the sources for his allegory were the authoritarian systems of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Here we’re conditioned indirectly, subliminally (subliminal seduction, to borrow a concept from the advertising world), to hate the enemies of the moment, the rogue nations, “terrorists” we don’t negotiate with, the full axis of evil, and to make firm distinctions between us and them, the good guys and the bad guys. These messages circulate via a variety of discourses, some less than five minutes, in news blurbs justifying the conflict of the moment in defense of the freedom to protect the country; military ads that hype the warrior mystique; blips from “journalists” who casually label countries, like Russia and China, our enemies; “reports” from retired Generals who vigorously drive home the necessity for increased funding for the Pentagon because it’s a dangerous world out there with many enemies jealous of our success, etc.

There are also those longer than five minutes. Like action-adventure movies that sell the need for violence against perpetually threatening enemies from chaotic territories and failed states, giving authority for superheroes to invade their land and assassinate bad actors or rescue victims; displays of weaponry at public events, like flyovers at football games; the hosting of sports spectacles from war-torn sites; “support our troops” media segments, the message often transferred to target bodies through symbols (driving home the propagandistic choice of either/or).

Few direct lectures needed, though hawkish think tanks thrive on badgering us.

The effects from this assault compound over time, get lodged in our subconscious, ready to erupt from a random trigger and present a simple option to support military ventures (like being driven inexplicably to buy a car you never thought you wanted). As a result, we don’t see how the enemy-matrix is fabricated, the extent to which we also create the dangerous world with our imperial overreach.