Cashing in on Fear

While it seems obvious to me, evidently it isn't to many Americans. Donald Trump and other fear mongers among us are constantly trying to make us afraid of - immigrants, minorities, Muslims, LGBT, terrorists, criminals, axis of evil....ad nauseum. If they can sell the fear, we're more likely to succumb to their proposed remedy - build walls, more guns, better locks, bigger armies and navies, yada, yada, yada. 

I've been thinking along this line for a long time, but an article recently passed my eyes that put some solid data behind it in "Why Are People So Averse to Facts"  by Prof. Tristan Bridges from the website Sociological Images. The article posted last week discusses the claims of a certain President that crime is on the rise along with the data that shows the opposite. While of course the make believe world of this detached fellow is of interest, what I found more interesting in the piece was data from annual Gallup polls between 1989-2016 that showed the majority of the American public has consistently believed crime was getting worse when it wasn't.

Interesting enough it was just a week ago that the very same author of the crime myth was selling another bag of fear around terrorism. This one comes with an additional $54 billion price tag, on top of the $600 billion we already spend on 'defense'. The lunacy would be laughable if it wasn't so harmful. If our major security concern is global terrorism why would one argue for building up a larger navy, adding 75 more ships to the 275 we already have floating around the world? Are nuclear powered submarines the answer to terrorism? This isn't defense, it's offense!!



But, let's not let any facts get in the way of protecting us from hyped up fears. Lockheed Martin, Boeing and their collaborators are happy to sell weapons to the US government or any other nation that buys the belief foisted by the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC) that the latest weaponry and a larger military footprint will bring them peace and prosperity.

The US government even works as arms merchants for these purveyors of weaponry, greasing the palms of the buyer - whether the purchase be planes, landmines (we still haven't signed the convention to outlaw them- one of only 35 countries out of 200), tanks, missiles, whatever. Note simply recent huge arms sales agreements with Israel and Saudi Arabia, and even more recently Vietnam.


Juxtapose these increases with the announced cuts to diplomacy and foreign assistance announced announced subsequent to the military build-up. Do the proponents seriously believe that we will defeat terrorism with more bullets and less bread? Do they think for a minute that we will win the hearts and minds of those who see us as global bullies as our military might becomes even more expansive?



The National Priorities Project notes that the $54 billion that will be cut to pay for the expanded  militarism of this regime exceeds the entire budgets of the following:

• Department of Homeland Security ($48 billion)
• Housing and Urban Development ($38 billion)
• Department of Energy ($30 billion)
• Department of Justice ($29 billion)
• Department of State ($29 billion)
• Environmental Protection Agency ($8 billion)
• National Science Foundation ($7 billion)
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($485 million)
• National Endowment for the Arts ($148 million)

Meanwhile no mention of cutting the enormous waste in military spending, as noted by the Pentagon's own study last fall that identified $125 billion in waste. Since the Pentagon is never audited, that figure is probably low.  Regardless the American public takes it all in without barely a whimper of protest, evidently convinced that the fear mongering of the MIC and their current White House champion is true. 

If we don't challenge the madness of militarism, we will insure the bullets and landmines we deploy under the guise of 'defense' will continue to harm innocent civilians. Meanwhile robbing both American families and our less fortunate of investments in true human prosperity.

Put Down the Guns

If "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a definition of insanity," it seems, to this observer, that nowhere is this more evident than in the use of violence to end violence.

I attended an impassioned and respectful discussion at a community meeting last night  over the best response to the violence perpetrated by the so called ISIL/ISIS  forces. President Obama is asking Congress for authorization to send troops to battle wherever Terror strikes and is deemed a threat to U.S. interests. Typically that would mean at  a minimum where we have troops stationed. Given that we have military bases with US personnel on them in all regions of the world, this essentially means anywhere.

 In terms of constraining the so-called ISIL/ISIS threat Middle East expert, Prof. Juan Cole (University of Michigan) wrote  about "Today's Top 7 Myths About Daesh/ISIL". Item No. 6 on his list is perhaps most pertinent here, but all are worth considering.

        Myth 6. Only US ground troops can defeat Daesh and the USA must commit to a third Iraq War. 
    The US had 150,000 troops or so in Iraq for 8 1/2 years! But they left the country a mess. Why in the world would anybody assume that another round of US military occupation of Iraq would work, given the disaster that was the last one? A whole civil war was fought between Sunnis and Shiites that displaced a million people and left 3000 civilians dead a month in 2006-2007, right under the noses of US commanders.

The U.S. is also a major provider of armaments in the world (US firms make up 7 of the top 10 manufacturers including the top 6) and Obama's new budget calls for even more money for a military that spends more than the next ten countries combined. Congress, under the influence of some Dark Age mentality, that more force is better, has contrived a game to elevate patriotism to a simple bidding game on who can pile more money on the military budget than the other side. Einstein, Eisenhower, and numerous others would tell us we're nuts.

Where is the new thinking that can lead us out of this ongoing, if not deepening morass? Certainly nothing portrayed in our mass media which seems to thrive on building fear in the population - it is more visually stimulating to watch buildings being blown up, than diplomats trying to find common ground. This feeds dreams of American exceptionalism and our military responses to violence anywhere, especially those with high tech wizardry. And of course there is ample funding for university research to develop more lethal forms of military hardware. Where is the research funding for other forms of disarmament that won't be profitable to corporations designing clever technological tools of destruction?

A Different Approach

From where I sit we need a major overall of consciousness and action. Some of the principles I would advocate in moving forward include the following:

1)    The U.S. is not the only nation state on earth - wouldn't each of the other 49 states balk at California deciding to take action in our state just because they are the biggest? It thus behooves us to build multi-nation efforts to end violence. If the structure of the UN prevents that effort from going forward, then  nation states that believe that wars cost too much, should either rework the rules of the UN to remove those barriers or create a new global intergovernmental entity. The entity should be designed with shared power (no veto power given to any single nation) and where consensus is the goal. But in its absence a vote of two-thirds or more of nation states could authorize international peacekeeper deployment to protect citizens, cultural and environmental landmarks. If the U.S. simply redirected funds the President is asking for "modernizing" our nuclear arsenal (a really counter-productive idea I'd suggest) towards this effort it would be highly more sustainable.

2)   Stricter arms control should be adopted and not just for nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, but for all military hardware. A global tax on production of weapons should be collected and deposited with funds being used to support global peacekeeping forces. Gun buyback programs should be monitored by an international intergovernmental entity, like the UN, and should be funded by states that export/profit from arms  sales beyond their border.

3)   The global community should be doing much more to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals they agreed to more than a decade ago.

 

  A good portion of what gets classified as terrorism by government and media arises from the seeds of inequality and injustice. The U.S. and any nation state would be more effective fighting terrorism if they addressed the underlying causes, not just the symptoms. Turn more of the defense budget towards development.

 4)   Employ nonviolent training using examples like the recent Nonviolent Peaceforce project in Syria and related projects with civil society organizations throughout the world. 

 
 
Support efforts of local residents resisting violence like that of Suad Nofel of Syria who has been leading resistance to ISIS since 2013.

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And perhaps most importantly start fostering the teaching of conflict resolution and dialogue processes in the schools, so that we graduate citizens who learn how to solve conflicts without weapons.

A Race With All Losers

Heading off recently to a small fishing village in Mexico for some quiet R&R with some good fiction and Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars in the backpack was mostly a good thing. No television, internet, no crowds, just surf, sun and breezes.



I say mostly, because Dirty Wars was a troubling read. I have been compelled again to investigate and ponder more thoughtfully issues of war and peace when I joined the board of our local Peace Education Center. More recently as I've become co-chair of the PEC, I feel a responsibility to better inform myself  of the complexities of global conflicts and the violence that surrounds them. Scahill's award winning journalism (two prestigious George Polk awards among others) deluges the reader with the forces driving U.S. military and paramilitary actions.

I'll spare you the details, but my immediate reaction (I'm not quite halfway through the 500+ pages) was how can Rumsfeld, Cheney and others not be forced to face prosecution for what they unleashed and to what Obama and his team have continued,under the cover of the War on Terror. Scahill's book is not a simple read. He relies extensively on interviews with members and past members of the military, intelligence, and political arenas. (I would relish a visual picture of the relationships of all the players he consults in pulling this together). There are some places where the evidence seems clear cut and others where he sees it as murky, if not indiscernible.

 

One area that Scahill emphasizes from the beginning is Rumsfeld's desire to consolidate more control over intelligence and special operations into the hands of the Defense department. This coincided with a further weakening (in part through budget re-allocations) of State Department efforts and diplomacy in general. In a more recently published book, Mission Creep: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy, Gordon Adams, a national security scholar, notes even concerns among the military with this approach:

      In 2012, ore than 80 retired senior military leaders sent a letter to Congress asking them not to cut the International Affairs budget that provides resources to civilian diplomacy and development agencies. In 2013, twenty retired three- and four-star generals admirals went to Congress to petition for an increase in the International Affairs budget. Gen. James martin, then commander of US Central Commad, is reported to have said, "If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition." [p.19, note 1]

As I return to frigid temperatures and a deep blanket of white I was assaulted with the announcement that Obama's budget calls for another significant increase in defense spending - a 7% increase on the base military budget - even as we have ended (?) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.




 In the current issue of The Atlantic James Fallows writes in "The Tragedy of the American Military",

     "By the fullest accounting, which is different from usual budget figures, the United Stated will spend more than $1 trillion on national security this year. That includes about $580 billion for the Pentagon's baseline budget plus "overseas contingency" funds, $20 billion in the Department of Energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and Department of Veterans Affairs costs and other expenses. But it doesn't count the $80 billion a year of interest on the military related national debt. After adjustments for inflation, the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War. It will spend as much as the next 10 nations combined - three to five times as much as China, depending upon how you count, and seven to nine times as much as Russia. The world as whole spends about 2 percent of its total income on its militaries; the United States, about 4 percent." [ January/February 2015, p.80]

Top this off with a February 1, 2015 piece by retired  Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore, "War is the New Normal" in which he revisits the "seven reasons why never-ending war is the new normal in America." Once again, this is the military voice speaking, not some chicken hawks like Rumsfeld and Cheney. Read it and get angry!

Seems like President Eisenhower's departing warning has come true -
      


        In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether  sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. [It is useful to read the entire farewell speech here.]

A day after returning from surf and sun my path came across a potentially powerful tonic to the endless war and violence that Scahill, Fallows, Adams, and the President have made more visible.


A new tome by Randall Amster, JD, PhD and director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown has just penned a book I was hoping to write myself, Peace Ecology. I've just scoured the 20 page introduction and believe I have found another soul interested in the links between peace and ecology. Amster is eager to make visible connections that we often miss. Whether he leaves me off the hook to write a tome on the same topic remains to be seen. But his introduction framed by a few quotations worth sharing give me a serious doze of hope.

     "War is a social, economic and ecological disaster. It is totally unsustainable and must be opposed by all who are concerned about meeting the real needs of all people and future generations. The effect of war is most immediate for those who are killed or maimed or made homeless, but the social and ecological consequences reverberate for generations. Among the children who survive, we still don't know the full extent of the psychic damage they have suffered or the degree to which their problems are transmitted to successive generations. War is the ultimate atrocity that dehumanizes victor and vanquished alike; divorcing children from parents, separating families, smashing communities, it deprives its victims of their basic need for love and security in the company of their fellow beings." [David Suzuki, quoted on page 4].

For so many reasons it's long past time to stop the arms race that we run assuming its winnable. Clearly we should have learned by now that it sows perpetual war. We can begin by controlling the expenditures for war and arms. A recent Nation article notes the Obama administration's interest in upgrading our nuclear arsenal, which one "one federal study estimated the cost of this enterprise at $1 trillion." Is there anyone sane enough to think that this money would buy more security if invested in providing access to clean water and energy for the world's disenfranchised?

Apathy is consent!