Fallout

by digby

Reader Sleon wrote to me about Ft Hood massacre and had some provocative thoughts about the potential ramifications:

Because of the way our political and media elites operate, I feel unfortunately secure in predicting that one bit of fallout from this event will be to make itmore difficult, if not impossible for President Obama to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq. Not that he seems inclined to make that tough, but oh, so necessary call anyway, but that likelihood is now somewhere near zero. And that will be an even greater tragedy because it can only mean more US casualties, many more Muslim dead, and the irreplaceable loss of treasure and freedom, here and throughout the world and it will accomplish nothing positive in the end.

Glenn Greenwald regularly points out that a state of continual warfare is incompatible with civil liberties. Ironically, it’s also incompatible with maintaining political hegemony. From “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000” by Paul Kennedy:

“The triumph of any one Great Power…or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequence of the more or less efficient utilization of the state’s economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which the state’s economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason , how a great Power’s position steadily alters in peacetime is as important…as how it fights in wartime.

“It sounds crudely mercantilist to express it this way, but wealth is usually needed to underpin military power and military power is usually needed to acquire and protect wealth. If, however, too large a proportion of the state’s resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is likely to lead to a weakening of national power over the longer term. in the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically – by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars – it runs the risk that the potential benefits…may be outweighed by the great expense of it all-a dilemma that becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline.

“Militarily the United States and USSR stayed in the forefront as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, because they both interpreted international problems in bipolar, and often Manichean terms, their rivalry has driven them into an ever escalating arms race which no other Powers feel capable of matching. Over the same few decades, however, the global productive balances have been altering faster than ever before. The Third World’s share of total manufacturing output,depressed to an all-time low in the decade after 1945 has, has steadily expanded since that time. The European Economic Community has become the world’s largest trading unit. The People’s Republic of China is leaping forward at an impressive rate, …by contrast, both the American and Russian growth rates have become more sluggish, and their shares of global production and wealth have shrunk dramatically since the 1960s.”

We really do stand at the edge of an abyss. One of the most salient indictments of the Bush-Cheney regime was that they were stupid enough to fall for the biggest sucker bet in history, a pointless land war in the Middle East. A sane person might wonder how, with the benefit of 500 years of repetitive history to guide us,and the fall of the ancient empires to boot, even they could have been such idiots. But, as Orwell reminds us in “1984”, the very purpose of war has changed, with the sole object now being to keep the elites in power perpetually:

“The primary aim of modern warfare…is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living…The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence in the long run too intelligent.”

Will the President have the brains and guts to steer us away from this course of self-destruction? Even if he does – and I become lass sanguine about that every day – it’s hard to believe the Owners will let him. And yet with their aversion to reform, their short-sighted greed, their celebration of their own ignorance, they are going to end up being failed parasites; because once they kill the host – we, the people – they’ll end up on history’s trash heap too.