origins of the warfare state: world war ii and the transformation of american politics

While Hollywood continues to romanticize World War II as a “good war,”Carl Boggs portrays the war for what it was: a massive industrial onslaught ofdeath and destruction that killed tens of millions of people and consolidated apermanent American warfare state. Rather than glorifying military violence,Boggs dispassionately explodes myth after myth of the National Security Statethat is today firmly in control of American power and politics. In the post-1945world, when use of weapons of mass destruction to attack civilians has becomecommonplace, Boggs’ critical perspective also contains a moment of hope that wemight yet escape imprisonment by the military-industrial complex.

George Katsiaficas, Wentworth Institute of Technology

Carl Boggs brilliantly exposes the emergence of a permanent “warfare state” bysituating it in the context of the structures, policies, and ideology underlying theU.S. mobilization during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Insightfullylinking the warfare state with historical conditions that gave rise to the U.S. as aglobal hegemon, Boggs provides the reader with an essential understanding of thedevelopments of the national security state and the imperial presidency sinceWWII. Using critical interpretive and analytical approaches, Boggs renders a lucidand compelling study that deserves both scholarly and public attention.

Francis Shor, Wayne State University

Carl Boggs shows us how the “Good War” created global domination andmassive destruction, taking millions of lives while propagandizing events every-where. Historically informed, clearly written, and hard-punching, this is Boggs athis very best.

Michael Parenti, Author of Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies

Carl Boggs has written the most detailed, convincing, and insightful book yet toappear on the origins and spread of the warfare state. Brilliantly dissecting itshistory and the range and scope of the institutions it encompasses, he makes clearthat the United States’ addiction to war is one of its most destructive character-istics. A perpetual-war psychosis now militarizes every aspect of American identityand society – ruining lives, diverting funds needed for the public good, andcrushing the ideals of democracy beneath its death-dealing machinery. If youbelieve that democracy matters, read this book. Origins of the Warfare State ranks asone of the best books of the year.

Henry Giroux, McMaster University

Origins of the Warfare State pries open a subject that has been nailed shut for far toolong – the ongoing bad effects of the “Good War.” This book should be a cat-alyst to explore the realities of how the United States and the rest of the worldcontinue to suffer from dire consequences set in motion by the World War thatended more than seventy years ago. Carl Boggs challenges us to reexaminethe myths and complacency that obscure the continuing harm from America'smost-glorified war.

Norman Solomon, Author of War Made Easy: How Presidents andPundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

In a world where the ruling classes and bourgeoisie are engaging in new forms ofeconomic banditry and outlawry, creating a strategic template that inevitably leadsto military intervention, financial parasitism, mafia globalism, and fascism, Originsof the Warfare State serves as a clarion call to action. Over the past three decadeswe have come to expect from Carl Boggs fearless scholarship in the service ofsocial justice, and this new volume does not disappoint. Here, Boggs clearlyestablishes himself as both critic and visionary, reminding us again why he is oneof the country's most prescient and preeminent social critics and publicintellectuals.

Peter McLaren, Chapman University

ORIGINS OF THE WARFARE STATE

The post-World War II emergence of a full-blown state of perpetual war isarguably the most important feature of contemporary American politics. Thisbook examines the “warfare state” in terms of a broad ensemble of structures,policies, and ideologies: permanent war economy, national security-state, globalexpansion of military bases, merger of state, corporate, and military power, animperial presidency, the nuclear establishment, and superpower ambitions. CarlBoggs makes the argument that the “Good War” led to an authoritarian systemthat has expanded throughout the postwar decades, undermining liberal-democraticinstitutions and values in the process. He goes on to suggest that current Amer-ican electoral politics show no sign of rolling back the warfare state and, in fact,may push it to a new threshold bordering on American fascism.

Carl Boggs is professor of social sciences at National University in Los Angelesand is the author of numerous books in the fields of social theory, Americanpolitics, social movements, film studies, and American foreign policy and militaryhistory. He is recipient of the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award fromthe American Political Science Association.

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ORIGINS OF THEWARFARE STATE

World War II and the Transformationof American Politics

Carl Boggs

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First published 2017by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Taylor & Francis

The right of Carl Boggs to be identified as author of this work has been assertedby him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs andPatents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from thepublishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registeredtrademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intentto infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 9781138204355 (hbk)ISBN: 9781138204362 (pbk)ISBN: 9781315469539 (ebk)

Typeset in Bemboby Taylor & Francis Books

To the Memory of My Father, Carl Boggs, Sr.Among the first of the Atomic Veterans

CONTENTS

Preface xi

Introduction 1

1 From Pearl Harbor to the “Asian Pivot” 17

The American Asia-Pacific Strategy 18The Turning Point 20Myths and Illusions 26War of Annihilation 31The Asian “Strategic Pivot” 33

2 Mobilizing for War 43

A Militarized Society 44A New Power Elite 47The Warfare System since 1945 50The Wreckage of Empire 55

3 U.S. Global Power and the “Higher Immorality” 63

Superpower Unleashed 63Political Demonology 67Warfare against Civilians 74Sanctions as Economic Warfare 84Superpower Legality 89

4 The Curse of Bomb Power 101

Atomic Politics: A New Era 102A “Godlike Power” 109The Nuclear-Industrial Complex 113The Real Nuclear Threat 119

5 The New Imperial Order 129

From Good War to Cold War 130Rise of the Imperial State 135Empire and Technowar 138The NSA: “Collect It All!” 143A Post-Orwellian Society 147

6 The Road to Global Disaster? 151

Postscript: Good-War Propaganda 170

Index 181

x Contents

PREFACE

Today World War II hovers over the American landscape as no other event inhistory—fully seven decades after the final Japanese surrender aboard the USSMissouri in Tokyo harbor. The many enduring consequences of that prolongedinternational conflict are still being felt around the globe, and will continue to befelt well into the future. As the subtitle of this book indicates, moreover, the wargave rise to nothing less than a full-scale transformation of American politics—notto mention economy, foreign policy, and culture—in ways that most people haveby now either forgotten or taken for granted.

World War II was the first truly global war, spanning as it did European, Asian,and African theaters from 1939 to 1945, and was by far the bloodiest ever, withits toll of roughly 60 million dead, nearly half of those in the Soviet Union alone,and a general civilian toll that reached 90 percent of the total. For the U.S.,which suffered as many as 300,000 dead in four years of both European and Asianzones of combat, the war turned into an especially righteous crusade againstunspeakably demonic enemies whose fascist ideology embraced virulent forms ofimperialism, militarism, racism, and (in the case of Nazi Germany) genocide. Thelegacy for American political culture would be the ultimate “Good War”, as theU.S. was presumed to exemplify all the best ideals: peace, democracy, freedom,human rights, a rational social order. No other war—indeed no other event—throughout American history was more celebrated (or dramatized) than WorldWar II.

No fewer than 18 million Americans served in the armed services, withanother 25 million engaged in war production on the home front. In 1945, withEuropean and Asian nations reduced to chaos and ruins, the U.S. would emerge(largely unscathed) as the world’s leading superpower, its economy stronger thanever, its political legitimacy solidified, its military forces scattered across the planet

at dozens of bases reinforced by superior air and naval power, the most advancedtechnology inherited from wartime R&D, and of course its unmatched atomicweapons. The Manhattan Project, after all, had endowed postwar Americanpower with something akin to a Godlike status that served to easily intimidateany rival (including the Soviet Union).

By 1945 neither the politics nor economy of the preeminent superpowerwould ever be the same, drastically altered by several years of sustained combatoperations that demanded virtually unlimited national mobilization. A wareconomy was born—later to become a permanent war economy—dependent onlevels of planning and organization historically unfathomable within a paradigmof liberal capitalism for which state power had been regarded as the quintessentialevil. While social Keynesianism at the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealhad only partially brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression, it was militaryKeynesianism that eventually sufficed to revitalize the American economy andestablish it on a relatively sound domestic and international footing.

Thanks to the blessings of a state-directed economy, by 1943 American fac-tories such as those at the Ford operations in Detroit were producing almost100,000 planes yearly, along with tens of thousands of jeeps, trucks, tanks, andartillery pieces. In 1944 the U.S. was able to deploy 100 aircraft carriers in thePacific Theater, crucial to the war of annihilation against the Japanese—madepossible by round-the-clock industrial activity. Given thorough coordination ofhuman, material, and technological resources, the American war machine neverrested; international battlefield commitments meant full employment, increasedproductivity, stupendous growth, and broadening material prosperity. Owing toheightened R&D, the U.S. was able to develop sophisticated new bombingtechniques, radar, code-breaking, computer-assisted gunnery, even antibiotics tominimize deaths from battlefield wounds—not to mention the atomic bomb. Atthe end of World War II the U.S. had doubled its prewar levels of industrial pro-duction, accounting for no less than 50 percent of the world’s goods and services.Thus, while Europe and Asia faced years and decades of rebuilding, the U.S.could move quickly to expand its global economic, political, and military leverageas a function of its exceptional status. Partially dismantled during the late 1940s,the war economy was quickly reinvigorated with onset of the Cold War and thelengthy Korean intervention, never again to be seriously weakened or seriouslychallenged: by the late 1950s the system would be consolidated, devouringeconomic resources at unprecedented rates—a trajectory maintained up to thepresent time.

From the 1950s onward the American economy would rest on a foundation ofboth social and military Keynesianism, surviving recurrent conservative attacks onthe former—a militarized state-capitalism governed by a rather distinct andextended power structure. A revitalized power elite, which C. Wright Mills wasfirst to analyze in the late 1950s, would be galvanized by a merger of corporate,government, and military interests, reducing the familiar claims of democracy and

xii Preface

free markets to sheer fiction. The war economy, fueled by U.S. internationalambitions, an empire of bases, the Bomb, and a thriving national security-state( justified by means of Cold-War fear and paranoia), would soon constitute thebasis of a warfare state without parallel in human history. Across several postwardecades, this labyrinthine power structure would gain special legitimacy—andglobal clout—within a system of unfettered corporatism, aggressive militarism,and resurgent imperialism—precisely what the Good War was said to haveopposed and defeated. As of this writing (Spring 2016) the warfare state, funded atthe staggering rate of over one trillion dollars yearly, was consuming resources atlevels comparable to all other nations combined.

For the U.S., war had indeed become the “health of the state”, as RandolphBourne had commented after the bloodbath of World War I. Put differently, torepeat General Smedley Butler’s famous characterization, “war is a racket”. Thepermanent warfare system generated by World War II, and subsequentlyembraced by leaders of both major parties, has been a boondoggle not only forthe “state” but for large corporations, banks, the military, and media outletswhere battlefield spectacles (real and contrived) have furnished a nonstop conduitof entertainment, patriotic celebration, and profits. Owing to this behemoth andits sacred institutional and ideological power, what Sheldon Wolin has called anew “power imaginary” emanating from World War II has steadily expanded,with malignant ramifications for political discourse, democracy, and citizenship.While elements of this system were visible throughout earlier phases of Americanhistory, it was the GoodWar that produced a full-blown warfare state indispensableto superpower ambitions from the early 1950s onward.

While “Good War” lore still has a special appeal within postwar U.S. politicalculture, its particular “goodness” would have little resonance for a larger worldthat had endured little but wartime savagery and horrors: the Holocaust, massivebattlefield death and destruction, aerial obliteration of major cities, atomic car-nage, deliberate assaults on civilian populations by all sides in the conflict. Viewedthusly, World War II did give birth to a new international Zeitgeist, reflected inthe Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, founding of the United Nations, andcodifying of universally-accepted human rights. The barbarism of unlimitedwarfare would inspire a new era of international laws, norms, and treaties, butdreams of a more civilized global order were short-circuited in the face of over-whelming U.S. power, which consistently bent the new Zeitgeist toward its owngeopolitical agendas. The world’s biggest superpower—only the Soviet Unionrepresented anything close to a rival—would be undaunted, ever expansive andaggressive in the midst of new military opportunities. Prohibitions against “crimesof peace” (a cornerstone of Nuremberg) would be brazenly and routinely vio-lated by Washington with impunity—in Asia, Central America, Europe, and theMiddle East.

As of this writing, the U.S. has become more involved in armed encountersthan ever: long-term warfare in Afghanistan, deep entanglements in the Middle

Preface xiii

East, bombings in Syria and Iraq, perpetual war on terrorism, the U.S./NATOpush eastward to isolate and diminish Russia, renewed imperial ventures in Asiadriven by the “Asian Pivot”, drone campaigns in several countries, ongoingconflict with Iran. Along the endless campaign trail presidential candidates nevertire of warmongering rhetoric directed against a continuous parade of viciousenemies—Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, terrorist groups such as IslamicState (ISIS), drug traffickers, Muslims, Arabs. Such rhetoric, of course, has longbenefitted the health of the Pentagon and the national security-state. Indeed,permanent war has evolved into the most effective mechanism used by the powerelite to stifle change and block dissent.

As the warfare state grows more institutionalized with each passing year, abroad range of harmful domestic consequences becomes ever more visible. In theshadow of perpetual war and militarism, legitimated by a xenophobic ideology,we see a persistent culture of violence that draws abundant energy from a Hob-besian state of nature that Americans commonly view as something of an exis-tential threat to their milieu of peace and stability. Violence has become anormalized, taken-for-granted dimension of postwar American life, replete with asacred gun culture, blood-saturated media, rampage killings, urban gangs,domestic terrorism, militarized police forces, and the world’s largest prison com-plex. A flourishing U.S. gun industry, which sells tens of billions of dollars worthof high-powered weapons across the globe, dovetails with an increasingly turbu-lent urban scene where 1.4 million Americans have been murdered or injured byfirearms just since 2001. This same gun culture feeds international smugglingnetworks, drug cartels, city gangs, local militias, international terrorist groups, anddeath squads. Politicians pander to this lucrative industry and its well-fundedlobbies, meanwhile calling for augmented military spending, “modernization” ofnuclear weapons, increased troop deployments, and more vigorous response toforeign “threats”—an outlook ironically resonant of that very fascism the Alliesfought so valiantly to crush in World War II.

Given this epic significance of World War II, including its dramatic impact onAmerican society and politics, one might have expected a proliferation of criticalscholarship among leading progressives over the years since 1945, but alas suchexpectations have not come to fruition. The study of World War II has been leftalmost entirely to mainstream scholars, journalists, and participants, usuallyimmersed in Good War mythology; the left, for its part, has been on the wholemysteriously silent. Those few leftists who set out to analyze the vast historicalramifications of that war—C. Wright Mills, Fred Cook, Seymour Melman,Gabriel Kolko—did so many years ago and, sadly, their work has never gottenthe political and intellectual attention it deserved. More recent critical work onWorld War II is sadly difficult to locate. Even Howard Zinn’s seminal volume,People’s History of the United States, devotes only a few pages to World War II, andvirtually nothing about its consequences. The reasons for such lacunae among pro-gressives call forth yet another discussion, but that will have to wait until a future

xiv Preface

day. Whatever the reasons, and they are probably many, one of my central aimsin writing this book has been to help fill that unfortunate intellectual and politicalvacuum.

World War II has always been one of my consuming interests: even duringchildhood I devoured whatever books, documentaries, and movies on the topic Icould locate. My father served throughout the war as a navy officer, commandingan LST during the landings at Okinawa and elsewhere across the Pacific. He wascaught in the midst of “Halsey’s Typhoon” at the end of the war, barely surviv-ing. He was aboard the USS Tennessee during the Japanese attacks on PearlHarbor. During college years I continued to explore many of the fascinatingaspects of World War II where time permitted. I probably assimilated a strongdose of Good-War mythology during my childhood and later, though over timemore critical readings served to challenge and unsettle important beliefs I hadtaken for granted—a “resocialization” process that has left its strong imprint onthe pages that follow. Having written several books on different aspects of U.S.militarism and imperialism over the past decade, moreover, I came to realize thatso much ideological discourse surrounding every American war has been riddledwith deceit, half-truths, and distortions—and World War II is no exception.

Abundant thanks are in order for those colleagues and friends who in differentways have contributed to this work: George Katsiaficas, Peter McLaren, MichaelParenti, Tom Pollard, and Ray Pratt have lent their generous intellectual andemotional support for this as well as earlier writing projects. I owe a special debtto the late Sheldon Wolin, inspiring as a political theory teacher at the Universityof California, Berkeley and author of seminal books—above all Democracy, Inc.,which more than any other contemporary text resonates with the main argu-ments set forth in here. I would be remiss not to mention Alan Adler and thewonderful employees at Panini Café in Marina del Rey, California, where somuch of this book was assembled and written. My editor for this project, JenniferKnerr, deserves special thanks for her encouragement and patience. The deepestgratitude goes to Laurie Nalepa, my longtime companion who has often seemedjust as passionately engaged in the work as the author himself.

Carl BoggsLos Angeles, March 2016

Preface xv

INTRODUCTION

Viewed across the historical expanse of seven decades, World War II can now beunderstood as the most transformative event in twentieth-century American history—if not indeed world history covering the same time span. The first truly globalconflagration, the war (spanning six years) produced unspeakable death anddestruction in three continents and many countries, leaving behind defeated andruined societies that would need years, if not decades, of reconstruction. Tens ofmillions of people were killed, the vast majority civilians. Tens of millions morewere wounded or displaced. Dozens of cities were turned into burnt-out ruins.While Germany, Japan, Italy, the Soviet Union, and China suffered most, theU.S. actually emerged from the war stronger than ever, thriving in the aftermathof full-scale mobilization that effectively rescued the nation from miseries of theGreat Depression. With a dynamic economy, comparatively few military losses,no home-front devastation, a sprawling warfare state, and newly-establishedempire of bases, the U.S. would achieve supremacy in the new postwar worldorder—a leading, prosperous, aggressive superpower with unlimited ambitions.

The postwar consequences of what in the U.S. came to be known as the GoodWar would be far-reaching, deep, and more or less permanent. World War II hadnot only bequeathed to America a superpower agenda but a permanent wareconomy and national security-state, with an enlarged economic, political, andmilitary presence from Europe to Asia, Latin America to the Middle East. It alsobrought Washington into conflict with its only potential rival—a severely debili-tated but still militarily potent Soviet Union—leading to a Cold War that lastedinto the early 1990s. Just as crucial, a new power structure was born, built on amerger of government, corporate, and military interests—a system that wouldbecome even more concentrated and authoritarian over time. Meanwhile, Americansociety was becoming increasingly militarized, as the warfare state—stoked by

several years of full-scale mobilization—would significantly reshape diverse realmsof public life: government, business, education, technology, the media, popularculture (above all film).

After 1945 the American warfare behemoth began to assume a life of itsown—a source of national pride, international power, and material prosperity.During World War II some 16 million American citizens had served in uniformacross Europe and the Pacific, with nearly eight million still abroad at the end ofthe war. A wide confluence of factors ensured the durability of a militarizedeconomy and security state ruled by an imperial presidency: superpower goals,military Keynesianism, the influence of corporate lobbies and think tanks, tech-nological agendas, a contrived arms race, payoffs to Congressional politicians,simple (Pentagon) bureaucratic inertia. Clearly some form of powerful stateapparatus—or modern Leviathan—would be required to integrate the far-reachinginterests and operations of a superpower. While military Keynesianism did feedindustrial growth and material prosperity (at least for some), it simultaneouslydeflected crucial resources from the domestic infrastructure, including vital urbanservices, environmental supports, and everyday social needs including educationand health care.

World War II gave birth to innovative directions in technology, driven bymilitary imperatives—above all atomic weapons, which reproduced a distinctivepolitics and culture of domination made possible by historic atom-splittingoperations at the Manhattan Project. If nuclear technology was nothing short ofapocalyptic throughout the postwar years, other inventions would likewise haveenduring repercussions, including radar, jet propulsion, rockets, incendiary devices,super fortress bombers, and cluster-bombs—not to mention the first fully-operational computers. What has been described as “technowar” first system-atically unfolded during World War II. The military-technology nexus wouldnaturally expand across the decades: today nearly 70 percent of federal researchand development funding goes directly to the Pentagon, which conducts itsR&D through a sprawling network of universities and laboratories.

If a new world emerged out of the ashes of the Good War, that world wouldbe deeply burdened by a legacy of unimaginable horrors and catastrophes inEurope and Asia. Thanks to the first appearances of technowar—including savageforms of aerial terrorism—civilians bore the brunt of wartime death and destruc-tion, in many cases (as with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) theresult of deliberate and systematic attacks on defenseless urban populations. At thetime there were no viable international rules of engagement or laws prohibitingwar crimes that might have blocked or at least impeded such barbarism—muchless the Nazi Holocaust targeting Jews and others. Of course the postwar globalorder would seek to rectify this tragic void, first through the Nuremberg andTokyo criminal tribunals, then with formation of the United Nations, then withinternational passage of the Geneva Protocols to codify rules of militarybehavior. These tribunals, unfortunately, were deeply marred by a set of

2 Introduction

procedures (ad hoc, partial) guaranteed to bring only victor’s justice, destined tocompromise hopes for arriving at genuine principles of universality. As for theHolocaust, it would generate political energies (mainly in Europe) behind theformation of the state of Israel, with all its continuing and explosive postwarramifications for the Middle East and beyond.

Finally, the immediate aftermath of World War II witnessed an intense periodof upheavals, civil wars, revolutions, and struggles for national liberation. Oldempires ruled by Britain, France, and Belgium were crumbling and gave way topopular movements for local independence and sovereignty. New charismaticleaders appeared on the scene: Josef Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, Mahatma Gandhi inIndia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria, Mao Zedongin China, Sukarno in Indonesia, and Fidel Castro (along with Che Guevara) inCuba. At least four of these postwar revolutions—in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam,and Cuba—would, in challenging American power, feed the ongoing momentumof a warfare-state politics.

The post-World War II emergence of a full-blown warfare state is arguably themost important feature of contemporary American politics, leading to dramaticchanges across the entire society. While the rise of a military-industrial complexhas been widely recognized by critics and supporters of U.S. foreign policyalike—it was given credibility, after all, by conservative president Dwight Eisen-hower—somewhat less understood have been the origins of this rather uniquepower structure. For purposes of this book, the “warfare state” refers to a broadensemble of structures, policies, and ideologies: permanent war economy,national security-state, global expansion of military bases, merger of state, corpo-rate, and military power, an imperial presidency, the nuclear establishment, super-power ambitions. This behemoth has been sustained and legitimated through adeeply-entrenched culture of militarism, itself largely a product of World War II.Whether under Republican or Democratic governance, the warfare state hasevolved according to its own seemingly unmovable logic, undeterred by domesticconstraints, material or human costs, international law, binding treaties, or com-peting national rights or interests. Whatever political or moral judgments mightbe rendered about the indelible Good War—an epic period in both Americanand world history—the argument here is that this remarkably popular war led toan authoritarian system that has expanded throughout the postwar decades,undermining liberal-democratic institutions and values in the process.

While the long history of U.S. military engagements before 1941 is well known,the appearance of a large-scale military-industrial system—a new kind of colossus—dates back to World War II, which first brought full-scale wartime mobilization,a global military presence, and unfettered imperial objectives. To mention such aphenomenon suggests a political order constantly at war or preparing for war, theessence of a perpetual military apparatus built on a continuous flow of material,structural, and ideological resources. It suggests further, endless Americanencounters across a Hobbesian global terrain riddled with chaos and violence,

Introduction 3

with demonic enemies to be fought: fascists, Communists, rogue nations, drugtraffickers, terrorists of many stripes. Although few U.S. military encounters inhistory could be aptly described as “good wars”, most if not all were generallyunderstood as “necessary”, morally imperative, a dire matter of “nationalsecurity”—a patriotic sacrifice needed to protect freedom and democracy, evenWestern Civilization. With ongoing and rarely-questioned postwar expansion ofmilitary power, the World War II legacy has nourished a deepening (thoughoften disguised) warrior ethos championed by a media culture saturated withnotions of American exceptionalism. More than that: the very actuality of awarfare state with recurrent ventures around the world has become, if not adistinctly American way of life, something uniformly endorsed, taken-for-granted,even celebrated.

The warfare state is driven by high levels of economic and technologicalgrowth, a bulwark of U.S. global military supremacy since the 1940s and crucialto the ethos of national exceptionalism. The belief in a uniquely noble superpower(that contrasts with all previous great powers and empires) standing for freedom,democracy, and peace, coexists with the premise that U.S. leaders should havefreedom to set their own rules and laws of international behavior. The result isutter collapse of the principle of universality—a trend going back to the postwarNuremberg and Tokyo tribunals that were anything but impartial or balanced.Such collapse was hastened (and further justified) by onset of the Cold War, anoutgrowth of U.S.-Soviet conflict that had festered even before the 1945 armistice,as virtually any policy or action could be defended in the fight against Communism.

The postwar development of a militarized society calls forth yet another jarringtruth: most U.S. wars have failed the test of necessity—that is, national defense—arising instead from fabricated crises and deceits used to manipulate public opinion.This was the pattern even before World War II, as shown by the flimsy pretextsfor war against Mexico (1846) and Spain (1898), and later the bogus case for U.S.involvement in World War I (and subsequent invasion of Russia). These wereunabashed imperial adventures having little to do with security or defense; the U.S.was never attacked or even threatened. Post-World War II machinations, how-ever, were far more ideologically defined as the corporate media played cheerleaderfor any U.S. military intervention abroad. Three major postwar ventures—inKorea, Indochina, the Persian Gulf/Iraq—were scarcely necessary; with minimalWashington efforts at diplomacy the bloodshed of millions of people would havebeen avoided. The phony rationale behind George W. Bush’s war against Iraq in2003—eliminating weapons of mass destruction—is too well-known (and toowell-documented) to require further elaboration here. As for World War II itself,there are plenty of reasons to conclude that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor(extensively discussed in Chapter 1) might also have been avoided—that in fact itwas deliberately provoked by a series of U.S. policies, as we shall see.

In the several decades since World War II, the presence of an American war-fare state has contributed greatly to the steady growth of an authoritarian power

4 Introduction

structure—a system legitimated by strong public belief in the unique goodness ofAmerican history, politics, and culture, in the U.S. as the world’s greatestdemocracy with a vibrant Constitution and free markets, a citadel of the “freeworld”. Behind these comforting myths has resided a complex institutional matrixof state, corporate, and military interests, basis of a new form of state-capitalism.

This postwar trajectory was first analyzed by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s, hisclassic, The Power Elite, describing an oligarchical system ruled by interwovengovernment, business, and military elites, their roles largely interchangeable anddetached from citizen participation, or any semblance of democratic politics.1

Writing at a juncture when the warfare state had become a “permanent fixture”,Mills observed: “As the institutional means of power and the means of commu-nication that tie them together become steadily more efficient, those now incommand of them have come into command of instruments of rule quite unsurpassedin the history of mankind.”2 For Mills, anticipating more concentrated power inthe decades ahead, the enormous thrust of an American-style state-capitalism wasbound to clash with the basic requisites of democracy and free markets, yieldingto a logic of domination. The American labyrinth was mainly an outgrowth ofWorld War II, when “the merger of the corporate economy and the militarybureaucracy came into its present-day significance”,3 deepening the convergenceof “private” and “public” interests. The resulting erosion of democratic citizen-ship and institutional accountability was, for Mills, endemic to this new system ofrule. It is an enduring tribute to Mills, fully attuned to the war economy andsecurity state, that he could already write that “ … the structural clue to thepower elite today lies in the enlarged and military state” where “virtually allpolitical and economic actions are now judged in terms of military definitions ofreality.”4 Mills’ seminal work preceded by just a few years President Eisenhower’sfamous reference to a “military-industrial complex of vast proportions”.

The power structure that Mills explored in the 1950s has grown steadily morecentralized and authoritarian in the midst of several wars, a solidified war econ-omy and security state, a pervasive corporate media, and the pressures of neo-liberal globalization. A more boldly imperialist politics since the 1980s has simplyreinforced this trajectory, exacerbated by a profound rightward shift in politicalideology, coinciding with greater U.S. involvement in the Middle East, a regionof violent chaos and breakdown that fuels warfare-state mobilization. Whether“liberal” or “conservative”, Democrat or Republican, corporate-military statismhas become a defining feature of American politics, while patriotism (or super-patriotism) constitutes the most central hegemonic belief-system of Empire,cutting across every social division.

Under these conditions, government spending has predictably skyrocketedsince the 1940s, especially at the federal level, whatever party controls the pre-sidency or Congress. During Ronald Reagan’s administration, for example, whenRepublicans screamed about the evils of “big government”, federal expendituresgrew by roughly 40 percent, from $678 billion yearly in 1981 to nearly $1.2

Introduction 5

trillion in 1989. While Reagan declared at his Inaugural Address in 1981 that“freedom demands limited government”, he presided over record-level budgetaryincreases, an orgy of spending for the Pentagon, law enforcement, intelligence,prisons, and Star Wars—priorities considered essential to “national security”,thereby made palatable to the American public. It was Reagan—not a “tax-and-spend liberal”—who imposed strict protectionist barriers against Japanese goods,authored huge Savings and Loan bailouts, and diverted massive tax revenues intothe military and space programs as well as the senseless War on Drugs. Later,when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress from 2001 to2006—when “free marketers” were able to dictate policy—federal spending rosemore than ten percent, the bulk consumed by the military and its prolonged warsin Afghanistan and Iraq, which eventually cost several trillion dollars.

President Bush’s projected military budget for 2009 was $805 billion (morethan a trillion dollars if veterans’ benefits are included), a staggering upsurge from$358 billion in 2000 when “big-spending liberals” occupied the White House.U.S. military outlays in 2009 equaled those of the next eight largest nationscombined, including supposed threats Russia and China. Total 2009 federalspending, happily endorsed by a “free-market” president, reached three trilliondollars as the fearsome national debt soared past $106 trillion. In late 2008, as theAmerican economy descended into severe crisis, free-enterprise champion Bushearmarked several hundreds of billions to save Wall Street, banks, insurancecompanies, and the auto industry—emphatically statist measures later carriedforward and augmented by the Barack Obama administration.

The present size and scope of U.S. military power is nothing less than stu-pendous, its budget consuming (in 2015) more than half of all discretionaryspending—at roughly one trillion dollars dwarfing any other nation’s expendi-tures. During Obama’s presidency the Pentagon was employing more than threemillion people, owned two trillion dollars in property worldwide, held fully 80percent of the federal inventory, operated several thousand bases domestically andglobally, and managed a nuclear arsenal bigger than all other atomic powerscombined. Driven by a fervent military Keynesianism, Pentagon spending hasspiked economic growth but has also contributed to the disintegration of socialprograms and public infrastructure, as resources that go to missiles, planes, ships,and guns mean less for roads, water and power facilities, bridges, transportation,and education. Along with rising American GDP come dilapidated civilian ser-vices and supports, while Republicans (theoretical champions of small govern-ment) feverishly agitate for heightened Pentagon expenditures. More than sheerhypocrisy, this reflects the degree to which the warfare state has become firmlyinstitutionalized, embedded in the culture, accepted as a way of life.

The question arises here as to whether the American superpower can maintainits global supremacy, whether it can continue a vigorous program of militaryKeynesianism without imploding economically and politically. That is surely avalid question. The evidence to date (early 2016) suggests the U.S. is perfectly

6 Introduction

capable of funding a gigantic warfare state, with its international presence, evenwhere the civilian economy is extensively weakened. Immanuel Wallerstein hassuggested that, with the economic rise of Europe and East Asia—that is, withnew challenges to U.S. global hegemony—sustaining its military capabilities willbe increasingly difficult.5 True, as Wallerstein observes, the U.S. is no longer themain center of capital accumulation in the world—but that has not yet triggeredany serious deterioration of its military budget or its vast empire of bases.

Warfare-state agendas reveal yet another truth about postwar American politics:the “libertarian” perspective on state power, in whatever ideological guise, turnsout to be a shameful fraud. The idea of government cutbacks, or fiscal austerity,turns out to be entirely selective and arbitrary, hardly a matter of principle (areducing of evil governmental power). It is sometimes forgotten that federalgovernment carries out an endless array of functions: regulation, public owner-ship, law enforcement, education and research, social programs, infrastructuredevelopment, corporate bailouts, intelligence, and of course military operations.A closer look at actual (rather than professed) political behavior reveals that “lib-ertarians” level their sights against just three of these functions: regulation, own-ership, and social programs, while happily promoting even more generousfunding for all others—with military, intelligence, law enforcement, and prisonsespecially privileged. Surpassing Democrats, in fact, Republicans have emergedas champions of big government, not to mention big (unregulated) corporations,big banks, big military, big drug war, and of course big superpower. Big bailoutscould be added to this list. The free-market pretensions of American con-servatives, Tea Party ideologues in the lead, have never moved beyond fancifulrhetoric. Enthusiastic supporters of the warfare state—and the endless militaryinterventions it fosters—they are content being (otherwise despised) Keynesiansin practice so long as the spending orgy happens to fit their narrow ideologicalpreferences, which fully mesh with an authoritarian power structure hostile toboth democracy and free markets.6

The warfare state has, oddly enough, generated few critics within mainstreamAmerican political, intellectual, and cultural life. The most insightful and dedi-cated opposition has come from progressives—Mills, Fred Cook, SeymourMelman, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and, more recently, Chalmers Johnsonand Chris Hedges. One of the newer critiques can be found in Sheldon Wolin’sDemocracy, Inc. (2008), which explores the strong authoritarian turn of postwarAmerican politics.7 Wolin questions whether democracy—even the minimalistsort—can have much future in an era of expanding corporate, state, and bureau-cratic power further enlarged by the insatiable U.S. drive for global hegemony.He argues that “One cannot point to any national institutions that [today] can beaccurately described as democratic …”.8 Congress, the presidency, the courtsystem, parties, bureaucracies, the media, corporate workplaces, schools and uni-versities—all these arenas of public life are hierarchical, lack meaningful account-ability, and allow for little deep or sustained citizen participation. In fact power

Introduction 7

has become so concentrated across the American landscape that few commenta-tors nowadays even pause to take notice, all-the-while continuing to employ thelabel “democracy” without any sense of irony.

Wolin identifies a key turning-point for American politics in the expanded“power imaginary” that took hold after World War II. Wartime mobilization,superpower goals, a security state, and the war economy all extended theboundaries of power, eroded parts of the Constitution, and stoked concentratedmilitary and corporate power, consistent with what Mills had earlier written. Theclassical liberalism of (relatively) free markets, limited government, local govern-ance, and social autonomy had lost whatever efficacy it possessed, even as politi-cians, the media, and educational system celebrated the special virtues of“American democracy”. The new “power imaginary” coincided with furthergrowth of large-scale organization, global expansion, perpetual war, a cohesiveelite culture, and general ideological consensus. As Wolin observes, however, thetruly novel aspect of this shift was its vast scope, for the U.S. had from the veryoutset been a colonial-settler nation committed to “progress” by means of con-quest and expansion under the aegis of “Manifest Destiny”. A broadened “powerimaginary” has further elevated this legacy from the late 1940s onward.

Most crucially, the warfare state reveals an intimate connection betweensuperpower politics and domestic authoritarian rule, as popular governanceshrinks in the face of expanding corporate, state, and military power. This phe-nomenon has become even more noteworthy in the post-9/11 milieu of heigh-tened vigilance associated with the war on terrorism. Since the early 1990s, if notearlier, jihadic terrorism has spread dramatically as a response to Empire in theform of blowback, while at the same time providing great stimulus behind themilitarization of American society. Constraints on the exercise of elite power,globally and domestically, have steadily weakened. The specter of a vengefulsuperpower at war against barbaric enemies in the form of al Qaeda and IslamicState (ISIS) points, once again, to a Hobbesian state of nature in which threat ofanarchic chaos is (must be) countered by the awesome force of a global Levia-than. Of course imperial power itself dictates ongoing military intervention, dip-lomatic manipulation, global surveillance, maximum elite flexibility, and thefamous “bipartisan consensus” in which ideological differences vanish on ques-tions of foreign and military policy. These are clearly signposts of an authoritarianstate, where democratic citizenship increasingly narrows.

As the new “power imaginary” reshapes the public landscape, familiar illusions—citizen participation, free markets, limited government, human rights, rule of law—gain special rhetorical appeal at the top of the power structure. The systemdemands basic agreement on the “big issues” (economy, military spending, foreignpolicy), with dissent marginalized or channeled into debates over peripheral con-cerns. Formal attributes of liberal democracy survive in the rituals of party competi-tion, elections, legislative activity, and presidential debates, but have diminishedrelevance where (inWolin’s words) “opposition has not been liquidated but rendered

8 Introduction

feckless”, where discordant views are filtered out and neutralized.9 Alternatives tobusiness-as-usual are nullified more through well-managed ideological consensusrather than through state coercion or heavy-handed government propaganda.

In such an undemocratic system, Rupert Murdoch and his NewsCorporationturn out to be far more potent—with nonstop system-affirming messages in theform of “news” and “entertainment”—than Josef Goebbels and his crude Nazitechniques could have ever imagined. For Murdoch and his global media apparatus,wars are beneficial—fodder for TV or movie spectacles, not to mention stu-pendous corporate profits and patriotic catharsis. As for American political discourse,it routinely avoids issues related to the distribution of power, wealth, and resourceswhile replicating the “consensus” on global affairs: genuine debate over Pentagonfunding is generally off-limits, as revenues inevitably go up, rarely down. Expensive,often superfluous or useless weapons systems (including nuclear projects) are readilypassed by Congress, even during times of purported fiscal austerity. Given themammoth scale of the war economy—and its degree of institutionalization—bigspending logically follows the modus operandi of an imperial power.

For the U.S. in the early twenty-first century, as opposed to all previousimperial systems, more coercive instruments of domination become counter-productive in an age of technological rationality, media culture, and “informa-tional revolution”, when the political system retains outer features of liberaldemocracy. Thus “participation” is a normal, legitimate (and legitimating) featureof the system, but always within strict limits. In fact both the corporate state andwar economy function best with some degree of political disengagement as distinctfrom the mass mobilization that ostensibly characterized moments of historicalfascism and Communism. In classical fascism, however, the general populationwas for the most part largely excluded from governance, whereas the genius ofthe contemporary American order is that it effectively depoliticizes and demobilizesthe vast majority of people while trumpeting the wonderful virtues of democracy,pluralism, free elections, and open debate.

Such a highly-illiberal state of affairs—appropriate to an administered society—echoes Herbert Marcuse’s familiar thesis of “one dimensionality”, though forMarcuse the problem of ideological domination resided mainly in the workingsof technological rationality.10 Advanced capitalism, in Marcuse’s view, hadbecome increasingly “totalitarian” behind a sophisticated liberal-democraticfaçade, which obscures and mystifies the power structure while subverting criticalthought and oppositional politics. Thus:

By virtue of the way it has organized its technical base, contemporaryindustrial society tends to be totalitarian. For ‘totalitarian’ is not only a ter-roristic political coordination of society but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs byvested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective oppositionagainst the whole.11

Introduction 9

For Marcuse, one-dimensional ideology is continuously reproduced within thepolitical system and media culture. Although Marcuse never directly addressedthe warfare state, his work pointed toward the same authoritarian trajectory forpostwar American society as did Mills.

Marcuse’s searing critique of technological rationality—more salient today thanin 1964—would seem to raise the prospect of an imminent fascist politics, thoughMarcuse himself never explicitly took up the issue in One-Dimensional Man.Elsewhere, however, Marcuse argued that fascism or its equivalent could emergefrom a “highly-organized capitalism” (state-capitalism) as it enforces the structuraland ideological contours of a rationalized new order, perhaps along lines of the“totalitarianism” mentioned in one-dimensional society. He argued, lookingahead, that “the idea of dictatorship and of authoritarian direction of the state isnot at all foreign to liberalism.”12 For historical fascism (notably in the Italiancase), we know that the regimes sought a more rationalized (and militarized)capitalist economy while retaining (or pretending to retain) important elements ofpre-industrial society and culture.

The steady ascent of a modern warfare state renders the task of making con-ceptual sense of the unique American power structure challenging—perhaps whyit has been taken up so infrequently. Mainstream observers remain trapped incivics textbook-style accounts, where “democracy” amounts to little more thanritualized discourse. Selected prefixes to “democracy”—elitist, pluralist, capitalist,polyarchic, representative, and so forth—scarcely help matters since close investi-gation of American politics reveals something less flattering than “democracy”,even if a number of familiar trappings persist. At the same time, conventionalreferences to “power elite”, “state monopoly capitalism”, “welfare-state capital-ism”, and the like offer few novel insights into more complex power dynamics.The defining characteristics of a vibrant democracy (citizen participation, populargovernance, open political discourse, a well-informed public, institutionalaccountability) do not significantly apply to a system dominated by the wareconomy, security state, and transnational corporations. Some labels fail to riseabove lazy sloganeering: thus both “oligarchy” and “plutocracy” capture abun-dant truths about postwar American politics, but furnish little of substanceregarding ideology, politics, and foreign policy. At the other extreme, the ColdWar “totalitarian” model first theorized by Hannah Arendt in the early 1950s—meant to define both fascist and Communist regimes—always exaggerated thetotalizing or monolithic character of even the most despotic systems, obscuringwhat many scholars eventually demonstrated was a far more complex and pluralreality—especially in the case of fascism.13

While the U.S. shares many characteristics with other advanced capitalistsocieties, the unprecedented expanse of the warfare state appears sui generis,without systemic parallel. Today the U.S. is the wealthiest, most economically-developed nation in world history, its ruling elite in control of the largest—andmost far-reaching—warfare system ever and fueled by a righteous legacy of

10 Introduction

national exceptionalism, its superpower status embedded in the most extremepatriotic ideology. This is a nation that has repeatedly and bloodily intervened inother lands, though with few actual territorial conquests. For two centuries it hasembraced norms of liberal democracy, however partial and truncated—normsultimately diminished by colonialism, racism, large-scale poverty, and grosslyunequal class and power structures.

As the warfare state sinks deeper roots into American public life, it is worthasking whether something akin to a fascist trajectory might indeed be on thehorizon. There are powerful trends favoring such development—from imperialreach and militarism to unfettered corporate power, an authoritarian state, and anincreasingly propagandistic media culture. Could a postwar militarized state-capitalism morph into something comparable to historical fascism, without theparticular symbols and extremes of the Hitler and Mussolini era? Wolin is onetheorist who poses the specter of a “fascist equivalent” for the U.S., in the formof what he calls an “inverted totalitarianism”.14 Could a modern, highly-rationalizedauthoritarian system be the outgrowth of a gradual, evolutionary process, incontrast to a radical departure from existing social forces, economic interests, andpolitical institutions? (Despite widespread myths, in fact nowhere did classicalfascism constitute this kind of rupture with the past.) No doubt the already-existingsystem described by Wolin has begun to resemble earlier fascist societies, thoughat this juncture the parallel would be more ideological than structural.

If trends pointing toward a distinctive American fascism are currently visible,analysis of conditions favorable to its long-term success (or failure) would seem tobe in order, but such an approach is evaded by those, like Naomi Wolf, whowarn of an imminent Nazism much like the German model of the early 1930s.15

If factors contributing to a future American fascism are to be understood, then theextreme Nazi case is largely useless to the task: modern fascism is unlikely tofollow the classic revolutionary-break pattern, a more probable scenario being alengthy process of historical transformation that extends, rather than overturns,existing power and class arrangements. In fact this was essentially the case even forclassical fascism. In diverse settings ranging from Germany to Italy, Japan, andSpain, fascists typically rose to power through a coalition of social forces, includ-ing big business and the military, allied with traditional interests (landholders, theChurch, monarchy) that won mass support through sophisticated multi-classappeals to nationalism and pre-industrial values. Social forces, political alliances,and historical conditions vital to the ascendancy of fascist movements, parties, andespecially regimes did not appear suddenly or unexpectedly, as Wolf and othersseem to believe, but evolved across relatively large expanses of time.

What, then, of a possible fascist outcome for an American superpower thattoday possesses so many historical fascist indicators but departs from many others?If democratic structures and practices are in fact severely eroded, the questionarises as to what institutional, ideological, and material barriers might stand in theway of a more full-blown authoritarian system, or “fascist equivalent”. Is the

Introduction 11

contemporary U.S., with the most powerful war machine and imperial presenceever known, on the path to a new type of fascism, one that might today bevisible within the very framework of liberal democracy?

Chris Hedges is among those writers, so far small in number, convinced thatcertain ideological strains of classical fascism are now deeply entrenched withinAmerican public life. In his book American Fascists (2006), Hedges charts the riseof a pervasive Christian fundamentalism he believes could prefigure a moredeveloped theocratic order, or a new kind of fascism. According to Hedges, in2006 there were some 70 million “evangelicals” in the U.S., belonging toroughly 200,000 churches and such mass organizations as the Christian Coalition,Eagle Forum, and Focus on the Family, their presence reinforced by a far-reaching media empire. As true believers, evangelicals are often filled with rageand intolerance, anxious to cleanse the world of infidels and enemies (of whichthere are obviously many), by means of violent warfare if needed. Hedges devotesattention to a thriving right-wing Christianity that embraces a rabid patriotismand fetishism of U.S. military power, inevitable for a political culture where “waris the final aesthetic of the movement”.16 Possessed of an unshakeable sense ofmoral certitude, evangelicals occupy the core of a “warrior culture” dominatedby white men, its followers ready to battle omnipresent forces of evil and darkness—savagely “un-American” forces that, in the wake of 9/11, are primarily defined asArabs and Muslims. Political violence, though fiercely condemned as “terrorism”

when practiced by other nations and groups, amounts to something of a sacredpractice for Americans, a cleansing tonic sanctioned by God and nation.17

What Hedges views as a “callous, hateful, ruthless ideology” surely has ante-cedents in historical fascism, especially when fortified by an ethos of victimism(Vietnam syndrome, 9/11) producing an insatiable quest for revenge againstwrongdoers. Elements of such an ideology are particularly visible among Tea-Party Republicans, who appropriate new forms of traditional, homespun, God-fearing Protestantism that had previously converged with racist, colonial, andchauvinistic elements of U.S. history. A key question today revolves aroundwhether existing conditions, intersecting with warfare-state politics, might befavorable to a systemic fascist outcome grounded in the reactionary populism thatHedges finds so widespread. If the survival of liberal democracy, in howeveremaciated a form, clouds the issue, one might still concede that strong ideologicalparallels between historical fascism and contemporary American warfare-stateideology are too salient to ignore. Here the “palingenetic” outlook connectingultranationalism, imperialism, and militarism that Roger Griffin considers alinchpin of European fascism, when placed alongside extended corporate power,recalls much (though surely not all) of interwar fascist political culture.

Griffin’s penetrating analysis of classical fascism—derived appropriately from theItalian model—seems relevant in many ways to American circumstances, despiteimportant historical differences. Looking at the “palingenetic form of populistultranationalism” that swept Europe in the years after World War I, he posits a

12 Introduction

“fascist minimum” stretching across geographical divisions in which those move-ments and regimes appeared.18 The ideology, most volatile at times of social crisis,promised national regeneration, a “new start” in a Hobbesian world riddled withcorruption, decay, and threatening forces. For Griffin, fascism championed ultra-nationalism as the most powerful and unifying of beliefs—all the more explosivewhen reinforced by strong religious values—a source of patriotic rebirth andcatharsis bringing to the masses a keen sense of collective empowerment. Fascistleaders skillfully manipulated a popular yearning for national identity throughlarge-scale political engineering: state planning, merger of government and bigbusiness, a powerful military apparatus, armed interventions, and ideologicalmobilization.

In the classic pattern, fascism built momentum from the powerful surge ofexisting societal forces not far removed from the militarized state-capitalism ana-lyzed by Mills and Wolin. Palingenetic motifs explored by Griffin have influ-enced American politics for several decades: national exceptionalism, militarism,imperialism, religious messianism, deregulated corporate power. If these seemcompatible with the American liberal tradition and its pluralist norms, the same wasat least partially true of historical fascism: less “totalitarian” than commonly believed,the regimes actually constituted an early variant of militarized state-capitalism wherepowerful interests retain some measure of leverage and autonomy.

While Mussolini and other fascist elites did mount an assault on liberalism,venerating state power and the dynamic role of great leaders, the assumption thata fascist outcome in the U.S. would mean a sharp break with established demo-cratic institutions seems misplaced. First, it exaggerates the present vitality ofAmerican liberalism which, as mentioned, has been for many decades compro-mised by the war economy, security state, and corporate power. Second, itignores the likelihood that any fascist shift will be a product of historical forcesand social interests already at work—rather than some diabolical scheme leadingto a revolution or coup. As Bertram Gross presciently argued many years ago, auniquely American fascism is likely to be a more “friendly” variant, withoutmajor political disruptions, governmental terror, paramilitary operations, Mussolini-style demagoguery, or even outright attacks on the Constitution.19 Modern-dayfascists, operating under more palatable labels, could readily succeed within theframework of corporate-state institutions. If a more coercive order is bound to failwithin the parameters of American political culture, neither would it probably benecessary—at least on any wide scale.

An American fascism (or its modern “equivalent”), aligned with the warfarestate, would surely diverge from the preponderance of historical experience,which itself was rather plural—the Nazi model (contrary to myth) being moreexceptional than typical. While Hedges dwells on American reactionary populismas a central ingredient in fascist ideology, recalling a premise of the classicAuthoritarian Personality (by Theodor Adorno and associates), he never connectssuch beliefs to a fascist outcome at the summits of power. Other contemporary

Introduction 13

writers—Michael Mann, Walter Laqueur, and Robert Paxson among them—

have a decidedly jaundiced view about prospects for American (or indeed anyother) fascism.20 According to Mann, whose judgment fits conventional thinking,the ideology was always uniquely European, one long ago “defeated, dead, andburied.”21 With its enduring negative stigma, fascism today appeals to just a fewcrackpots, skinheads, and racist thugs. The institutionalization of liberal democ-racy in Europe and North America, moreover, has neutralized the totalizing (alsopartly pre-modern) character of fascist appeals. Laqueur agrees, emphasizing thatfascism cannot coexist with either modernity or liberal-democracy given itsarchaic single-party monopoly, reliance on terror, virulent nationalism, anddependency on traditional (now largely vanished) social forces. Laqueur suggeststhat the right-wing populism so feared by Hedges is not only harmless but underpresent conditions could never be translated into a durable movement, party, orregime; it is destined to remain localized, dispersed, mired in futility.22

The general consensus of mainstream thought, often sullied by obsession withthe Nazi example (the only one marked by sustained wars of aggression, con-centration camps, and holocaust) has followed roughly the same logic. As noted,however, any facile comparison between historical fascism and more recentAmerican tendencies is misguided, indeed useless. Structural and other contrastscan obscure striking ideological parallels, as I have argued. Gross was the first topoint out that right-wing authoritarian elites today are far less likely to embraceFreikorps-style militias, the Fuhrerprinzip, and death camps, choosing instead fas-cistic agendas more appropriate to the framework of a rationalized state-capitalismand severely truncated liberal democracy.

The widening expanse of American power today—global, military, corporate,bureaucratic—does in fact raise the issue of a potential “fascist equivalent” in thepresent context, despite an ensemble of historical forces that differs greatly fromthat of interwar Europe. Whatever the degree of economic crises (indeed capit-alism is in perpetual crisis), the warfare state exhibits no signs of retreat eitherdomestically or internationally; it is more robust militarily than ever. Familiarpredictions of “American decline” seem entirely premature. While Mann cor-rectly stresses the firm grounding of liberal institutions in the U.S., he forgets thatthis system has been thoroughly reshaped by corporate and military power,severely diminishing the efficacy of the party system and electoral politics. A newfascistic order would necessarily be less “totalitarian” than interwar states that, inany event, relied heavily on traditional pillars of support (Church, aristocracy,monarchy), which often resisted curtailments of their influence. Further, elementsof liberalism and right-wing authoritarianism can readily coexist, as shown incountries like Japan, Mexico, Russia, Taiwan, and South Korea. It turns out thatno fascist “revolution” will be needed to advance a “fascist equivalent” underconditions of militarized state-capitalism.

If a revolutionary scenario is today outmoded, then fixation on paramilitarygroups or rampaging local militias as in the famous (but largely fictional) “march

14 Introduction

on Rome” is overdrawn, even for best-case Italy. In reality powerful elite coali-tions dictated the nature and pace of fascist ascendancy, paramilitaries being eitherweak or absent; mass political activity occurred within a transmission belt thatworked from top to bottom. As Laqueur points out:

True, the masses were “mobilized”, but not in order to participate actively inpolitics, not to fight in the streets, but to march in occasional mass demon-strations and parades, and to listen from time to time to lectures, and toattend similar functions.23

For Japanese fascism, Barrington Moore arrived at much the same conclusion: theregime was based on an alliance of big business and traditional interests, whereelites rallied the masses around nationalism and militarism as they orchestratedeverything from above.24 The Japanese model, though rarely discussed, was closerto the general pattern than was Nazi Germany, a nation that relied more heavilyon a mobilization system. It follows that a depoliticized public sphere would poseno great obstacle to a fascist potential in the U.S., where weakened mass invol-vement would permit corporate and imperial power to achieve ultimate maneu-verability. For modern authoritarian rule, popular insurgency (in the form of localmilitias, for example) becomes far more disruptive, and dysfunctional, thansystem-sustaining.

Predictions of a full-blown fascist order in the U.S. seem (in 2015) rather far-fetched, even wildly irresponsible—especially at a time when understanding offascism clings to the classic European experience. Whether Constitutional orother mechanisms might be nowadays strong enough to prevent such a devel-opment in the context of an expanding warfare-state power, however, isincreasingly doubtful. Counter-forces surely exist, including a multiplicity ofsocial movements and progressive grassroots activism of the sort that has pervadedAmerican history. The twentieth century witnessed a steady growth of popularsuffrage along with spirited defenses of civil and legal rights, even as the politicalsystem itself has grown narrower and less participatory under the weight of cor-porate power, the war economy, and a concentrated mass media. On the otherhand, progressive movements capable of sustaining alternatives to authoritarianpower have achieved only limited scope and durability.

In the U.S., as in other parts of the world, democratic upsurges become mostvisible at times of deepening social crisis—as during the 1930s and 1960s—whileelections as such have rarely produced far-reaching change.25 The episodic char-acter of popular movements suggests their capacity to effectively challenge, muchless overturn, existing class and power relations is uncertain, at least for the nearfuture. Put differently, the warfare state that came into prominence during WorldWar II has evolved into a durable fixture of American economic, political, andcultural life, its legitimacy reinforced by a media propaganda system that has nohistorical parallel. While the Obama presidency seemed to offer Americans a

Introduction 15

promise of hope and change, it is worth emphasizing that Democrats are behol-den to the same corporate and military interests—the same warfare state—asRepublicans. And those voracious interests, capable of destroying life on theplanet in a matter of hours, demonstrate no readiness to abandon their stupendouswealth and power, nor question the grand myths and deceits that so effectivelysustain their domination. Whether such an authoritarian order is likely to morphinto fascism—or some kind of “fascist equivalent”—remains an open question.

Notes

1 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).2 Ibid., p. 23.3 Ibid., p. 212.4 Ibid., p. 275.5 See Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World as We Know It (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 36.6 I develop this point much further elsewhere. See Carl Boggs, Phantom Democracy:

Corporate Interests and Political Power (New York: Macmillan, 2011), pp. 91–102.7 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted

Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).8 Ibid., p. 105.9 Ibid., p. 141.10 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964).11 Ibid., p. 3.12 Herbert Marcuse, Negations (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 9.13 On this point, see Walter Laqueur, Fascism Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996), pp. 224–25.14 Wolin, Democracy, Inc., Ch. 11.15 Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (White River

Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2006).16 Chris Hedges, American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (New York:

Free Press, 2006), p. 29.17 Ibid., p. 27.18 See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 38.19 Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1982).20 See Michael Mann, Fascists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Laqueur,

Fascism Past, Present, Future; Robert O. Paxson, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

21 Mann, Fascists, p. 370.22 Laqueur, Fascism Past, Present, Future, p. 36.23 Ibid.24 Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon

Press, 1967), pp. 495–96.25 On the decline of democratic participation in American politics, see Wolin, Democracy,

Inc.; Boggs, Phantom Democracy; E.J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politiics (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1991).

16 Introduction

1FROM PEARL HARBOR TO THE“ASIAN PIVOT”

The optimum point of departure for exploring how World War II has shapedAmerican politics is surely Pearl Harbor—not simply the Japanese attack itself butthe complex historical forces leading up to, surrounding, and following theattack. An epic moment in twentieth-century history, the Pearl Harbor eventshave few parallels either militarily or politically, for the U.S. or the world at large.It clearly goes down in the lore of armed strategy as one of the most daring, risky,and audaciously successful military exploits ever, all the more astonishing giventhe vastly unequal power relationship between the Japanese and the U.S. Itbrought destruction of the American battleship fleet in the Pacific—a fleet inthose years viewed with awe and envy around the world. At a time of strongpublic and elite antiwar sentiment, the attack brought the U.S. into World War IIagainst the Axis powers, giving the country a profound sense of wronged self-righteousness that fueled its four-year pursuit of war to victorious conclusion.The events fundamentally altered the way Americans came to view the globalarena and the U.S.’s place within it.

Just as important, the Pearl Harbor attack set the U.S. on a path towards aninstitutionalized military-industrial system without rival—a warfare state thatwould sink deep roots in the economy, political system, and culture, from whichthere would be no retreat or reversal. World War II established an historical tra-jectory that would persist well into the twenty-first century. Although PearlHarbor in the early 1940s symbolized defeat and humiliation for the U.S., theattack has over time been duly celebrated in the form of an endless production ofceremonies, rituals, books, TV specials, monuments, and of course Hollywoodmovies. Initially a great shock to the American psyche, it has become an iconicmemory of the ultimate Good War legacy.

The American Asia-Pacific Strategy

Initially experienced as a stunning military defeat—a “day of infamy” in PresidentFranklin Roosevelt’s words—Pearl Harbor became a launching pad for U.S.pursuit of its own imperial agenda in the Pacific arena. A surface reality in factconcealed much deeper processes and interests at work. Viewed from the per-spective of 2015, after Washington had launched numerous postwar militaryadventures on the basis of flagrant deceptions and myths, a revisiting of PearlHarbor in both history and culture offers a wealth of historical and politicallessons.

In culture as well as politics, World War II hovers over the American landscapemany decades after the first armistice was signed aboard the battleship USS Mis-souri—a phenomenon that transcends nostalgia and remembrance. The war, ofcourse, was one of the epic moments in world history, its consequences in allspheres of life still deeply felt many decades later. Of course World War II waseasily the most popular war the U.S. ever fought, with unparalleled support onthe home front and participation of some 18 million Americans in uniform, withadditional tens of millions in military production and logistics made possible bysustained mobilization of human and material resources. Patriotic fervor sur-rounding the four years of conflict, fueled in no small measure by a deep sense ofnational victimhood stemming from the Pearl Harbor events, has never beenmatched before or since. Yet its meaning for American political culture goes farbeyond any historical specificity, representing today a watershed moment behindU.S. imperial agendas in the Pacific and the institutionalized military edificebehind those agendas.

The forces leading to Pearl Harbor have roots in the nineteenth century whenthe U.S.—still absorbed in its own internal development—made its first realovertures toward overseas expansion. With effective closure of the frontier in the1890s, an American Pacific strategy began to gain momentum. Propelled by thetwin drives of capitalism and nationalism, U.S. elites looked increasingly towardsAsia for resources and markets—and for crucial geopolitical leverage.

Capitalism was determined to expand beyond fixed national borders, fueled byan imperial ideology aligned with the blessings of a God-ordained Manifest Des-tiny and the great virtues of white-settler culture.1 This ideology was arrogantlyembraced by the most respected American leaders of the period, above all Pre-sidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Foreign intervention,migration, and warfare were the essence of a Pacific strategy born in the 1890s.

As for Hawaii, its strategic location roughly midway between North Americaand the Asian landmasses initially placed it at the center of any U.S. imperialdesigns. Already with an economic and missionary presence in Hawaii, in the1890s Washington moved to overthrow the monarchy, orchestrating an 1893insurrection that would lead to expansion by joint resolution of Congress in July1898. That was the very year McKinley declared war on Spain, opening the way

18 From Pearl Harbor to the “Asian Pivot”

toward U.S. control over not only Hawaii but the Philippines, various Pacificislands, Cuba and Puerto Rico. At a time of intense racism, American leaders—ever mindful of economic and geopolitical objectives—pledged to enlighten anduplift the Asian masses. In the Philippines, this great “uplifting” process wouldtake three years of military repression costing hundreds of thousands of lives. Forboth McKinley and Roosevelt, this was the destiny of a superior civilization.

Hawaii would eventually become the center of U.S. economic, political, andabove all, military objectives in Asia—ideally situated in the middle of the Pacific.The Navy had already established a presence there by the 1890s. Formallyannexed in August 1898, the islands became a U.S. territory in 1900—prelude tomuch later statehood in 1959. In the decades preceding the attacks on PearlHarbor, the American military would appropriate hundreds of thousands of acreson Oahu alone, for huge Navy and Army bases along with supporting facilities.Since 1893, according to a recent statement by the Hawaiian SovereigntyMovement, “The United States has malformed Hawaii into a command andcontrol center for U.S. imperialism in Oceania and Asia.” It added: “We havesuffered from the effects of being the pawns of U.S. wars in the world.”2 Oneresult of this “occupation” (for which President Bill Clinton issued a formalapology in 1993) has been steady deterioration of indigenous political rights andhistorical traditions.3

Following World War I, once the world was “made safe for democracy”,Washington renewed its fixations on the Pacific, looking especially to out-maneuver a rising Japanese power for markets, resources, and geopolitical advan-tage. In the 1920s, rapid U.S. economic growth brought to the fore an urgentneed for oil, iron, and other resources to feed the expanding automobile, steel,rubber, and electronics sectors. At the same time, the power structure focused ona supposedly mounting Japanese threat fueled by the pervasive media image of“spreading yellow hordes”—a sign of sharpening U.S.–Japanese rivalry during the1920s and 1930s. In such a global context, the two nationalisms—American andJapanese—could be expected to not only flourish but clash, giving rise simulta-neously to competing military objectives. Viewed thusly, the conventionalwisdom of a fierce U.S. “isolationism” in the years preceding World War II hasfar overblown.

In May 1903 the first battleship USS Wisconsin entered the Hawaiian port forcoal, water, and other supplies. A Pacific fleet was first created in 1907 whenships of the Asiatic squadron and Pacific squadron were combined under onecommand. Accordingly, in 1908 the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard was estab-lished, setting in motion a phase of steady U.S. military expansion in Hawaii from1908 to 1919. In May 1908 dredging and enlargement of the Pearl Harborchannel was underway, permitting entry of the largest ships along with con-struction of a dry dock. In 1917, Ford Island, located in the middle of PearlHarbor, was purchased for joint navy and army use in strengthening militaryaviation capabilities. The U.S. military preserve in the Islands gradually increased

From Pearl Harbor to the “Asian Pivot” 19

through the 1920s and 1930s, ostensibly to counter Japanese naval supremacy inthe Pacific. Passage of the Two Ocean Naval Expansion Act—embraced byPresident Roosevelt, a champion of naval power—facilitated this process.

Until May 1940, the main elements of the U.S. battle fleet in the Pacific—including several battleships—were stationed on the west cost (mainly San Diegoand Long Beach). In summer 1940 FDR had instructed U.S. naval forces to takeup an “advanced position” (logistically permanent status) at Pearl Harbor, a movestrongly resisted by the commander, Admiral James Richardson, who was thenreplaced by Admiral Husband Kimmel, in command at the time of the Japaneseattack. The Pacific fleet was formally reestablished as a permanent force inFebruary 1941.

This strategem corresponded to ongoing American buildup in the Pacificthroughout the pre-World War II years. The U.S. naval presence in the Phi-lippines, Hawaii, and scattered Pacific islands matched the Japanese expansioninto China and Southeast Asia. Confrontation was built into the very logic ofimperial rivalry, which the U.S ratcheted up during 1940 and 1941 with its sys-tematic policy of new military deployments, provocations, and economicembargo. The very fact that the U.S. moved its Pacific fleet to Hawaii in early 1941was viewed by Japanese leaders as something of an escalation. As H.P. Willmotthas written: “What was happening by January 1941 was that Japan and theUnited States either had entered or were about to enter realms of self-fulfillingprophecy whereby their separate actions fed off one another.”4 To view thecomplex historical development leading to the Pearl Harbor attack as simply amanifestation of Japanese expansion and perfidy would be crudely one-sided.

Far from being a peaceful island paradise at the time of the attack, Hawaii wasmore akin to a military fortress central to U.S. geopolitical ambitions. InDecember 1941, the American Pacific fleet based in Hawaii consisted of no lessthan nine battleships, three aircraft carriers, 12 heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers,50 destroyers, 33 submarines, and 100 heavy bombers—hardly the mark of aninnocent power in the throes of “isolationism”.

The Turning Point

The standard view of the audacious Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is that itforced U.S. entry into World War II. Though obviously true, the attack wouldhave even larger historical significance: it gave momentum to a bold AmericanPacific strategy, which in fact gathered steam after 1945.

We know that the Japanese naval armada, planned and assembled in themonths leading up to December 7, 1941, pulled off one of the most remarkablemilitary feats ever. On November 6 the naval assault forces—20 submarines, sixaircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, 11 destroyers, eight tankers and423 planes—departed Hitokappu Bay in Japan, passing undetected on a north-westerly course to reach a point, 200 miles north of Oahu, where they could


deliver a devastating blow to the U.S. Pacific fleet. The results (including thesinking of four battleships) are too well known to require full recapitulation here.Aside from having been an embarrassing military fiasco, Pearl Harbor revealed aseries of major U.S. political, military, and intelligence fiascos that ultimately ledto several investigations, commissions, and reports that in fact never satisfactorilyresolved all the issues in doubt. Precipitating an immediate declaration of war byan outraged President Roosevelt, the attack came to symbolize the ultimate senseof military victimhood: a dastardly “sneak attack” on an innocent, peace-lovingnation just minding its own business.

In reality Pearl Harbor marked a point when two wars—in Europe and thePacific—merged into one extended global conflict, with the Pacific Theaterinvolving a fierce confrontation between two powers seeking imperial controlover territories and resources. As the Pearl Harbor events, then and later, signifieda perpetual American search for Good War themes, in both politics and culture,here it is worth noting how a terrible catastrophe could be so dramatically turnedaround and converted into the perfect American triumph.

Aside perhaps from the Normandy invasion, surely no World War II momentembellishes the Good War trope more than Pearl Harbor. Hollywood movieshave always been central to this cultural endeavor—Michael Bay’s 2001blockbuster Pearl Harbor being the most expensive, most ambitious, and mosttechnically sophisticated of the lot. While Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimerwould no doubt deny it, their version of the events probably best fits the propa-gandistic narrative contours of the formulaic World War II narrative, replete withmotifs of national heroism, individual courage, and military triumph over evil,that both romanticize and distort the historical events in question. What precededPearl Harbor were several documentaries, including John Ford’s Oscar-winningDecember 7th (1943), and three features: Howard Hawks’ Air Force (1943), FredZinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), and Richard Fleischer’s Tora! Tora!Tora! (1970). The only remotely accurate, objective, and balanced account of theJapanese attacks is the latter movie, although it too suffers from a failure to frameevents within their historical context. The release 30 years later of such a heavilyone-dimensional and distorted spectacle as Pearl Harbor only underscores itsideological function in replicating Good-War discourse.5

The December 7th documentary turns out to be especially illuminating. In itFord (with collaborator Gregg Toland) wove together a series of still photos,historical footage, and contrived scenes made in the back lot of Fox studios toproduce an extremely patriotic, pro-war film, enhanced by the acting presence ofJohn Huston. The bulk of the film is dedicated to show-casing the unique“Aloha Culture” of Hawaii—images of a happy, peace loving, socially-mixedsociety that, at the same time, had become wonderfully Americanized after U.S.business interests had moved onto the islands. Hawaii in 1941 was a land of sugarcane and pineapple fields, beautiful homes and hotels, a thriving tourist mecca,diverse sites of worship, warm and friendly people, a haven for passing ships.


School children are depicted singing “God Bless America”. U.S. corporationsflourish, made more profitable by the import of cheap labor from Asia and thePacific islands.

Within this Polynesian mecca of beauty and innocence, however, it was pos-sible to identify a festering problem: the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu, in itsservice to imperial power, became an active center of espionage and treachery.Local inhabitants, along with the Japanese workers, were observed reporting onU.S. ship, troop, and plane movements in and around Pearl Harbor, laying thegroundwork for political subversion and military assault that American officialswere too naïve to think possible—in part, no doubt, owing to their own racism.Ford and Toland depict a Japanese enemy that exemplifies two-face schemingand diabolical motives. The attack on the U.S. fleet is shown more realisticallyhere than in most later films (including Pearl Harbor), coming as Hawaii sleeps orattends Sunday religious services, striking at a happy tropical paradise with nologic beyond sheer evil. That Hawaii in 1941 was a bastion of U.S. militarypower—key to its strategy for Asia-Pacific hegemony—was nowhere evident.Virtually every subsequent documentary on Pearl Harbor has followed the scriptlaid out by Ford and Toland.

Offering a far more complex, variegated picture of life (both civilian andmilitary) in Hawaii in the months proceeding the attack, From Here to Eternity,deservedly winner of several Academy Awards, focused mainly on peacetimemilitary (army, not navy) operations—the tough discipline, rebellion in the ranks,personal hatreds and rivalries, wild bouts of drinking and womanizing. Based onJames Jones’ novel, the movie presented one of the most penetrating critiques ofmilitary culture at the onset of World War II, in which disloyalty, violence, anddeath appears as the predictable outcome of a system riddled with repression andconflict. As in the book, the film contains only a brief (if still dramatic) sequencedepicting the attack itself, and nothing on the battleship navy that was targeted inthe bombing. The U.S. military stationed in Hawaii was depicted so negativelythat the Board of Admirals banned the picture from being shown on Americanships.6

Despite serious flaws, Tora! Tora! Tora! remains easily the best film ever madeon the Pearl Harbor events. Produced at the height of the Vietnam disaster, Fle-isher’s picture (co-directed with two Japanese filmmakers) approaches historicalaccuracy, enhanced by its cinema verite style and genuine efforts to frame the attackfrom both sides, with Japanese language spoken where relevant. Throughout,Japanese military figures appear as something other than cartoonish villains—itselfa radical departure form the entire cycle of World War II movies. While rela-tively weak in presenting the larger context of events, Tora! does graphically showthe American defeat in its dramatic totality, including the strange lack of pre-paredness leading up to the bombings. Billed as the “most spectacular film evermade”, it did set out to put on screen authentic recreation of the military action,culminating in the awesome destruction of the USS Arizona. Action scenes were


all-consuming: there were no contrived love stories or sex triangles, no maudlinnarratives of personal tragedy, no gripping interspersing of home-front experi-ences. The actual bombing of Battleship Row, however, was rendered moregraphically than Ford’s December 7th.

Despite enormous costs and sophisticated technology, Bay’s Pearl Harbor turnsout to be the most problematic of all films dealing with the events, both cine-matically and historically. The director said he was looking for a mixture of truestories and everyday heroes, military drama and personal sagas—towards which heand writer Randall Wallace revisited Pearl Harbor with a sense of “utmost rea-lism”, interviewing dozens of survivors, researching the events, and seeking outelements of authenticity for which they received generous Pentagon assistance.Perhaps reflecting on the Titanic extravaganza, Bay and Wallace felt that massaudiences would be more likely drawn to a spectacle combining elements of alove story and real life narratives. In Pearl Harbor as in Titanic, however, thesenarratives wind up overwhelmed (and thus grossly distorted) by the burdensomeweight of the personal melodramas.

In the end, Bay’s flawed epic manages to transform the shocking U.S. militarydebacle at Pearl Harbor into an improbable victory filled with the usual assem-blage of Good-War themes. As in the case of Titanic, a heart-rending romantictriangle occupies center-stage in what is ostensibly an historical drama. At onepoint Bay interrupts the personal saga with the Japanese attack, recreating thehorror, chaos and destruction of the massive aerial bombardments carried outagainst navy and army targets, depicting the devastation of Battleship Row in allits fury. The film shows pandemonium in and around the ships with sailorsswimming for their lives, being stranded on deck and trapped in battleship hulls.Relying on surprise and attacking early Sunday morning, the Japanese were ableto sink many ships while destroying the many Army Air Force units on theground; counterattack was virtually impossible.

Consistent with Good-War motifs, the final scenes of Pearl Harbor representBay’s efforts to rescue victory out of defeat, with depiction of the audaciousDoolittle raid on Japan in April 1942, the screen protagonists gung-ho to take thebattle to the enemy in payback for the “sneak attack”. Here the U.S. mobilized alarge reservoir of elite pilots, assembled 16 specially-designed B-25s, bombed theJapanese mainland from the carrier Hornet to supposedly reveal the enemy’s vulner-ability, and give Americans a badly needed psychological boost. In many booksand documentaries over subsequent decades this venture was referred to as “TheRaid That Avenged Pearl Harbor”. Running low on fuel, most B-25s were ableto unload their bombs over Japan, but the damage inflicted was minimal and thepilots were forced to ditch, crashed, or were shot down. While never mentionedin the movie, at the time the Doolittle raids were considered a military failure.7

Like the vast majority of Hollywood films about World War II, Pearl Harbor isbest understood as propaganda that, more than anything, embellishes themythology of U.S. triumphalism. If the goal of Bruckheimer, Bay, and Wallace


was to render the “utmost realism” of events surrounding the Pearl Harborattack, then the film was a complete disaster. It is riddled with distortions andinaccuracies, lacks historical mapping, dwells on peripheral narratives at theexpense of the main story, and furnishes visual images that seem artificial. Anyoneinterested in the actual history is best advised to forget Pearl Harbor and view Tora!Tora! Tora!, which does seriously grapple with the complex factors surroundingone of the most fascinating military operations in history. Since the filmmakersrepeatedly mention that they were searching for maximum authenticity, theirutter failure here is noteworthy. As Lawrence Suid writes: “Given the inaccura-cies of fact and history in his script, Wallace probably should have visited his localbookstore and bought one of the many good histories about December 7thbefore he put word onto the paper. Except for the fact that the Japanese did bombPearl Harbor, his account of events bears little resemblance to what actuallyhappened before, during and after the date that will live in infamy.”8

Aside from the obligatory love story, the first thing that strikes the audience isthat Pearl Harbor is essentially about planes—American planes—and the men whoflew them. This is rather astonishing in so far as the real history of Pearl Harborinvolved altogether different military personnel: the Japanese naval armada sailingtowards Oahu, the many squadrons that bombed and torpedoed mostly navaltargets in and around Battleship Row. The U.S. Army, both ground and airforces, played a limited role in the December 7th events. Here the selection oftwo army pilots as protagonists comes across as bizarre and out of focus, muchlike dwelling on the role of the Soviet navy in a film depicting the battle ofStalingrad. Further, in a picture supposedly devoted to Pearl Harbor, sequencesabout the Doolittle raid consumed more than half an hour. It is well known thatthe Japanese called this the “Do Nothing Raid”, an operation undertaken strictlyfor media effects. As Willmott notes: “Strategically the Doolittle Raid was of littleaccount. Indeed staging it threatened to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet because itneeded the use of these fleet carriers in the central Pacific … at a time when theAmericans became aware of Japanese intentions toward Port Moresby and theSolomons.”9

The actual story of Pearl Harbor was first and foremost about the colliding fatesof the Japanese and American navies—astonishing triumph for the former, humi-liating defeat for the latter. This narrative is entirely lost in Bay’s ideologically-driven account. From the U.S. standpoint, the incredible saga of Battleship Rowwould be the natural starting point for any movie seeking even a modicum ofauthenticity. After all, the Japanese managed to destroy the Pacific battleship fleet,sinking four ships and disabling four others while killing more than 2000 sailorsand officers—the main damage inflicted by the invaders. What happened atHickam Field and Schofield Barracks (Bay’s primary focus) was of marginalimportance. In Pearl Harbor, the ships are visible largely as distant objects, the horrorand chaos of Battleship Row shown only in detached fragments. Nowhere doesBay try to capture what the battleships were—their gigantic and awesome


presence, their unique stature, what they symbolized as warships, what the attackdid to annihilate all that.

This is quite unfortunate from a cinematic as well as historical point of view,for there has been no military force quite as fascinating as the U.S. battleship fleetbefore or since. These ships were indeed huge floating cities nearly three footballfields in length, multi-tiered, organized into a complex network of workingcomponents, graceful without parallel on the seas, manned by crews of more than1200 men. They were armed with 14 and 15-inch guns that could fire 1500-poundshells more than 20 miles, requiring intricate guidance systems that first intro-duced the modern computer (aboard the USS California in 1939). They amoun-ted to something of a walled, medieval fortress operated by a special caste ofmaritime warriors imbued with special norms and practices.10 The battleship sai-lors who lived, often for deployments of many years, on such behemoths as theCalifornia, Tennessee, and West Virginia, were part of an arrogant, provincialsubculture, condescending towards all land creatures and those stationed on shipsconsidered lower in the hierarchy: destroyers, cruisers, even aircraft carriers, thatwere seen as ugly and clumsy. There were the abundant on-board rituals, such ascoffee rooms, musical activities, boxing matches and other sports events, massivedrills and myriad social activities.

Once the battleships reached port for shore liberty—during the 1930s and early1940s the Pacific fleet moved back and forth regularly between California andPearl Harbor—this unique navy culture carried over into bars, dance halls, bor-dellos and myriad ventures for which the fleet became notorious. It was preciselythese immense ships (and their culture) that were effectively demolished with theevents of December 7th, after which the carriers would assume overwhelmingtactical importance following the rise of naval airpower. It is hard to imagine amore intriguing, indeed more historically compelling, setting for any moviehoping to capture the full meaning of the Pearl Harbor legacy than these ships,but in this case Hollywood chose to push the narrative in other directions.

The Japanese attack put no fewer than eight battleships under siege, yet PearlHarbor stages its action almost entirely outside the ships, targets that take on all therealism of video games. The real picture, on the other hand, was mesmerizing:huge vessels suddenly set ablaze while crews attend reveille or have breakfast atmess hall—many simply getting ready to face a peaceful Sunday after drinkingbouts on Hotel Street. The ships are transformed into cauldrons of fire, smoke,and gushing oil as entire infrastructures are turned into ruins. Men are blown up,others forced overboard. There are calls to abandon ship as the once gracefulvessels begin to list severely, capsize or sink to the bottom of the bay. Recallinghis terrifying moments aboard the USS California (eventually sunk), SeamanTheodore Mason writes:

The harbor was a scene from Dante’s Inferno, evoking all the horrors of theninth circle. Oil was spreading everywhere: spreading out from the ships in


pernicious rings, mottling the water, blackening the shore. Drifting in theslow currents were life rafts, life jackets, pieces of boats, and other flotsam.The air smelled of bunker oil, fire, smoke and death.11

On the beleaguered California, five heroic seamen were honored for braveryunder attack by having ships named after them in World War II.

The Pearl Harbor events represent probably the most dramatic military debacleever suffered by the U.S. If the attack served to awaken a sleeping industrial giantthat in a relatively short time would allow the U.S. to transform tactical defeatinto strategic victory in the Pacific, the national stain of December 7th wouldremain forever. Never has the collective psyche of Americans become so trau-matized. For that moment, at least, Pearl Harbor represented anything but aGood War.

Myths and Illusions

What most conventional history of Pearl Harbor misses is that the Japanese attacknot only destroyed the Pacific battleship fleet (although a few of those ships werereturned to service during World War II) but, more tellingly, revealed the obso-lescence of the battlewagon itself as a major weapon of war. By 1942 the war hadalready highlighted the supremacy of the aircraft carrier (and naval air power) thatwould be so decisive in the Pacific Theater. The huge battleships made easy tar-gets for carrier-based planes as indeed the Japanese were the first to demonstrate.It was this carrier superiority that, in the end, would propel U.S. forces to victoryacross the Pacific. Having been a tremendous symbol of military power in the1920s and 1930s, the battleship now came to signify impotence despite its awe-some turrets capable of demolishing an entre city. While a few of the ships sunkat Pearl Harbor were soon rebuilt, their role would be increasingly limited andrarely involved actual sea combat. The industrial assembly lines produced severalnew carriers monthly along with thousands of planes but only a small number ofmodern battleships like the Missouri and Iowa. Their passing from the scene wasduly noted by Seaman Mason: “Never again would the mighty battleships of thePacific Fleet stream off the California coast in line of battle ahead, their torrentstrained out … Never again would the 14 and 15-inch rifles speak in concertsplitting the heavens with thunder … Never again would the once-revered bat-tleship anchor in arrow-straight columns in the lee of the San Diego breakwater.And never again would the fleet landings at Long Beach and San Pedro comealive with thousands of battleship sailors bringing good news to bars and bistrosand bordellos.”12 In fact the battleships would have one last moment of glorywhen, on October 25, 1944, five of the classic vessels—California, Maryland,Tennessee, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—established a formidable battle line inthe Surigao Strait, part of the epic naval battle of Leyte Gulf, the last instancewhen such behemoths would ever square off at sea. In the battle the U.S. fleet


overwhelmed the Japanese, sinking the massive battleship Yamashiro in a matter ofminutes.

This eclipse of an already–aging battleship fleet points to a central mythologyof Pearl Harbor that finds its way into most history and popular culture related tothe attack. While tactically audacious and stunning—and while it served to bringthe U.S. into World War II—the bombing did little to immobilize Americancapabilities in the Pacific, even Hawaii itself. Most treatments of Pearl Harborconclude that the attack decimated the Pacific Fleet, a crushing blow to the U.S.military at the onset of the war. Not true, as the battle of Midway (in April 1942)would soon reveal. It was surely a moment of great historical drama, and thelosses should not be forgotten, but the military impact has been drasticallyoverblown.

At the time of the raids the U.S. Navy in Hawaii had 106 ships deployed outto sea and 103 in port, of which 21 were sunk. Of the eight battleships hit onlyone (the Arizona) remained permanently at rest—eventually to become a mem-orial visited by millions of people yearly. The others were quickly repaired,modernized and returned to sea where, as mentioned, their impact was notextensive. An important Japanese prize—three large aircraft carriers—was out ofreach, the carriers having been sent away from port. Most significantly, massiveground facilities received little damage on December 7th: the huge submarinebase, oil depots, supply warehouses, dry docks and repair shops all emerged fullyoperational, crucial to restoring U.S. power in the Pacific. Outside Pearl Harbor,destruction was surprisingly light, Honolulu itself hit only sporadically with nomore than 60 civilian casualties (resulting mostly from friendly fire). More than180 planes were destroyed on ground at Hickam Field and elsewhere, but thesewere largely obsolete fighters and bombers. Even the overall casualty total fromthe raids was not extraordinarily high when compared with later World War IIair aid bombardments—or the fierce combat at such battles as Tarawa, Saipan,Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. There were 2,403 dead (nearly half of these aboard theArizona) and 1,178 wounded, in contrast to tens of thousands routinely killed inU.S. bombing raids against Japanese cities towards the end of the war.

Could the audacious Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have made any decisiveimpact on war in the Pacific Theater even if it had been more perfectly designed?Surely not, given the level of American industrial supremacy that could be (andwas) so quickly translated into military success. (Even Japanese military strategistspinned hopes for quick victory on American psychological demoralization whichof course never happened.) From this standpoint, Japanese naval advantage in thePacific in 1941 would be, in the first analysis, rather meaningless, Willmottwriting: “If the first carrier striking force had managed to sink every single unit inthe U.S. Pacific Fleet, including the carriers, at the outbreak of war and then theImperial Navy had not lost a single warship, the Kaigun (military directorate)would still not have been able to offer battle on the basis of numerical equalityeither at the Philippine Sea in June 1944 or, more obviously at Leyte Gulf in the


following October.”13 Insofar as the Pearl Harbor attack was directed at the(limited) tools rather than the foundations of American warfare, its success, howeverdaunting, could be only ephemeral, limited. Within several months the remark-able U. S. industrial superiority enabled it to determine exactly when, where andhow to fight in the Pacific.

What about the historical framing of the Japanese attack? American discussion ofthe events and factors leading up to the outbreak of war suffer grievously fromlack of contextual depth. Brief passing references to the U.S. oil embargo onJapan in the months before the bombings, for example, scarcely reach the level ofhistorical analysis. With few exceptions, U.S. accounts focus on the actions of evilJapanese militarists, motivated by sheer imperial goals, who carried out a “sneakattack” on peace-loving Americans at their tropical outpost. (Sneak attack: whohas ever announced to the targeted enemy the precise time and place of theirmilitary operations?) Americans have been generally clueless as to why the Japa-nese would decide to mount an assault they knew would lead to protractedarmed combat with a much stronger power.

Little historical probing is required to show that several crucial factors con-tributed to the Japanese decision to launch its attack, all part of escalating U.S.–Japanese rivalry over imperial domination in the Pacific—over access to rawmaterials, trade arrangements, geopolitical leverage, and of course military dom-ination. By 1941, as mentioned, this rivalry had generated sharp competition,rigidity and arrogance on both sides, aggravated by expanded U.S. militarydeployments to the Philippines across to Guam, Wake Island, and Hawaii, andthen heightened by the American embargo. Washington demands that Japanwithdraw from China and Indochina, part of its own imperial gambit, were, ofcourse, summarily rejected. The U.S. decision to permanently station the PacificFleet at Pearl Harbor naturally added fuel to the conflict. In fact, U.S. ships werealso disrupting trade routes, a stratagem that had to be considered as anything butpassive or innocent.14 By late 1941 Japanese leaders felt they had no option but torespond militarily to U.S. provocations—an ominous shift in outlook well knownto American leaders who, according to reliable reports, had anticipated thisJapanese shift as an outcome of their own deliberate policies and actions.15

It is probable that sections of the U.S. power structure, imbued with racism,viewed the Japanese as so primitive that their capacity to launch successful armedoperations was doubtful—a view that would begin to change in the period leadingup to the Pearl Harbor events. They simply did not know how to build first-rateships and planes, much less adequately train their crews. One American militaryofficial was quoted as saying: “We can lick the Japanese in 24 hours”. TheRoosevelt administration no doubt initially believed its provocations would leadto an attack on the nearby Philippines—not Hawaii—but that view wouldchange with the flow of new information. Still, once U.S. intelligence came topossess intelligence about an imminent bombing raid on Hawaii, many officialsresponded with contemptuous disbelief, which of course turned to outright shock


on December 7th. The conversion of such national hubris into a mood of terri-fying surprise and anger ought to be a central motif of the Pearl Harbor saga,surely more compelling than the familiar trope of unspeakable treachery byarchitects of a “sneak attack”.

There is far more to the story: abundant evidence shows that FDR and someof his cabinet members were not only fully aware of the Japanese mobilization forwar but coordinated their foreign-policy efforts in a manner calculated to pro-voke an intemperate response (though again surely not against Hawaii). Accord-ing to Robert Stinnett and others, FDR was prepared to enter World War II butneeded Japan to take the first step in order to get an isolationist Congress (andpublic) willing to join the battle against the Axis power. The U.S. was no inno-cent sleeping giant, nor indeed was it caught totally off-guard by the PearlHarbor events, though it is true that officials in Washington failed to pass alongvictory messages to the armed-forces command in Hawaii, leaving both GeneralWalter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel out of the loop (and thus easytargets for later blame and punishment).

After reviewing some 200,000 documents, Stinnett writes: “By provoking theattack, Roosevelt accepted the terrible truth that America’s military forces—including the Pacific Fleet and the civilian population in the Pacific—would sitsquarely in harm’s way, exposed to enormous risks.”16 (Hawaii, again, might wellhave been regarded as out of reach.) By means of well-planned covert and overtactions, the U.S. implemented an elaborate eight-point scheme to incite theJapanese to war, including the embargo, military support for the Chinesenationalist regime, expansion of the Pacific fleet, and dispatch of naval task groupsinto Japanese waters (a violation of international law) and then harshly dismissedall protests. Having run for the presidency on an antiwar platform in 1940, andhaving failed to sell Congress on the urgency of reversing course and entering thewar, FDR decided on a “back door policy” by forcing the Japanese hand, andhistory shows that it worked splendidly.

As the eight-point scheme, brainchild of Lt. Colonel Arthur McCollum, wentforward, U.S.-Japanese relations steadily worsened. Stinnett writes: “Throughout1941, it seems provoking Japan into an overt act of war was the principal policythat guided FDR’s actions towards Japan.” In fact, “Roosevelt’s fingerprints can befound on each of McCollum’s proposals.”17 Most shocking of these initiatives wasU.S. naval deployments within or near Japanese territorial waters. The larger focuson the FDR/McCollum strategy, however, was maintaining a permanent U.S. navyfleet in Hawaii, consistent with FDR’s move (in February 1941) to establish apowerful two-ocean navy. Clearly, the Japanese were thrown onto the defensive. InStinnett’s words: “The civilians in Japan’s government still wished to do everythingpossible to avoid war and to negotiate a diplomatic settlement with the UnitedStates.”18 In the end, Roosevelt’s stratagem rendered this prospect impossible.

In fact long before the Pearl Harbor events, a state of war had existed betweenthe allies of Japan and those of the U.S.—especially in the Atlantic—as FDR


sought to maneuver the U.S. into battle by means of a “back-door” strategy,through actions designed to provoke. In the case of U.S. relations with NaziGermany, those actions (mainly in support of British war efforts) failed to pro-voke. For Washington, that strategy continued and intensified during 1941, butemphasis shifted toward the Pacific where it was believed the Japanese could bemore easily manipulated into war. As George Victor writes in The Pearl HarborMyth: “Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a long chain ofevents, with the U.S. contributions reflecting a strategy formulated after Francefell.”19 Once the oil embargo was implemented—one of McCollum’s keypoints—in summer 1941 Japan moved to make preparations for an attack on U.S.military forces somewhere in the Pacific, a likelihood clearly understood byeveryone in the Roosevelt administration.

Victor persuasively argues, following Stinnett, that the Japanese attack on PearlHarbor was surely no surprise to government and military leaders in Washington.Thus: “That Japan had taken pains to surprise the United States at Pearl Harborwas true … however, her efforts at secrecy had failed, and Washington hadreceived about 230 indications that Japan would attack.”20 Victor adds: “Militaryintelligence … had been well staffed and had produced excellent results—phenomenal penetrations of Japan’s codes and an accurate, detailed picture of herwar plans, which specifically identified Pearl Harbor as her target.”21 The trigger,along with the oil embargo, was FDR’s complete unwillingness to carry outdiplomatic talks in good faith; everything was a setup, with outright provocationin mind. In Victor’s words: “According to the myth, the United States offeredcompromises, but Japan refused to compromise. It was Japan, however, thatoffered compromises and concessions, which the United States countered withincreased demands.”22 What followed in the public record were years and dec-ades of obfuscations, deceit, and cover-ups leaving those on the scene (AdmiralKimmel and General Short) to serve as scapegoats.

Not only was FDR anxious to face off against the Nazis in Europe, he hadrefused to accept the idea of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, viewednot in moral terms but as a serious threat to U.S. economic and geopoliticalinterests in Asia. With the Japanese code broken and crucial messages intercepted,Washington officials knew by late November 1941 that an attack was imminent,the only question being exactly when and where a strike would occur.23 In thedays leading up to December 7th, vast Japanese fleet movements were detec-ted in the Pacific but this information was never passed along to Kimmel, theHawaii commander responsible for military preparedness. With the bombing,FDR had achieved his goal: U.S. entry into the war was now fully justified,indeed a matter of fervent patriotic duty that all Americans across the politicalspectrum could support. Pearl Harbor not only unified the country behind themost all-consuming war in U.S. history but contributed immensely to the rise ofa military-industrial complex that remains a fixture within American society tothis day.


War of Annihilation

As World War II continues to shape and reshape the American political andcultural landscape, the Pacific Theater remains crucial to this legacy. As we haveseen, conflict between the U.S. and Japan during the 1930s and 1940s containednot only a strong imperial but racial dimension that influenced the character ofwarfare. As John Dower writes, the Pacific war quickly became a “spellbindingspectacle of brutality and death” marked by sheer hatred on both sides.24 Itappeared that no U.S. enemy was ever as detested as the Japanese, who becameimmediate objects of racial caricatures, reflecting attitudes that predate PearlHarbor. What Dower refers to as “exterminationist rhetoric” continuedthroughout the war, laying the ideological foundation of later firebombings ofJapanese cities (overwhelmingly civilian targets) and the atomic destruction ofHiroshima and Nagasaki.25 No accurate depiction of the Pearl Harbor legacy ispossible without taking into consideration this annihilationist historical backdrop.

The problem here is that American political culture has embraced the longPacific warfare trajectory as something of a Good-War fairy tale. The war of attri-tion in the Pacific Theater, with its incendiary fusion of imperialism, militarismand racism—and with its massive shift of U.S. armed forces into the Pacific-Asiaregion—followed a long historical pattern of expansion and control originating inthe national ethos of Manifest Destiny. Popular culture, above all Hollywoodmovies, served as a propaganda instrument of these objectives just as it would laterin newer geopolitical contexts. While Dower correctly observes that World WarII was driven by hatred and violence on both sides, that hardly captures the entiretruth: although Japanese military operations soon turned defensive, confinedalmost totally to military engagements, the U.S. conduct of war became fiercelyoffensive, systematic, and ultimately directed towards obliteration of an entiresociety. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor targeted only military objects,sparing Honolulu and its environs. By early 1945, when the U.S. took the war toJapan proper, military strategists celebrated the aerial destruction of its cities andtheir civilian inhabitants.

The American warfare narrative is reflected in John Ford’s December 7th film:treacherous, militaristic Japanese—benefitting from a network of spies and sabo-teurs on Oahu—attacked a peaceful, innocent island paradise, forcing a reluctantU.S. into war. Motifs of betrayal and sabotage fed neatly into U.S. racial hysteriadirected at the “yellow threat”, fueling impulses for maximum revenge thatwould underpin the Pacific Theater to the very end. In this context, Pearl Harboras symbolic moment of American victimization turned into what Dower calls a“godsend”—a great blessing for U.S. leaders.26 On this basis virtually any militarystrategy directed against Japan could be morally and politically justified.

As World War II moved inexorably toward its bloody climax, with the Japa-nese military effectively defeated, U.S. leaders happily (even sadistically) embraceda war of annihilation, targeting cities and their civilian populations—most


defenseless owing to weakened air power and great anti-aircraft losses—withoutmoral or political restraint. Under the direction of General Curtis Lemay andfellow architects of saturation bombing, the U.S. during 1945 adopted a strategyof aerial terrorism that was first implemented against such German cities asHamburg, Berlin, and Dresden—also relatively defenseless in the face of newfirebombing tactics employed by hundreds of U.S. and British bombers. In Japan,the American objective was nothing short of reducing all major urban centers torubble, leaving behind “ghost cities” that would be uninhabitable. There wouldbe no moral limits, no rules of warfare that would be applicable to the vengeful,but still noble, American superpower.

In the early months of 1945, the skies over Japan would be filled with routinemissions of hundreds of super-fortresses armed with high-power bombs, napalmand other incendiary devices targeting cities and their civilian infrastructures.Nothing was left to chance and nothing was overlooked or forgotten. Newincendiary weapons geared to urban wooden structures were developed uniquelyfor Japan. The idea, embellished by Lemay and others was to burn the country tothe ground—payback for the supposed perfidy of Pearl Harbor.

By July 1945, with U.S. air power meeting little resistance, the administrationof President Harry Truman was able to achieve its central objectives, justified onthe basis that Japan—an imperialist nation ruled by evil militaristic fascists—deserved fully whatever punishment came their way. Mass destruction would besimultaneously embraced and glorified. The raids were conducted under a varietyof pretexts—to destroy general Japanese morale, eviscerate military production,and hasten the end of the war—yet in truth by spring 1945 Japan was thoroughlydefeated and its leaders were ready to surrender (hoping only to keep theemperor in power, which eventually was granted). Repeated U.S. air raids onTokyo in March 1945 were carried out with the intent of burning the heart ofthe city to the ground: firestorms were created, 267,000 buildings were destroyed,more than 100,000 civilians were killed and one million people were madehomeless. Fires burned for days. It took nearly a month to finally remove all thecorpses. The Tokyo bombings, like those in Dresden, were essentially bereft ofmilitary purpose.

After Tokyo came other major cities—Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe—and other smaller centers until the tally of American terror-bombing targetsreached 66 cities, all targeted with incendiary weapons. From March through July1945, the raids against a defeated and mostly defenseless country continued, everyplane leaving massive destruction in its wake. Some cities were hit with up to90 percent annihilation, vast residential and commercial areas left in ruins. Some30 percent of the Japanese population was left homeless, with more than onemillion dead. A number of U.S. military leaders even acknowledged that aerialwar over Japan was probably the most ruthless and barbaric operation in humanhistory. Lemay admitted that: “If we had lost the war we all would have beenprosecuted as war criminals.” For the most part, however, American government


and military officials were little troubled by these gruesome achievements of aerialterrorism.27

The mass firebombing of Japanese cities turned out to be something of a pre-lude to the main event—the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inAugust 1945, which ushered in a new era of military barbarism. More than100,000 civilians were killed initially in the attacks, with tens of thousands moreto follow as the effects of radiation poisoning took hold. All the horror andmisery was a product of cold, sadistic calculation justified as a means to accelerateJapanese surrender when in fact that could have been achieved months earlier ifone single condition—restoration of the emperor—had been granted. Japan hadlittle capacity to fight, its cities destroyed, its military defeated, its economy cutoff from resources. Weapons of mass destruction could only have one purpose atthis juncture—pure, militaristic, racist-motivated revenge. A defiant PresidentTruman never had second thoughts about his decision to needlessly incineratehundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

The consensus among U.S. leaders was that Japan was a nation of evil fanaticswho should pay for their unspeakable treachery. For American war planners,destruction was meant to be total, not partial or selective—something to becelebrated without the slightest concern for any rules of combat. Said Lemay,referring to Tokyo: “We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kidswhen we burned that town. Had to be done.”28 While the U.S. suffered fewcivilian casualties during World War II—its 295,000 deaths were almost entirelymilitary—Japan lost by conservative estimates 1.5 million civilians along withmore than 1 million armed-forces personnel. Its overall toll of 2.5 million killedwas third among all combatant nations, behind only the Soviet Union and China.

The Asian “Strategic Pivot”

It would not be too far-fetched to argue that Pearl Harbor served as a launchingpad for postwar U.S. superpower hegemony in Asia. A Pacific strategy goingback to the 1890s came to fruition out of the ashes and horrors of World War II.The heralded Good War was fought ostensibly to abolish fascist dictatorships, yetthe war gave rise to strong elements of imperialism, militarism, and statism—notto mention racism—on the American side. Over time U.S. pursuit of Pacificdomination would lead to new phases of warfare, exposing the vacuity of officialclaims that it was all about advancing freedom and democracy. Even before theclose of World War II, as we have seen, Washington had been planning to bol-ster its postwar global position against such potential competitors as Germany,Japan, the Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain.

As these possible rivals suffered debilitating human and material losses, theirinfrastructures in shambles, the U.S. exited several years of brutal warfare more orless unscathed, its civilian population safe, its economy stronger than ever, itsmilitary casualties far less horrific than what others had suffered. In the years


spanning 1941 to 1945 the U.S. built a military-industrial system of unparalleledsize and scope, invented (and used) atomic weapons, established a sprawling net-work of bases across the Pacific, and ideologically prepared the country for newmilitary ventures that would sustain warfare-state vigilance at high levels. Militaryforce targeting Asians, begun already with conquest of Hawaii and the Philippinesin the 1890s, would continue from the mid-1940s onward, catalyzed by PearlHarbor and fueled by racist attitudes pitting enlightened whites against primitiveyellow hordes.29

For American leaders in 1945, the years following World War II opened spacefor a new world order congruent with their geopolitical interests. A crucial axis ofthis “order” would be Asia, as Washington moved to control not only the Pacificislands and the Philippines but also Japan and Korea—the spoils of war—whileseeking to neutralize if not isolate China. As early as 1944 FDR had anticipatedthat the U.S. would replace Great Britain at prime mover of a revitalized inter-national capitalism, its economic, political, and military leverage sufficient to setits own international norms and rules. Not only had the U.S. won the GoodWar, it had unveiled a doomsday weapon with the awesome power to intimidateany competitive threat. The Bomb soon appeared as centerpiece of U.S. globalambitions, a vital tool of the “American Century”.

At a time when the American economy was producing ever-new sophisticatedtechnologies of death and destruction, the media and cultural apparatus wasskillfully framing World War II as an epic struggle of “civilization” against“barbarism”, the noble allies a bastion of “freedom and democracy on themarch”. This was the guiding motif of Frank Capra’s series Why We Fight—watched by millions of Americans—and the entire genre of Hollywood combatmovies released then and later. As Dower points out, portrayal of the Japaneseas monolithic evil, a country of ruthless madmen, would feed near-genocidaldiscourses and practices, as the U.S. war machine would later unleash its furyagainst Korea and Indochina.30 After all, had not Pearl Harbor revealed theJapanese as exemplars of Asian treachery, the ultimate enemy of peace anddemocracy?

By the late 1940s a deeply-ingrained imperial culture would be legitimizing theU.S. drive for postwar supremacy in Asia, legitimizing each expansive movestarting with the occupation of Japan itself. As the U.S. imposed its national willon a broken and humiliated Japan, under the severe tutelage of General DouglasMcArthur, racist ideology took a new turn: the Japanese would no longer beregarded as evil monsters but rather as naïve uncivilized children needing to betaught the hard lessons of democratic governance. A thoroughly defeated enemywould now be transformed into a friendly client state once its leaders adapted tothe dictates of an imperial power while keeping their own military capabilitiesfully in check.31 Literally overnight a conflicted relationship had become that ofcongenial parent-child, as the old racial animus shifted from Japan to China—atrend exacerbated by the 1949 Communist Revolution. With the Cold War gaining


momentum, Japan would now stand as a Pacific bulwark of anti-Communism; theyellow (also red) hordes were relocated to China.

As Washington extended its postwar hegemony in Asia, elite thinking turnedincreasingly to markets and resources needed to sustain capitalist expansion.Meanwhile, U.S. military power took on a life of its own as the Pentagondeployed its power (including nuclear weaponry) across land, sea, and air.Countless military bases were built, including dozens in Japan and Okinawaalone. South Korea would become a lively center of American military activity.The U.S. was providing generous military aid to friendly dictatorships in Taiwan,Indonesia, and the Philippines as well as South Korea. The American presencewould constitute what Chalmers Johnson later referred to as an “empire ofbases”, a global thrust without parallel in history.32 While some U.S. initiativetoward postwar military demobilization were undertaken during the late 1940s, itwas at this precise moment that the warfare state would become institutionalized,as new, even more frightening “enemies” appeared on the global landscape.

Far from Hawaii, U.S. military planners were erecting a costly system of basesin the late 1940s, stretching from Japan and Okinawa to Korea, the Philippines,Australia, Thailand, the Pacific Islands and Taiwan. Okinawa alone had even-tually become the locale of 39 American installations, large and small. With theCold War shaping American politics, these bases would serve as centers of armed-forces training and operations, covert actions, and aerial surveillance, not tomention logistical and political support for allied governments fighting Com-munism. Referring to the unique importance of Okinawa, Johnson writes: “It isused to project American power throughout Asia in the service of a de facto U.S.grand strategy to perpetrate or increase American hegemonic power in this crucialregion.”33

U.S. wartime propaganda defining the Good War as an epic struggle ofdemocracy against dictatorship would be totally at odds with the historical actu-ality. Postwar American strategy in fact depended on a merger of local author-itarian rule and U.S. political-military dictates, as Washington pouredinstitutional, material, and ideological resources into right-wing authoritariangovernments—Syngman Rhee in South Korea, Ferdinand Marcos in the Phi-lippines, Suharto in Indonesia, a mélange of corrupt bureaucrats in Taiwan andJapan—all to defeat, or at least contain, Communism. And in all these casespeople were arrested, imprisoned, and killed, as opposition groups (includinglabor unions) were crushed to “save democracy” from the ubiquitous clutches oftotalitarianism. Capitalist expansion soon enough produced its own rigid oli-garchical system, a far remove from the fictions of self-governance and “freemarkets”. Indeed most Asian countries, including Japan (under tight single-partyrule until 1993), would be governed by strict authoritarian regimes with statisteconomies well into the 1990s.

Under the familiar guise of promoting democracy, Washington set up a net-work of military bases in South Korea after 1945 that operated in close alliance


with the Rhee dictatorship, which sought to destroy any popular resistance as“Communist”. Hand-picked by the Truman administration, Rhee governed aharsh police state during the early postwar years that was (in Bruce Cumings’words) akin to a “colonial state in mildly-altered form”.34 Bruce Cumings writes:“The Americans would not turn Korea over to the Korean … Korea thusbecame a harbinger of policies that followed throughout the world—in Greece,Indochina, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua—where Americans came to defendanyone calling themselves anticommunist, because the alternative was alwaysthought to be worse. And six decades later, the Korean problem [division]remains unsolved.”35

Beyond its domestic situation, South Korea had become vital to Americanimperial ambitions in the Pacific, as would (at different times) such countries asIndonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam not to mention Japan. In these zonesexpression of local resistance—or national independence—was viewed as a direthreat to U.S. hegemony, to be targeted with some mixture of internal repres-sion, covert action, diplomatic maneuvering, and economic pressure or, whenneeded, outright U.S. military intervention. As the U.S. had brutally demon-strated in Japan, its leaders were always read to wage bloody warfare to serve theirown geopolitical interests.

With onset of the Cold War and then revolution in China, military conflict inKorea seemed imminent, the country having been artificially divided betweenNorth (Communist) and South (U.S.) in 1945. When almost daily borderencounters finally led to all-out warfare in 1950, Washington (using its control ofthe embryonic United Nations) intervened to prevent a North takeover that, itwas argued, would encourage Communist revolutions across Asia and possibly therest of the world. At this juncture the U.S. and South Korean militaries weremore or less fully integrated. With Chinese entry into the war after U.S. troopsmoved far above the line separating the two sides, Truman—fearing endlessstalemate—embarked on a war of attrition that would continue for nearly threeyears, producing casualties well beyond those of World War II in the Pacific.Under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. was prepared tolay waste to North Korea—a country, after all, thoroughly infected with the evilsof Communism.

MacArthur proposed full-scale war against China, insisting all military optionsshould be kept alive to break the stalemate—including even nuclear weapons,which Truman did in fact seriously consider. For the U.S., saturation-bombingcampaigns like those of World War II would have to suffice: using napalm, otherincendiaries, and high-explosive bombs, the U.S. air force set out to burn everysizable city and town in the North to the ground, killing at least three millionpeople, mostly civilians. After months of aerial terrorism, military standoff was stillthe final outcome: once painstaking armistice was secured, the pre-war boundaryseparating North and South was simply reestablished. In the end, the Korean Warwas a huge boondoggle for the Pentagon and its hundreds of military contractors,


as spending for ground troops, bases, air force, nuclear weapons and aerospacetook off in the early 1950s. Reflecting on the Korean military impasse, BritishPrime Minister Winston Churchill commented: “Korea does not really matternow. I’d never head of the bloody place until I was 74. Its importance lies in thefact that it has led to the re-arming of America.”36

The Korean War would be a turning-point in the forging of a U.S. Pacificgrand strategy, along with solidification of the warfare sate. A scorched-earthcampaign had been undertaken with the same frenetic dedication that character-ized the Pacific Theater in the 1940s. Fear of Communist power in Asia wouldsoon drive U.S. military intervention in Indochina, another war of attrition thatwould cost an estimated 3.5 million lives and bring ruin to Laos and Cambodia aswell as Vietnam. Those wars would be fought with the indispensable help of U.S.military bases in Japan and Okinawa.

Vietnam became yet another crucial, bloody “testing point” of Americanpower in Asia—spanning in this case three presidencies (those of John F. Ken-nedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon). Taking over the failed legacy ofFrench colonialism in the early 1960s, Washington would frame its war in Viet-nam as another historic struggle to “defend the free world”, meaning support forright-wing dictatorships aligned with U.S. pursuit of Asian hegemony. Architectof the first counter-insurgency programs, which promised democracy but reliedon harsh internal repression, JFK warned that he would never preside over the“loss of Vietnam”—an imperative rendered more urgent in the wake of thedevastating U.S. “loss of China”. Following his 1964 election victory, LBJ laun-ched a massive escalation of warfare: U.S. troops moved into Vietnam by thehundreds of thousands, saturation bombing campaigns followed, free-fire zoneswere carved out, and such devastating weapons as napalm, white phosphorus,high-explosive bombs, and herbicides were widely used in still another war ofannihilation. True to Cold War mythology, the war (extended by LBJ and Nixonto Laos and Cambodia) was advertised as a mortal battle of “democracy” against“totalitarianism”.

Global counter-insurgency was a linchpin of JFK’s foreign policy, following inthe tracks of Roosevelt’s earlier Pacific strategy reinforced and Truman’s ColdWar anti-Communism. Indochina was defined as a central testing-ground in thebattle to save Western Civilization. JFK was the main catalyst behind more than adecade of imperial savagery in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, his liberal aides stillat the helm as LBJ boosted military operations that were set in motion during1961–1962. Bruce Miroff writes: “If Kennedy was privately musing about awithdrawal after the 1964 presidential elections, as Kenneth O’Donnell was toclaim a number of years later, his thoughts were apparently unknown to thoseactually entrusted with Vietnam planning.”37 Those “entrusted” individualsincluded ardent cold warriors Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, andRobert McNamara. Contrary to so much JFK mythology, the most rigid ColdWar dogmas were always central to his foreign policy. So too were the seductions


of “hot war” ventures consistent with his apocalyptic view of the Americanglobal mission.

In the years following the Pearl Harbor attack, the Pacific War—indeed WorldWar II in its totality—was depicted across the U.S. political and media culture asa life-and-death battle against a wide range of scourges: fascism, imperialism,militarism, authoritarian rule. What this propaganda ignored was the very pre-sence of those same “scourges” in American public life—a reality both then andlater. Such tendencies, part of the American historical landscape though in lessdeveloped form, would be exacerbated by the rise of the warfare state, symbo-lized by the proliferation of military bases across the Pacific. In historical terms,the U.S.-Japanese conflict had actually spanned many decades, with Pearl Harborrepresenting a single (however traumatic and transformative) moment whenconflict erupted into a war of annihilation. The Pacific war, as shown in thischapter, was driven more by fierce imperial rivalry than by U.S. efforts to makeAsia (and the world) safe for democracy. America’s triumph over Japan wouldpave the way toward global realignment destined to ensure new phases ofmilitarism, war, and authoritarian politics on all sides.

U.S. military expansion in the Pacific-Asia region included new troopdeployments, a network of bases, arms sales to local governments, and refinementof nuclear weapons now made available to a variety of planes, ships, and sub-marines. As for expansion of “free markets”, the reality was a spread of manifestlystatist capitalist economies in the region, organized on the basis of ambitiousgovernment planning and regulations, state ownership, corporate-governmentpartnerships, massive public spending, and strong military sector. From SouthKorea to Taiwan, Japan to the Philippines and Indonesia, economic growth(always congruent with U.S. interests) pursued a distinctly state-capitalist model.There would be no bureaucratic centralism endemic to the Soviet commandeconomy—nor would there be anything resembling a “free-market” systemoften, but misleadingly, identified with the American system. None of this post-war reality discouraged American politicians, officials, and media outlets fromdescribing Asian nations within the U.S. orbit as thriving centers of “democracy”and “free markets”. State-directed capitalism in Japan and across the Pacificlaid the foundations of rapid growth and a measure of economic indepen-dence, though ultimately restricted by the encroachments of U.S.-engineeredglobalization. Growth rates among the “Asian tigers” typically exceeded ten per-cent, a challenge to the fictional American model which itself contained abundantelements of statism, above all its swollen military-industrial complex. In the caseof Japan, huge transnational corporations and banks entered into partnership withgovernment, amounting to an elevated variant of Keynesian economics thatMitsubishi, Sony, Toyota, and kindred interests eagerly welcomed. This was aparadigm of vigorous and efficient industrialization built on production of auto-mobiles, electronics, petrochemicals, and a plethora of consumer goods. At thesame time, the Japanese “miracle” (and what followed elsewhere) hardly


threatened U.S. hegemony in Asia, which always relied heavily on militarysuperiority.

Nor have the Chinese to date managed to seriously undermine U.S. imperialpower in the Pacific, despite their widening economic, military and geopoliticalleverage. Following a different variant of state capitalism—in which the central gov-ernment drives investment, planning, and growth—China long ago departedfrom the Soviet-style economy, allowing more space for private and foreignbusiness. The “Communist” label has meant little, a reality grasped by PresidentNixon and Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s when they moved to “normalize”U.S.–Chinese relations. Happy to do business with yet another authoritarianregime, the U.S. forged its Chinese “opening” around prospects for expandingtrade, investments, and markets. The Nixon-Kissinger move was a cynical ploy toundercut the Soviet Union, but of course the Soviet Union ultimately vanishedfrom the scene while the Chinese regime was further departing from any sem-blance of Communism. As for the U.S., it has never refused alliance with anystatist order that might serve its insatiable geopolitical interests—quite at oddswith Good War propaganda.

Of course such geopolitical objectives would be checkmated without thecudgel of military power dispersed across the Pacific islands to Japan, Okinawa,South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. With Hawaii as command center,and control over nearly half the earth’s surface, the Pentagon has constructedbases in Guam, Samoa, Palau, and more recently in Jeju Island off the coast ofSouth Korea. From 1946 until 1958, the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests in thesouth Pacific, leaving the Marshall Islands the most radiated area in the world,much of it uninhabitable. Today some bastions of American power in the Pacific-Asia region are run as colonial fortresses, part of the “wall of Pacific islands”stratagem to achieve full-spectrum domination.

Many decades after the Pearl Harbor attack, U.S. imperial expansion in thePacific continues unabated, driven partly by longstanding fear of emergentsuperpower China. Having fought three wars of attrition in Asia, Washingtonremains obsessed with sustaining its geopolitical advantage—the Obama adminis-tration’s recent “strategic pivot” to Asia being the latest maneuver to check theChinese behemoth. Since Obama’s ascent to the White House in 2009, the U.S.has bolstered its military ties with Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Aus-tralia while deploying new military resources throughout Asia. Depicting Chinaas an aggressive, ruthless giant—in the midst of tightening U.S.–China economicrelations and greater Chinese openness to foreign investment—Washington hastaken a path of political and even military confrontation, reflected in far-reachingsurveillance operations combined with provocative aerial and naval operationsnear Chinese borders.

Indispensable to the “strategic pivot” is a strengthening of U.S.–Japaneserelations—the basis of an historic alliance linking the first and third largesteconomies in the world—premised on further militarization of Japan, meaning


suspension of the nation’s pacifist Constitution that Washington enforced afterWorld War II. In April 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave the first-everJapanese speech before a joint session of Congress, officially commemorating the70th anniversary of the end of World War II but mainly dedicated to a U.S.-ledPacific-Asia order that, if viable, could serve to restrain Chinese power. Towardthis end the Abe government would have a green light for new military buildupswhile the U.S. (against strong local protests) would further modernize its ownpresence in strategically-crucial Okinawa (where in 2015 a sprawling new Marinebase was under construction). Crucial to the “pivot”, Japan and Okinawa wouldprovide locales for missile-defense capabilities, surveillance and intelligenceoperations, logistical supports, and new cyber-warfare initiatives.

A major linchpin of the “pivot” is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 14-nationtrade agreement designed, in great measure, to economically weaken if not mar-ginalize China. First proposed in 2005 and later negotiated on a yearly basis—incomplete secrecy—the TPP has been sold to the American public as indispensablefor economic growth, technological innovation, and job creation though a keyoverriding purpose (as revealed by Wikileaks and other sources) is to augment thetrade and geopolitical leverage of the U.S. and its allies, much to the disadvantageof China. “Free trade” would give the U.S. and its partners broader access tomarkets, technology, and material resources throughout—perhaps the mostextreme neoliberal agenda yet. Written almost entirely by transnational corpora-tions, with the participation of as many as 600 American-based interests, the TPPempowers business interests close to the American and Japanese governments toeffectively set their own laws and rules, to the great detriment of smaller nationsnot to mention labor, consumers, and the impacted environment. The treaty(only five of its 29 chapters dealing with “trade” issues) represents an historic boonto such corporations as Monsanto, Nike, AT&T, Sony, and Disney. Celebrated asthe most important (certainly the largest) trade pact in history, the TPP was signedin February 2016—despite fierce strong opposition from within Obama’s ownparty.

If the long and twisting road from Pearl Harbor and World War II to the Asian“strategic pivot” and the TPP is toward radically-expanded American power inthe Pacific, the future could actually bring daunting obstacles to this imperialjourney. Whatever the fate of the TPP, China is destined to become the world’sleading economy in less than two decades; its sphere of influence, in Asia andelsewhere, will be difficult to counteract. At the same time, the Chinese economyis so interwoven with the American that any military conflict between the twonations could have no rational purpose. Far from being “isolated”, in fact, Chinahas been pursuing its own “silk road” trade arrangements, through the AsianInfrastructure Investment Bank, with growing links across Asia, Latin America,and even Europe. Meanwhile, the NATO thrust eastward (part of familiar U.S.efforts to “isolate” Russia) has pushed Moscow into at least a short-term alliancewith China, spurred by a 2015 $400 billion energy contract between the two


erstwhile enemies. Such an ascendant Eurasian coalition might well undercut theTPP, and by extension the Asian “pivot”—though of course any future economicwarfare is bound to sharpen political and military tensions in the region.

Commenting on mounting U.S.-China tensions in the South China Sea,Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter reaffirmed, in early 2015, that the “U.S. willremain the principal security power in the Asia-Pacific region for decades tocome.” Washington was even prepared to challenge Beijing around control ofthe Spratling Islands, close to Chinese national waters, calling it an urgent matterof international law and naval freedoms. It was precisely this American policy ofself-righteous belligerence close to Asian shores that set the contours for theoutbreak of World War II in the Pacific.

The U.S. continues to rekindle the flames of militarism in the Pacific. In 2015,Washington was exerting pressure on Japan to scrap its pacifist Constitution thatwas imposed upon the nation, at General MacArthur’s insistence, at the end of WorldWar II—the idea being that a strong Japanese military would nowadays come inalignment with American regional power, directed mainly against “Chineseexpansionism”. New legislation, supported vigorously by the ruling LiberalDemocratic party, would once again permit Japan to deploy its armed forcesabroad. This comes at a time just following the 70th anniversary of Pacific battlesin Saipan, Guam, the Mariana Islands, New Guinea, Palau, the Philippines, andBurma, and just before that of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Manila—not to mentionthe firebombing of Tokyo and 65 other Japanese cities and the atomic destructionof Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As John Letman appropriately observes: “Each eventrepresents death and destruction of the past in a region scarred by militarism andan ongoing legacy of war without end.” 38

Many decades after the 1941 Pearl Harbor events, Hawaii remains vital to U.S.military power in the Pacific and is indeed a bastion of American supremacythroughout the world. Whatever FDR’s intentions might have been leading upto (and following) the Japanese attack, the historical trajectory of that attack (andsurrounding events) fits the overall pattern of U.S. imperial expansion begun duringthe 1890s, after closure of domestic frontier. World War II paved the way towardU.S. unchallenged superpower status in Asia, which it has yet to relinquish.

Notes

1 Referring to Manifest Destiny and imperial ideology in general, Takaki points towardthe “racialization of savagery” that infected American historical development from theoutset. See Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co.,1993), p. 88.

2 See Elinor Langer, “Famous Are the Flowers”, The Nation (April 29, 2008), p. 29.3 Ibid., p. 17.4 H.P. Willmott, Pearl Harbor (London: Cassell, 2001), p. 45.5 On the evolution of the Pearl Harbor events in American popular culture, see Carl

Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine (Boulder, CO: Paradigm,2007), pp. 155–68.


6 Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), p.151.

7 On the dismal failure of the Doolittle raids, see James M. Scott, Target Tokyo (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2015).

8 See Suid, Guts and Glory, p. 655.9 Willmott, Pearl Harbor, p. 172.10 For an excellent depiction of the battleship culture, see Theodore C. Mason, Battleship

Sailor (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1982), pp. 66–72.11 Ibid., p. 249.12 Ibid., pp. 268–69.13 See Willmott, Pearl Harbor, p. 161.14 See Michael Slackman, Target Pearl Harbor (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,

1990), p. 8.15 Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York:

Free Press, 2000), Ch. 1.16 Ibid., p. xiv.17 Ibid., p. 9.18 Ibid., p. 29.19 See George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007).20 Ibid., p. 19.21 Ibid., p. 14.22 Ibid., p. 15.23 Ibid., pp. 137–38.24 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York:

Pantheon, 1986), p. 33.25 Ibid., p. 37.26 John Dower, Cultures of War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), pp. 138–39.27 Ibid., p. 186.28 Cited in Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 109.29 Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 152.30 Ibid., pp. 20–27.31 See ibid., pp. 302–04.32 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004), Ch. 6.33 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), p. 64.34 See Bruce Cumings, “Decoupled from History: North Korea in the ‘Axis of Evil’”, in

Cumings et. al., Inventing the Axis of Evil (New York: New Press, 2004), p. 18.35 Ibid., p. 22.36 Cited in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New

York: Gallery Press, 2012), p. 251.37 See Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David MacKay, 1976), p. 164.38 John Letman, “The Militarized Pacific: An Anniversary without End”, Truth-Out (May

14, 2014).


2MOBILIZING FOR WAR

While World War II was not the longest war that humans ever waged, its his-torical legacy for modern times has no parallel: it transformed the globe forever.The war was the most costly of all, in both human and material terms. It resultednot only in the defeat of international fascism but in the rise of a new constella-tion of global forces—the arrival of two competing superpowers, advent ofnuclear weapons, creation of the United Nations, the spread of anti-colonialmovements, and birth of Israel. For the U.S., the war gave rise to a permanentwarfare state fueled by pursuit of world supremacy, a war economy, an emergentnational security-state, an empire of military bases. It brought new power rela-tions embedded in a dynamic partnership of corporations, state, and an enlargedmilitary sector. Across the postwar decades, this revitalized power structure woulddecisively impact on every realm of American public life.

In the years preceding World War II, American society had been deeply miredin economic depression that FDR’s New Deal, relying on social Keynesianism,could at best only partially reverse. Government spending did little to improvegrowth or generate jobs, the unemployment rate in late 1941 hovering at nearly20 percent. At that time military spending—in the wake of post-World War Idemobilization—was quite feeble, less than one percent of Gross National Pro-duct (GNP). Overall troop strength (army and navy) was barely 200,000, with airpower limited to 150 fighters and 50 bombers (one-tenth that of Germany). As iswell known, the political mood of the country was ardently isolationist, reflectedin the fact that neither the public nor Congress had any appetite to join theEuropean conflict that had begun in 1939.

Roosevelt, however, brought to the presidency a more politically expansiveand interventionist outlook: in 1940 he already sought to double the size of boththe army and navy, while setting out to implement a universal draft policy. He

laid out plans for expanded military production, including large increases in thenumber of planes and ships. The U.S. was assisting Britain through the “lendlease” program, hoping to stave off disastrous losses to the Germans. Meanwhile,as discussed in Chapter 1, FDR was vigorously pursuing a “backdoor” strategy toprovoke war with Japan, by means of an elaborate eight-point program. By mid-1941, if not earlier, the U.S. was in fact well along the path to warfare in boththe Pacific and Europe, a prelude to full-scale war mobilization.

A Militarized Society

Even before the Pearl Harbor events, President Franklin Roosevelt had moved toestablish American society on solid war footing, though it would take the Japa-nese attack to propel the nation toward full-scale mobilization. By mid-1940FDR was able to persuade an isolationist Congress to increase military spending asa step toward boosting arms production while expanding both navy and armydeployments that would be facilitated by the draft. In 1940 U.S. military spend-ing was merely $1.6 billion (two percent of GDP) but reached $6.4 billion in1941 and then $25.6 billion in 1942 before escalating full-speed in 1943. By 1941the U.S. had actually matched what the Germans were spending on armamentsand troop deployments, which was nearly triple the Japanese levels.1

Once the U.S. entered World War II and global conflict intensified, a systemof state-directed war mobilization was rapidly developed, signifying a radicaldeparture from earlier capitalist patterns associated with limited government and“free enterprise”, and this turned out to be the very stimulus needed to awakenAmerican society from its economic doldrums. Once the war machine hadrevved up, the U.S. managed to achieve record levels of economic growthspanning 1942 to 1945, rooted in a national consensus strongly favoring militarypriorities.

In January 1942 the U.S. launched an historic armaments campaign, geared tomassive conversion from human, material, and technical resources into a military-industrial complex powerful enough to defeat the Axis nations. A War ProductionBoard was set up, dictating a wide range of economic outputs: 300,000 aircraft,86,000 tanks, 76,000 ships, 2.6 million machine guns, 40 billion bullets—accompanied by an armed-services deployment that would exceed 11 millionduring the war.2 A system of extensive civilian rationing was initiated. Taxes wereraised on the wealthy, reaching 90 percent, to help fund War Department orderstotaling $330 billion by 1945. The national debt rose from $49 billion in 1941 to$259 billion in 1945, eliciting few noteworthy complaints from either Repub-licans or Democrats. Prices and wages were placed under control of the Office ofPrice Administration (OPA), again with little protest. By the end of World War IIAmerican GNP had more than doubled its 1941 level.3

Under the aegis of a militarized state-capitalism, the U.S. economy grew dra-matically, made possible by an entirely new set of rules guiding development,

44 Mobilizing for War

planning, and regulation. Not only were millions of Americans recruited intomilitary service, tens of millions more were employed in armaments and relatedindustries, at wages far above what had been expected in the 1930s. Both womenand minorities entered the work force by the millions, effectively revolutionizingthe broad labor terrain. Military Keynesianism provided such an enormous sti-mulus that, in a span of just a few years, the dystopic narratives of economicdepression and social misery were reduced to distant memory. The armamentfactories, shipyards, aircraft plants, and scattered combat operations all contributedto this high-powered stimulus.

To secure military victory the U.S. opted to move toward global levels ofeconomic and military power, which for the Roosevelt administration meantpushing capitalism in more expansive directions, toward a partnership of bigbusiness, government, and the military—and this would constitute the basis of thepost-1945 warfare state. Corporate behemoths (Ford, General Motors, KaiserIndustries, IBM, etc.) would under such new conditions come to view the federalgovernment—source of lucrative war contracts—as friendly beneficiary, nolonger the hostile invasive force against “free market”. As it turned out, thechieftains at Ford and GM were perfectly happy to produce tanks and jeeps ratherthan automobiles and buses, so long as big profits were forthcoming. They werealso ready to embrace an ambitious federal plan geared to an ensemble of nationalpriorities, so long as generous private contracts would be awarded.

As explored at length by A. J. Baime in The Arsenal of Democracy, Ford MotorCompany (and the city of Detroit) became an overnight epicenter of unprece-dented U.S. war production. With aerial warfare taking on ever-increasing pri-macy, Ford shifted from cars to planes, from consumer goods to militaryproducts, as early as 1941. To manufacture a new generation of B-24 bombers,Ford (overcoming the well-known Nazi sympathies of Henry Ford) erected anentirely new industrial apparatus, including a revitalized managerial structure,resource base, assembly line, and work force.4 Ford’s modernized factories—replicated in different ways across the country—would now be fully dedicated tothe enterprise of wartime combat, its wildly-successful Willow Run bomberfactory emerging as the biggest of all high-tech production centers.

The federal government, represented in Detroit by Ernest Kanzler, sent a bluntmessage to automakers: shift virtually everything to military production, imme-diately. Said Kanzler in early 1942: “We must have it at once, in fact we shouldhave had it yesterday, an all out war economy. We (the Roosevelt administra-tion) were all agreed upon what we wanted to do to Hitler and the Japs”.5 Theauto industry would be producing tanks, trucks, and planes, and there wouldbe no debate on the issue. Extended war on two fronts would demand full-scalepolitical and economic mobilization, involving government controls overimportant urban centers, factories, transport, housing, and the general publicinfrastructure. An explosion of war-related jobs meant a broadening tax base thatwould go a long way toward funding the war effort. The bomber plant at Ford,

Mobilizing for War 45

with its sprawling labor force and highly-efficient assembly-line production, cameto be regarded by many as “the supreme achievement of American history.”6

By early 1943 this vast new complex had moved full-speed ahead toward adurable war economy. At Willow Run, factories were producing not onlythousands of bombers but fighters as well as trucks, jeeps, engines, generators,ammunition, and of course spare parts for planes and vehicles. General Electricand Westinghouse were making thousands of turbine engines and spare parts;Kaiser Industries was manufacturing a constant stream of aircraft carriers and otherlarge ships. General Motors was operating full-throttle as tank and truck maker;Dow Chemical was producing napalm and kindred weapons; and the pharma-ceutical industry (Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, etc.) was enlisted in campaigns toprovide penicillin and other medicines in urgent demand across the many combatzones. Production Board chair Donald Nelson said that patriotic loyalty amongbusiness leaders would be measured according to a simple criterion—maximizingoutput for the war effort.

More than anything, World War II set in motion skyrocketing arms produc-tion and military deployments: by spring 1943 an ambitious state-planning appa-ratus was fully in place, recasting capitalist production at its very core. From thefourth quarter of 1942 to the second quarter of 1943, four-engine bomber outputincreased from 5,376 to 11,928.7 The new B-29 super bomber was being man-ufactured and deployed in large numbers. A U.S. air corps that totaled no morethan 20,000 personnel on the eve of conflict grew to an astounding 2.4 millionby the end of 1943. At this juncture no other nation—not Germany, the SovietUnion, Great Britain or Japan—could begin to match the output of a flourishingAmerican war economy. New arenas of military combat brought not only unfa-thomable profits to military contractors but hastened the overall modernization ofcapitalist production—the vitality of which depended on a tightening partnershipof corporations, government, and the military.

The American wartime economic miracle amounted to a state-directed mobi-lization process never before seen in world history. At the end of the war GeneralDwight Eisenhower observed: “America’s record of production, as well as on thebattleline, is one that will fill our histories forever.”8 Seizing on the dramaticimpact of aerial warfare, U.S. leaders presided over the manufacture of 324,000planes of every sort, surpassing the output of Great Britain and the Soviet Unioncombined. Ford alone was to produce nearly 20,000 B-24s and 58,000 planeengines, not to mention 93,000 trucks and 278,000 jeeps.9 The planes were natu-rally bigger, faster and more lethal, enabling the U.S. to turn combat outcomesconsistently in its favor, in both the Pacific and Europe. It was aerial warfare, afterall, that reduced German and Japanese cities to rubble: in Europe alone Alliedbombers flew 1,440,000 sorties and dropped nearly three billion tons of bombs,destroying industrial and transportation capacity while killing 300,000 civiliansand leaving 7.5 million people homeless. Before the introduction of atomicwarfare, this represented a peak achievement in the mass production of killing.


In the end, the U.S. nearly equaled the output of war materials by the Axispowers combined, with 45 percent of the overall federal budget invested inmilitary priorities. As of mid-1945, the U.S. had devoted a staggering $342 billionto the war effort—compared to $270 billion for Germany, $94 billion for Italy,and $56 billion for Japan. (The Soviet Union spent $192 billion.) Washingtonalso deployed more combat troops—more than 11 million—than any countrybut the Soviet Union.10 Such expenditures were unconditionally supported byCongress, the White House, leaders of both major parties, and the general public.This allocation of resources toward protracted warfare could only be associatedwith unprecedented levels of death and destruction on a world scale, with Ger-many, Japan, and the Soviet Union obviously hit hardest. Americans were able tocarry on their lives in a safe and peaceful environment, far removed from themajor war theaters. Casualties were relatively limited, as American cities werebeyond the range of enemy bombers and rockets. Alone among wartime com-batants, the U.S. emerged from World War II with a vastly strengtheneddomestic economy and more dynamic international presence. It also emergedwith a largely reconstituted power structure.

A New Power Elite

If war in the modern world can generally be said to benefit state power, corpo-rate interests, and military agendas, then surely World War II—the most globaland savage of military engagements—was sure to produce the same outcome,though in more exaggerated form. For the U.S., war mobilization not onlytransformed the economy but politics, culture, and social life, infused the societywith renewed patriotic energy and firm belief that the quintessential Good Warhad been fought and won. Behind the myth of a Good War, however, could beuncovered a political and media discourse riddled with xenophobia, deceit, andhalf truths surrounding the deeper agendas of a power structure concerned morewith imperial expansion than with promotion of freedom and democracy. Asearly as 1945 American elites moved to advance their domestic and globalagendas—in a setting where the U.S. was already well along the road to superpowerstatus.

An enlarged power structure appeared on a broadening institutional foundationof what would become the permanent war economy. World War II had gener-ated far-reaching ideological consensus behind this complex as oligarchy was nowbecoming an entrenched reality. A trajectory that would be traced and analyzedby C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956) and Fred Cook in The Warfare State(1962), efforts that stood alone in surveying a new form of authoritarian rule atthe center of postwar American politics. Observed Cook: “The two tremendouspower complexes of our Warfare State—the Military and Big Business—join inan inevitable meeting of minds over billions of dollars in contracts, the one has toaward and the other to fulfill.”11 As Smedley Butler had famously argued


regarding World War I in his book War is a Racket (1937), the scandalous war-time profit-making of hundreds of corporations was destined to give rise to newconcentrations of wealth and power, bringing to the light of day the fiction offree-markets and democratic politics.12 Thoroughly embedded in the economy,government, and culture, militarism was now becoming a way of life that wouldfully reshape everything it touched.

In strictly economic terms, World War II simultaneously boosted industrialgrowth and state spending, while bringing prosperity to levels historically unim-agined, rescuing American society from its prolonged depression. GNP more thandoubled from 1941 to 1945. In 1935, at the height of economic crisis, federalspending was $6.4 billion and then rose to $9.4 billion in 1940 (when FDRbegan the military buildup) and finally to $92.7 billion in 1945—a level reachedagain in 1960, before steadily increasing (with a few dips) into the present.13 Mostcrucially, the war elevated the U.S. to leading world economic power, in com-mand of sufficient resources to maintain a robust militarized state capitalism acrosslater decades.

It would be Mills, writing in the mid-1950s, who would first present a boldconceptual view of the new power elite—a stratum that was now driven by anelaborate “military definition of world reality.”14 For Mills, the warfare systeminherited from World War II was the foundation of a new type of state capital-ism, built on a merger of corporations, government, and the Pentagon in theshadow liberal-democratic institutions and norms. Elements of such convergencewere surely in place before the war, but were now more full-blown, durable, andglobal, not to mention more militarized. Wrote Mills: “Since Pearl Harbor thosewho command the enlarged means of American violence have come to possessconsiderable autonomy as well as enlarged influence, among their political andeconomic colleagues.”15 This was the essence of what would become known asthe “military-industrial complex”, where state power—a friend rather thanenemy of big business—would be the main driving force in capitalist develop-ment. In Mills’s words: “The structure due to the power elite today lies in theenlarged military state linked to the ascendency of Pentagon interests.”16 Publicvalues were corrupted as familiar references to peace, democracy, and freedomwound up emptied of content. For Mills, signs of ideological deterioration werehard to miss as “the higher immorality is a systematic feature of the Americanelite [and] its general acceptance is an essential feature of the mass society.”17

In subsequent years the warfare state, despite ebbs and flows in levels ofspending, became an institutionalized fixture of American public life, its prioritiesembedded in the economy, government, and culture—virtually impossible todislodge. Noted Cook: “The military and big business … had their hands on thethrottle, and they have never (as of 1962) relaxed their grip.”18 Military Key-nesianism meant growth, jobs, profits and stability even as it often worked againstthe material needs of a thriving social infrastructure, Cook adding: “The picturethat emerges is the picture of a nation whose entire economic welfare is fixed to


warfare.”19 With Pentagon spending routinely in the hundreds of billions, cor-porate lobbies multiplied, members of Congress worked tirelessly to secure allo-cations for their districts, and ordinary citizens looked to the system for jobsand careers—the essence of what Seymour Melman would call “Pentagoncapitalism.”20

The American warfare state could never have been sustained in the absence ofstrong patriotic consensus—a consensus fully shared by elites and masses alike.Wrote Mills: “American militarism, in fully developed form, was the triumph inall areas of life of the military metaphoric and hence the subordination to it of allother ways of life.” Further:

They [military men] must not be considered parasites on the economy [orrelated to] “the dirty politicians.” On the contrary, their ends must be iden-tified with the ends as well as the honor of the nation; the economy must betheir servant; politics an instrument by which, in the name of the state, thefamily, and God, they manage the nation in modern war.21

Transforming narrow material interests into broad ideological agendas would bemainly the task of media culture, which in the realm of foreign policy took onfeatures of an outright propaganda machine.

The pervasive influence of military power, its sprawling global presence, and itssupporting ideology coincided with the growth of an increasingly authoritarianstate: limits associated with the Constitution and liberal norms were steadilydiminished.Oligarchy grounded in a linkage of corporate and military power—neither representing much of a democratic legacy—gave rise to an insular rulingelite, departing from the old power constraints, along lines of what SheldonWolin calls a “new power imaginary” appropriate to the immediate postwarsituation. In this context: “Superpower is the union of state and corporations inan age of waning democracy and political literacy.”22 These new powerarrangements would coexist with liberal-democratic politics, Wolin adding: “Ourtotalizing system had evolved its own methods and strategies. Its genius lies inwielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentrationcamps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissidents solong as they remain useful”.23

Wolin noted that the “new power imaginary” had origins in World War II,sustained by the Cold War as it served to rationalize American imperial ambi-tions. A ruling elite oriented toward perpetual war needed a “new power voca-bulary” consistent with enlarged state functions, military Keynesianism, and morevigorous state management of resources. This was indeed one of the great legaciesof President Roosevelt, eventually carried forward by Presidents Truman, Eisen-hower, Kennedy, Johnson, and later White House occupants, Democrats andRepublicans alike. Everything seemed to reinforce this trajectory: wars, ColdWar, the Pentagon system, permanent war economy, security state, empire of


bases, imperial reach, and of course nuclear politics. None of this bore muchresemblance to the comforting myths of “free enterprise” or “free markets”associated with traditional capitalism: on the contrary, the new power elite pre-sided over a state capitalism driven by rules and practices quite different fromanything conventionally found in textbook capitalism. The warfare state not onlystimulated the American economy, temporarily insulating it from crisis and col-lapse, but led to its reconstitution on a new footing, both structural andideological.

The Warfare System since 1945

At the close of World War II, the U.S.—basking in the fruits of hard-wonvictory—could theoretically have moved toward full-scale military demobiliza-tion, but that might well have taken the country back into the sorrows ofdepression. In 1945 the picture of American domestic vitality and of global strengthwas indeed glowing—industrial growth rates had reached 15 percent yearly whilethe U.S. was producing 50 percent of the world’s goods, held two-thirds of itsinternational gold reserves, had relatively thriving cities, and of course enjoyedatomic monopoly. At this juncture pressures toward dismantling the warfare statewould be countered by a stubborn reality: war happens to be very good for thehealth of both the economy and government. At a time of expanding U.S. globalpresence, in fact, there were strong incentives to maintain high levels of federalspending and economic development vital to a powerful military.

The prewar national mood of isolationism appeared to have vanished. At thesame time, some level of demobilization seemed inescapable and military cutbacksdid occur during the immediate postwar years. After all, the fascist enemies hadvanished from the scene, defeated and ruined. It would be impossible to keepsome 16 million people in uniform, or to run armaments factories at full throttle.Still, the new power imaginary set in motion by five years of global warfarewould not seamlessly disappear. After a few years of severely reduced spending,the warfare state would be resurrected with a vengeance, thanks to the emer-gence of a new mortal threat in Soviet Communism. The Cold War providedthe ideal stimulus for reviving military Keynesianism, which would serve as alinchpin of the warfare state until the early 1990s. There would be no turningback: by the time of the Korean War, if not sooner, American pursuit of militarysupremacy had become a taken-for-granted element of the expanded powerimaginary.

A militarized state capitalism first took hold from 1941 to 1945, declinedbriefly, then resumed its steady trajectory across the postwar years, as the Pentagonbecame an institutionalized fixture of American public life. While U.S. militaryspending followed cyclical ups and downs, its average levels were enough to funda thriving warfare system. By the early 1950s, with onset of the Korean War andCold War hysteria, armed-forces expenditures approached World War II levels, a


fiscal agenda fully embraced by both parties. According to the Office of Man-agement and Budget, annual Pentagon spending during the postwar years (in2013 dollars) averaged roughly $400 billion, until a radical spike during Pre-sident George W. Bush’s first term.24

As bipartisan Cold War consensus gained momentum out of the ashes ofWorld War II, soon enough alien threats surfaced one after the other—first theSoviet Union, followed by China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and assorted local“revolutionary” challenges. The Truman Doctrine, set forth in 1948, gaveWashington license to intervene militarily anywhere U.S. national interests wereperceived to be threatened. Far-flung American bases were to be maintained orexpanded, not dismantled, while U.S. nuclear supremacy was to be preserved atall costs. By the late 1940s official propaganda had decreed that Communism wason the move, infiltrating movements and organizations everywhere, ready toconquer the world—though actual dangers to the U.S. homeland were in factlargely manufactured: the Soviet military was roughly half the size of its coun-terpart, while American bases bordered the Soviet Union rather than vice-versa.Washington’s global power was unmatched, with a sprawling empire of bases andnuclear arsenal possessed by no other country.

Every occupant of the White House, from Harry Truman to Barack Obama,has tenaciously upheld a military Keynesian program, ever fearful of being labeled“soft on defense” or “weak” in the face of enemy threats. No leader surpassedJohn F. Kennedy in this realm. Campaigning in 1960 as a tenacious cold warriorintent on rolling back global Communism, JFK entered the presidency with apromise to overcome a (phony) missile gap with the Soviet Union, dedicated tobuilding the most powerful military force in history. He indeed presided over amassive arms escalation, sponsored the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba, launchedthe Vietnam War, and brought the world close to nuclear apocalypse with the1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Architect of a vigorous counter-insurgency strategy,JFK during his brief presidency moved from one international crisis to another:the Soviet Union, Berlin, Indochina, Cuba. There was no more ardent supporterof the warfare state than the reputed liberal Kennedy.25

In the wake of the disastrous Bay of Pigs escapade, JFK did everything possibleto provoke the Cubans and justify yet another invasion with the purpose ofregime change, which was dubbed Operations Northwoods. Kennedy wasassured, in Chalmers Johnson’s words, that “elated Cubans would welcomeAmerican-supported insurgents, strew rose petals in their path, and help U.S.-based Cuban exiles overthrow the Castro government.”26 As William Blumwrites, in Killing Hope, JFK’s failure at the Bay of Pigs was followed by a campaignof smaller attacks including attempts to assassinate Castro. Blum adds:

Throughout the 1960s, the Caribbean island was subjected to countless seaand air commando raids by exiles, at times accompanied by their CIAsupervisors, inflicting damage upon oil refineries, chemical plants and railroad


bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and sugar warehouses, infiltrating spies,saboteurs, and assassins—anything to damage the Cuban economy, promotedisaffection, and make the revolution look bad.27

At a time when the Soviet leadership was anxious for some measure of “peacefulcoexistence” and “detente”, JFK opted for confrontation and militarism, convincedthe Communist evil would have to be extirpated by means of force. In this veinRichard Walton writes: “With his knowledge that the Soviet Union was—inrelative terms—weak, he could have moved toward detente with Russia, for evenwithout further buildup he held all the high cards. But he chose instead … tolaunch a military offensive against communism, one that would turn the tide that,in his campaign speeches, he saw as unfavorable to the ‘Free World’.”28 JFK’srapid military buildup, overseen by the Harvard technocrat Robert McNamara,was geared toward transforming the Pentagon into an, efficient, aggressive jug-gernaut ready to wage combat on any continent. Ideological to the core, Ken-nedy’s leadership style was rigid, belligerent, and reckless, a recipe for disastrousforeign-policy outcomes. What JFK cherished most were the heroic virtues ofpatriotism, resolute action, courage, and honor. Viewed thusly, the Kennedylegacy was precisely the opposite of his liberal image, Walton adding: “As Con-gressman and Senator, Kennedy was never a liberal, and as President he prose-cuted the Cold War more vigorously, and thus more dangerously, than didEisenhower and Dulles.”29

In a world supposedly riddled with Communist aggression, JFK understood theU.S. mission as one of epic responsibility, of bringing “freedom” to the entireplanet. Upon ascending to the White House, Kennedy observed: “There is verylittle time. The enemy is lean and hungry and the United States is the only strongsentinel at the gate.”30 This outlook—underscored by the idea of rolling backCommunism—shaped JFK’s early, and calamitous, decision to send U.S. militaryforces to Vietnam. He saw Indochina following the French defeat as somethingof a “testing ground” in the life-and-death struggle to defend national securityand save Western Civilization. Contrary to so much historical mythology, theVietnam War turned out to be central to Kennedy’s foreign policy and, in theend, his most enduring legacy.31 All the horrors—support for dictatorship, covertoperations, political deceit, chemical warfare, strategic hamlets, civilian massacres,saturation bombing—had their impetus during the Kennedy administration,which never budged in its effort to destroy the nationalist revolution. True to hisuncompromising persona, JFK rejected any move toward diplomacy or peacefulresolution consistent with the Geneva Accords (which sought to block foreignintervention). What JFK set in motion was expanded to more savage levels in the1960s and early 1970s by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Probably more than anyother postwar episode, the Vietnam War invigorated the U.S. warfare state.

The postwar years witnessed four major spikes in U.S. military spending—from$100 billion to $500 billion during the Korean War, from $250 billion to $430


billion under JFK, from $370 billion to $590 billion through the Reagan years,and from $370 billion to $750 billion at the time of the George W. Bush pre-sidency (all measured in 2013 dollars).32 Overall federal budgets skyrocketedaccordingly to keep up with the Pentagon’s insatiable appetite for tax revenues.Reagan, of course, followed Kennedy in revisiting the great Soviet monster—animplacable “evil empire” that demanded massive Pentagon buildups, an elaborate(and costly) missile defense system, and new cycles of nuclear warheads. A repu-ted “free market” and a “small government” champion, Reagan set aboutexpanding big government, with special largesse devoted to the military, intelli-gence agencies, law enforcement, and of course nuclear weaponry. Crises andthreats now emerging from Central America helped generate ideological con-sensus behind renewed warfare-state vigilance. Whatever their “free enterprise”rituals, large corporations (especially military contractors) needed a powerful statesystem that could subsidize and legitimate their profit making.

The George W. Bush presidency ended up as by far the most profligate interms of overall military spending throughout the entire postwar era. In 2000Bush inherited a Pentagon budget (inflation adjusted) of $339.5 billion, roughly15% of total federal outlays. Spending then rose dramatically, skyrocketing 40percent to $550 billion by 2007, and then to $643.2 billion in 2009 (nearly 20percent of the total).33 At this point U.S. military expenditures, not counting thatspent on actual wars, were more than 45 per cent of what all other nations spentcombined. The aftermath of 9/11, and onset of the War on Terrorism, areusually cited as the reasons for Bush’s great military buildup. In truth, the Bushadministration was driven from the outset by hawkish neocons who had beenpushing for huge military increases well before 9/11—the same ideologues whovigorously promoted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the full story: the stupendous costs of Bush’s wars,largely unfinanced even today, will not be fully paid for many years, even dec-ades. According to a 2011 report by the Costs of War Project at Brown Uni-versity, the Iraq war alone has drained $1.7 trillion from the American economy,not counting $490 billion in benefits owed to veterans—expenses that couldreach at least $6 trillion over coming years. When the costs of military interven-tion in Afghanistan and Pakistan are included, that amount soars to $3.7 trillion,based on combined actual expenditures and future commitments.34 Yet anotherreport, by Linda Bilmes at Harvard, places the final cost of recent U.S. wars atbetween $4 trillion and $6 trillion, revenue that likewise has yet to be paid.Bilmes concludes that Bush’s wars—illegal and disastrous—turned out to be themost expensive in U.S. history, adding that “the legacy of decisions taken duringthe Iraq and Afghanistan wars will still dominate future federal budgets for dec-ades to come.” Future liability for medical care and disability benefits to assist warveterans will be especially overwhelming.35

By 2015 the warfare state had long since evolved into a behemoth with anoverriding logic of its own, its consumption of human and material resources at


levels unmatched since World War II, its penchant for military interventions stillvery much alive. (At the time of this writing, actual or potential U.S. militarytargets included sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran.) Pentagonspending in fact doubled from the late 1990s to 2014, abundant proof (if any wasneeded) that a militarized state-capitalism was never simply a response to theCold War—the Soviet threat was always grossly inflated—but followed its own stricttrajectory. This system had two broad purposes: domestically, to facilitate militaryKeynesianism, globally to sustain U.S. economic and military domination.

While the post-9/11 Bush administration boosted Pentagon spending to recordlevels, the Obama administration did nothing to reverse this trajectory. In 2014Washington still maintained its costly empire of several hundred bases, hadongoing (though limited) combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, was con-ducting drone strikes in several Middle Eastern countries, was carrying out vastglobal surveillance and intelligence operations, and was modernizing its alreadyhuge nuclear arsenal. The U.S. military retained supremacy on land as well asacross the oceans, in the air, and in space. If there were no great menaces to Americannational security—no fascists, Communists, rogue leaders, or terrorists—thewarfare state would be hard put to continue along its merry course.

Political leaders in Washington have paid little attention to President Eisen-hower’s famous 1961 warning about the corrosive force of the “military industrialcomplex”, as resources needed for social well-being and the public infrastructurewind up diverted to an ever-insatiable Pentagon. Military priorities and valueshave become so deeply rooted in the economy, government, and culture as to beseemingly immune to change. Armed-forces contractors, in partnership withwell-funded lobbies, public relations firms, and media outlets, have come toexpect a flow of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenues yearly—a matrixof “bidding” and peddling far removed from the fictional realm of free markets.In 2012 Lockheed-Martin received nearly $45 billion in contracts, followed byBoeing ($31.4 billion), Raytheon ($22.7 billion) General Dynamics ($21 billion),and Northrop-Grumman ($20.6 billion).36

As military Keynesianism takes on a life of its own, the system of corporate-government-military resource allocation and planning becomes more rituallyaccepted, nourished by the easy guarantee of markets and profits—a system per-fectly suited to the reproduction of wealth and privilege at the summits of power.Under these power arrangements, corporations can depend on a large and effec-tive government that can provide lucrative markets, mobilize resources, ensuretechnological development (R&D), and subsidize much of their operations.While profits naturally remain in the “private” domain of business, costs are lar-gely socialized owing to taxpayer benevolence. Meanwhile, throughout the far-flung U.S. military network itself, the bulk of familiar liberal welfare programsremain intact, despite all the feverish calls for fiscal conservatism: GI Bill, freehealth care, subsidized housing and education, discounted consumer goods, themost generous jobs program in U.S. history.


The warfare system that emerged out of the carnage of World War II remainsstronger today than ever, revealing the conservative hypocrisy that routinely“exempts” the Pentagon from the predictable, but futile calls for small gov-ernment. When Republicans took over Congress in November 2014, their firstmove was to fight any prospects for (earlier stipulated) military cutbacks, evenas they shamelessly railed against out-of-control federal spending. It turns outthat the world’s largest military apparatus, a behemoth of waste and destruc-tion, retains a special place in the hearts and minds of American politicians.The evidence is incontrovertible: in 2013 the nation spent a staggering $948billion to nourish the warfare state—$634 for the Pentagon, $139 billion forVeterans Affairs, $75 billion for intelligence agencies, $69 billion for Home-land Security, and $17 billion for the space program—roughly equal to what allother countries together were spending on their (mainly domestic) armedforces.37

The Wreckage of Empire

After roughly seven postwar decades of an expanding warfare state, it seemsappropriate to assess the overall costs and harms both domestically and inter-nationally. Even the most cursory observation reveals a horrendous legacy of U.S.policies, actions, and interventions spanning every presidency since 1945:

� The death and destruction wrought by U.S. imperial power has been notablyhorrific, starting with the Korean War and continuing through present-daymilitary actions (as of 2015) in Afghanistan and Iraq—dozens of armedinterventions all told, small and large.38 The human toll can only be roughlyestimated: perhaps nine million killed in Korea, Indochina and Iraq alone,with additional tens of millions wounded and yet tens of millions more madehomeless, turned into desperate refugees. Several nations have been attackedwith special ferocity, their political and social systems broken, their infra-structures ruined, their ecologies undermined by spent munitions, chemicalweapons, and radiation deposits (where depleted uranium was used), not tomention widespread damage to urban and rural landscapes.

� The warfare state feeds a condition of permanent military readiness and vig-ilance, as powerful economic, bureaucratic, and cultural forces converge toreproduce (and justify) such a logic, always with focus on specific foreignenemies. A unbearably costly military apparatus demands continuous vigi-lance and engagement, which helps elevate the role and status of ruling elites.As Robert Higgs writes: “Any president who craves a high place in theannals of history should haste to thrust the American people into an orgy ofdeath and destruction.”39 The leadership reputations of Washington, Lincoln,Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy were thoroughly upgraded in the aftermath ofdifficult military tests.


� Massive resource allocation for a permanent war economy has severelyharmed the domestic infrastructure. While Pentagon spending remains atastronomical levels—stimulating economic growth while creating lopsidedprosperity—vital social needs (healthcare, education, transportation, theenvironment, water facilities, etc.) have languished, creating a massive blighton the wealthiest country in the world—a country that could easily affordexcellent roads, a first-rate train system, efficient and clean urban transitoperations, the best educational facilities for all, and universal health care.The U.S. produces the most sophisticated high-tech fighter planes, spacevehicles, nuclear warheads, aircraft carriers, and atomic submarines, yet itsmedical system is afflicted by perpetual crisis, more bureaucratic, costly, anddysfunctional with each passing year. Other social programs have fallen intosimilar disrepair, at a time when most American cities (in contrast with Eur-opean and Asian cities) face steady deterioration. Federal budgets routinelyelevate armed-forces spending as public services suffer on the altar of fiscalausterity.

� With its sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy, security-state, and war economy—all driven by a national fetish of military power—the warfare state feedsstrong tendencies toward authoritarian rule, as both Mills and Cook had longago anticipated. The steady growth of statism, meaning a well-funded, large,and active federal governmental apparatus, is the logical outgrowth of amilitarized state-capitalism. We can look to World War II and its full-scalepolitical and economic mobilization for the origins of this enlarged “powerimaginary”, a defining characteristic of American politics. Not only is suchconcentrated power taken for granted, public debate over its scope and tra-jectory is essentially ruled off-limits, made taboo—one reason it has becomean institutionalized fixture of postwar American society.

� If perpetual war and military Keynesianism contribute so greatly to health ofthe state—above all to economic growth—one by-product of this system isoligarchy, in which corporate wealth and political power underpin anincreasingly insular elite stratum. The war economy depends on swollenprofits accrued from military buildups and foreign interventions. Big con-tractors gain enormous wealth from taxpayer-supported programs and sub-sidies. Since 9/11 the War on Terrorism has meant lucrative sales forprecision guided missiles and bombs, drone attacks, and high-tech surveil-lance equipment for combat, which fills the profit ledgers of such warfarecorporations as Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and Bechtel.

� Meanwhile, as Republicans were taking over Congress in early 2015, theircommitment to a robust warfare state readily negated their professed con-cerns for fiscal austerity: indeed their first order of business was to restorePentagon cutbacks set by previously agreed-upon budget limits, known as“sequestration.” Fixated on national-security threats, real or contrived,Republican leaders called for new military buildups well beyond those


proposed by the White House—ostensibly for the purpose of fighting IslamicState (ISIS) and related groups in the Middle East. Aerospace giants Boeingand Raytheon were expecting rich contracts for high-tech weaponry andsurveillance used extensively in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Mili-tary oligopolies like Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop-Grumman,and Raytheon achieved all-time trading records on Wall Street, revealinghow extended combat operations generously serve the oligarchies.40

� As longtime world leader in armaments production and military deploy-ments, the U.S. is also easily number one in global arms trade—its govern-ment (and corporations) reaping huge benefits from shipments of everythingfrom assault rifles to helicopters, precision bombs, and fighter planes to tonsof ammunition. Profits can run into the tens of billions of dollars yearly.American weapons trade not only fuels worldwide militarization but oftenheightens regional conflicts while bolstering repressive states in Israel, Paki-stan, Colombia, South Korea, Indonesia, and elsewhere. There is, moreover,little accountability on the part of military traders: their deadly hardware notonly reaches brutal governments and paramilitary groups but even drugcartels in Mexico and Central America.

� The warfare state has long supported dictatorships on every continent, bymeans of arms shipments, covert action, intelligence and surveillance opera-tions, economic aid, and diplomatic support. U.S. imperial power has typi-cally depended on tight alliances with local government, corporate, andarmed-forces elites, while considerable resources have been mobilized tooverthrow unfriendly governments in Asia, the Middle East, and LatinAmerica. The common result is a subversion of democratic politics rather thanits promotion or enhancement, contrary to what official (and media) propagandaclaims.

� By virtue of its far-reaching military power and its continuous armed inter-ventions, support for dictatorships, embrace of double standards (acceptanceof nuclear weapons for close allies, not for others), the U.S. has systematicallybehaved in ways guaranteed to elicit blowback. Chalmers Johnson describesthis dialectic as “empire reaping what it sows”, meaning (roughly) that forevery act of imperial aggression some form of counter-reaction is likely, ifnot predictable. U.S. global actions, whatever their official rationale, gen-erally give rise to negative feedback. Years, indeed decades, of Americanwarfare, economic sanctions and covert operations in the Middle East havelaid the foundations of insurgency and terrorism understood as resistance toempire. In 2015, nearly a quarter-century after the first Gulf War, blowbackshows no signs of weakening, as events in North Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,Yemen, even Europe reveal.

� With its far-flung global operations, the warfare state has exerted a crushingimpact on the global environment. Consuming roughly a trillion dollars inresources yearly, U.S. military operations deplete scarce metals and other


goods while polluting the air, water, and soil, leaving behind blighted land,damaged cities, and large munitions residues including toxic wastes andradiation, while consuming more water than many nations. More egregious,the Pentagon uses profligate amounts of fossil fuels to maintain planes, ships,trucks, and other vehicles—nearly two percent of the world total—a majorsource of global warming.

� A key defining feature of the U.S. war system since World War II has beenits unmatched nuclear arsenal—the province of a vast nuclear complex—thatdoes so much to bolster American military superiority while also threateningworldwide catastrophe. At present, as throughout the postwar era, Washingtonhas elaborate plans to fight and win a nuclear war, maintaining a first-strikedoctrine that is unique among nations. Having destroyed two Japanese citieswith atomic bombs, U.S. political and military leaders have long fancied theidea of a super weapon, including an impregnable missile defense that couldrender the country immune to nuclear devastation. In the postwar arms racewith the Soviet Union, Washington took the first step in virtually everyphase of the escalation—from the Manhattan Project to the hydrogen bomb,long-range missiles, nuclear submarines, multiple warheads, and missile-defense efforts. Further, while lecturing and threatening such nations as Iranand North Korea over nuclear proliferation, the U.S. shamelessly protectsothers (Israel, India) as they develop their own huge arsenals, in violation ofthe Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). Meanwhile, the U.S. movesfull-speed ahead in pursuit of its own nuclear modernization, elevating risksof both nuclear proliferation and war.

� Resistance to progressive social change at the summits of power is partly afunction of the warfare state and its security apparatus, which strengthens theimperial presidency while contributing to a narrowing of public discourseand political debate. In Bomb Power, Garry Wills sums up this dynamic:

The whole history of America since World War II caused an inevitablerolling of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use ofnuclear weaponry, the cult of the Commander in Chief, the worldwide webof military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy … the permanentemergency that has melded World War II to the Cold War and the ColdWar with the war on terror—all these make a vast and intricate structure thatmay not yield to efforts dismantling it.41

� Another linchpin of the warfare state, the national-security complex, wasborn in the early Cold War years and has expanded with little resistanceacross the decades, leading to the modern surveillance society. The NSA,CIA, and kindred agencies have their origins in the first postwar efforts tofight Communism, as both a domestic and international threat. The agenciescarried out surveillance and intelligence operations in order to intercept


challenges to the power structure—challenges greatly exaggerated, to besure, but a convenient pretext for aggressive intelligence, surveillance, andlaw-enforcement work. Over time, as recent disclosures by NSA whistle-blowers and others have shown, such operations have often run up againstConstitutional limits, democratic norms, legal due process, and politicalrights. The NSA, most powerful of these agencies, has developed over timethe high-tech capacity to monitor personal movements, track flows ofmoney, intercept cell-phone traffic, and mine Internet-based information.Surveillance methods, by the 1990s directed more at terrorists, drug traf-fickers, and ordinary political dissidents than at Communists, have pro-liferated: satellite-based systems, public cameras, GPS locating devices,Internet and cell-phone tracking mechanisms, ordinary wiretaps, drone air-craft. The NSA alone can daily process billions of data pieces, much of itdomestic and personal, justified on the basis of national-security priorities.

� Whatever its rationale, the surveillance complex (at a cost of nearly $100billion in 2014) serves a variety of repressive political functions, again as amatter of meeting crucial intelligence demands. Maureen Webb writes:“Those in power who are pursuing an imperial project need to maintaintight control at home in order to extract the political, material, and humanresources they need for their project and at the same time, to avoid beingoverwhelmed by dissent and political unrest.”42 As technology grows evermore sophisticated, elite obsession with political control easily surpassesconventional limits, its sights more all-encompassing, Webb adding: “Viewedtogether, it can be seen that they (elites) aim to ensure that almost everyoneon the planet is registered, that all travel is tracked globally, that all electroniccommunications and transactions are monitored or accessible to the state, andthat all information collected about individuals in public and private sectordata-bases is stored, linked, data-mined, and made available to state agents.”43

Thanks to widening use of super-computers within the surveillance complex,this project is already well advanced, having met with little opposition fromCongress (including its “libertarian” Tea Party members).

� The security-state has increasingly enabled the militarization of law enforce-ment, which benefits from high-tech surveillance as well as the ever moresophisticated techniques of combat. Since the 1990s many American citieshave employed Police Paramilitary Units (PPUs) that rely heavily on high-tech SWAT teams with special-ops military units. Most urban police forcesnow have SWAT teams, first widely used in drug raids. Nowadays alsoinvolved in fighting domestic terrorism, PPUs are typically equipped withmilitary-style vehicles, body armor for police, high-powered assault weapons,even drones—all first developed, tested, and used by the Pentagon.

� As might be expected of a nation at perpetual war, its veteran population hasdramatically swollen, reaching a total of several million by 2010. Since the1991 Gulf War, the number has surpassed three million, the vast majority


with serious medical or psychological afflictions that the Department ofVeterans Affairs (despite a 2014 budget of $152.7 billion) has never had suf-ficient resources to handle. Tens of thousands veterans who served in combatzones (many for two or more tours of duty) arrive at the home front withassorted injuries and dysfunctions, including drug addictions, in desperateneed of urgent health care and related services that easily overwhelm asystem that faces harsh cost cutting. The pressures are extreme, leading tohorrendous outcomes: high levels of unemployment, poverty, homelessness,psychological break downs, alarming rates of suicide (in 2014 reportedly upto 20 a day). The warfare state often destroys the lives of those sent off bypoliticians with their own narrow agendas and interests. Crippled Vietnamvet Ron Kovic, author of Born on The Fourth of July, laments: “It’s uncon-scionable and outrageous that so many of our veterans are sleeping on thestreets or in front of the locked gate at the (Los Angeles) Westwood VA …

We’re pretty quick to send them out to war, but not motivated to care forthem when they return.”44

� Since the 1940s, when the Good War served as springboard for Hollywoodmilitary propaganda, the warfare state has been celebrated and legitimatedthrough what has become a deepening culture of militarism. That culturehas, in turn, thoroughly permeated other media realms: film, TV, literature,video games, music, the Internet. The perpetual war system has embracedmilitary life and its sanctified violence as both media spectacle and civic reli-gion, great tribute to a system in which its messages are effectively transmittedwithin a framework of entertainment and news. During World War II thefilm industry produced not only the widely-viewed Why We Fight series butdozens of movies featuring heroic American warriors fighting hated villainsin Europe and the Pacific. After 1945 Good War combat pictures would stillbe released in large numbers, most conveying images and narratives of mili-tarism, male heroism, and ultra patriotism. Such veneration of military forceremains integral to American political and popular culture, which translatesto consensual support of the warfare state.

� Referring to how militarism and war have pervaded and corrupted Americanpublic life, Chris Hedges writes: “By destroying authentic culture … thestate (at war) erodes the moral fabric. It is replaced with a warped version ofreality. The enemy is dehumanized; the universe starkly divided between theforces of light and the forces of darkness. The cause is celebrated often inovert religious forms, as a manifestation of divine or historical will. All isdedicated to promoting and glorifying the myth, the nation, the cause.”45

This phenomenon is all the more problematic for the U.S. under historicalconditions where warfare is hardly a matter of defending the homeland, butis largely remote, detached from the imperatives of national defense. Theculture of militarism tends to give expression to the worst of human impul-ses: ultra-nationalism, racism, sexism, the cult of violence. In this vein, the


Good War legacy has left its destructive mark, John Dower writing: “AfterWorld War II, irrationality was passed on like a candle flame to burn onenonwhite adversary after another—the Chinese, Koreans, peoples of South-east Asia, and Muslims and Arabs.”46 It was the incineration of Japanesecities, fueled by a militant xenophobia and racism, that set the historicaltemplate for so much of what followed.

� In a society that for decades has venerated militarism and war—its politicalelites having presided over tens of millions of foreign casualties—corrosion ofthe public sphere was bound to occur. Warfare breeds a discourse of lies,myths, and distortions—a political mendacity that in the U.S. is usually takenfor granted, characteristic of what Mills labeled the “higher immorality”,where “might and power” readily triumph over “moral virtues”.47 Therationale for military action based on imminent threats to the homelandgenerates its own ideological syndrome, as Hedges notes: “The myth of warcreates a new artificial reality. Moral precepts—ones we have spent a lifetimehonoring—are jettisoned. We accept, if not condone, the maiming andkilling of others as a regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moralcode.”48

Reflecting in 2015 on the multiple realms of imperial wreckage across severaldecades, the first conclusion must be that the world has paid an unspeakably ter-rible price for what the U.S. warfare state has brought to the world. Of courseAmericans too have paid a stiff price, even as they lend their material and ideo-logical support to the carnage while embracing, to varying degrees, militarism andwar. This barbaric system still hovers over the global landscape, as old wars persistand new wars appear on the horizon. Some pillars of the warfare state (wareconomy, nuclear politics, superpower ambitions, the targeting of civilians) camespecifically out of the nightmares of World War II, while others (authoritarianrule, the security state, corporate oligarchy) were visible earlier but gained entirelynew meaning (and scope) in the aftermath of the Good War. Taking everythinginto account, the warfare state has become so embedded in the economic,political, and cultural life of America as to be nearly invisible, yet its threat tointernational peace and order is clearly unmatched by any other global force.

Notes

1 For an historical view of U.S. military spending, see www.USgovernmentspending.com/defensespending.

2 See A. J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,2014), p. 132.

3 See www.swlearning.com/economics/tucker/tucker/_survey/tucker_survery3eGDP.doc.4 Baime, Arsenal, pp. 94–98.5 Cited in Baime, p. 135.6 Ibid., p. 200.


http://www.USgovernmentspending.com/defensespending

http://www.swlearning.com/economics/tucker/tucker/_survey/tucker_survery3eGDP.doc

http://www.USgovernmentspending.com/defensespending

7 Ibid., pp. 252–53.8 Cited in Baime, p. 205.9 See ibid., p. 286.10 See www.WW2-weapons.com/History/Production.11 Fred J. Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Collier Books, 1962).12 See Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2003), pp. 23–32.13 See www.federal-budget-insidegov.com/1/37/1935.14 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 206.15 Ibid., p. 198.16 Ibid., p. 275.17 Ibid., p. 343.18 Cook, Warfare State, p. 45.19 Ibid., p. 189.20 Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).21 Mills, Power Elite, p. 22.22 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy, Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted

Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 131.23 Ibid., p. 57.24 Defense Monitor (April–June, 2014).25 On President Kennedy’s specific brand of militarism, see Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic

Illusions (New York: David MacKay, 1976), pp. 40–50.26 Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Henry

Holt and Co., 2006), p. 96.27 William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 186–87.28 Richard J. Walton, Cold War and Counter-Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972).29 Ibid., p. 233.30 Ibid., p. 9.31 See Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David MacKay, 1976), Ch. 3.32 On the postwar trajectory of U.S. military spending, see www.USgovernmentsp

ending.com/defense_spending.33 On the astronomical growth in military spending during the George W. Bush presidency,

see www.historycommonorg/context.jsp?item_aom201/militarybudget.34 For estimates made at the Costs of War project, see www.hks.harvard.edu/news-e

vents/news/articles/Bilmes-iraq-afghan-war-cost-wp.35 www.thehill.com/policy/defense/290981/study-iraq-afghanistan-wars.36 www.defensenews.com/top-100/charts/rank_2013.php.37 Defense Monitor (October–December, 2014).38 For a comprehensive overview of postwar U.S. military interventions, see William

Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).39 Robert Higgs, Delusions of Power: New Explorations of the State, War, and Economy

(Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2012), p. 193.40 Los Angeles Times (November 8, 2014).41 Garry Wills, Bomb Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).42 See Maureen Webb, Illusions of Security (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2007), p. 208.43 Ibid., p. 71.44 Los Angeles Times (November 9, 2014).45 Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002),

p. 63.46 John Dower, Cultures of War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), p. 19.47 Mills, Power Elite, p. 360.48 Hedges, War is a Force, p. 35.


http://www.WW2-weapons.com/History/Production

http://www.federal-budget-insidegov.com/1/37/1935

www.USgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending

http://www.historycommonorg/context.jsp?item_aom201/militarybudget

www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/Bilmes-iraq-afghan-war-cost-wp

http://www.thehill.com/policy/defense/290981/study-iraq-afghanistan-wars

http://www.defensenews.com/top-100/charts/rank_2013.php

www.USgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending

www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/Bilmes-iraq-afghan-war-cost-wp

3U.S. GLOBAL POWER AND THE“HIGHER IMMORALITY”

In the United States, with epic victories secured in Europe and Asia, popularimages of World War II were those of heroism, courage, sacrifice, and patriotism—

and for good reason: not only had fascism been defeated, but America was theonly nation to emerge from years of intense global combat in splendid economicand military condition. Other combatants—Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan,France, Italy—were reduced to chaos, their industries and cities in ruins. TheSoviet Union, while a victor, suffered the greatest loss of human life and materialdestruction. Such an enormous advantage opened space for U.S. world domina-tion, consistent with its emergent strategy for global supremacy. Well before theend of World War II, President Roosevelt still at the helm, Washingtonbegan postwar maneuvering in hopes of bolstering its power not only in Europeand the Pacific but in the Middle East and beyond, while neutralizing Sovietgeopolitical leverage. Years of wartime barbarism would soon give way to newcycles of militarism and imperialism, to escalating struggles over power, wealth,and resources. Even as the United Nations would mark its historic beginnings inthe aftermath of war, peaceful international cooperation was hardly on theagenda.

Superpower Unleashed

By 1945 the American economy had been transformed into what is best descri-bed as a militarized state-capitalism—permanent war system—based on a dee-pening partnership of government, corporations, and armed forces, a powerstructure destined to remain intact into the present. While some modest attemptsat military demobilization would be undertaken, this postwar trajectory wouldcontinue largely unimpeded. In fact U.S. global ambitions and commitments,

prime mover of exorbitant Pentagon spending, would interrupt such demobili-zation. Washington had not only exited the war with a far more dynamic econ-omy than it had in 1941, its military was scattered across the globe, in the processof establishing permanent bases in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, the Pacific Islands, andEurope. Just as significant, the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weaponry,however short-lived.

In 1945, the U.S. had a Gross Domestic Product (GDP—in 1990 prices) of$1.5 trillion, easily outdistancing the Soviet Union ($343 billion), Britain ($331billion), Germany ($310 billion), France ($101 billion), and Japan ($144 billion).1

The U.S. share of world GDP stood at 22.5 percent. At the same time, U.S.military output predictably dwarfed that of any other nation, reaching (in 1945dollars) $107 billion by the end of the war—more than triple that of the SovietUnion and five times that of both Germany and Britain. Pentagon spendingdeclined to roughly $36 billion in 1948 (still higher than any other nation) butthen increased steadily across the Cold War period, the first important triggerbeing the Korean War. As for overall U.S. growth, decline set in briefly from1946 to 1949, then rose to World War II levels by 1950, expanding continuouslythereafter, as the miseries and trepidations of the Depression era were left farbehind.2

Meanwhile, World War II had dismantled the traditional great-power systemand generated in its place a polarized world of two rival superpowers—the U.S.and Soviet Union—though, as mentioned, Soviet wartime losses significantlyreduced its ability to challenge American power. The Axis powers (Germany,Japan, Italy) were occupied and demilitarized, while France, Britain, and Chinahad been severely weakened. Although the Soviet Union now possessed theworld’s largest army, the U.S. had the most powerful navy and air force—and ofcourse the atomic bomb. Already by 1945 relations between the two super-powers had begun to sour, with seeds of the Cold War visible, yet in reality theSoviets were no military threat as their human and material resources weredesperately needed to rebuild a war-torn society.

President Harry Truman and his advisers, however, depicted the Soviet Unionas expansionist, an imminent threat to U.S. global power and even nationalsecurity. They feared a return to isolationism, which could leave Washingtonmilitarily weakened, as was supposedly the case on the eve of World War II.Refusing to accept large-scale military demobilization, they opted for a foreignpolicy geared to Soviet containment, especially in Europe—at a time when JosefStalin clearly had no interest in fostering (or aiding) revolutions anywhere in theworld. In March 1947 Truman requested $400 million from Congress to aidGreece and Turkey in their civil wars against Communist rebels, at which timehe outlined what would become the Truman Doctrine, proclaiming a U.S.“right” to intervene anywhere its national interests were deemed in jeopardy.This superpower agenda would define American foreign policy throughout thepostwar era, serving as a template for interventions in Korea, Indochina, Central

64 U.S. Global Power and the “Higher Immorality”

America, and the Middle East. Truman divided the world into two broadcamps—one based on freedom and democracy (led of course by the U.S.), theother on terror and minority rule (Communism, led by the Soviet Union), thatis, another “good” versus “evil” struggle.

The Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 helped accelerate the Cold War and,with it, a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy, including formation of the NorthAtlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on the premise the Soviet Union was amortal threat to Western Europe. In the period 1948–50 conflict between thetwo superpowers escalated, following Soviet development of the atomic bomb,the Chinese Revolution, and start of the Korean War. In early 1950 the StateDepartment drafted its famous NSC-68 report, calling for a more vigilant posturetoward international Communism, the raising of taxes to fund a new doomsdayweapon (hydrogen bomb), the expansion of conventional forces in Europe and Asia,and the acceleration of covert operations. While the Korean War continued forthree torturous years, mired in stalemate, the Pentagon budget nearly tripled; therewould be no reversal of the permanent war system. By 1953 this system hadbecome so powerful that, in effect, the vast majority of countries in the world wereseen as “strategically vital” to American interests, testing zones in the historicconflict between democracy and totalitarianism.

As the Cold War intensified during the 1950s, fueled not only by globaldevelopments (including fear of nuclear catastrophe) but by a sharpening domes-tic mood of anti-Communism, the U.S. benefitted from rapid economic growthassociated with a dramatic rise in consumer goods, spread of the automobile cul-ture, and increasing suburbanization. American GDP had increased (in 1990dollars) to $2.4 trillion in 1958 and $3.6 trillion in 1963—a nearly 150 percentelevation beyond peak World War II and Korean War levels.3 The warfare statehad indeed become the health of government and economy: not only did the U.S.reach new levels of affluence, it was now by far the wealthiest country in theworld—indeed world history. The auto industry was of course vital to thisgrowth, the number of cars manufactured yearly quadrupling between 1946 and1955. The period also witnessed an unprecedented housing boom, stimulated byaffordable mortgages for returning war veterans. Escalating military spendingcontinued to spur economic growth. The three pillars of the warfare state—corporations, government, military—were steadily expanding. By 1960 theAmerican superpower was in full bloom.

As the ultimate confrontation of good versus evil, for the U.S. World War IIlent new credibility to its exercise of global power, which the Truman adminis-tration had seized upon in 1945. The entire world would soon become hotly-contested terrain, with Communism supplanting fascism as the demon to befought and vanquished. Reflecting on this juncture, Wolin writes:

After 1945, “war” was akin to a tabula rasa on which opinion makersand governmental decision-makers were free to constitute its meaning in

U.S. Global Power and the “Higher Immorality” 65

terms that pretty much suited their purposes, allowing them to set thecharacter of public debate and to acquire a vastly enlarged range of govern-mental powers—powers that, when they did not violate the Constitution,deformed it.4

In this context warfare could have virtually any pretext, while serving to primarilybenefit elite wealth and power.

The Good War built upon a strong ideological consensus that followed thePearl Harbor events, the U.S. taking on the character of a wronged and vengefulwarrior nation—a legacy that would profoundly shape the postwar years.Between 1945 and 1950 Washington moved to extend its worldwide network ofmilitary bases, intervened in China, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Philippines,developed the hydrogen bomb, and mobilized for a lengthy Korean War. Eliteflexibility in such pursuits was enhanced owing to popular support across theideological spectrum—a “bipartisan consensus” lasting throughout the Cold Warera. The deceit that everything revolved around the marvelous values of freedomand democracy would be uncritically accepted from top to bottom.

As Wolin notes, once Washington achieved superpower status the restraints onelite power were greatly diminished. Concentrated warfare-state power insulatedthose at the top from democratic pressures: under imperatives of “nationalsecurity” the general population was mostly disenfranchised.5 Elites wereincreasingly free to set their own rules, indifferent to public ethics and legislativeinputs. Under the sturdy “bipartisan” formula, debate was largely restricted toperipheral issues or technical details, meaning Congress was essentially neutralizedin the realm of foreign policy. Dissent was understood to be a mark of disloyaltyor treachery. The postwar system was consolidated by the late 1940s, superpowerbehavior following its own strict logic—constrained only by such external counter-pressures as Soviet or Chinese power. Since Congress was fully immersed in thebipartisan agenda, foreign-policy initiatives could easily be justified with referenceto the most absurd myths and lies. The power structure would be governed byan ethos of “higher immorality” that Mills viewed as a natural outgrowth ofCold-War politics.

The postwar expansion of U.S. global power resurrected a deep attachment tonational exceptionalism first visible in the Westward colonial push of whiteEuropean settlers, repository of a messianic patriotism that resonated with strongelements of racism, militarism, and imperialism. During the postwar years a moodof national superiority among Americans greatly intensified, especially after 9/11.By 2002 national surveys were finding a 71 percent identification with patrioticideology in the U.S., compared to 38 percent in Italy, 38 percent in France, and21 percent in both Japan and Germany.6

As Robert J. Lifton has observed, the American “superpower syndrome” isaligned with a strong belief in the idea of controlling and remaking history,facilitated by a “Godlike nuclear capacity to obliterate the cosmos.”7 Lifton


focuses on a deep culture of violence and militarism that accompanies nationalexceptionalism, which has long been crucial to the American identity. Possessionof nuclear weapons anointed Americans with the unique power to punish anddestroy—a motif extending from Truman to post-9/11 neocons in the Bushadministration. As Lifton notes, as was the case for those fascists who weredemonized (appropriately) in World War II, “Apocalyptic violence becomes theultimate form of collective regeneration.”8 A wide panorama of ideologicalmyths, ritually transmitted by the mass media and widely held among the generalpopulation, have always undergirded U.S. military interventions. There is ofcourse the eternal fiction of American benevolence, of a great power acting outof noble aims—indeed the only empire in history to be so motivated. Not only isthe U.S. morally obligated to confront modern-day Hitlers (Noriega, Milosevic,Hussein, Quaddafi, et al.), it is the main repository of democracy and humanrights in a threatening Hobbesian universe. The fact that the U.S. has long sup-ported human-rights transgressions in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, allthe while helping to keep brutal dictators in power, scarcely enters contemporarypublic discourse.9

Superpower politics (and its morality) ensures that national exceptionalism willclash with the principle of universality—global rules and laws equally binding onall states. Although a postwar Zeitgeist enshrined in the United Nations and otherinternational bodies has codified such universality, its tenets (such as banningmilitary force except for self-defense) are routinely ignored by U.S. leaders,consistent with an ethos of double-standards. The U.N. Charter was establishedto prevent the horrors of warfare from being repeated, but Washington hasrepeatedly made decisions in flagrant violation of its statutes—and that extends tomost of its postwar military interventions. While generally understood to beunlawful, these actions are widely regarded in the U.S. as legitimate, necessary,even “humanitarian.” The infamous Bush Doctrine of “preemptive war”,invoked to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, fits this very superpower modusoperandi; its very elasticity allows for virtually any mode of aggression. Far frombeing novel, however, this “doctrine” actually has roots in Truman’s 1947 procla-mation giving the U.S. the “right” to respond militarily anywhere its interests areconsidered to be threatened. Now, as then, the doctrine serves the same imperialpurpose—to advance U.S. economic and geopolitical interests on a world scale.

Political Demonology

American pursuit of global supremacy requires, by its very nature, a powerapparatus bolstered not only militarily and economically but ideologically—throughbroadly-held beliefs, perceptions, and myths. To the extent the imperial systemdemands perpetual warfare, the need for strong legitimacy, or deep popular sup-port, is crucial and ongoing. This very logic extends to the huge costs (humanand material) in the domestic setting. For the U.S., as World War II symbolized


the Good War in both official and popular discourse, legitimacy easily rested on aManicheistic outlook pitting the forces of great virtue (U.S. and its allies) againstthe forces of monstrous evil (fascist Axis powers), with good ultimately triumph-ing over evil. Of course the Germans and Japanese—governed by fascist dicta-torships—were easy enough to hate and villainize. Such hatred was carried intothe postwar era, transferred first to the ruthless and Godless Communists and theirworldwide conspiracy, then to the yellow hordes of Asians (Chinese, Koreans,Vietnamese, etc.), later to Serbs, Arabs, Muslims, and assorted rogue states, drugtraffickers, and terrorists.

The colonial push of white European settlers across the Western frontier, andits violent displacement of Indian populations, opened a culture of perpetual waragainst fearsome enemies, which naturally demanded a compelling ideologicalrationale. Pacifying of the frontier was framed as a struggle for civilization againstsavagery, democracy against tyranny, order against chaos and anarchy. The settlerswere of course noble, their victims evil, appropriate to be targeted for elimina-tion. Native Americans were framed within imperial ideology as primitive, ruth-less, scheming, and violent—impediments to progress, modernity, anddemocracy. American ideals gained force within a matrix of superior affluence,technology, and power, a narrative the U.S. would endlessly appropriate to servelarger global ambitions. Here an explosive cauldron of racism, militarism, andimperialism would reach its zenith in the Pacific war, when political demonologytargeting the Japanese became something of an elevated art form.

Much later, the warfare state would require a perpetual stream of enemies tobe fought—some obviously real, as during World War II, others manufactured tojustify permanent war footing and global leverage (as in Korea, Indochina,Yugoslavia, and Iraq). Political demonology has long been central to nationalexceptionalism—and of course to warfare itself. Writing in American Terminator,Ziaddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies observe: “Central to this [imperial]ideology is the notion that American tradition and history are universal narrativesapplicable across time and space.”10 Those who depart from such “universal nar-ratives” are quick to be relegated to the margins of American public discourse. AsWestward colonization faced new challenges and threats, settlers (or imperialists)resorted to every method at their disposal, as “savagery” could only be defeatedthrough relentless warfare. Where the ubiquitous “enemy” is depicted as barbaricand treacherous—invoked first against Indians and later against any opponent ofAmerican power—violence is deemed necessary, even cathartic, a moral impera-tive. Since the sacred historical mission of Americans was to transform “wild-erness” into “civilized order”, all obstacles to such progress would have to beobliterated. The result was a nation forged in racism, warfare, and conquest.11

Political demonology viewed racial Others as bereft of humanity, a “peopleswithout culture” lacking history, culture, and individuality—a motif taken up bypoliticians, writers, and Hollywood filmmakers.12 Removed from actual history,villains could be dehumanized and set up for extermination, especially in the case


of nonwhite targets, as was usually the case. This racist dynamic—a factor inmany American wars—was for the U.S. a prime mover through the Asian-Pacificregion: from Hawaii and the Philippines to the Pacific islands, Japan, Korea, andIndochina. Here Michael Rogin writes: “Large-scale transfer [or annihilation] ofnative populations, in the name of security and modernization, has continued toappeal to American statesmen. Indian removal bears resemblance to ‘forced drafturbanization’ in Vietnam and urban renewal in our cities.”13 American wars wereaccompanied by gratifying myths and fantasies embedded in such politicaldemonology: a sense of national destiny was formed and sustained by means ofimperial violence, itself a recurrent source of patriotic catharsis. Rogin notes:“The myth about Indians was not the work of paranoids and social madmen buta consensus of almost all leading American political and intellectual figures.”14

Warrior fantasies of destroying evil roadblocks to “civilized progress” would suitthe power structure across the twentieth century and beyond, as the “Indianwars” were recycled again and again, above all in Asia.

Nowhere was the American impulse toward political demonology morepowerful than in the Pacific Theater of World War II: combat against the Japa-nese was driven from beginning to end by racial hostility (discussed more fully inChapter 1). The “Japs” were a race apart—a monolithic population, a subhumanenemy ready to commit the worst acts of savagery. Proof resided in Pearl Harbor,a sign of indelible Japanese militarism, irrationality, and treachery. Politics, themedia, and popular culture all framed the enemy as a nation of uncivilizedmonsters, revealing an American hatred for Asians more virulent than for anyothers. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, viewed by millions of Americans,presented the Japanese as masters of killing, torture, rape, and other forms ofbarbarism, manifestations of the “yellow menace” that recalled the great Indianscourge. Whereas distinctions were made among Germans and Italians—somewere fascist, some were not—in the Pacific Theater all Japanese were consideredirreversibly evil.

At a time when Japanese-Americans were being incarcerated at domesticinternment camps, in the Pacific war they would be targeted for military assaultwithout limits, their humanity having been culturally and politically strippedaway. For the U.S., there were no constraints in pursuit of total victory; the lineseparating combatants from civilians simply vanished, as the military sought ven-geance for Pearl Harbor. In his War Without Mercy, Dower writes: “… while theexpressive forms of race hate remained relatively conventional, a revolution wastaking place in military technology and strategy—giving Allied powers, amongother things, the flame thrower, the B-29 superfortress bomber, napalm, theconcept of strategic bombing, the identification of civilian morale as an importantand legitimate target in war, the tactical perfection of low-level saturationbombing raids over urban centers, and, finally, nuclear weapons. In the course ofthe war in Asia, racism, dehumanization, technological change, and extermina-tionist policies became interlocked in unprecedented ways.”15 The novelty here


can be found in the duration and intensity of those annihilationist yearningsidentified by Dower.

In this historical context, with the very notion of “noncombatants” renderedobsolete, a policy of mass destruction could be readily embraced, coinciding withwhat Dower elsewhere refers to as “idealistic annihilation.”16 The entire Japanesepopulation constituted the monolithic enemy. Rules of engagement were effec-tively ignored: subhumans, after all, deserved no ethical consideration. Japanesecities inhabited by millions of people were declared “lucrative targets” by U.S.military leaders, and these cities were indeed attacked systematically and mercilesslyfrom the skies.

A plan for mass destruction was endemic to the imperial mentality, as racial animustransformed large civilian populations into optimum targets. Where random killingcame from the air, at great distances—as in the U.S. bombardments of Japan—this psychological tendency could be sharply accentuated. As Japanese cities werebombed into ruins, for the American military there was what Dower calls the“exhilaration of unrestrained violence.”17 War was perceived as a great spectaclewhere human casualties could be hidden, ripped from immediate experience and thenlost to memory. What might be called a politics of mass destruction would of coursereach its cathartic (and barbaric) peak with the atomic bombings of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki, framed by its architects (including President Truman) as the greatestachievement of both modern technology and American civilization. The bombs weresimply a continuum of what had already been set in motion—warfare to exactmaximum revenge against an entire people, which reached near-genocidal levelsby the end of World War II. Since the American war machine was fully alignedwith progress, modernity, and freedom, its awesome weapons of mass destructionwould soon become a normalized feature of postwar military strategy.

In Korea, where death toll estimates from 1950 to 1953 have reached as highas four million, a U.S. war of attrition followed the World War II pattern: anentire nation was pulverized from air, sea, and ground, its cities and townseventually rendered unlivable. Everything was turned into a legitimate militarytarget. In 1950 General Douglas MacArthur ordered the air force to destroy everyvillage, city, factory, and installation—essentially a continuation of General CurtisLeMay’s saturation-bombing campaign in Japan. In a desperate attempt to breakthe military stalemate, the U.S. resorted to scorched-earth tactics, biologicalweapons, and sustained attacks on civilian infrastructure including dams and waterfacilities. Truman even considered using nuclear weapons.18 This was possiblesince the Korean opponent raised the specter of, alternately, “red hordes” or“yellow hordes” taking over the country (and perhaps the world). General Mat-thew Ridgway, Eighth Army commander, could say: “The real issues are whe-ther the power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in ourown beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism … whether to survivewith God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of aGodless world.”19


In Vietnam, as in Japan and Korea, Asians could be psychologically substitutedfor frontier Indians in those warfare fantasies where primitive villains fullydeserved their fate—as “yellow hordes” without a history or culture whose vio-lence had no reason or logic. For more than a decade (spanning 1962 to 1974),the U.S. waged a merciless war of annihilation to crush a popular nationalistinsurgency, using everything short of atomic weapons: strategic hamlets, “free-firezones”, search-and-destroy missions, chemical warfare, saturation bombing, tor-ture. The death toll in Vietnam alone reached at least three million, to which canbe added tens of thousands more in Laos and Cambodia.

The framing of these victims as savage Communists made such carnage possi-ble, even desirable. American popular culture, then and later, was filled withimages of Rambo-like characters fighting the barbarism of racial Others thatlurked in the jungle darkness of Indochina.20 Political demonology had been soelevated that mass killings, such as the My Lai massacre in 1968, were a commonby-product of search-and-destroy operations across southern Vietnam.21 TheWinter Soldier hearings revealed hundreds of such episodes, most clearly fueledby racist hatred. Said one U.S. solider: “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cutout their tongues, their hair, scalped them. I did it. A lot of people were doing it.I just followed.”22 Others reported how they enjoyed the orgy of torture, rape,and murder, told by their superiors “not to worry about casualties.”23 After all,the depraved enemy inhabited an especially violent and lawless milieu, where U.S.victory meant (again) a triumph of civilization over barbarism, modernity overdarkness, freedom over tyranny. Here we encounter yet another recycling ofDower’s “idealistic annihilation” outlook, in which violence became psychologicallycathartic, regenerative, and of course patriotic.24

The apparent end of U.S. imperial ventures in the Pacific-Asia region—fromHawaii to the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—wouldgive way to military combat elsewhere: Central America, theMiddle East, the Balkans.In each setting political demonology was unveiled to smooth the path towardwarfare. As of this writing (summer 2015), the U.S. was still militarily engaged inAfghanistan and Iraq as well as scattered locales in Pakistan and Yemen.

The 1999 U.S./NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, launched withoutU.N. approval, seemed to defy the historical pattern as Yugoslavia, after all, was aEuropean nation in both geography and heritage. This would not be the case,however, as the Serbs were demonized beyond any meaningful rationale orlimits, derided as a population of bloodthirsty ethnic cleansers led by Hitler-liketyrant Slobodan Milosevic (actually an elected Socialist). In reality the Serbs weretragically dragged into protracted civil war, instigated in no small measure byWestern powers hoping to destroy the last bastion of opposition to NATO’saggressive push eastward. By 1992 American media outlets had moved into fullswing, replete with narratives of a Serb-engineered “holocaust” against the hap-less victims of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The Serbs too had suffered greatlyduring the several years of bloody civil strife, but this was ignored in favor of wild


tales about Milosevic’s supposedly genocidal ambitions for a “Greater Serbia.”Implausibly, the Serbs were blamed for virtually every episode of violence thattore apart Yugoslavia—though the worst violence came from nearly threemonths of U.S./NATO bombing raids in early 1999.

While NATO air forces carried out their destruction in Serbia, it was Serbs whowere depicted as crazed Nazis, as destroyers of a nation and war criminals to be triedbefore a WorldWar II-style tribunal at The Hague. The American media, in tandemwith a phalanx of think tanks, lobbies, and public-relations machines, workeddiligently to convince the public of these myths and fictions.25 There were obli-gatory lurid accounts of Serb atrocities, including “rape camps” and “death camps”,that were never documented.26 The claim that Serbs were unmitigated evil andMilosevic a modern-day Nazi was repeated across the dominant public sphere, leadingto calls for “humanitarian intervention.” Michael Parenti asks: “Why were theSerbs targeted? They were the largest and most influential nationality in theformer Yugoslavia, with a proportionally higher percentage of Communist partymembers than the other nationalities. They were the only ones to have given upan independent nation-state in order to enter a unified state.”27 In fact it was theother groups—Croatians, Bosnians, and Kosovars—that had earlier gravitatedtoward fascism, which the Serbs had ferociously opposed and destroyed.

Turning to Asians, harshly-negative stereotypes actually well predated the mili-tary encounters; political demonology had already identified these groups asenemies, as threats to American order and security. Much the same would be trueof Arabs and Muslims, villainized in mainstream culture long before any politicalor military clashes—seemingly intelligible in the context of several developments:the Iranian hostage crisis, Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait, the events of 9/11,and threats from Middle-Eastern-based terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and,more recently, Islamic State (ISIS). The other side of such trajectory includes twoU.S. attacks on Iraq, drastic economic sanctions imposed on Iraq during the1990s, longstanding U.S. support for brutal dictatorships in the region, a series ofU.S. military interventions and covert operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, andYemen, and decades of full Washington backing of Israel.

As Jack Shaheen shows in his book Reel Bad Arabs (and film by the same title),stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in American culture goes back many decades,visible in literature, movies, and TV—long before recent political and militaryevents.28 Such images, moreover, have remained with little interruption into thepresent: Arabs and Muslims fit a social category that can today be unapologeticallytargeted with outright hatred. Shaheen writes:

Degrading images [of Arabs and Muslims] have been virtually unchallengedfor more than a century. As a rule, Arab women are still projected as mostlymute and submissive figures: bundled in black, beasts of burden, exotic bellydancers, and even bombers. Arab men surface as villains: Bedouin bandits,sinister Sheikhs, buffoons, and gun-wielding terrorists.29


These images have entered hundreds of Hollywood films over several decades,though the images are probably more flagrant today than at any time in the past.Arabs and Muslims are routinely shown as faceless terrorists, as shady characters inmany Navy SEALs movies, the Delta Force series, and such films as True Lies,Executive Decision, Rules of Engagement, and Argo (2012 Oscar winner for BestPicture), along with the popular TV shows Homeland and Tyrant. Villains aredepicted as fanatics who believe in a strange God, practice weird rituals, don’tvalue human life, carry out random acts of violence, and are (naturally) hostile tofreedom and democracy.

Like Asians at a different historical moment, Arabs and Muslims have come tooccupy a specific niche in American public discourse—as bearers of primitivismand against modernity, a monolithic bloc of people standing outside of andagainst Western Civilization. While familiar stereotypes of blacks, Jews, Italians, andIrish have vanished or diminished under threat of social protest or legal action,starkly stereotypical imagery of Arabs and Muslims has become more widespreadin recent years, no risks incurred, no apologies needed; one-sided portraits aresimply taken as truth. Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has intensifiedwhile the U.S. continues its many operations in the Middle East, not to mentionrepeated military threats against Iran.

By the mid-1990s, with collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the ColdWar, political demonology shifted its focus toward Russia, an extension of tradi-tional U.S. hostility toward the Communist bloc. In this situation, however, warbetween the U.S. and Russia was unlikely, if for no other reason than mutual fearof nuclear annihilation. In this context demonology would have an entirely dif-ferent projection, consistent with the U.S./NATO strategy to isolate Russia byconstructing Western military bases close to the very borders of Russia. Anti-Russian hysteria in American political and media culture took a shrill turn withVladimir Putin’s 2013 re-election as president, Russian staging of the 2014Winter Olympics, and sharpening of the Ukrainian crisis.

Such American hysterics has centered on Putin himself, depicted as a brutalautocrat at the head of a “thugocracy”—a system of military aggression, oli-garchical greed, and out-of-control corruption. Media tropes of this sort arenearly monolithic, visible at CNN as well as FOX, the New York Times, vastmajority of local newspapers, and members of Congress. Putin emerges as arecycled version of either Ivan the Terrible or Stalin, someone (in the words ofLeon Aron at the American Enterprise Institute) who is “reshaping his govern-ment into one that is far more repressive, ideologically driven, openly messianicand founded on a revisionist view of history that is explicitly anti-Western andanti-American.”30 All this seems to recall the worst years of Cold War ideology.Thus Aron sees a “new cult of personality that is already enormous and mightone day rival even that of Josef Stalin.” Putin is an imperialist seeking return tothe Soviet glory years, now (with some 1,700 nuclear warheads) a fearsome threatto European and world peace. Aron urges the U.S. “to commit all necessary


resources to building a far more formidable strategic missile defense”, an urgenttask now that Moscow has begun to modernize its nuclear arsenal.31

The specter of a Stalinized Putin is useful for popular consumption—and forhealth of the warfare state—but vanishes on close inspection: since the Sovietbreakup in 1991 it is Russia that has been thrown onto the defensive, as NATOpushes relentlessly eastward. Russian economic, political, and military power hasbeen steadily and dramatically weakened. Strategic nuclear missiles? Those sameweapons are already deployed in large numbers very close to Russian borders (notthe reverse)—part of U.S./NATO efforts to undermine Russian power. Westernpenetration into former Soviet regions such as Georgia, Ukraine, and the CentralAsian nations has proceeded apace. It is largely in response to such incursions,including a U.S.-sponsored 2013 coup in Ukraine, that Russia moved to resistany further weakening of its geopolitical position.

While Putin is surely no exemplary political figure, his supposed autocratic ruleis vastly exaggerated by anti-Russian demonologists. The overblown charge thathe is “modernizing” the Russian nuclear arsenal is especially overstated, not tomention hypocritical: this is exactly what the U.S. has been doing for years,indeed decades. Depiction of Putin as a crazed militarist and imperialist, asidefrom lacking concrete evidence, ignores some basic realities: without Putin, andRussian moderation, there would have been no solution to the Syrian chemicalweapons crisis of 2013 nor any prospects for diplomacy on the Iranian nuclearprogram. Contrary to stereotypes, Russian behavior on the U.N. SecurityCouncil has been overwhelmingly moderate, a far remove from what one mightexpect of the world’s most threatening “thugocracy.”32 Here as elsewhere, poli-tical demonology reflects back on its purveyors rather than its villainized, typicallyfar weaker, objects of hatred.

If, as Rogin argues, political demonology goes to the very core of Americanpolitics, it gathered new ideological definition and momentum during and afterWorld War II.33 Nowadays it resonates with the comforting myth of a noblesuperpower built on ideological consensus and unity, yet challenged by foreign(at times domestic) evil, Rogin suggesting that under such conditions nationalidentity morphs into something of an “imperial self” that stands opposed to amultitude of “alien” intrusions.34 The dehumanization of alien cultures makesthese cultures easy targets for military attack: what Tom Engelhardt calls“warscapes” saturated with diabolical enemies performs key functions for thewarfare state and its sacred wars.35

Warfare against Civilians

One logical extension of political demonology is military action directed againstcivilian populations—one of the barbaric legacies of World War II. Such warfarehas been systematic, deliberate, planned, even celebrated. To be sure, the U.S.(and other nations) had previously carried out armed attacks on civilians—the


nineteenth century alone saw plenty of such combat, usually carried out withimpunity. During World War II, however, this mode of warfare was taken toentirely new heights and given new significance, leaving in its wake a postwartrajectory of extreme militarism with few parallels in human history.

During 1944 and 1945 American military forces unleashed their fury againstcivilian populations in both Europe and Asia, by means of systematic bombingof cities that were often poorly defended; atomic warfare against Japan; delib-erate attacks on civilian targets (including water and food sources); large-scalemilitary assaults (artillery, armor, infantry) on urban centers; use of incendiaryweapons against noncombatants. Beyond anything known during World War Iand earlier, moreover, this war moved onto the terrain of highly-industrialized,technological combat that, by definition, transcended the rules of warfare. Whileall combatant nations engaged in patriotic warfare at the time, it was the U.S. thatbrought technowar-based savagery to new levels of intentionality and scale. Asthe war reached its nightmarish end, U.S. air power waged a strategy of annihi-lation against Japanese cities, unmatched in its aerial terrorism and conducted withmoral and legal impunity.

Military targeting of civilians has been considered a breach of international lawfor more than a century, a fundamental source of modern legality. By World WarI the major powers had subscribed to certain rules of engagement, outlined in theHague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Casualties during the Great War, anexceedingly protracted and bloody event, were overwhelmingly military, theresult of battlefield operations. By the time of World War II it was still universallyagreed that warfare should be limited to actual combatants, with civilians immunefrom attack—although such norms, as it turns out, were never to be respectedbeyond abstract principle. The U.S. would be among the leading violators,though none of its government or military leaders would be held accountable ateither Nuremberg or Tokyo.

If general rules of warfare have rarely been applied to U.S. global behavior,they were mercilessly trampled in the final year of World War II, when urbancenters inhabited by millions of civilians became deliberate targets of militaryaction. Large cities in Germany and Japan were systematically bombed, with fewoperative constraints (and generally little military rationale). In the Pacific thisincluded not only aerial warfare but ground and naval actions that were notablysavage on both sides. For its part, as Dower shows, the U.S. military behavedwith unbelievable ruthlessness: prisoners were regularly mistreated, tortured and shot,soldiers and civilians were massacred by the hundreds, prisoners were buried alive,survivors of sunken ships were strafed and killed at sea, towns and citiesbombarded with little regard for human life.36 Attacks of this kind were scarcelyisolated or exceptional, nor were they always incidental to broader militaryoperations. They conformed to a pattern of armed-forces conduct, accepted fromtop to bottom within the logic of a war of annihilaltion. This near-genocidalmodality was enhanced by the fact that, in Dower’s words, “the Japanese were


more hated than the Germans before as well as after Pearl Harbor … They wereperceived as a race apart—and an overwhelmingly monolithic one at that.”37

The vast majority of civilian targets were hit from the air, where the U.S.enjoyed overwhelming superiority against both Germans and Japanese. As early asthe 1920s, American war planners were investing great faith in the possibilities ofaerial warfare, including the role of seabound carriers. Bombing targets from highaltitudes would amount to a nascent form of technowar—widely perceived asmore efficient and less risky. By 1944 and 1945 this faith took on new dimen-sions as first Great Britain and then the U.S. embraced plans for “strategic” or“area” bombing in Germany and Japan, ostensibly to end the war more rapidlybut also for purposes of revenge, destroying morale, weapons testing, and (espe-cially for the atomic bomb) conveying a political message. With incendiaryattacks on many German cities, including Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden, Gen-eral LeMay envisioned a new form of aerial warfare with vast prospects for U.S.operations in Asia. The strategy would involve burning cities to the ground whiledrastically minimizing American casualties. Prospects of massive destruction wereapproached with great optimism if not excitement.38 The concept of technowarby means of saturation bombing would become a cornerstone of U.S. militarypower throughout the postwar era.

The firebombing of German cities at the end of the war produced hundreds ofthousands of deaths, mainly civilians, wounding and displacing several millionmore. The military aim, especially in the case of Dresden during February 1945,was highly questionable, as the city was of little strategic importance industriallyor militarily. Swollen with war refugees, Dresden was reduced to ashes followingrepeated incendiary attacks by U.S. and British bombers. Such area bombingwould reach new levels in spring 1945, when the targets shifted from Germany toJapan and moral constraints were even further jettisoned.

In July 1945 American bombers, the Pacific war at its conclusion, raided 66mostly defenseless Japanese cities with no serious military objectives in mind,burning out large sectors while killing up to one million civilians. On March 9–10,1945, hundreds of U.S. planes had previously attacked Tokyo with incendiarybombs, killing at least 100,000 people and making one million homeless—again,with little if any military purpose beyond revenge. Dower argues that this sense-less aerial terrorism was driven largely by racist animus, discussed more thoroughlyin the previous section.

As is well known, on August 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped atomic bombson Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unprotected urban centers with little militaryimport, killing (immediately) a total of at least 200,000 civilians. (Thousands moredeaths from radiation poisoning and other after-effects would come in lateryears.) General LeMay, his aides, and other military planners celebrated these raids(both conventional and atomic) with enthusiastic testimonials to the awesomeforce of modern aerial warfare. The systematic destruction of Japan broughttechnowar to new, more deadly heights. At this time General MacArthur’s aide,


General Bonner Fuller, described the raids as “one of the most ruthless and bar-baric killings of noncombatants in all history.”39 In fact there was really no pre-cedent to such barbarism—all carried out in the guise of winning the peace andextending civilized values.

The final months of World War II ushered in a new era in the history ofarmed combat—aerial warfare with few limits. Strategic bombing with its delib-erate attacks on civilian populations and related targets was now (especially for theU.S.) perfectly legitimate, in some instances the preferred modality of war. TheGood War served as testing-ground for area bombing and use of incendiarydevices like napalm—and finally nuclear weaponry, laying the groundwork forpostwar U.S. strategy. Such aerial warfare inevitably erases the distinction betweencombatants and noncombatants, military and civilian objects, transgressing themost basic rules of engagement.

A.C. Grayling writes in Among the Dead Cities, the most systematic treatment ofthis phenomenon, that “the area-bombing campaigns of the Second World Warwere as a whole morally criminal.”40 As he puts it, bombing civilians from thedistance and anonymity of 20,000 feet is no different than shooting innocent,defenseless people with guns at point-blank range. Whatever the specific rulesgoverning aerial warfare—and they are deliberately ambiguous—there can be nodenying that wanton attacks on civilian targets, no matter how conducted, violatecommon-sensical norms of proportionality; they cannot be morally or legallydefended. Grayling concludes by asking: “Was area bombing necessary? No. Wasit proportional? No. Was it against humanitarian principles that people have beenstriving to enunciate a way of controlling and limiting war? Yes. Was it againstgeneral moral standards? Yes.”41 That the U.S. could do this repeatedly, and withimpunity, is yet another disturbing mark in the history of superpowerexceptionalism.

Contrary to prevailing mythology, therefore, civilian populations and relatedtargets have long been strategically central to U.S. military operations, a legacy ofWorld War II—calling into question all those glib official references to “collateraldamage.” In fact the practice constitutes something of a pattern, one function ofsuperpower privilege. While difficult for opinion leaders in American society toacknowledge, civilian victims of U.S. warfare have often been intended, or at leastproduced by the callous indifference of military planners.

For several decades since World War II the U.S. has been the leading source ofmilitary violence worldwide, reflecting the dark side of a political culture whichproudly champions freedom, human rights, and democracy. No country rankseven a close second on this measure of imperial destruction. A rather conservativeaccounting of civilians killed by American military forces since the late 1940swould be close to eight million, with more robust estimates going beyond tenmillion. Add to this carnage the number of wounded, maimed, displaced, andimprisoned—surely more tens of millions, though no fully accurate picture seemspossible given the range of interventions, from Korea to Vietnam, Laos,


Cambodia, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq. The record furtherincludes environmental damage from U.S. military actions, including differenttypes of battlefield destruction, aerial bombardments, use of chemical warfare,deployment of weapons tipped with depleted uranium (DU), and residues ofunexploded ordnance such as land mines. It extends to proxy warfare and secondarymodes of violence supported—politically, economically, and militarily—byWashington, as in Central America, Colombia, parts of Africa, and Israel.

The Korean War, relatively hidden from American history and consciousness,took a horrendous toll on human life: aside from the torrent of bombs droppedby planes and massive offshore shelling by ships, American ground forces oftenmoved with disregard for rules of warfare in what became a bloody war of attri-tion. On the Korean calamity, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman refer toa total war starting in autumn 1950, when General MacArthur ordered his troopsto destroy virtually everything from the 38th parallel to the Yalu River on theChinese border. The authors write:

As it had been in World War II, strategic bombing was extended to the massdestruction of civilian populations; and, as in World War II, the reservationsthat the United States had about the saturation bombing of Europeans in thatearlier war were not extended to Asians … American military cultureaccepted the World War II standpoint that the mass destruction of civilianswas a legitimate military target in an expanded war of attrition.42

It is worth adding here that the larger political culture likewise embraced thisoutlook.

Refusing any political settlement in Korea, MacArthur chose a scorched-earthpolicy as his troops retreated and, frustrated over the stalemate, he and PresidentTruman contemplated using atomic weapons to secure victory. General Ridgwayframed the conflict as an heroic defense of God, country, and Western Civiliza-tion against “atheistic yellow Commies”. Driven by such fanaticism, the U.S.wasted little time in expanding the war to civilian targets, which included eco-nomic resources vital to human survival. Hydroelectric plants and other waterfacilities were bombed in June 1952, and in August 1952 the capital (Pyongyang)was systematically destroyed as part of an aerial campaign extending to 78 otherNorth Korean cities and towns—similar to what the U.S. had done in Dresdenand Tokyo. The Chiefs of Staff in Washington directed U.S. armed forces towage merciless combat, without regard for any moral or legal precedent.

In Korea, the U.S. total-war campaign meant bombing the country intooblivion, leaving few inhabited areas untouched. Endicott and Hagerman write:

Korea was pulverized. It is not easy to find words to describe the carnage. Ina territory smaller than the state of Oregon, two and a half million comba-tants fought on the battle lines for seemingly endless years; shells and bombs


rained down in unmerciful torrents from naval vessels along the coasts andfrom aircraft overhead, setting new records for destruction.43

American pilots used conventional weaponry, napalm, and fragmentation bombson offices, homes, shelters, vehicles—anything that moved.44 Visiting Korea insummer 1952, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said: “I have seen the war-battered cities of Europe, but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”45

While difficult to imagine, U.S. military aggression in Indochina turned evenmore barbaric, turning into another war of annihilation, spanning more than adecade (1962 to 1974). The carnage in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia resultednot only from extended aerial bombardment but from a variety of groundoperations: strategic hamlets, free-fire zones, search-and-destroy missions, chemicaldefoliation. The war killed roughly three and a half million people, mostlycivilians, and displaced more than ten million while laying waste to much of thecountryside. By the end, the U.S., had destroyed 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets, 25million acres of farmland, 1.2 million acres of forest, and 1.5 million farm animals.Towns and villages were bombed, torched, and bulldozed, their inhabitants oftenrounded up and tortured, raped, and murdered. Nearly one million orphans werecreated, in addition to 181,000 disabled persons and one million widows.46

More than 19 million gallons of toxic herbicides were dumped on SouthVietnam, by far the greatest use of chemical weaponry ever. Vast regions of theVietnamese countryside were pulverized to secure “pacification” and “nation-building”, code words to legitimate the most ruthless counterinsurgency programever undertaken. Massive long-term health, agricultural, environmental, andsocial harm to a poorly developed nation was a legacy to be felt for many dec-ades, if not longer. Such criminal deeds, the product of a carefully planned tech-nowar, have never been acknowledged by any U.S. government official, and noapologies or reparations have been forthcoming.

As in Korea, the standard U.S. modus operandi in Vietnam was to destroy allimpediments to military success in the field—to “kill ’em all”, as the title of aBBC documentary on American war crimes in Korea conveys. “Search-and-destroy” meant attacking both civilians and combatants in a guerrilla war whereinsurgents had overwhelming popular support, where boundaries between fight-ers and noncombatants were inevitably blurred. Not only civilians but animalsand the entire life-support system became part of the combat zone, fit targets fora war of attrition. Steeped in a military culture engulfing the highest ranks, U.S.troops were rewarded according to the well-known calculus of “body count”that was never limited to identifiable combatants. One common Americanresponse in combat areas was, if it’s dead it must be VC (Vietcong). Pressures torecord high body counts, to destroy anything that moved, automatically guttedany rules of engagement.

In Vietnam, U.S. military units that carried out murder, rape, torture, andother atrocities did everything possible to ensure that no solider would speak out


or press charges—and of course few did. (The My Lai massacre of March 1968,during which hundreds of defenseless civilians were killed, was uncovered andreported by journalist Seymour Hersh.) 47 Cover-ups were routine: after all, theVietnamese—like the Japanese and Koreans earlier—were viewed as subhumanmonsters deserving their horrible fate. At both the Dellums hearings in the Houseof Representatives and the Winter Soldier hearings of the early 1970s manyveterans testified as to how military training itself prepared them for brutal,unrestrained violence in the field—how dehumanizing the enemy allowed forkilling without mercy. In the end, American firepower was little short of geno-cidal, its level dwarfing that used by all combatants during World War II. AsWilliam Gibson writes, U.S. war managers adopted a “production model of warin Indochina”, a dedication to technowar that, pushed to extremes, allowed forsystematic destruction of the land and its people.48

Between 1965 and 1973 the U.S. dropped eight million tons of bombs onVietnam and another several million tons on Laos and Cambodia—the mostintensive aerial campaign in history, its sum total equivalent (in Vietnam alone) to640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Saturation bombing was carried out routi-nely and thoroughly by B-52s, with little attempt to distinguish between civilianand military targets. To a degree greater than in World War II and Korea, warfarewould turn on technological operations that left no area untouched by scorched-earth bombings. Except for nuclear weapons, the U.S. resorted to everything inits arsenal, hoping to force the Vietnamese into total submission: 2,000-poundbombs, chemical defoliants, white phosphorous, missiles, fuel-air bombs, andfrightening amounts of regular ordnance. As Lindqvist writes, there were nolimits for U.S. military planners in Vietnam: “The rule book said of course thatcivilians were not to be bombed. But for the military, rules were not norms tofollow but problems to solve.”49

In Vietnam the U.S. developed new and improved napalm made to adheremore closely to the skin, burn more deeply, and cause more horrific injury ordeath. During World War II the U.S. had dropped 14,000 tons of napalm,mainly on the Japanese. During the Vietnam War the total was 32,000 tons of afar more debilitating incendiary—double the total used in Korea. Napalm waspreferred since it could destroy wide target areas, set fires, and incapacitate largernumbers of people. There can be no doubt that the U.S. air war was aimeddirectly at civilians: aside from napalm, new weapons like CBU-24 cluster bombswere refined for that very purpose. Here Lindqvist writes: “When the B-52scarpet bombed, they often first dropped explosive bombs in order to ‘open thestructures’, then napalm to burn out the contents, and finally CBU-24s to killthe people who came running to help those who were burning.”50 Under suchcircumstances, any reference to “collateral damage” would be a sad joke.

Sustained bombing raids were conducted against North Vietnam, Cambodia,and Laos, stepped up after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. Nixon and HenryKissinger sought to broaden the war of attrition by means of extended carpet


bombing, which meant large-scale destruction of farmlands, villages, towns, andcivilian infrastructure including dams, dikes, irrigation networks, and water-production facilities. According to Marilyn Young, the intensity of U.S. bombingin Vietnam and Laos was such that organized life was no longer possible in mostvillages. The goal, as in Korea, was to leave nothing standing—to destroy thevery “material basis of civilized society.” In late 1969 one observer stated that“after a recorded history of seven hundred years the Plain of Jars [in Laos] dis-appeared.”51 U.S. aerial bombardments represented a total-war strategy meant todemoralize populations, wreck infrastructures, and eviscerate the workforce—while imposing high-tech military supremacy. This surely ranks among the mosthorrific war crimes in modern history.

Compared to such carnage, the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989involved a relatively brief attack with moderate casualties. Still, the operation washigh-tech and deadly, leading to some 4,000 civilian deaths and 50,000 homelessin Panama City, according to the 1990 Independent Commission of Inquiry.52

Oppositional political groups were immediately smashed or outlawed, manypeople were detained for weeks, even months, and many others wound up“disappeared.” 53 The Pentagon’s strategy for rapid victory involved heavy fire-power within a small, densely populated territory, with predictable (not collateral)results.

It was at the time of Desert Storm (winter 1991) that the U.S. militaryunveiled technowar in its fullest glory—that is, distant operations as a completesubstitute for battlefield (infantry, armor) combat. Iraq became something of a“free-fire zone” for artillery and air attacks. Some 110,000 sorties were flown injust a few weeks, dropping 88,000 tons of bombs on a country with little in theway of air defenses. The USAF pulverized the Iraqi public infrastructure whilesuffering few casualties of its own. At the end of combat, with nothing left indoubt, American planes bombed and strafed Iraqi troops, killing at least 20,000on the gruesome “highway of death.” Aerial bombardment of Iraq, moreover,continued regularly after main warfare operations had come to an end. The U.S.fired thousands of artillery shells and missiles tipped with DU, ensuring thatradioactivity would remain in the water, soil, and food chain for decades orlonger.54 Desert Storm was a prelude to the full invasion and occupation of Iraqin 2003. That was preceded by more than a decade of harsh economic sanctions,leading to as many as one million civilian deaths (discussed more fully in the nextsection).

In spring 1999 the U.S. and a few NATO allies conducted bombing raids overYugoslavia that would last seven weeks, targeting Belgrade and other Serb cities,labeled “humanitarian intervention” to prevent Serb atrocities when in realityprotracted civil war had involved large-scale military violence among all rivals—Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars, Serbs. As in Desert Storm, those attacks—in theabsence of ground operations—demolished hundreds of public and residentialbuildings, water and electrical works, transportation, bridges, hospitals, schools,


and food production, leaving the Serb infrastructure in ruins.55 All this was car-ried out, as in Iraq, against a nation posing no threat to the U.S. and without airforce or air-defense capabilities, revealed by the fact U.S./NATO forces sufferedno casualties during this entirely one-sided “war.” As in Iraq, this was really nowarfare but rather an organized, planned, and sustained criminal massacre orchestratedfrom the skies.

In his lengthy account of the U.S./NATO attacks on Serbia, Michael Parentiwrites in To Kill a Nation that “such massive aggression amounts to a vastlygreater war crime than anything charged against Milosevic [and the Serbs].”56

Belgrade officials reported that 15 towns and cities were hit, resulting in sig-nificant casualties: 500 combat and roughly 2,000 civilian deaths, 6,000 wounded,and several thousand made homeless. The widespread use of DU-tipped ordnancedid widespread ecological harm, as it had in Iraq. In May 1999 a team of lawyersfrom Canada and Europe submitted a brief accusing the U.S. and NATO of warcrimes, including “wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages, of devastationnot justified by military necessity.”57 In June 2000 a panel of 16 judges from 11countries found the same Western forces culpable of war crimes including“planning and executing the dismemberment, segregation, and impoverishmentof Yugoslavia”, as well as the “killing and injuring of a defenseless population.”58

Following 9/11, President George W. Bush launched a bombing campaignagainst al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan—a war that would con-tinue for another 15 years, the longest in American history. Air attacks soonresulted in several thousand deaths in targeted areas, mostly remote. Despitefamiliar claims of “precision bombing”, it was Afghan civilians who suffered mostof the casualties. After sustained military operations, reports surfaced that U.S.planes (including drones) had frequently hit civilian targets. Bombers attackedlarge areas, while AC-130 gunships armed with howitzers, cannons, and machineguns had carte blanche in some parts of the country. Here, in contrast with otherU.S. postwar military interventions, the Afghan venture could be justified asdefensive, a response to the 9/11 attacks in a country where al Qaeda had manybase camps (though the majority of perpetrators were Saudis). Still, armed attackson civilian population (or where civilian casualties might be expected) are underany circumstances a violation of international law.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, spanning 2003 to 2011, approachedthe level of carnage reached in Korea and Indochina. The initial “shock-and-awe” operations targeting densely-populated urban centers could not have beenanything but wanton and indiscriminate, soon leading to a much larger panoramaof death and destruction that, by 2006, had produced an average of 3,000 Iraqideaths monthly. As in previous cases of U.S. military intervention, the publicinfrastructure (electricity, water, transportation, communications, healthcare, basicservices) was left in ruins, the society encountered mounting joblessness, poverty,violence, social dislocation, and outward flow of refugees—hardly incidental tothe main thrust of the invasion.59 From Desert Storm through twelve years of


economic sanctions, bombing raids, covert actions, and more warfare, Iraq wasovercome by a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks, occupation and resistancegiving rise to further chaos and loss of human life. Such horror pervaded theentire occupation, worsening as the anti-U.S. insurgency picked up momentum.In addition to the standard inventory of high-explosive bombs, missiles, andartillery shells, the American arsenal included DU-tipped weapons, white phos-phorous, napalm, and cluster bombs specifically designed to maim human beings.By late 2006, the savagery of prolonged occupation and civil strife had becomeacute: Baghdad, an urban center of five million people, was transformed into ashell of a city, its inhabitants victims of constant home invasions, roadblocks, round-ups, curfews, detention, and scattered atrocities—not to mention evisceration ofbasic public services.

The U.S. attack on Falluja in November 2004 deserves special mention: city of350,000 people, a center of Sunni-based insurgency, was virtually leveled with hun-dreds of people killed and tens of thousands of residents left homeless—their foodsources, water supplies, electricity, and medical services cut off for days. Americanvengeance grew out of local revolts against American troops during the early stagesof the occupation. Ground and aerial bombardment of the largely defenseless civilianpopulation came round-the-clock, Marines cordoning off routes of escape andexploiting free-fire zones to the maximum. In roughly one week this medium-sized city was reduced to rubble—a modern-day Stalingrad—as troops dideverything possible to quell the resistance. Desolate streets were filled with trau-matized Iraqis, many of them children, seeking refuge, food, water, and medicaltreatment. The violence unleashed on Falluja by vastly superior military force wasindiscriminate, exercised with few limits or restraints. Most public structures weredestroyed or badly damaged. Cluster bombs were dropped by the thousands,along with containers of white phosphorous. According to one observer, U.S.troops “shot all the sheep. Any animals people owned were shot. Helicopters shotall the animals and anything that moved in the villages surrounding Falluja.”60

This somewhat recent example of American warfare against civilians roughlyfits the general postwar modality, a pattern in which large-scale death anddestruction become part of the normal calculus of warfare. Despite all theadvertised benefits of high-tech warfare, therefore, the civilian toll from U.S.military ventures since the late 1940s has been extraordinarily high—a templateset by World War II. Evidence suggests that American callousness on the matterof foreign casualties has declined little, if at all, hardly shocking for a militarizedculture that has only deepened across the postwar years.61 The human lives ofothers—especially those with dark skins, those already dehumanized—remaindevalued, rationalized as the inevitable product of war in the service of nobleends. Further, the unrestrained arrogance of imperial power has scarcely abated:millions of civilian deaths are ritually justified on the basis of military necessity,yet in virtually every instance of U.S. armed intervention the demolished enemydid not pose a genuine threat to American territory or interests.


Sanctions as Economic Warfare

Warfare by means of economic sanctions has been used extensively, often bru-tally, by the U.S. against designated geopolitical enemies since World War II.Throughout the world there have been nearly 100 such cases, roughly 80 percentcarried out by Washington against far weaker nations: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua,Iraq, Yugoslavia, more recently Iran. While not technically regarded as an act ofwar, the debilitating consequences of long-term sanctions for civilian populationscan be said to have exceeded that for chemical, biological, and nuclear weaponrycombined. Where this punishment has been imposed to advance specificallynational objectives, as is typically the case, it is in fact an act of war—not tomention a violation of international law and, where civilian harm is severe, acrime against humanity. The perpetrator of sanctions can be found culpable whenaccess to basic goods like food, water, and medical supplies is forcibly denied.

For the U.S., sanctions as a form of warfare actually originated in FDR’s poli-cies against Japan in the period leading to World War II in the Pacific. We haveseen how during 1940 and 1941 Washington implemented the eight-pointMcCollum plan, extensively documented by Stinnett in Day of Deceit—a planexplicitly designed to provoke Japan and bring the U.S. into the war.62 Thispolicy imposed a total embargo on Japan, blocking access to international deliv-eries of such critical supplies as oil, iron ore, and various metals. Reinforced by aseries of diplomatic and military provocations, sanctions were fully expected toelicit a hostile reaction from Japanese leaders (including a possibility of armedattack), and of course history shows these expectations were born out. As theU.S., with British collaboration, tightened the screws as the months passed in1941, Japan understandably came to view sanctions as an outright act of war.

Postwar American resort to sanctions, usually routed through the U.N.Security Council, has uniformly targeted weak countries viewed as an impedi-ment to U.S. global power. This strategem is yet another mark of nationalexceptionalism—in this case, of the strong punishing the weak. The longest, andsurely most irrational and counter-productive of these sanctions has been the oneenforced against Cuba, beginning in late 1960 and extending into the present.Restrictions on finances, trade, travel, and diplomacy have been kept firmly inplace by both Democrats and Republicans, partly on the outlandish theory thatsuch policies would somehow destabilize the Communist regime and lead to itsoverthrow. (No one, at least since JFK, has seriously considered Cuba to be athreat to the U.S. homeland.) While Cuba estimates the embargo has cost itseconomy $685 million yearly, and has negatively impacted civilian access to foodand medicine, the leadership has managed to sidestep the worst consequences—thanks to foreign help. Cuba was able to join the World Trade Organization(WTO) in 1995, providing some respite.

For most years since 1960Washington has been essentially isolated in its economicwarfare against Cuba—its stubbornness partly a function of the well-funded


anti-Cuban lobby based in Florida. While some restrictions were eased under theBush and then Obama presidencies, this irrational policy is still fiercely defended,whatever its questionable legal and moral basis. Since 1992 the U.N. GeneralAssembly has passed a yearly resolution denouncing the sanctions as a violation ofthe Charter, with no impact. In October 2013 the General Assembly urged theU.S. to terminate its senseless embargo, by a vote of 188 to two (Israel supportingthe U.S. in opposition).

Even more debilitating instances of U.S. economic warfare have been carriedout in the Middle East, driven by strong geopolitical interests in the region. InIraq, the U.S. (backed by Britain) pushed through and then tenaciously enforceda particularly cruel sanctions regime, legitimated by the United Nations between1991 and 2003—an extension of the initial Gulf War. For Presidents Bill Clintonand George W. Bush the sanctions became a ruthless tool of imperial strategyin the buildup to war and overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Already severely wea-kened by the two wars, the Iraqi public infrastructure was weakened and thenfurther battered by years of draconian economic measures that blocked importsessential to water facilities, electricity, food production, sanitation, and medicalcare. The policy was sadistically punitive, ostensibly designed to underminematerial and ideological supports for the Baath Party, while forcing disarmamentin accordance with U.N. resolutions—but well after reports (beginning in themid-1990s) indicating that Iraq was largely disarmed and no longer posed amilitary threat of any sort.

Despite intensifying pressure from Security Council members Russia, China,and France, the U.S. refused to lift or ease sanctions even after reports of wor-sening civilian harm, including a rising death toll. In fact Washington was simplyconducting warfare by “more humane” means, combining sanctions with recur-rent bombing raids, sabotage, covert action, and surveillance. With the flimsyjustification of forcing an already enfeebled Hussein regime to “disarm”, the U.S.orchestrated the most debilitating sanctions program in history, giving rise toeconomic collapse, disintegration of public services, widespread unemployment,and massive human casualties. By 2002 the United Nations estimated that 5,000Iraqi children under five were dying on average each month, with the overalldeath toll reaching upwards of 500,000—mass murder by any reckoning.63

Writing in Harpers, Joy Gordon presented the harshest criticism of the sanctionsattack, writing: “U.S. policymakers have effectively turned a program of inter-national governance into a legitimated act of mass slaughter.”64 When U.N.observers predicted, and later discovered, an “unbelievable catastrophe” in Iraq,the Bush administration ignored everything and pushed full-speed ahead towardmore sanctions and regime change, unmoved by the civilian suffering. Once inplace, the sanctions could not be lifted until the U.S. relented—something thatsadly never happened. Washington continued to block even the most humani-tarian needs under the guise of prohibiting “dual-use” imports that “might con-ceivably be” adapted to military use. Here, behind the facade of fighting Iraqi


militarism and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) proliferation—contrivedpretexts from the outset—the U.S. persisted in a scheme resulting in at least triplethe human casualties produced by the two atomic bombings of Japan, a legacy that,as Gordon observed, “is unlikely to be either forgotten or forgiven.”65 In the endsanctions worked quite efficiently for U.S. war planners, softening the country forinvasion, regime change, and occupation long after it ceased to be a threat toanyone.

As in the case of Iraq, economic sanctions would be carried out in the 1990sagainst Yugoslavia to advance U.S. (also NATO) geopolitical objectives.Washington intervened, politically, economically, and militarily, to break up theYugoslav nation-state and isolate the Serbs as the last bastion of European resis-tance to the NATO eastward push. In 1992 the first Bush administration foughtto push through harsh economic sanctions against the FRY (under U.N. aus-pices), banning all exports and imports and precipitating financial and social chaosfor a nation already overcome by economic crisis. Congress had passed the For-eign Operations Appropriations Law (in November 1990), cutting off all aid andcredits to Yugoslavia, a prelude to U.N. Resolution 757 that imposed morecrippling sanctions.

From 1992 through 1999 sanctions hit the FRY, especially Serbia, hard byimposing a ban on all diplomatic, trade, scientific, and cultural exchangesaccompanied by a strongly-enforced naval blockade. This resulted in a vastincrease in joblessness, inflation, poverty, and material shortages (including med-ical supplies). The FRY soon became a deteriorating pawn of external politicalforces. By 1993 the public infrastructure was in ruins. In 1990, Serbia alone had aGDP of $24 billion with excellent national health care, educational, and trans-portation services; by 1995, all this had vanished while the GDP fell to $10 billion—even before the U.S./NATO bombings of 1999. Here, as in Iraq, the harshsanctions program constituted nothing so much as a systematic attack on aninnocent, defenseless civilian population denied basic necessities of life.66

The U.S.-engineered sanctions against Iran, again set up through U.N. reso-lutions, have strong parallels with Iraq, including the pretext of targeting (non-existent) WMD facilities. Both are classic examples of using economic warfare toserve geopolitical interests. In both cases the sanctions are integral to a larger strategyinvolving sanctions linked to covert operations, political confrontation, supportfor oppositional groups, and, ultimately, plans for military intervention andregime change. As with Iraq, sanctions are meant to weaken a center of resistanceto American (here also Israeli) power in the region, though Iran has been able toevade the worst consequences.

In fact Washington began sanctions against Iraq as early as November 1979,after overthrow of the Shah, when President Jimmy Carter ordered a freezing ofIranian assets, which in fact continues today. Sanctions were unilaterally expandedthroughout the 1980s and 1990s, President Reagan issuing a 1987 executiveorder blocking all U.S. trade with Iran. The basis of the current program is the


Iran Sanctions Act of 1996, passed by Congress and signed by PresidentClinton. Efforts were made at that time, and later intensified, to pressure Eur-opean nations to join the financial and trade embargoes. Since 2000 a powerfulanti-Iranian lobby, centered in neocon and pro-Israeli organizations, has beenremarkably effective in pushing Congress toward extreme hawkish policies. A2010 bill imposing sanctions of foreign banks and companies doing business withIran passed the Senate 99 to 0, and a 2011 amendment penalizing internationalcompanies dealing with the Iran Central Bank passed 100 to 0. In 2012 yetanother sanctions amendment passed the Senate 94 to 0, and a 2013 resolu-tion backing Israel should it attack Iran was supported by a vote of 99 to 0.A further toughening of sanctions was endorsed 400 to 20 by the House inJuly 2013.

In the face of such crippling measures—not to mention cyber sabotage,heightened political pressure, and implicit military threats—the Iranians (as ofsummer 2015) remained steadfast in their commitment to what all credible evi-dence reveals is a peaceful nuclear program. As a member in good standing of theNuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has every right within its rules tocontinue the program, at a time when Israel possesses up to 400 warheads anddismisses the NPT as a worthless nuisance. Its nuclear outlawry, along with thatof non-NPT state India, has for decades received material aid and diplomaticcover from Washington. Meanwhile, U.S. surveillance activities have uncoverednothing beyond a legal civilian energy program. No investigations by the Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have turned up any Iranian nuclear-weapons facilities or plans—yet this has not deterred the U.S. from seeking evenharsher sanctions (provisionally lessened with the fragile diplomatic agreements ofearly 2015). These sanctions, if leveled against the U.S., would be angrily treatedas an act of war.

The anti-Iranian lobby wants the U.S. to reject any dealings with Iran andrefuses to recognize Tehran’s rights under the NPT. Economic sanctions, under-stood (as with Iraq) as a prelude to regime change, are pressed with nothing shortof religious fervor. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, linked to suchthink tanks as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the American Israel PublicAffairs Committee (AIPAC), and the Washington Institute for Near EasternPolicy (WINEP), has effectively shaped recent U.S. policy on Iran. As Eli Cliftonand Ali Gharib write in The Nation:

The hawkish groups skillfully work the Hill with regular briefings and fre-quent contact with staffers. Their battalions of policy analysts and lawyers[package sanctions bills]. They also assiduously ply the mainstream media,regularly providing op-eds and quotes in news coverage. In other words, thisis a full-scale operation: the hawks generate the ideas, translate them intopolicy, shepherd bills through Congress, and celebrate their passage.67


As for the Obama White House, its stated goal has been to create “a compre-hensive sanctions strategy”—that is, a program designed to cripple the Iranianeconomy and wreak havoc on the civilian infrastructure. Banking, trade, energy,and transportation were [in 2015] being especially targeted. Iranian currency hadplummeted in value by 38 percent, with horrendous consequences for foodprices, jobs, and inflation. In 2012 Obama announced that the U.S. was com-mitted to “forcing Iran down the path of international isolation”, made possibleby the harshest economic sanctions ever imposed on a nation. Secretary of StateHilary Clinton intoned that the Iranians, by their outlandish behavior, were doingall the harm to themselves, while Senator Lindsey Graham stated that: “theIranian people should be willing to suffer now for a better future.”68 All this wasdirected at Iran’s supposed “defiance of the international community”. Mean-while, AIPAC and other groups within the Israel lobby continue to agitate foreven more far-reaching sanctions.

Such aggressive use of economic sanctions by a great superpower—always withthe support of partners—against far weaker countries is best understood as a formof economic warfare to serve imperial domination directed overwhelminglyagainst civilian populations. The stratagem has been likened to an extension ofsaturation-bombing into new circumstances.69 The inevitable result of harshsanctions, with Iraq in the 1990s as something of a barometer, is nothing short ofwidespread public misery: shortages of vital goods, poverty, disease, famine, massfatalities. Where this is the case, a virtual “state of siege” is imposed—that is, adeliberate targeting of civilians, a mode of collective punishment. As warfare byother means, sanctions can be viewed as a clear violation of international law,which prohibits actions that deprive inhabitants of “objects indispensable to theirsurvival”, as codified in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 GenevaConvention. Where policies leading to cruelty, suffering, and death among civi-lians are part of imperial agendas, as is obviously the case for the U.S., this vio-lation becomes even more egregious. Andrew Cockburn, writing in Harper’s,points out that sanctions programs have become an effective U.S. global strategyby virtue of being sold (to the United Nations) as a “peaceful alternative” tomilitary action. In reality armed “shock-and-awe” has simply been replaced byeconomic “shock-and-awe”.70

The use of economic sanctions for geopolitical purposes, according to HansKochler, violates standard ethical and legal precepts, as innocent civilians becomethe primary target, victims of collective punishment. Kochler goes further: sanctionsimposed by strong nations on weaker ones constitute a form of economic ter-rorism. In fact sanctions as employed by the U.S. throughout the postwar yearshave been anything but “peaceful”—often paving the way toward, or reinforcing,military action as in the case in Iraq. Kochler writes: “The sacrifice of a wholepeople for the sake of strategic interests of a superpower or a coalition of states (asmay be formed within the Security Council) would appear to be in no wayethically justifiable.”71


The historical reality is that sanctions have been uniformly employed by the U.S.and some European powers to discipline nations that go against Westernhegemony—Cuba, Serbia, Iraq, and Iran being recent examples. Sanctions havebeen very selectively imposed, Iran targeted for its nuclear program while othernations with similar facilities are ignored or provided a green light for continuedresearch and development. Others with advanced nuclear weapons arsenals (Israel,India, Pakistan)—all refusing NPT membership—receive carte blanche in theirinternational outlawry, no sanctions to face. Rather than curtailing WMDproliferation (or human-rights violations), selective punishment aggravates theproblem by its outrageous double standards. At the same time, in bringing large-scale misery to civilian populations the sanctions regime produces its own human-rights and sundry criminal violations. According to the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights (UDHR), “In no case may a people be deprived of its own meansof subsistence”—nor of its rights to an adequate standard of living.

Sanctions warfare, like so much else in the American economic, political, andmilitary arsenal, constitutes yet another case of superpower exceptionalism. Theschemes are inherently discriminatory and hypocritical, not to mention indefen-sibly punitive. As a tool of international peace and security they are entirelyfraudulent. The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly condemned the use ofcoercive economic measures to serve narrow political goals, especially wherehighly-developed nations use their economic and military superiority to forceweaker nations to submit to self-serving geopolitical agendas.

Superpower Legality

Nowhere is the legacy of U.S. exceptionalism and outlawry more visible, andmore flagrant, than in the realm of international norms and laws—a legacy rootedin World War II and its immediate aftermath. It was the extreme militarism ofthis global conflict that gave rise to widespread hopes for a new internationalZeitgeist that could shape enduring world peace and cooperation. There wasindeed something of an ideological shift reflected in the postwar Nuremberg andTokyo tribunals, founding of the United Nations, a series of Geneva Protocols,and forging of the UDHR. This shift later found its way into hundreds of bilat-eral and multilateral treaties that would be signed across several decades. Asinternational agreements became more established, they helped frame a globalconsensus in which all states would be obligated to follow rather strict moral andlegal principles, including those regulating how armed combat is initiated andconducted. Whether such consensus would be truly universal and binding, how-ever, raised a broader set of political issues that, unfortunately, have never beenresolved.

Moral and legal standards governing international behavior, including conductof warfare, have been effectively codified and institutionalized since World War II.International law has been shaped and reshaped in the aftermath of a war that


brought unspeakable death and destruction, repeated atrocities on all sides, andcrimes against humanity. Although Nuremberg was essentially a victor’s tribunalset up by the Allies, its main principles were adopted by the United Nations in1950 and are today uniformly regarded as universally enforceable. The principlesstate that any person found to have committed a war crime under internationallaw must be held accountable, like those Germans and Japanese defendants foundguilty of assorted crimes in the late 1940s. Within this ideal global framework itshould be at least theoretically possible for any government or military actor to beprosecuted for crimes against peace (the “supreme crime”), war crimes, or crimesagainst humanity. Within this framework, moreover, all international agreements(including treaties) should be uniformly binding in order to be efficacious.

Postwar history, on the other hand, has scarcely confirmed such optimism.Despite common references to an expanding “culture of human rights”, thedream of a world moving toward respect for sovereign equality, arms control,binding principles of military conduct, and universal accountability has turnedinto something of a global nightmare, as if the lessons taught by the barbarism ofWorld War II had been forgotten. While causes of this dystopic reality are surelymultiple, a central problem from the outset has been the ongoing Americanpursuit of world hegemony on a foundation of superior military power. WhileU.S. leaders ritually uphold the rhetoric of democracy, human rights, and rule oflaw, their actual conduct has been more congruent with imperial agendas thatconflict with requirements of a peaceful and lawful international order. Theoutcome has approximated what Philippe Sands refers to as a “lawless world”.72

The United Nations was a product of World War II and its fallout, whichincluded the Nuremberg and Tokyo courts set up to prosecute and punish theGermans and Japanese. (The very idea of pursuing crimes that might have beencommitted by other nations was never seriously considered.) The legacy of Nur-emberg has been repeatedly invoked to legitimate and sustain the idea of amodern international tribunal—or tribunals—to try alleged criminals; it was to bethe model for a new global jurisprudence. In reality the Nuremberg proceedingswere established by the U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, and it wasthose countries that furnished prosecutors and judges for bringing many leadingNazis to justice. There was broad consensus in favor of trying and punishingthose presumed guilty of the most heinous war crimes and crimes againsthumanity.

The early postwar years were filled with the dream of a world legal order thatwould drastically reduced the likelihood that such crimes would ever again becommitted—that is, making military aggression and its consequences a thing ofthe past. Yet the Nuremberg and Tokyo proceedings could hardly be judged assuccessful in laying the foundations of a truly universal system of legality. In factthese tribunals were emphatically partial and biased—ad hoc mechanisms forvictors to judge losers, adopting ex post facto criteria where most crimes weredefined after the fact and, moreover, were prosecuted against just one side in a


lengthy global war involving horrendous crimes on all sides. As instruments ofvictor’s justice, Nuremberg and Tokyo must be regarded as a disastrous backdropto a viable international legal framework—yet this flawed legacy lives on,uncritically embraced in the U.S. and much of the West.

While the Nuremberg tribunal did prosecute and sentence 21 leading Nazis formonstrous crimes, several receiving the death penalty, the proceedings wereoverwhelmingly biased and compromised. Historian Joe Persico argues that theentire IMT (Nuremberg) apparatus, whatever its motivations, lacked legitimacyfrom the outset.73 German leaders were convicted of crimes against peace—waging military aggression against nations that had been no threat to the Naziregime, referred to as the “supreme crime”. Here the Allied powers were clearlyinnocent of any wrongdoing. In other areas of military behavior spanning severalyears, however, differences between the Allied and Axis nations were not such asto justify selective jurisprudence; massive violations were attributable to all parties.Any legitimate tribunal would have put defendants on trial from all sides of theconflict. It could easily be argued that, for example, wanton attacks on civilianpopulations and related targets (already prohibited by the Hague Conventions)were more widespread on the Allied (U.S., British, Soviet) than on the Germanor Japanese side.

There can be little doubt that the saturation bombing of major urban centers(Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, dozens of other Japanese cities), not tomention the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rank among themost terrible war crimes in history. Yet such crimes, as well as extensive abuseand killing of war prisoners, were made off-limits by Allied prosecutors, so thatthe U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union could end up fully protected against theseand other possible charges. Given that reality, it is hardly surprising that Nurem-berg (or Tokyo) has never led to any independent tribunal where war crimes andcrimes against humanity might be equitably tried and punished. The principles oflegal equity and universality have been honored only as abstract discourse.

While the postwar tribunals were bereft of legitimacy, they did establish certainlegal precedents for judging and punishing war crimes. The first was the idea thatcrimes against peace should be prosecuted as the “supreme crime”, with thosefound culpable ultimately responsible for all the mayhem and violence thatnaturally follows military aggression. The second was the precept, still generallyregarded as valid, that all individuals, whatever their status or power, must be heldlegally and morally accountable for their actions, that criminal deeds cannot bejustified on grounds of bureaucratic command or simply following orders. Theseprinciples were indeed enforced at Nuremberg and have since been widelyunderstood as integral to moral codes of individual behavior within and outsidethe context of warfare. Whether those principles have had any lasting globalimpact, however, is yet another story: there are in fact few postwar instanceswhere the Nuremberg legacy has been applied in legal practice, despite itsembodiment in the U.N. Charter and elsewhere. The historical record since 1945


has been one of repeated and flagrant horrors—wars, civil strife, insurrections, covertoperations, terrorism, etc.—marked by few prosecutions for war crimes attributableto government and military leaders. As for the U.S., the nation most respon-sible for such crimes, its leaders have been totally immune from prosecution—quiteconsistent with the one-sided character of Nuremberg jurisprudence.

Tens of millions of lives have been lost to postwar military aggression, yet onlyrarely have perpetrators been brought to justice in a court governed by universallegal principles—and such cases have never involved the leading superpower. Theonly judicial proceedings have involved local, ad hoc structures where, onceagain, victors (great powers always) stand in judgment of vanquished or weakerparties, as in the cases of Yugoslavia and Iraq. Here the U.S. (and its junior part-ners) have emerged untainted, able to carry out criminal policies and actions withimpunity, subject neither to international law nor to the workings of any specifictribunal. Persico writes: “As for crimes against peace, the likelihood of anyonebeing prosecuted for committing aggression has been even more remote than forcommitting atrocities. Aggression appears to be in the eye of the beholder.”74 Asof the early twenty-first century, there were no laws or precedents with enoughweight to supersede the interests and priorities of the world’s leading superpower.In other words, the hallowed norms of universality simply do not apply to theU.S.—always the most exceptional nation.

Drawing on the Nuremberg principles, the United Nations banned the firstuse of military force, stating: “All members shall refrain in their internationalrelations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of politicalindependence of any state … ” (Article 2.4). Further, the Charter provides adefinitive list of violations, including armed invasion, occupation, bombardment,blockades, attack on a nation’s armed forces, using territory for aggression, andsupporting local groups (proxies) to carry out military aggression. These prohibi-tions are contained in numerous treaties, conventions, protocols, and chartersestablished in the several decades since World War II. The U.S. has egregiouslyviolated every one of the above strictures, typically holding itself above the mostcherished norms of international behavior. Its multiple transgressions have beenfor the most part planned, deliberate, systematic, and brutal, with increasinglyhigh-tech firepower directed against weak, relatively small, underdeveloped, andusually defenseless countries. The American military, by far the most powerful theworld has even seen, has conducted both selective and strategic bombing, usedweapons of mass destruction, wantonly attacked civilian populations and infra-structures, mined harbors, invaded and occupied foreign territories, imposed dra-conian sanctions, set up population-relocation programs, and supported viciousparamilitary groups on behalf of superpower agendas—and has done so across theglobe with virtual impunity.

Postwar military interventions that have brought U.S. leaders directly intoconflict with international law include Greece, Korea, Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam,Laos, Cambodia, Haiti, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Somalia,


Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. There have been literally dozens ofoperations—covert or direct, large or small—involving some form of proxy war(as in Colombia and Central America). In few if any of these cases has the U.S.met the U.N. criteria for self-defense. In three protracted instances of warfare(Korea, Vietnam, Iraq) the accumulated casualties, overwhelmingly civilian, havereached well into the millions.

For Washington, there has been no diminution of the warfare state, no les-sening of its impulse toward military intervention—witness the recent examplesof Afghanistan and Iraq, along with military threats against Iran. U.S. warfareagainst Iraq represents the best possible example of crimes against peace of the sortprosecuted at Nuremberg and contained in the U.N. Charter. After the first GulfWar the U.S. resorted to every method possible—sabotage, inspections, bombingraids, covert action, economic sanctions—hoping to subvert Iraqi power andsecure military supremacy across the region. As early as 1992 necocon ideologueswere calling for a “remapping” of the Middle East to advance U.S. and Israeliinterests, starting with regime change in Baghdad. We have seen how cripplingsanctions eroded Iraqi economic and military strength, easing the way toward the2003 invasion and occupation that would reorder the nation’s governing, indus-trial, financial, and legal institutions. Every phase of this operation—buildup,invasion, occupation, reconstruction—unfolded in flagrant violation of interna-tional law. The disastrous failure of this imperial project does not ameliorate anycriminal transgressions on the part of leading decision-makers—yet to date noone has been held accountable.

The hallowed Nuremberg precedent, unfortunately, would be of no help insuch instances because those proceedings embraced one-dimensional legality overuniversality, exempting the leading powers from culpability. More than anything,Nuremberg embellished and legitimated U.S. exceptionalism and the facile resortto double standards. During the postwar era Washington has opposed literallyhundreds of U.N. resolutions favoring human rights, basic provisions of interna-tional law, disarmament, curbs on military intervention, and nuclear regulations.It has routinely defended Israeli violations of numerous U.N. resolutions goingback to the mid-1970s, all in the defense of military occupation, illegal settle-ments, military atrocities, and crimes against peace. Indeed nothing is more indi-cative of U.S. hostility to the world consensus—and international law—than itsunwavering support of Israeli crimes across several decades. Resolution 242,passed by the U.N. General Assembly in 1967, called for Israeli withdrawal fromGaza and the West Bank—illegally seized through armed conquest—as the basisof any settlement. With strong U.S. backing, Israel has consistently spurned 242,a measure based on national self-determination and endorsed universally. Mean-while, as Israel achieved major nuclear status in the early 1970s (eventually accu-mulating between 100 and 400 warheads), its leadership has steadfastly refusedNPT membership. Such flagrant outlawry can be viewed as a national stancelegitimated by yet another World War II legacy—the Holocaust.


The issue of war-crimes prosecution is today more crucial than ever, as globalviolence spreads and, moreover, the instruments of modern warfare grow evermore technologically barbaric. In this context, the future of global jurisprudencedepends on the capacity of nations to achieve universally-binding norms, whichmeans that American exceptionalism—with its repeated transgressions of interna-tional law—stands as the crucial impediment to such prospects. Yet, even asWashington refuses universal principles for itself, it remains ever vigilant in seek-ing to bring others to justice for crimes real or contrived—especially those stateswith the audacity to challenge U.S. geopolitical interests.

One case in point: the U.S., joined by NATO, set up the InternationalCriminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1993, convened atthe Hague explicitly to try Slobodan Milosevic and other Serb leaders for crimesallegedly committed during a decade of civil wars in the Balkans. Milosevic wasformally indicted in May 1999, not coincidentally at the height of NATO aerialbombardments, on 61 counts including genocide crimes against humanity, andvarious war crimes associated with Serb “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, Bosnia,and Croatia. Milosevic was arrested in March 2001, after the U.S. first threatenedthe new Serb government and then bribed it with millions of dollars in cash.Western powers, the U.S. in the lead with strong German backing, portrayedMilosevic and the Serbs as the latest incarnation of Nazi militarists carrying outruthless aggression, architects of a new holocaust replete with mass murder, massrape, torture, and ethnic cleansing—atrocities so horrible as to require “humani-tarian intervention” by (U.S. and NATO) military force. Once the 1999 bomb-ings were finished, the NATO-financed and organized Hague Tribunal wouldbring the Serb monsters and their accomplices to trial.

By holding Serb leaders accountable for unspeakable crimes the ICTY was saidto have introduced a new era of international law, Secretary of State MadeleineAlbright referring to the Hague as the “mother of all tribunals”.75 This would bea legal forum within which it would be possible to try, following the tradition ofNuremberg, some of the greatest villains in European history. Milosevic wasdeemed the kind of war criminal the world desperately needed to bring to justiceto avoid “international anarchy” and lawlessness—a motif repeated endlessly inthe American media. Improbably but not surprisingly, one finds no mention ofany other party to the long and complex Balkans civil wars, nor of the roleplayed by NATO and the U.S. in their illegal aerial warfare directed against asovereign nation. Authors Norman Cigar and Paul Williams, presenting the vic-tors’ case against the Serbs, write: “The atrocities committed by Serbian forceswere part of a planned, systematic, and organized campaign to secure territory foran ethnically ‘pure’ Serb state by clearing it of all non-Serb populations.” Theycharacterize the tribunal as a historical breakthrough in global jurisprudence.76

Despite such overblown rhetoric, it takes little effort to uncover the ICTY asan outrageous fraud from the very outset—biased, one-sided, at odds with anyconcept of universal jurisprudence. In fact the tribunal was set up and financed by


the U.S. and other European powers, which supplied the bulk of investigativeand prosecutorial resources, the very nations that had conducted illegal warfareagainst the Serbs. After nearly a decade of armed conflict involving not only theSerbs but Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovar Albanians, and diverse para-military groups—not to mention the covert operations and military aggression ofNATO—the fiction was upheld that the Serbs alone were guilty of atrocities,that all others parties were innocent victims of a singular, genocidal evil whileSerbs themselves never could have been victimized. This scenario, constructed byWestern public-relations firms and the media defies all logic as well as historicalevidence. Indeed the targeted Serbs could be said to have suffered most duringthe 1990s, especially when the bombing attacks are taken into account.

The Hague Tribunal totally ignored this complex history, dismissing the manyinstances where Serbs experienced atrocities—for example, the several thousandkilled and at least 300,000 displaced in Croatia alone and another 300,000 dis-placed in Kosovo from the NATO attacks and U.S.-supported KLA terrorism.The failure of the ICTY to address this ridiculous anomaly, to investigate andprosecute war crimes across the board, to look impartially at all combatants in theprotracted civil strife (including outside aggressors), demonstrates both its moralbankruptcy and legal absurdity. In fact the ICTY proceedings grew out of aunilateral (U.S./NATO) claim to militarily intervene despite lacking any basis inthe U.N. Charter or international law. Following Nuremberg, this was anothercase of both crimes against peace and victor’s justice. No evidence of “Serb gen-ocide” or “ethnic cleansing” was ever uncovered—though even if it had, therewas no legitimate cause for either military attack or special tribunal. The entireBalkans operation was a function of securing Western geopolitical interests inthe region. Michael Mandel correctly notes that “the role the ICTY was born toplay came in the Kosovo war. This had nothing to do with trying and punishingcriminals and everything to do with lending credibility to NATO’s cause.”77

While the Hague Tribunal was theoretically erected to purge monsters likeMilosevic from the world scene, in actuality it was U.S./NATO leaders—drivenby a goal of destroying Yugoslav resistance of Western domination—who turnedout to be most guilty of war crimes. Among other transgressions, the bombingcampaign itself was entirely illegal. Interestingly, the U.S. moved to ensure thatstatutes prohibiting crimes against peace would be excluded from the ICTYagenda. In the end, nowhere was it ever shown that Milosevic’s supposed drivefor a Greater Serbia (itself a questionable charge) was motivated by a desire forethnic purity—or was motivated by anything beyond understandable efforts topreserve Yugoslav national integrity against external subversion and intervention.

In its crudely selective, ad hoc approach to legality, the ICTY exemplified allthe flaws of such “special” tribunals. The entire legal process was biased, unde-mocratic, and ideologically driven. Not only did the U.S. provide most ICTYresources, it offered huge rewards for the capture of Serb “war criminals” butnothing for apprehension of Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovars, and others.78


Moreover, the ICTY was able to set its own rules of jurisprudence—and thoserules were essentially those with the superior military force. As in the cases ofNuremberg and Tokyo, it was a situation where the sheer exercise of powerdictated the narratives of justice and criminality. The Hague Tribunal representsnot so much a new era of international law as a momentous step backward, agreat retreat from hopes of global justice—in fact a return to the earlier colonialethos where Western power could dictate everything by virtue of economic andmilitary supremacy. Reflecting on the truncated legacy of Nuremberg, TelfordTaylor writes: “To punish the foe—especially the vanquished foe—for conductwhich the enforcing nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as todiscredit the laws themselves.”79

The very logic referred to by Taylor applies, even more compellingly, to thead hoc Iraq Tribunal set up in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion to try SaddamHussein and seven co-defendants for assorted war crimes. The first court, con-vened in October 2005, found Hussein and six other former Ba’ath Party leadersguilty of killing 148 people at the village of Dujail in 1982—a preordained ver-dict rendered November 5, 2006 and followed by the videotaped execution ofHussein in December. The verdicts were greeted by President Bush as a “greatmilestone” in the march toward international justice, a “turning point” in secur-ing peace and democracy in Iraq.80 Like Bush, the entire American political andmedia establishment heralded both the Iraq Tribunal and its guilty verdicts as awondrous exercise in global jurisprudence, lavishly praised for its quick dispatchof one of the world’s leading tyrants.

In fact the Iraq Special Tribunal (later renamed the Iraq Higher CriminalCourt, or IHCC) had been repudiated by the global community as a sorry effortby the Bush administration to cover its own more terrible crimes while deflectingpublic gaze from its costly, disastrous, and illegal military intervention. Here againwe had a carefully-orchestrated legal process to punish a designated enemy.Everything that surrounded and defined the Baghdad court, buried deeply withinthe fortified Green Zone—military occupation, puppet government, collapse ofsocial order, full U.S. logistical and financial support for the entire operation—inevitably reduced the trials to a comical farce, their procedures manipulated andoutcomes well known in advance.

As at The Hague, the Baghdad tribunal was devoid of political and legallegitimacy. How could a legal system established under foreign military occupa-tion, itself the product of an entirely criminal operation, be considered remotelyfair and independent—much less a “turning point” in global jurisprudence?Neither the client Iraq government nor the phony war-crimes body could survivea single day without U.S. military power. Tribunal statutes were created andimposed by the U.S. armed forces, political operatives, and academic “experts”,completely at odds with requirements for a viable judiciary. The Hussein trial, inreality limited to one secondary charge more than two decades old, was carefullydesigned to show that the post-Ba’ath government was sovereign, efficient, and


democratic—a legitimate alternative to the Hussein regime—but in actuality thestate system in place under U.S. occupation had no power over such crucialissues as taxation, banking, trade, media control, and foreign policy. In the end,the American claim that this was an “Iraqi tribunal” allowing people to finallysettle historical accounts was nothing but pure myth.

Meanwhile, beneath the familiar rhetoric about upholding international lawand human rights, Washington has fiercely opposed any genuinely independentcriminal tribunal based on universal legal principles. Here, as in other realms ofglobal behavior, the U.S. has insisted on special status consistent with its nationalexceptionalism. The U.S. reserves the unique right to operate on the basis of itsown legal processes in order to advance geopolitical objectives. Dreading loss offreedom to intervene militarily where and when it chooses, it endorses nothingbeyond its own tailor-made tribunals—those where charges can be leveled againstchosen villains while leaving itself, the accuser and prosecutor, completelyimmune. As of summer 2015, the U.S. was persisting in its frequently hystericalrejection of the only legitimate world tribunal, the International Criminal Court(ICC), founded on the Rome Statutes in 2002 involving first-time ratification of60 nations. The universal legality championed by the ICC had the objective, notyet realized, of creating a system of global justice equally relevant to all nations;legality would finally triumph over sheer power, over national interests.81

Following earlier hopes and promises for something beyond mere victor’s jus-tice, the ICC was to have worldwide jurisdiction over individuals and statesaccused of war crimes and crimes against humanity (though not crimes againstpeace), but the U.S. refused to join when its outrageous demand for veto powerover any charges against American citizens and personnel—requested by no othercountry—was unanimously disallowed. In 2002 the rejectionist U.S. position wasvoiced by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “The United States will regardas illegitimate any attempt by the Court of state parties to the [Rome Statutes] toassert the ICC’s jurisprudence over American citizens.”82 No reason, aside fromthe obvious prerogatives of the superpower, seemed necessary. Further, the U.S.threatened to paralyze U.N. peacekeeping operations if it did not receive assur-ances that Americans (deployed by a warfare state involved in perpetual militarycombat) would be granted immunity from criminal prosecution—a conditionthat backers of the Court found politically and legally untenable.

If today there is indeed a widening commitment to norms of lawful interna-tional behavior—toward a system of commonly-shared global rules—then theU.S. unfortunately represents a solid impediment to such possibilities. The mostominous threat to world peace demands immunity from prosecution as it goesabout setting its own rules and laws. Of course there is plenty of American lip-service to high-sounding ideals, but great-power interests always prevail. U.S.global behavior, in the tracks of the Nuremberg travesty, remains steeped in apolitical culture of national exceptionalism, imperial arrogance, and glorificationof (its own) military power. American obsession with ad hoc tribunals, its


rejection of independent legal processes, and its well-documented contempt forglobal agreements sadly reflect this culture.

Notes

1 For comparative GDP data for the period under study, see www.en.wikipedia.org/Military_Production_during_World_WarII#GDP.

2 American GDP levels (in real numbers for the period) were: $92 billion for 1939; $101billion for 1940; $126 billion for 1941; $198 billion for 1943; $223 billion for 1945;$269 billion for 1948; $294 billion for 1950; and $619 billion for 1963. See www.davemanuel.com/historical-gdp-numbers-united-states.php.

3 www.en.wikipedia.org/GDPhistory.4 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy, Incorporated, Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted

Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 32.5 Ibid., Ch. 8.6 Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America Against the World (New York: Henry Holt

and Co., 2006), pp. 44–45.7 Robert Jay Lifton, Superpower Syndrome (New York: Nation Books, 2003).8 Ibid., p. 22.9 See Norman Solomon,War Made Easy (New York: JohnWiley and Sons, 2005), Ch. 5.10 Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, American Terminator (New York: Disinformation,

2004), p. 204.11 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1993), p. 44.12 See Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race (San Francisco, CA: City Lights,

1998), p. 175.13 Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1987), p. 154.14 Ibid., p. 140.15 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York:

Pantheon, 1986), p. 93.16 Dower, Cultures of War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), p. 252.17 Ibid., p. 223.18 Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 192–94.19 Ibid., pp. 98–99.20 On the Rambo phenomenon in Hollywood cinema, see Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard,

The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: ParadigmPublishers, 2007), pp. 107–08.

21 Michael R. Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial (Lawrence: The University Press ofKansas, 2002), p. 56.

22 Cited in Belknap, p. 65.23 Ibid., p. 76.24 Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 300.25 Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade (New York: Monthly Review, 2002), pp. 47–50.26 Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 88–89.27 Ibid., p. 81.28 Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs (Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2001), pp. 1–37.29 Ibid., pp. 4–5.30 Los Angeles Times (November 10, 2014).31 Ibid.32 Stephen F. Cohen, “Distorting Russia”, in The Nation (March 3, 2014).33 Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie, p. 274.


www.en.wikipedia.org/Military_Production_during_World_WarII#GDP

www.davemanuel.com/historical-gdp-numbers-united-states.php

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/GDPhistory

www.en.wikipedia.org/Military_Production_during_World_WarII#GDP

www.davemanuel.com/historical-gdp-numbers-united-states.php

34 Ibid., p. 284.35 See Tom Engelhardt, The United States of Fear (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books,

2011), pp. 5–9.36 Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 69.37 Ibid., pp. 8–9.38 Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 126.39 Quoted in Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 41.40 See A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities (New York: Walker and Co., 2006), p. 272.41 Ibid., p. 277.42 See Endicott and Hagerman,The United States and Biological Warfare, pp. 97–98.43 Ibid., p. 88.44 Ibid., p. 101.45 Quoted in Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, p. 128.46 Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), pp. 301–02.47 Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath (New York:

Vintage Books, 1972).48 James William Gibson, The Perfect War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), Ch. 5.49 Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, p. 159.50 Ibid., p. 157.51 Young, The Vietnam Wars, p. 235.52 See Philip E. Wheaton, Panama Invaded (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992), pp. 13–23.53 Ibid., pp. 115–16.54 See the volume Metal of Dishonor (New York: International Action Center, 1999),

Chs. 1, 3, and 8.55 Ramsey Clark, “Indictment of the U.S./NATO”, in John Catalinotto and Sara

Flounders, eds, Hidden Agenda: U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia (New York:International Action Center, 2002), pp. 33–45.

56 Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation, p. 124.57 Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade, pp. 118–19.58 Catalinotto and Flounders, eds, Hidden Agenda, pp. 318–21.59 Los Angeles Times ( January 17, 2007).60 www.dahrjamailiraq.com (February 3, 2005).61 Los Angeles Times (November 10, 2014).62 See Richard Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York:

Free Press, 2000), Ch. 1.63 On the terrible impact of economic sanctions on Iraq, see Dilip Hiro, Iraq (New York:

Nation Books, 2002), pp. 1–19.64 See Joy Gordon, “Cool War”, Harpers (November 2002), p. 43.65 Ibid., p. 49.66 Richard Becker, “Sanctions in the Destruction of Yugoslavia”, in Ramsey Clark, et. al.,

NATO in the Balkans (New York: International Action Center, 1998), pp. 107–29.67 Eli Clifton and Ali Gharib, in The Nation (August 4–11, 2014), p. 23.68 Huffington Post (September 3, 2013).69 See Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror (Gabriola Island, BC: New

Society Publishers, 2003), p. 123.70 Andrew Cockburn, in Harpers (September 2013).71 Hans Kochler, “Ethical Aspects of Sanctions in International Law”, IPO Research Paper

(December, 2013), pp. 17–18.72 Philippe Sands, Lawless World (New York: Viking Press, 2005).73 Joe Persico, Nuremberg (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 437.74 Ibid., p. 442.75 Quoted in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2000), p. 282.


http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com

76 Norman Cigar and Paul Williams, Indictment at the Hague (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2002), pp. 17, 21.

77 Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder (London: Pluto, 2004), p. 132.78 Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade, p. 101.79 Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 39.80 Los Angeles Times (November 17, 2005).81 Sands, Lawless World, Ch. 1.82 Los Angeles Times (August 3, 2002).


4THE CURSE OF BOMB POWER

The end of World War II, marked by the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki, ushered in a new era of mass destruction as human warfare wouldforever be overshadowed by the prospects of nuclear barbarism. For triumphantAmerican military power, the historic atomic breakthrough signified the verygreatness and exceptionalism of a national tradition driven by its proclaimedmission of bringing freedom and democracy to a strife-ridden world. The Bombrepresented nothing less than a thoroughgoing revolution in military affairs—andof course global affairs—amounting to an awesome spectacle of U.S. technolo-gical prowess and superiority, a confirmation of its unique status on the interna-tional scene. Although world opinion in general viewed the Bomb as aninstrument of barbarism, for U.S. leaders it would be embraced as a benevolentsource of perpetual global hegemony, a guarantee of superpower domination.Well before the 1945 armistice was signed aboard the USS Missouri, FDR andother American statesmen made clear their goal of a U.S.-controlled postwarorder enforced by its singular possession of a doomsday weapon. The Bombwould go a long way toward securing their long-term economic and geopoliticalagendas, starting with the capacity to dominate worldwide financial and industrialmarkets.

Viewed from this vantage point, the Bomb as ultimate weapon of massdestruction—product of a well-funded scientific-military elite working at theManhattan Project—would completely alter the trajectory of American politics asit would for the rest of the globe. This elite was created through an unprece-dented constellation of forces: governmental, corporate, academic, military. Whathas been called “big science”, headed by such academics as Ernest Lawrence atthe University of California, Berkeley, would serve to underpin the world’smost ambitious nuclear program—a regimen that would recruit thousands of

well-trained scientists, technicians, and managers dedicated to the health of thewarfare state.1

The new scientific-military elite would continue to operate as a matrix ofdynamic interests within the evolving warfare state, defined by a militarizedeconomy, imperial executive, and broadened international reach. Since the Bombwould be central to the postwar U.S. power structure—though never acknowl-edged as such—its stupendous (“Godlike”) destructive force was something to becelebrated, though of course still feared. After all, President Harry Truman hadglorified this new marvel of warfare in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima andNagasaki, where some 200,000 innocent and defenseless civilians had beenincinerated. For the U.S., at least, birth of the nuclear age meant not onlyacceptance but glorification of mass murder as national policy.

While U.S. government decision-makers involved in the historic decision touse atomic weapons against Japan never expressed much guilt or sorrow, manyscientists at the time (and later) could not escape pangs of conscience. In a 1947speech, J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, referred tothe bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the most horrible instances of mass-destructive force ever used in human warfare. To date no American leader orspokesperson has ever issued an apology for the savagery that had no militarylogic or political rationale. The entirely hapless civilians targeted in August 1945were sacrificed on the altar of crude superpower ambitions.

That nuclear legacy has remained very much alive in Washington across thepostwar years, constituting an important pillar of American military strategy asoutlined in a series of Nuclear Posture Review documents.2 In fact, despite itsconstant moralistic lecturing of other nations about the threat of “weapons ofmass destruction” (WMD), the U.S. not only continues to modernize, stockpile,and deploy its huge nuclear arsenal but has in fact widely used multiple instru-ments of mass destruction, including economic sanctions (Cuba, Iraq, Yugoslavia,Iran), saturation bombing (Germany, Japan, Korea, Indochina), and chemicalwarfare (Vietnam). The U.S. alone among nations has employed all four of theseWMD strategies—widely and repeatedly. This particular hypocrisy seems ende-mic to a power structure, whether presided over by Democrats or Republicans,that has long been happy to invoke the special privilege of superpowerhegemony.

Atomic Politics: A New Era

Within the historical rubric of WMD, the most awesome and planet-threateningweapons are beyond doubt nuclear, first developed, tested, and used in 1945 andcontinuously modernized by a growing atomic club ever since. We know that,after the stupendous achievements of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. droppedtwo atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, just days before capi-tulation, bringing deliberate and unnecessary wanton destruction to large civilian

102 The Curse of Bomb Power

populations. As mentioned, this moment was celebrated by President Trumanand indeed nearly universally within the political and media establishments. Theidea of a superbomb had far less military than geopolitical rationale: Trumandecided to inaugurate the nuclear age mainly to impress (and surely to intimidate)the Soviets, to warn potential future global competitors. From this standpoint, theBomb could be seen as probably the first salvo in the Cold War.

Among types of WMD, nuclear warfare stands alone in its unbelievabledestructive power—at present the only form of military conflict that could placethe entire planet in danger, or at least life on the planet. It is one truly doomsdaythreat, a super weapon capable of demolishing “friends” and “enemies” alike.Since 1945 the U.S. has insisted that nukes ought to be considered anotherinstrument of modern warfare. President Truman apparently had no doubts, orqualms, about whether to drop atomic bombs on Japan, relying almost exclu-sively on the advice of a committee headed by Secretary of Defense HaroldStimson, which recommended using the weapons against urban civilian popula-tions without warning. Truman seemed to believe the Bomb would not onlydestroy the enemy, but bring peace and deter future wars.

Although the Japanese had months before offered to surrender (wanting onlyto keep the emperor, in fact retained in the end), Truman and Stimson arguedthat atomic warfare had to be unleashed in order to avoid U.S. invasion of Japanand save perhaps a million American lives. While Truman viewed the bombingsas necessary to punish and pacify a “cruel and uncivilized nation of beasts”, somearmed forces leaders had grave misgivings. For example, Admiral William D.Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in late 1945:

The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of nomaterial assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were almostdefeated and ready to surrender. In being the first to use it, we adopted anethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.3

It was Truman, moreover, who once again gave thought to using atomic weaponsto break the military impasse in Korea after 1950.4

For the U.S., atomic politics would shape its larger postwar trajectory—questfor superpower domination, development of a global military presence, formationof an elite scientific-defense stratum, even source of national identity. At the sametime, the reality of a super weapon meant that consideration of wartime ethics,international law, and “rules of engagement” were largely moot insofar as theBomb was by definition an instrument of barbarism, eliminating any separationbetween combatants and noncombatants, military and civilian targets. As physicistEnrico Fermi observed: “Necessarily any such weapon goes far beyond anymilitary objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophe [and]becomes a weapon which in practical effect is about one of genocide.”5 Indeedthe power of atomic weaponry was such that it would not actually have to be

The Curse of Bomb Power 103

used to be effective; its very presence, its implicit threat, would suffice to intimidateopponents.

As Gary Wills points out, moreover, the Bomb quickly emerged as a crucialjustification for (and linchpin of) a rapidly-swelling national-security state. Atomicpolitics required not only a regime of secrecy but strong, decisive executivepower—the famous “imperial presidency”—reliant on massive intelligence opera-tions, enhanced surveillance, covert actions, and broadened capacity of thePresident to intervene in foreign affairs.6 U.S. possession of the Bomb signifiedfrom the outset a drive toward nuclear supremacy or even (never-achieved)exclusivity. It also led to a certain normalization of atomic politics within evolutionof an expanding warfare state.

With onset of the Cold War, the U.S. rushed to further develop its nuclearcapability, laying out a strategic doctrine tied to a first-strike option and, ulti-mately, diversification of its arsenal.7 In the early 1950s the Pentagon shifted to aperpetual ready-alert status, prepared to rain more than 800 Hiroshima-sizebombs on the Soviet Union, embellishing its power to destroy human civilizationseveral times over. Supposedly “unthinkable”, the idea of nuclear confrontationwas in fact brought into the “normal” deliberations of American military plan-ners. This ideology became more deeply embedded when, in March 1954, theU.S. detonated a hydrogen bomb, “Bravo”, with a force of 15 megatons—theexplosive power of 1,200 Hiroshimas—elevating the nuclear epoch to new levelsof fright and horror, further obliterating any limits to modern warfare. Arma-geddon-style policies embraced by Washington and followed by Soviet leadersthroughout the Cold War remained in force across many decades, backed byincreasingly massive and flexibly-deployed nuclear arsenals.8 There is evidencethat the U.S. either threatened or seriously considered use of nuclear weaponsseveral times in the postwar years—most notably to break the Korean stalemateand during the Cuban missile crisis.

Surely no historical episode more clearly reveals the centrality of atomicpolitics to the American power structure than the near global catastrophe result-ing from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This was a moment in history whenPresident John F. Kennedy was ready to risk mutual nuclear annihilation in orderto impose his will on the Soviet Union (and Cuba). JFK insisted that Sovietleader Nikita Khrushchev withdraw (defensive) missiles deployed to Cuba—orface maximum U.S. military response.9 Here it is worth remembering thatJFK had entered the White House as the ultimate Cold Warrior, intent ondefeating global Communist “aggression” centered in the USSR and spreadingits tentacles into Asia and Latin America. (In the 1960 presidential debatesKennedy actually held a position to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign-policyissues.) JFK presided over a massive arms buildup, reaffirmed U.S. first-strikeoption, and deployed missile systems to Europe, Turkey, and Asia. As mentionedearlier, he orchestrated the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in May 1961, set up aneconomic embargo of Cuba in February 1962, carried out assassination plots


against Fidel Castro, and maintained fierce diplomatic hostility toward theHavana regime.

While JFK was clearly prepared to go to the nuclear brink, refusing anynegotiated compromise, it was only Khrushchev’s willingness to back down—toremove the missiles with virtually no concessions from Washington—that keptthe world from unprecedented nuclear disaster. Indeed the crisis itself could havebeen averted had JFK chosen to enter negotiations with the Cubans, who wereready to eliminate the missiles in exchange for American promise to respectCuban national sovereignty.10 JFK, wanting to be “tough on Communism”,apparently decided he would rather risk nuclear war than offer such basic (andlawful) assurances. Referring to Kennedy’s actual desire for an epic standoff withthe Soviets, Bruce Miroff writes: “With a grossly exaggerated scenario of Russiantriumph and American decay seemingly running through his mind, he thus pre-pared to risk everything.”11 JFK’s chosen political modality was one of threats,ultimatums, and demands. In the end, only Khrushchev’s last-minute retreat inthe face of an American naval blockade allowed for a peaceful resolution. Ken-nedy, of course, emerged from this entirely manufactured crisis triumphant, aman of heroic and virtuous conviction.

In 1968 most nations of the world signed the Nuclear Non-ProliferationTreaty (NPT), which set limits to the modernization of existing arsenals, placedcurbs on proliferation, and urged a global move toward disarmament. This his-toric agreement did little to stop the U.S. from augmenting and improving itswarhead stockpile, which rose from 4,500 to nearly 10,000 within a singledecade—an arsenal regularly modernized since. Far from renouncing nuclearwarfare as unimaginable, as inherently barbaric, the U.S. (under all postwar pre-sidents) has been dedicated to absolute strategic domination in this realm, onereason Washington remains today increasingly rejectionist in its attitude towardantiballistic and related arms treaties. Since the late 1940s the U.S. has foughtstrenuously against outlawing nuclear weapons, even as their inevitable targetingof civilian populations with mass terror renders them both effectively illegal andimmoral. Yet, as of early 2015, the U.S. had manufactured and deployed morenuclear warheads than all other nations combined, still possessing at least 7,300bombs and missiles.12

Meanwhile, nuclear proliferation continues and the threat of mass annihilationrefuses to vanish. The current American nuclear posture has, amidst considerableself-righteous posturing about the evils of WMD, coincided with a dramaticescalation of the worldwide nuclear danger.13 The U.S. and Russia togetherpossess several thousand atomic weapons, the vast majority directed at eachother. (A bizarre state of affairs: despite the many alarms heard in the mediaabout rogue states, terrorists, and the famous “axis of evil”, the U.S. in 2015still had more than 90 percent of its warheads targeted on Russia—another absurdlegacy of the Cold War.) While hysterically opposed to the spread of WMD tocountries designated as enemies—Cuba, North Korea, Iran—the second Bush


administration, following earlier precedents, contributed mightily to nuclearproliferation, rendering official pronouncements worthless.

The U.S. transgressed the spirit if not the letter of the NPT by holding to afirst-strike strategy, refusing genuine moves toward nuclear disarmament, buildinga strong missile-defense system, modernizing its arsenal, giving assistance to nuclearprograms of other nations such as India, and providing cover for Israel’s outlawweaponry. Even the much-celebrated 2002 Moscow Treaty, signed by PresidentBush and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is riddled with serious flaws and was inany event soon violated by the U.S. Designed to control production and deploymentof nuclear weapons by the two powers (and only those powers), the Treaty washeralded as a bold move toward disarmament. But that promise turned illusory: as partof the agreement Washington ended up scrapping all binding arrangements forstrict limits and regular inspections in favor of one that is largely unilateral,voluntary, devoid of monitoring provisions. All categories of warheads and deliv-ery systems are left essentially uncontrolled—precisely what Bush (and thenObama) preferred. Against this backdrop it was easy for the U.S. to simply junkthe important 1972 ABM treaty setting limits to further nuclear development.

The large U.S. nuclear stockpile has been continuously modernized, withextensive funding for new programs granted on a yearly basis. At the same time,new global targets have been identified, missile defense has been refined andexpanded, and first-strike options have been renewed. Further, under Bush andObama the U.S. has moved to better integrate nuclear weaponry into a broaderstrategic framework, defined by greater flexibility that smaller, presumably more“usable” nukes would provide in facing a new era of scattered and asymmetricalcounter-insurgency warfare. Such flexibility lies at the heart of an increasingly far-flung military strategy, oriented primarily toward the Middle East and Asia. Inrecent years the U.S. has embraced a more fluid, balanced military outlookcombining strategic and tactical, fixed and mobile, long-distance and battlefield,offensive and defensive priorities within a paradigm of nuclear elasticity—allgeared to defense of Empire under altered conditions.

This enhanced “flexibility” of American nuclear doctrine has made itself visiblein two wars since 9/11—in Afghanistan and Iraq—where “contingencies” fornuclear attack were openly discussed at the Pentagon and even mentioned obli-quely by politicians and the media, bringing the threshold of usage to its lowestpoint since the Cuban missile crisis. In these (and probably other) combat situa-tions, the U.S. might confront its own nightmare scenarios in which conventionalweaponry has perhaps exhausted its limits. Iraq, of course, was said to possesshuge stores of WMD, allegedly behind the “preemptive” U.S. military attack.Tactical bunker-buster nukes (B6–11 earth-penetrating bombs with yields of upto 300 kilotons) are viewed by military planners as a quick way out of a difficultquagmire. This could apply to fighting the Taliban in the mountains and caves ofAfghanistan, or fighting Middle Eastern insurgents in difficult urban warfare—orindeed efforts to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities hidden deeply underground.


Despite its holy crusade against WMD, the U.S. has in fact encouraged—directly and indirectly—the spread of nuclear arsenals. While fiercely opposed tostates like Iran that might want their own nuclear deterrence, the U.S. has overthe years obstructed attempts within the U.N. to create durable arms-controlagreements, or nuclear-free zones, binding on all nations. Washington stillreserves for itself the right to manufacture, deploy, and use nuclear weapons inclear violation of NPT protocols. It also accepts large WMD programs for Israel,Pakistan, and India, all outside the NPT framework at the very time Iran (anNPT member) is being targeted with economic sanctions and military threats forhaving nuclear-weapons potential. A WMD outlaw of the first order, Israel cur-rently possesses between 100 and 400 warheads, dismisses the NPT as a nuisance,and rejects any inspections regimen—yet has never been threatened or sanctionedconcerning weapons it already possesses.14 Israel has repeatedly opposed U.N.resolutions (the very resolutions accepted by Iran) calling for a Middle Eastnuclear-free zone. As noted above, the U.S. has dutifully (and illegally) furnishedpolitical and diplomatic cover for the Israelis.

As for Pakistan, Washington rewarded the Musharraf regime in 2002 with athree-billion dollar aid package for its ostensible assistance in the War on Ter-rorism, indirectly giving the Pakistanis a green light to expand their nuclearcapacity at a time when the Bush administration was issuing dire warnings to Iranand North Korea about their nuclear ambitions. The fact that Pakistan, along withIsrael and India, has been able to avoid inspections held by the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—the very inspections demanded of North Koreaand Iran—reveals the blatant hypocrisy and double standards involved in globalatomic politics, another recipe for proliferation. A crucial issue surfaces here: ifsuch nations as Israel, Pakistan, and India, following claims of the major nuclearpowers, can insist that WMD are needed for their military security, how canthese privileged nations credibly deny the very same motive or need to other,even weaker states? Mohamed El Baradei, former IAEA director, once askedpointedly why it is “morally reprehensible for some countries to pursueweapons of mass destruction yet [is] morally acceptable for others to rely onthem for security while continuing to refine their capacities and postulateplans for their use.”15

After calling WMD “the greatest threat to humanity”, President Bush in 2006moved to establish a nuclear “strategic partnership” with India, an NPT outlaw.The U.S. and India agreed to a long-term program of space and nuclear coop-eration, in which Washington would sell advanced technology to India toenhance its status as a “democratic” and “peaceful” power in Asia—in realitymeaning a counterweight to Chinese influence. According to the NPT, nocountry should be allowed to assist India’s illegitimate nuclear program—

embraced by the U.S. as early as 1974—but here as elsewhere the U.S. simplybent the rules to allow for its exceptionalism. Opening up lucrative U.S. nuclearbusiness with this deal, the Bush administration simply gave India the green light


to produce as many warheads as it chooses, ignoring long-simmering tensionsbetween India and Pakistan over Kashmir and other incendiary issues.

In October 2008 Congress approved the deal, rewarding a nation that flauntsthe NPT and maintains eight nuclear plants outside international scrutiny. Notsurprisingly, this rogue arrangement met with widespread outrage and only servedto further encourage WMD proliferation in countries aspiring to nuclear status.(As of 2010 there were at least 30 states with the potential for advanced nucleartechnology in coming years.) Moreover, the U.S. audaciously completed this dealat the very moment it (along with Israel) was threatening Iran, an NPT memberwithin its right to develop non-military forms of nuclear energy. Insofar as U.S.leaders seem bound to enforce what has been called a “nuclear apartheid regime”,dominated by the U.S. and a few allies, the existing NPT system would appear tobe largely bankrupt.16

The unfortunate truth is that U.S. policy has had little to do with curbingpossession or spread of WMD—or indeed with any genuine arms-controlagreements—and everything to do with bolstering national economic and geo-political interests. Washington seeks maximum freedom for itself and allies toexpand and modernize their own nuclear arsenals while self-righteously attackingthe programs, real or imagined, legal or illegal, of others. One aspect of thisduplicity is the dangerous National Missile Defense (NMD) project, a spinofffrom Reagan’s 1980s futile Star Wars scheme. NMD, integral to the eastwardpush of NATO since the early 1990s, is based on surrounding Russia (and to alesser extent Iran) with “defensive” missile systems that the targeted nationsrightly view as part of an offensive strategy meant to isolate and weaken thempolitically and militarily. At the same time, NMD is linked to future U.S. weap-onization of space.17 As new modes of warfare demand sophisticated globaltechnology, surveillance, and logistical flexibility—along with upgraded nuclearpotential—the American space program might well emerge as a cornerstone offuture Pentagon strategy. The space dimension furnishes U.S. military powerwith a high-quality “networked environment” integrated through satellites,military platforms, laser technology, and infrared systems like those already foundvaluable in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and across the Middle East.

The nuclear supremacy achieved at the end of World War II has been anunquestionably defining factor in postwar U.S. foreign and military policy, givingWashington a special power and legitimacy grounded in remarkable scientific-technological progress. A taken-for-granted instrument of freedom and democ-racy, the U.S. can feel the justified historical agent of potentially cataclysmicviolence.18 Despite posturing about the mortal threat of WMD proliferation,therefore, Washington has never wavered in its God-given right to develop,modernize, stockpile, and deploy atomic weapons. U.S. leaders have shown littlewillingness to entertain policies, agreements, or laws that might compromise that“right” at a time when the U.S. continues to resist any constraints on its globalpower and military force.


A “Godlike Power”

Throughout the postwar era the U.S. has stood as the biggest champion ofWMD in the world—producing, stockpiling, deploying, indeed using more of thisweaponry than all other nations combined. It remains the only state to embracenuclear arsenals as a linchpin of its military strategy, a vital element of its goal ofinternational supremacy. In this context, apocalyptic notions of mass destructionhave entered the elite political culture, representing a kind of national ideologyconsistent with American exceptionalism.

As Robert J. Lifton observes, since the Manhattan Project U.S. leaders set outto create a “godlike nuclear capacity” that would empower them to shape his-tory.19 Despite a recurrent American fixation on “realism” in foreign affairs, thePentagon has embellished spectacles of modern warfare involving unfathomablelevels of violence and destruction—spectacles going back to the 1945 atomicbombings of Japan. From that juncture Washington viewed the atomic era as agreat revolution in the history of warfare, unleashing fantasies and possibilitiesthat, it was hoped, could never be matched by any other nation. As an ideology,therefore, nuclearism came to affirm a mode of military conduct involving whatLifton calls a “shared psychological energy pressing toward cruelty and killing.”20

From the moment the first bomb was detonated at Almagordo, nuclear weaponrywas understood by its architects to be nothing short of “God’s power unleashed”—a sentiment captured in Roland Joffe’s excellent 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy.Many believed (though some later recanted) the mission of Enola Gay to oblit-erate Hiroshima fit God’s preference, following a deity-sanctioned ManifestDestiny.

From the early postwar years, as Lifton emphasizes, nuclear ideology under-pinned American superpower ambitions, serving as a basis of self-definition, a“currency of power”.21 This shift corresponded to an increasingly militarizedsociety endemic to the warfare state, shaped by what C. Wright Mills referred toas the “higher immorality” of the leadership stratum. For Mills, “the higherimmorality is a systemic feature of the American elite, its general acceptance anessential feature of the mass society.”22 To the extent that nuclear ideology meantembracing the prospects of mass destruction—that is, indiscriminate violenceagainst civilian populations and related targets—the political culture was destinedto veer toward ethical bankruptcy. In this context, as Mills noted, moral discoursearound such familiar virtues as peace, democracy, and progress was emptied ofsubstance, corroded by the hulking presence of the warfare state. Referring at leastin part to the debilitating impact of atomic politics, Mills wrote: “America …

appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power as, in the name ofrealism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon worldreality.”23

John Dower has characterized birth of the nuclear age in terms of “Hiroshimaas Code”—an awesome spectacle of warfare in the service of American


superiority, goodness, and exceptionalism.24 The Bomb obviously meant thatmillions of innocent, defenseless civilians would be targeted—a form of barbarism—

yet the enormous power of this super weapon would ultimately transcend allmoral concerns. Put differently, unlimited wanton military attacks on non-combatants, ordinarily prohibited within the rules of war, would now be bothtolerable and in some manner glorified, consistent with President Truman’sresponse in 1945. Whether nuclear weapons would actually be used, their veryavailability helped forge a new military doctrine that U.S. leaders (unique amongnations) seemed perfectly happy to embrace. It is hardly surprising, therefore, tofind Washington having repeatedly blocked U.N. efforts to declare these weaponsillegitimate, illegal.

The postwar evolution of atomic politics, above all for the U.S., allowed forcertain normalization of nuclearism—an ideology that made its peace with theprospects of mass destruction, or total war. Apocalyptic violence, when employedfor noble ends (defeating Communism, fighting terrorism, spreading democracy),was to be valued, integral to what Dower calls “idealistic annihilation” that wasalready widespread during World War II.25 Dower writes: “… the war that cul-minated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also recognized as the onset of an epoch inwhich slaughter from the air became routine.”26 It is worth noting here that theU.S. carried out aerial terrorism throughout the postwar years (in Korea, Indo-china, Iraq) without ever resorting to nuclear weapons. What Hiroshima andNagasaki legitimated did not have to be concretely replicated in order to bringapocalyptic violence to the world.

U.S. aerial warfare against the Japanese, including saturation bombings ofTokyo and dozens of other cities as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, raisesanother dimension of such military combat: it can easily involve a form ofexterminism that targets hated racial groups, above all nonwhite populations.Dower looks closely at U.S. efforts to completely destroy Japan—a “barbarismfrom the skies” adhering to no limits or restraints which, in the end, victimizedmostly civilians. The racism was so extreme that distinctions between combatantsand noncombatants, leaders and ordinary civilians, had largely vanished; the entirecountry, inhabited by primitive and evil “Japs”, was open terrain for mass killing.American hatred of the Japanese had indeed reached near-genocidal propor-tions.27 Given such racial animosity, the decision to use the Bomb in 1945 mostlikely came with little if any guilt or ambivalence. Much the same would be trueof later aerial terrorism waged by the U.S. in Korea, Indochina, and Iraq.

At the same time, the new weapons of mass destruction would be associatedwith the virtues of modernity, with industrial and technological progress that, inturn, would be aligned with American exceptionalism. Doomsday warfare wouldbe the first, and most awesome, manifestation of technowar. In the years after1945 the U.S. would energetically produce new cycles of nuclear weapons as itprepared for literally hundreds more Hiroshimas, driven by a keen sense ofnational pride; some combination of Yellow and Red perils would have to be


fought, after all. The new era of military combat would be overwhelminglytechnological, remote, impersonal, and of course far less risky for the attacker,hugely convenient for blocking out the immense criminality involved. The victimsin this scenario were nowhere to be seen.

As World War II gave rise to super weapons and apocalyptic thinking, it alsogenerated a new, enlarged stratum of technological-military elites that wouldchampion the Bomb, its culture, and the ideology of nuclearism. The advent oftechnowar brought a historic convergence of science, technology, industry, gov-ernment, and the military within the warfare-state framework. High-level tech-nology permitted a more full-blown military strategy, a battlefield without limits,where international law would be regarded as something of a nuisance. Oncenuclear weapons had been used, the concept of total war would follow quicklyand more seamlessly—as it did throughout postwar U.S. global behavior.

The mostly-forgotten Korean War reveals this trajectory in stark relief: threeyears of U.S. warfare on the peninsula were carried out with few limits orconstraints—total war geared to annihilation of the enemy, infused with theharshest racism, the arrogance of technowar, and a fanatical drive to defeatCommunism. Douglas MacArthur and other military leader in the field wereprepared to destroy nearly every civilian target in Korea, hoping to break a des-perate stalemate. WMD in the form of atomic bombs was seriously considered,and WMD in the form of both chemical and biological warfare was indeed used,though for the most part not effectively. 28

As Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman note:

The objective was not territory; it was to wear down, exhaust, and ifnecessary annihilate the enemy. It was a strategy carried over from WorldWar II, with antecedents in the education and mindset of U.S. officers datingfrom the Civil War.29

With frustration mounting from 1951 to 1953, the U.S. quickly embraced ahigh-tech war of attrition with little concern for rules of engagement. In 1952American pilots systematically bombed civilian populations, agriculture, hydro-electric plants, irrigation dams, and every conceivable infrastructural target—actions judged as war crimes by the Geneva Protocols. At this point, according toEndicott and Hagerman: “Moral qualms about using biological or atomic weap-ons had been brushed aside by top leaders, and biological warfare might dodgethe political bullet of adverse public and world opinion if it were kept secretenough … ”30 U.S. pilots had already relied extensively on napalm, incendiarydevices, and fragmentation bombs, against both civilian and military targets. InDecember 1952 the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported Truman’s readiness to useatomic weapons in Korea, against both Korean and Chinese forces, a prospectnarrowly avoided by late movement toward cease-fire. The U.S. did in fact resortto biological weapons, though briefly and without much success, believing (as


Endicott and Hagerman write) that: “the spread of debilitating or deadly diseasescould reasonably be expected to create panic among the masses of Chinese andNorth Koreans”31 All this was possible at a time when American political andmilitary leaders had embraced a strategy of total war already inspired by events atthe end of World War II.

This same mentality, or ideology, would infuse U.S. military conduct duringthe Vietnam War: mass killing would be considered normal, and atrocities rou-tine, owing to the achievements of technowar.32 The ethos of an unlimited, andmerciless, war of attrition inherited from the Good War and Korea would beenthusiastically adopted by the new stratum of liberal, enlightened war plannersin Washington. In such personae as Robert McNamara and Henry Kissingercould be seen the merger of scientific principles, technological innovation, man-agerial expertise, and military ambitions the ultimate expression of rationalizedwarfare. A great virtue of technowar, whether in the case of WMD or othersystems, was its facile sidestepping of moral concerns; the world revolved aroundnew manifestations of power and technology that could decisively shape history.In Vietnam, as is well known, the common use of saturation bombing, search-and-destroy missions, napalm, chemical agents, anti-personnel bombs, and torturewas motivated by systematic “idealistic annihilation”. In more than a decade ofmilitary aggression the U.S. dropped the equivalent of 700 atomic bombs onVietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—a source of massive death and destruction by anyrational measure. As William Gibson notes, the result here—again influenced bythe modalities of World War II—amounted to a highly-refined production modeof warfare.33

Beyond the culture of militarism as such, the postwar years witnessed thegrowth of a uniquely American form of nuclearism—a belief in total war thatcame out of the Manhattan Project. At the elite level, this belief is saturated witha worship of WMD, of what WMD represents and can achieve in advancing theinterests of imperial power. In this context the emergence of what Joel Kovelcalls “nuclear state terrorism” has become a normalized feature of Americanpolitical life, an instrument that requires no actual usage to exert its devastatingeffects.34 The very presence of a massive, constantly-modernized nuclear arsenal isenough to empower those at the summits of power. As the ultimate expression oftechnowar, moreover, this weaponry takes on a certain self-perpetuating logicwithin the matrix of industrial and technological progress.

From the start of the Manhattan Project, American nuclear ambitions took onthe character of apocalyptic violence combined with Godlike power—the mostawesome expression of modernity. Atomic politics still possesses that ideologicaldefinition, with all its messianic vision. Several decades ago Herbert Marcusetheorized the historical linkage of technology, domination, and violence, inwhich the warfare state and mass killing had become entirely “rational” withinthe prevailing ideology.35 Technological rationality, in war as elsewhere, wasnow the standard measure of thought and behavior, its own “closed universe of


discourse”. More recently, Chris Hedges set forth the same argument, thoughmore bluntly: “The employment of organized violence means one must, in fact,abandon fixed and established values.”36 Hedges goes further, referring specificallyto American nuclear policy:

Washington wants “more options” with which to confront contingencies“immediate, potential, and unexpected”, for smaller but more effectivemega-tonnages to be deployed. This flirtation with weapons of massdestruction is a flirtation with our own obliteration, an embrace again ofThanatos.37

This embrace of mass extermination by means of apocalyptic warfare has emergedas one of the most enduring legacies of World War II.

This legacy has been not only destructive in new and more horrific ways butself-destructive within the framework of crude national interests. To this point,Henry Giroux writes:

Pearl Harbor enabled Americans to view themselves as the victims but thenassume the identity of perpetrators and become willfully blind to the UnitedStates’ own escalation of violence and injustice. Employing both a poisonousracism and a weapon of mad violence against the Japanese people, the U.S.government imagined Japan as the ultimate enemy, and then pursued tacticsthat blinded the American public to its own humanity and in doing so becameits own worst enemy by turning against its most cherished democraticprinciples.38

Giroux adds that, in the aftermath of Hiroshima:

embrace of the atomic age altered the emerging nature of state power, gaverise to new forms of militarism, put American lives at risk, created environ-mental hazards, produced an emergent surveillance state, furthered the poli-tics of state secrecy, and put into play a series of deadly diplomatic crises,reinforced by the logic of brinkmanship and a belief in the totality of war.39

There is currently no sign that such frightening trends are likely to be reversed.

The Nuclear-Industrial Complex

The rise of a military-industrial system during World War II and in the late 1940seventually took diverse forms: permanent war economy, national security-state,proliferation of intelligence agencies, global expansion of military bases, readinessfor armed interventions, incipient militarization of American society. Yet anothercomponent was a nuclear institutional establishment made up of scientific-military


elites who would be in a position to strongly influence U.S. international beha-vior. Over time this establishment took on bureaucratic momentum of its own,part of the ongoing process of technological rationalization. The new “Godlikepower” would find its structural and material dynamism within this complex offorces.

Atomic politics has in fact nurtured the largest and most elaborate and well-funded academic-military network ever assembled—a network that, 70 years afterits birth, retains a pervasive impact on American society. The Bomb created bythe Manhattan Project was understood among scientific and military elites as agreat triumph of modern technology, a breakthrough in human knowledge des-tined to change the world forever. By 1945 the Project had given rise to asprawling community of scientists and various technical experts located at 30research and production sites in the U.S., Canada, and Britain, along with three“secret cities” (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford) where the nuclear complexand its supporting culture has flourished. No fewer than 30,000 military and non-military people were employed at the Project, which provided strong momentumtoward full-blown technowar. When the Atomic Energy Commision (AEC) wasformed in 1946 the U.S. nuclear establishment was already well along a path tobecoming a fixture of American life.40

Mobilizing expertise from government, military, corporations, and academia,the nuclear establishment would contribute toward a more concentrated powerstructure, including the imperial presidency with complete authority over thenuclear arsenal. Secrecy in defense of atomic politics, along with disenfranchise-ment of Congress, meant that material and ideological supports for the arsenalwould be easy to maintain; this was above all a bipartisan mission. Of course theCold War guaranteed such supports, as did inducements of military Key-nesianism. After World War II the nuclear complex, much like the warfare stateas such, achieved special privilege within American society, beyond the reaches ofpublic debate. A steady flow of resources into the arsenal and its infrastructurewas virtually automatic. The growth of U.S. military power was fueled bynuclear ambitions that were largely insulated from the democratic process. Theemergent new “power imaginary” followed a definite authoritarian trajectory.From the Manhattan Project forward the Bomb would forever transform U.S.history, politics, and culture, not to mention foreign policy.

The Pentagon system, bolstered by its international deployments and “obliga-tions”, was driven first by the ethos of permanent war and, second, by pursuit ofnuclear superiority. It should be noted that during the postwar years Washingtoninitiated virtually every new escalation of the nuclear arms race: the hydrogenbomb, new delivery systems, multiple warheads, submarine-based nukes, missile-defense networks. Atomic supremacy gave the U.S. strategic cover for its manyarmed interventions, its capacity to incinerate any target within minutes alwayspresent. An expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenal—the U.S. had accumu-lated roughly 10,000 warheads by the early 1960s—furnished ongoing sources of


new investment, R & D, technowar development, and corporate profits. Thislogic was strengthened once the Soviets and then the Chinese were able to pro-duce their own atomic weaponry. The presumed Soviet threat especially helpeddrive U.S. nuclear ambitions well into the 1980s.

As atomic politics generated something of a new mystique of power, whatmight be called the American weapons oligarchy became firmly institutionalized,a fixture of the federal government. Here Lifton refers to a postwar weapons-centered definition of national identity, of American power.41 The scientific-military elite had sufficient resources and credibility to conduct R&D on superweapons with little regard for expense, risk, or legality—an issue that came to thefore with introduction of the NPT in 1968. The intellectual culture at the Pen-tagon was one of incessant weapons refinement and modernization, that was socrucial to sustaining U.S. global supremacy.

Thanks to massive federal investment, nuclear development has revolved aroundthree major laboratories: Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico and Livermore inCalifornia. R&D is overseen by the Pentagon, Department of Energy (DOE),and the University of California, Berkeley, though work is actually spread amongother centers across the country. Thousands of scientists, technicians, and man-agers are given exalted scholarly status, generous salaries, and a patriotic niche inthe social order, the basis of an elite community that Helen Caldicott appro-priately labels a “scientific bomb cult”.42 In a setting where design and produc-tion of nuclear weapons capable of killing hundreds of millions of people isviewed with great enthusiasm, attached to a mixture of aesthetic beauty, scientificcreation, and political obligation, even slight expressions of dissent are treated aspuzzling, reprehensible. This is a milieu, after all, in which prospects of untoldnumbers of civilian deaths is shrouded in esoteric techno-strategic discourse andgame-theoretical models championed at elite American universities.

With the steady growth of nuclear-related R&D over the postwar decades, thethree main labs entered into fierce competition over the design and manufactureof new weapons cycles, though obviously aware of NPT stipulations requiringthe nuclear powers to retrench and, ultimately, disarm. Teams of military, cor-porate, and academic elites labor virtually non-stop with their supercomputers todesign new bombs and missiles like the “reliable replacement warheads” (RRWs)approved by Congress in 2005. In their dedication to U.S. nuclear supremacy,these teams ridicule even the most vague nods toward arms control: anyone whothinks about deferring to NPT statutes calling for reductions is dismissed as anunpatriotic “crazy”, surely no one to be taken seriously. International law is forutopian dreamers.43 Weapons labs received a generous contract in 2007 todevelop a new series of hydrogen bombs, projected to cost tens of billions ofdollars—integral to the RRW project.44 The Pentagon has introduced a sophis-ticated computer modeling system allowing it to sidestep the nuclear testingmoratorium established in 1992. Atomic politics has flourished independent ofwhat party occupied the White House, regardless of international conditions. The


eclipse of Soviet power in the early 1990s, for example, did not produce anydecline of U.S. nuclear vigilance.

In recent years both the Bush and Obama administrations embarked on acourse to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while threatening Iran over its(so far peaceful) nuclear program. Obama, of course, entered the presidency witha promise to reverse the global arms race, which should have meant significantcutbacks in weaponry. Obama’s oft-praised Berlin speech of June 2013 called fora “world without nuclear weapons”, starting with cuts in deployed strategicwarheads below Cold War levels, building on the bilateral START treaty withRussia which stipulated U.S. reduction of its battlefield warhead total from 5,000to 1,550 before 2020. (The targets set in this treaty were essentially voluntary, thusrather problematic.) Obama’s actual military expansion, however, has turned suchprojections into mockery while further eroding what is left of NPT credibility. Itis worth repeating here that Article VI of the NPT requires all member states(especially nuclear-weapons states) to pursue negotiations toward arms reductionsand, eventually, full nuclear disarmament.

While American politicians and the media ceaselessly warn about the dangersof nuclear proliferation, the warfare state remains busy with sophisticated newuranium-enrichment projects at sites in New Mexico, California, Tennessee,Missouri, Nevada, and South Carolina. Touchstone of the weapons oligarchy is“modernization”. Streamlined warheads are being designed and re-designed atstate-of-the-art Y-12 atomic locations in New Mexico and Tennessee, consistentwith plans laid out in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. Mostly unknown to theAmerican public, these exorbitant programs are largely insulated from fiscal pres-sures, political inquiry, and treaty obligations. Modernization includes fresh cyclesof “replacement bombs” like the B61–12 warheads, costing taxpayers roughly$25 million per bomb in the midst of supposed fiscal austerity. At Y-12 andrelated facilities a new generation of “life-extension” nukes is being researchedand produced, upgraded from earlier designs. Such refinements allow the U.S. tomake inflated claims of reducing warhead totals while overall deployments losevery little, if anything, in overall firepower. Meanwhile, delivery systems (planes,ships, submarines, artillery missiles) are being steadily improved, their apparentneed legitimated by those WMD “threats” from inscrutable rogue nations likeIran and North Korea.

According to a December 2013 Congressional Budget Office report, the U.S.was on line to spend some $350 billion over a decade for ongoing nuclearmodernization—better research centers, labs, weapons, delivery systems, com-mand-and-control operations. At a time of federal cutbacks and frenetic clamor-ing for “small government”, this largesse already exceeds by $150 billion theamount initially earmarked and will surely increase further. (Federal outlays fornuclear weaponry could reach a staggering one trillion dollars by 2030.) In 2014Air Force General Robert Kohler, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, calledfor a “multi-decade effort to recapitalize our nuclear deterrent force and its


supporting infrastructure.” (Note that the world’s leading military power appearsto need “deterrence”, while countries like Iran—placed under constant eco-nomic, political, and military siege—can perfectly do well without it!) Nuclearspending is in fact a rather easy sell to Congress, academia, scientists, the media,and of course the military, even if this means drastic cuts in social programs.Conforming to NPT statutes is scarcely an issue for elites, as insatiable demands ofthe warfare state and corporate profiteers like Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, andNorthrop-Grumman easily take precedence.

In 2014 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimated that the U.S. still possessed4,650 deliverable nuclear warheads, including 2,120 deployed on ballistic missiles.At a time when President Obama has called for reducing the threat of nuclearweapons, it is precisely this lethal arsenal that is being rapidly upgraded—that is,rendered even more lethal, in violation of the NPT. Overseen by the NationalNuclear Security Administration, the U.S. atomic complex in 2014 consisted ofeight plants and laboratories across the country, employing 40,000 people with aknown budget reaching into the tens of billions of dollars yearly (dwarfing theoutlays of Russia and China, not to mention such nations as Iran). Federalupgrades have been planned for every site, as well as foreign bases where Amer-ican nukes are deployed. At the new National Security Campus near Kansas City,Missouri, work on refurbishing nuclear warheads built in the 1970s is movingfull-speed ahead, focused on improving the precision and firepower of weaponsboard 14 Ohio-class nuclear submarines. Meanwhile, the Obama administra-tion requested purchase of 12 new ballistic missile subs along with 400 new orrefurbished land-based missiles.

In recent years the U.S. nuclear complex has fixed its attention on the pluto-nium bomb-core production facility at Los Alamos, part of the Chemical andMetallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR), with costs (in 2014) already run-ning into tens of billions. The bomb-core project now advances a new cycle ofmodernized warheads, linchpin of Obama’s “surge” in nuclear development—soeven with a reduction in overall number of warheads the explosive potential willbe greater than the older, larger, less mobile arsenals. This is again consistentwith strategic objectives laid out in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review: “The U.S.will modernize the nuclear weapons infrastructure, sustain the science, tech-nology, and engineering base, invest in human capital, and ensure senior lea-dership focus.”45 Pentagon obsession with global nuclear supremacy todayprobably goes beyond what it was at the height of the Cold War, with its per-petual modernizing agenda, continued first-use doctrine, wide internationaldeployments, and multiple “contingency” plans for using nukes against selectedtargets.

The Obama promise of a “world without nukes”, uttered in Berlin, has gottenfully obscured in Europe: dictated by U.S. and NATO geopolitical priorities, thecontinent now hosts perhaps the biggest concentration of nuclear weaponry onearth. Hundreds of warheads are dispersed, operational within the U.S./NATO


doctrine of preemptive first-strike, meaning of course first-launch option. Inaddition to sizable “official” French and British arsenals, Washington hasdeployed nearly 500 B61 bombs (tactical warheads) in Germany, Belgium, Hol-land, Italy, and Turkey. Most of these “smaller” nukes (still 13 times more pow-erful than the Hiroshima bomb) are fixed on Russia and Iran. Incirlik, Turkeyalone is site of an estimated 90 such warheads. Any military attack on Iran wouldprobably involve some or all of these host nations. With the IAEA preoccupiedwith other matters, large-scale joint U.S.-European nuclear projects continueunimpeded, the aforementioned B61–12 warheads (refined “precision” bunker-busters) slated for European deployment in coming years, ready to face off againstthe supposedly aggressive Russian or Iranian menace.

The B61–12 warheads amount to what the Federation of American Scientistscalls “all-in-one nuclear bombs on steroids”—atomic weapons simultaneouslymore usable and more explosive. Germany, not technically a nuclear state, hasbeen the locale for dozens of these weapons, its super-fighters equipped to deliverhuge atomic payloads against Russia or Iran. The reality is that Germany today,despite its well-known anti-reactor stance, is among the most nuclearized ofcountries, with three atomic-friendly bases vital to NATO strike options, main-tained through illegal U.S.-German collaboration. This clear violation of theNPT has not kept either the U.S. or Germany from threatening (and sanctioning)Iran over its legal nuclear program.

For decades the U.S. has shamelessly found ways to advance both nuclearmodernization and proliferation where it benefits long-held military agendas—the NATO deployments being one example. In 2006 Hans Blix, former chiefU.N. weapons inspector, authored a report titled “Weapons of Terror”, spon-sored by the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction.46 It called on majorpowers to take international laws and treaties, including the NPT, more seriously,pointedly urging the U.S. and its allies to refrain from blocking arms control,disarmament, and moves to curtail proliferation. It states: “All parties [to theNPT] should implement the decision on principles and objectives for non-proliferation and disarmament [embraced in] the resolution of the Middle East asa zone free of nuclear and all other weapons of mass destruction.” The latter ideahad been proposed by Egypt, Iran, and a few other states but was quickly dashedby the U.S. and Israel—two nations already deploying a combined severalhundred warheads in the region.

In his book laying out WMD Commission recommendations, Why Disarma-ment Matters (2008), Blix envisioned ultimate catastrophe in a global setting wherethe leading nuclear states randomly and flagrantly violate the NPT statutes.47

Here a pressing question resurfaces: how can proliferation be reversed whenatomic outlaws—U.S. in the lead—routinely privilege their own military ambi-tions over universal rules and norms? By 2008 efforts to convince Israel, India,and Pakistan (all non-NPT members) to submit to NPT protocols had beeneffectively abandoned, Blix adding: “Convincing states that do not need weapons


of mass destruction would be significantly easier if all U.N. members practicedgenuine respect for existing [U.N.] restraints on the threat and use of force.”48

The WMD Commission report further adds:

Any state contemplating replacement or modernization of its nuclear-weap-ons systems must consider such action in the light of all relevant treaty obli-gations and its duty to contribute to the nuclear disarmament process. As aminimum, it must refrain from developing nuclear weapons with newmilitary capabilities or for new missions.49

The report adds: “Every state that possesses nuclear weapons should make acommitment not to deploy any nuclear weapons, of any type, on foreign soil.”For many years, as indicated above, the U.S. has regarded itself as specially enti-tled to sidestep NPT statutes prohibiting both modernization and proliferation—consistent with the ideology of national exceptionalism and contempt for theprinciple of universality, a contempt that has deep origins in World War II and itsimmediate aftermath.

The Real Nuclear Threat

At the beginning of his book Blix poses what today might be the most urgent ofall questions: is the threat of nuclear holocaust greater now than at any point inthe past?50 His response, one dictated by the worsening global predicament—especially in the Middle East—is a reluctant but unambiguous “yes.” No doubtthe madness of the nuclear arms buildup continues at a time when prospects forarms control appear hopeless and NPT statutes are being torn to shreds by theleading nuclear states. When it comes to atomic politics, the world is currentlymoving backwards, not forward. As for the U.S., it retains a few thousand war-heads in several countries, seeks modernization of its arsenal, assists outlaw nationsin their weapons programs, provides several NATO states with sophisticatedwarheads, prepares for the militarization of space, and stands as an impediment toreversing the arms race. Meanwhile, American leaders routinely target Iran as apariah state bent on developing (and using) nuclear weapons, though evidence ofan actual Iranian threat has been lacking.

The risk of nuclear confrontation has been intensified by failure of the majordevelopers of such weapons to take the NPT seriously. In Washington, therhetoric of fighting proliferation is undermined by real policies and conduct des-tined to worsen the international atmosphere. Such establishment political figuresas the late McNamara, for example, have railed against U.S. nuclear strategy asillegal, immoral, dangerous, and indeed unnecessary.51 As they emphasize, it is astrategy riddled with hypocrisy and double standards, guaranteed to fuel globalinsecurity and conflict. American preoccupation with its own nuclear security canonly generate a pervasive sense of vulnerability, fear, and anger among others,


especially so long as the first-strike option remains part of Pentagon doctrine.Moreover, when the leading atomic superpower violates NPT protocols whiletargeting others that are exercising basic rights within that same treaty, the threatof catastrophe is only elevated, yet another element of the blowback dynamic.

Nuclear proliferation is the inevitable result of a one-sided, illegal, hypocriticalapproach embraced by the U.S. and such nations as India and Israel. The keyproblem is collapse of universality in a global milieu where the most powerfulnations routinely target and punish weaker nations concerned mainly with theirown deterrence priorities. A universal framework would bring all nuclearprograms under multinational control, requiring systematic inspections andmonitoring—precisely what has been fiercely opposed by the U.S. and Israel,both deeply attached to national exceptionalism.

The deep U.S.-Israeli hostility to Iran, manifest through ongoing military threats,in fact has a long history, having less to do with imminent WMD fears as suchand more to do with preserving a shared geopolitical hegemony in the Middle East.In 1953, as is well known, Washington engineered the overthrow of a democraticIranian government, paving the way toward nearly three decades of brutal tyrannyat the hands of the Shah, kept in power by U.S. economic and military support.After the Shah was driven from power, the U.S. instigated several years of warfare,conducted by its client Iraq against Iran, at the cost of nearly one million lives.Since the early 1980s, Washington has waged a systematic campaign of covertoperations, sabotage, military threats, and economic warfare (including recentsanctions) combined with efforts at diplomatic isolation—prior to more recent inter-national negotiations that would curb Iranian nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, theU.S. has invaded two neighboring countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) and set upmilitary bases across the region that have effectively encircled Iran. In this context,U.S.–Israeli targeting of Iran for its imputed WMD objectives is best understoodas a pretext for regime change, suggesting that the world faces what Gareth Portercalls a “manufactured crisis”.52 At no point in this protracted “crisis” has the issueof Israeli nuclear weapons ever been raised, much less confronted.

As of early 2015, there was no evidence that Iran was close to a nuclear-weapons program—or indeed that it had any interest in doing so. IAEA reports,based on continuous and extensive monitoring within Iran, have cited only“continuing enrichment programs” but nothing beyond the 20 percent level, farshort of the roughly 90-percent level essential to weapons development. TheIAEA has merely stated what should be obvious—that some Iranian sites “havethe capability” of being diverted toward a weapons program at some point inthe future.53 High-powered U.S surveillance and espionage operations, manyinside Iran, have revealed nothing beyond a civilian energy project. Further, noviable delivery system or command structure has been uncovered. Today NPT-member Iran is just one of perhaps 30 nations with equivalent high-level nuclearcapacity, but the only one targeted with sanctions, threats, cyber attacks, andassassination of nuclear scientists.


In November 2013 an interim agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear program inexchange for limited sanctions relief was orchestrated by the Obama administra-tion and backed by four other major nuclear states—prelude to the more elabo-rate (yet still provisional) agreement reached in April 2015. The process has beenmarred by the appearance that nothing less than nearly-total Iranian capitulationwas being demanded by the U.S. and Israel Lobby, ever-anxious to rachet upalready crippling economic sanctions that would mean scuttling the diplomaticprocess, thereby reviving prospects for military action. Although Iran has beengranted mild and temporary sanctions relief, its energy, banking, and trade sectorswere still hit hard by sanctions and fears that any diplomatic solution will fail.

One problem with nuclear diplomacy today, as during most of the postwaryears, is that it has been employed as an instrument of the global atomic powers,often working through the U.N. Security Council and the IAEA, as shown bythe fact that Iran has been consistently targeted while exercising its basic NPTrights. Neither the U.S. nor Israel, in fact, are prepared to accept Iranian entitle-ment to peaceful atomic development, Secretary of State John Kerry insisting that“There is no [Iranian] right to enrich uranium within the four corners of theNPT. And this document [2013 interim accords] does not do that.” Israeli PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu, denouncing any form of nuclear diplomacy astreacherous appeasement, repeatedly stated that anything short of full Iranianabandonment of its program is unthinkable—this from the militaristic leader of anation with an arsenal of perhaps 400 warheads and implacable animosity towardthe NPT, which it dismisses as “worthless”. Following the line of Netanyahu andthe Israel Lobby, Washington politicians in shamefully large numbers wantnothing less than complete Iranian submission, on the unproven claim that theregime is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.

The reality, however, is that Iran has consistently opened its enrichment facil-ities to IAEA inspections, a reasonable stance that Israel has always regarded as athreat to its own national sovereignty. Global nuclear diplomacy is riddled withsuch deceit and hypocrisy, with all compromise favoring (and expected to favor)the existing nuclear states against weaker, targeted “offenders”. Iranian and otherregional efforts to force the IAEA to apply identical nuclear rules and standards toIsrael have been repeatedly blocked, thanks to U.S. and European maneuveringwhile unimpeded access to Iranian research and military sites is a taken-for-grantednorm.

As for Israel, it is an open secret that it has long been an elite nuclear state, firstgiven life by French scientific and technical assistance and later sustained by U.S.and European diplomatic cover. For many years the U.S. has worked tirelessly toshield its client from ongoing international demands that Israel relinquish itsoutlaw status, join the NPT, and open its clandestine atomic sites to internationalmonitoring. The U.S. and Israel hypocritically reject for themselves the veryopenness, monitoring, and accountability they ritually demand of Iran underthreat of sanctions and war. While Israeli leaders hide behind the silly façade of


“nuclear ambiguity”, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has been more forth-coming, stating that “nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destructionhave no place in Iran’s defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religiousand ethical convictions.”54 While elite statements of this sort cannot generally betrusted, it is worth noting that no such affirmation has come from any Israeliofficial.

An Israel exceptionalism even more robust than the American variant—and thegrotesque double standards it perpetuates in the global arena—has for many yearsdecisively shaped Middle-Eastern (indeed world) politics, surely nowhere more sothan on nuclear issues. This is rendered possible by an increasingly formidabletriad of forces: the U.S., Israel, and the Israel Lobby based in Washington. Suchpreponderant (and largely unchallenged) influence on the course of internationalevents stems, in turn, from an enduring ideological legitimacy rooted in theWorld War II era—Nazi atrocities, the Holocaust, Zionist mobilization leading(in 1948) to formation of a Jewish state. The current strength of Israel is an out-growth of that transformative period. In some measure the world, and especiallythe Palestinians, has been asked to atone, again and again, for Nazi crimes thatwere committed against European Jews. This dynamic, however, has turned dis-astrous as Israel’s own monstrous crimes—occupation of a land and its peoples,stolen territory, military aggression, racist oppression—have extended across sev-eral terrible decades, with little political or legal accountability thanks to thecontinuing weight of double standards. The nuclear situation clearly fits this tragicpattern: while Israel has emerged as a major nuclear state, it fully resists obligationsthat derive from its status, including participation in organizations like the NPT,which it dismisses as a “waste of time”.

The great historical irony here is that, while Nazi horrors are widely under-stood to be a catalyst behind political Zionism and the Israeli takeover of Pales-tine, the government of Israel itself has taken on strong features of classicalfascism, including racism, colonialism, militarism, and international outlawry.Israeli power depends overwhelmingly on an ethnic and religious hegemony thatunderpins political unity and, by extension, supremacy over a colonized popula-tion, unique to the modern world. One problem with this development is thatNazism never gave contemporary Jewish settlers (many from such countries asRussia and the U.S.) the legal or political right to subjugate local inhabitantsfor purposes of establishing a “homeland” (a vastly different proposition thanexercising total state control over an area).

Resistance to Israeli colonialism is attacked locally as crude “terrorism” andmore broadly as anti-Semitism, ritually invoked to deflect criticism of Israelibehavior while justifying the aforementioned double standards. While recurrentIsraeli invasions of occupied Gaza, with their wanton destruction of homes, offi-ces, schools, hospitals, and refugee centers, do generate some international out-rage, little is done legally, politically, economically, or militarily to hold Tel Avivaccountable, or to force change. Steadfast U.S. financial, military, and diplomatic


support ensures that Israel will not have to pay any significant price for its bar-barism. It is worth pointing out here that these same policies and actions, if car-ried out by any other nation, would precipitate urgent calls for economicsanctions if not military intervention—probably nowhere more so than at thesummits of American power. In fact Israel has long held international laws, rules,and conventions (including the all-important NPT) in total contempt. As forIsrael’s ambitious nuclear program, Prime Minister Netanyahu and other leadershave repeatedly stated that no international body is relevant to their decision-making. This extends to the “right” of such agencies as the IAEA (which con-stantly monitors Iran) to investigate or oversee Israeli facilities—a process that isabsolutely crucial, here as elsewhere, to any serious WMD counter-proliferationefforts.

The Israeli nuclear weapons program at Dimona goes back to 1955, when thefirst reactors were set up (thanks to French technical assistance), regulated by theAtomic Energy Commission, leading eventually to production of at least 200warheads—enough to turn the entire Middle East into rubble several timesover.55 An open secret and subject of many books and documentaries, theDimona facility has always been closed to outsiders of any stripe, especially toIAEA inspection. One of the biggest jokes on the world scene is the Israeli pre-tense of non-nuclear status, referred to as “ambiguity” in the official propaganda,enabling Israeli leaders to make demands of other states they would never dreamof entertaining for themselves.

This tortured world of political mythology is vigorously upheld in the halls ofAmerican power as well, with scarcely a dissent. Politicians across the politicallandscape—all beholden to the well-funded and hyper-aggressive Israel lobby—sacredly follow every policy twist and turn emanating from Tel Aviv. Of coursethe U.S. has for many decades provided Israel unconditional backing for itsongoing transgressions and atrocities, Congress kept in line by virtue of the hugecontributions its members receive from the lobby, which includes such organi-zations as the American Enterprise Institute, the American Israel Public AffairsCommittee, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the American JewishCommittee, and the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy. These andmany other kindred groups support every Israeli move to supposedly fend offwaves of “extremists”, “anti-Semites”, and of course sundry “terrorists” and theirsympathizers. The U.S. government, media system, academia, think tanks, andlobbies all converge behind Israel’s “right to defend itself” against a plethora ofenemies—although Israel possesses unchallenged power in the region, reinforcedby its atomic monopoly.

At this historical juncture, any American public figure who even tepidly criti-cizes Israel—or its vast network of supporting organizations—is engaging in sui-cidal behavior. That is especially the case for politicians, who must face theinevitable fusillade of ideological and personal attacks along with severe fund-raising disadvantage. All candidates for office must dutifully carry forward the


myth of an embattled, isolated, and weak Israel facing off against Arab andMuslim terrorist demons, upholding double standards while Israel continues todefy international law, U.N. resolutions, nuclear diplomacy, and the principle ofuniversality upon which any hope for world peace must be based. As Israeltightens its brutal rule over Palestinian occupied territories, its political lackeys inWashington champion the Jewish state as “the only democracy in the MiddleEast”. Israel and its lobby, moreover, have consistently pressured U.S. govern-ments to carry out policies (such as the Iraq war) that ultimately work to under-mine American national interests in the service of Israeli regional hegemony.56

Sadly, this state of affairs constitutes the historical backdrop of contemporarynuclear discourse and policy, with all its frightening ramifications for the future.

The supposedly mortal challenge posed by what Netanyahu calls a “nuclear-ized mullocracy” is therefore nothing but a pretext for eliminating any obstacle tojoint U.S.-Israeli hopes for unfettered regional domination. Iranian “defiance”and “belligerence” is ultimately less a matter of Iran rejecting NPT statutes andIAEA inspections—much less threatening to attack neighboring countries—thanof resisting (illegitimate) demands for total nuclear shutdown. The fraudulent Israeli“red line”, or threshold of tolerance, refers not to a real Iranian military challengebut to the “technical capacity” of Tehran some day achieving weapons status, a“capability” already held, as mentioned, by as many as 30 nations. Further, whileIran remains surrounded by U.S. and Israeli military force, including advancednuclear arsenals, any future Iranian attack on Israel (for which no motive is evident)would be suicidal, as large parts of the country would be quickly reduced torubble. In any event, the “red line” barrier suggests nothing less than eventual Iraniansurrender to combined U.S.-Israeli geopolitical interests that, sooner or later, aregeared to regime change. Any military attack, of course, carries great uncertaintyand risk, meaning that (as of early 2015) a campaign of atomic sabotage, includingcyber operations, will be the preferred method for subverting Iranian nuclearoperations, especially given the fragile character of interim diplomacy.

Meanwhile, for non-nuclear states like Iran, endless military threats from morepowerful nations must constitute an incentive to acquire nuclear weapons as adeterrent—a logic that is universally grasped outside the U.S. In Why DisarmamentMatters, Blix, as noted above, writes that persuading states they do not needweapons of mass destruction would be much easier if all U.N. members respectedexisting restraints on the threat and use of force. In fact the U.N. Charter goesbeyond restraints, imposing legal prohibitions. Iran has repeatedly asked forsecurity assurances as part of its diplomatic negotiations with nuclear powers, buthas received nothing from the U.S. or Israel.

Blix notes that Western intent to strip Iran (and only Iran) of its NPT rights,humiliating enough in itself, demands the kind of concession no state can bejustifiably expected to make—although this does not stop the self-appointedguardians of nuclear rationality from expressing outrage at Iranian “rejectionism”.Blix adds that the NPT is not, and never has been, “a treaty that appoints the


nuclear-weapons states individually or jointly to police both non-nuclear statesand threaten them with punishment.”57 The salience of this point is underlinedwhen those supposedly enlightened nuclear powers do nothing to curtail illegalatomic proliferation among the three non-NPT (outlaw) nuclear states—India,Pakistan, and Israel. It becomes even more salient when those powers (above allthe U.S.) choose to maintain their own nuclear modernization agendas. Whattoday passes for nuclear diplomacy is so one-sided and irrational—an obviousmechanism for Western, especially U.S., geopolitical aims—that it inevitablyworks against cooperation and nonproliferation.

Leaving aside the issue of weapons proliferation, some might argue that Wes-tern fears have more to do with the dangers of nuclear power than with roguearsenals, especially in the aftermath of the 2013 Fukushima disaster in Japan.While risks associated with atomic energy cannot be dismissed, this concernrelative to Iran seems entirely misplaced. First, the Israelis have been particularlyfixated on Iranian weapons potential and have voiced no opposition to reactorprograms anywhere else in the world. Second, all major nuclear states possessrobust atomic energy facilities of their own, with no observable plans to cut back.Third, as NPT signatories, countries throughout the world can freely exercizetheir atomic prerogatives, as is presently the case in such nations as Argentina,Brazil, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Mexico, Sweden, and SouthKorea. None of these states has yet faced economic sanctions or military threats—or even serious political opposition from the U.S. or elsewhere. On the contrary,in 2015 nuclear energy was being championed by President Obama and someEuropean leaders as a future “clear” alternative to fossil fuels, a strategy to combatglobal warming. New U.S. reactors are planned—for example, at the TennesseeValley Authority under the slogan “more nuclear, less coal.” Abundant publicresources are being thrown into nuclear power on a global scale, eliciting littlecriticism from the IAEA or others—indeed scarcely a word from the high-mindedmonitors of international peace and security.

The Iranians, for their part, have an understandable desire for more diversifiedelectricity sources for a nation (of 70 million people) that has seen energy con-sumption grow six times since the early 1990s. When it comes to Fukushima,Obama and leaders of such countries as Russia, China, and France—in line withan extremely profitable (and highly-subsidized) nuclear power industry—havebeen largely silent about the catastrophe and its implications for future atomic-energy projects. While nuclear reactors (as of 2015) provide less than ten percentof electricity worldwide, the realistic industry hope (Fukushima notwithstanding)is for a doubling or even tripling of that level within the next decade. To dateonly one nation—Germany—has moved to decommission its aging and danger-ous reactors, owing to the influence of the Greens and spurred by the Japan dis-aster. The U.S. possesses 104 such energy facilities, with several more on thehorizon. Outrage over prospective Iran nuclear-power reactors seems veryimprobable, but if genuine then grossly hypocritical.


From 2013 to 2015 a new, more liberal Iranian government agreed to stricterenrichment limitations and more open inspections without getting durable sanc-tions respite in return—a problem that was slightly alleviated with the April 2015interim agreements. One Washington official was quick to insist that sanctionsrelief must be regarded as both temporary and easily reversible, adding: “Iran is notopen for business.” Congressional Republicans continued to insist on the harshestpossible sanction so long as Iran possessed any enrichment facilities. Meanwhile, asnoted, Iran’s NPT rights have been vigorously contested by the nuclear powers,meaning negotiations are likely to remain on shaky ground until the U.S.-Israeligoal of regime change is secured. The result is a scenario in which conflict candramatically escalate—with potentially catastrophic global consequences.

It is worth asking whether nuclear diplomacy as presently conducted can haveefficacy beyond an imperial framework allowing Western powers to routinely targetselected weaker states, ostensibly to enforce NPT statutes but in reality to securegeopolitical advantage. The late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was quotedas saying: “It cannot be that some countries that have developed nuclear energycan prohibit those of the Third World from developing their own sources. Weare not the ones developing atomic bombs; it is the others, the nuclear powers,who do that.” This predicament reflects yet another legacy of World War II andthe nuclear oligarchy it created. In the end, the Iranian “crisis” is symptomatic ofan even deeper set of conditions: nothing will be resolved until every state—notjust certain targeted villains—is held accountable to the same universal norms.

Roughly a quarter-century after the end of the Cold War—collapse of theSoviet Union and eventual disintegration of other European Communistregimes—the U.S. remains fully on Cold-War footing, though of a different sortthan during the 1950s and later. It is surely worth remembering that Americannuclear supremacy lies at the heart of superpower behavior, one reason its com-mitment to “nonproliferation” is so fanatical and yet so one-sided, discriminatory.Today Washington retains several thousand warheads—by far the most of anycountry in the world, and the only state with a longstanding first-strike doctrine,an ambitious modernization program, missiles deployed in other countries, and anelaborate missile-defense system directed mainly at Russia. These policies havebeen carried out in total contempt for the NPT and fundamental disregard forthe principle of universality, the only principle consistent with long-term non-proliferation and disarmament. Such policies, moreover, not only lie at the heartof American global hegemony but make the U.S. the greatest threat to peace inthe world.

Notes

1 See Michael Hiltzik, Big Science (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).2 On the Nuclear Posture Review for 2010, and for earlier reviews, see www.defense.

gov/npr/.


www.defense.gov/npr/

www.defense.gov/npr/

3 The Leahy quote is cited in David Model, Lying for Empire (Monroe, ME: CommonCourage, 2005), p. 70.

4 The case that President Truman had been contemplating use of nuclear weapons tobreak the Korean stalemate is made in Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, TheUnited States and Biological Warfare (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998),pp. 97–98.

5 Garry Wills, Bomb Power (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 34.6 Ibid., Ch. 8.7 See Robert Aldrich, First Strike! (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), pp. 21–42.8 Ibid., pp. 255–74.9 For an account of JFK’s bellicosity and threats during the Cuban Missile Crisis, see

Richard J. Walton, Cold War and Counter-Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972),pp. 140–42.

10 Ibid., p. 115.11 Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David MacKay, 1976), p. 94.12 The 7,300 total nuclear warheads for the U.S. compares with 300 for France, 250 for

China, 225 for Britain, and fewer than 10 for North Korea. See the Ploughshares Fundreport for 2015: www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report (2015).

13 The contemporary nuclear danger—too often forgotten—is persuasively argued byHenry Giroux in “Remembering Hiroshima in an Age of Neoliberal Barbarism”,Truth-Out (September 12, 2014).

14 See Julian Borger, “The Truth About Israel’s Secret Nuclear Arsenal”, The Guardian( January 15, 2014).

15 For El Baradei’s statement, see New York Times (February 12, 2004).16 See Fred Kaplan, “India’s Summer”, at www.slate.msu.com.17 Helen Caldicott, War in Heaven (New York: New Press, 2007), Ch. 3.18 See Robert J. Lifton, Superpower Syndrome (New York: Nation Books, 2003), p. 117.19 Ibid., p. 24.20 Ibid., p. 41.21 Ibid., p. 132.22 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 343.23 Ibid., p. 360.24 See John H. Dower, Cultures of War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), Ch. 7.25 Ibid., pp. 281–85.26 Ibid., p. 222.27 Ibid., p. 277.28 See Endicott and Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare, pp. 97–103.29 Ibid., p. 98.30 Ibid., p. 103.31 Ibid., p. 104.32 On the development and refinement of technowar at the time of the Vietnam War,

see James William Gibson, The Perfect War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986),Ch. 5.

33 Ibid., p. 152.34 Joel Kovel, Against the State of Nuclear Terror (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), p.

39.35 On the linkage of technology, domination, and violence, see Herbert Marcuse,

One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 48–55.36 Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002),

p. 26.37 Ibid., p. 160.38 Giroux, “Remembering Hiroshima”.39 Ibid.


http://www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report

http://www.slate.msu.com

40 Wills, Bomb Power, pp. 45–46.41 Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, p. 135.42 See Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger (New York: New Press, 2002), p. 15.43 Los Angeles Times ( June 13, 2006).44 Los Angeles Times (March 2, 2007).45 Nuclear Posture Review for 2010. See www.defense.gov/npr/.46 Hans Blix, Why Disarmament Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).47 Ibid.48 Ibid., p. 73.49 Ibid., p. 49.50 Ibid., p. 4.51 Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara emerged, toward the end of his life,

as a passionate advocate of nuclear disarmament. In one statement he concludes: “It istime—well past time in my view—for the United States to cease its Cold-War stylereliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. I would characterize U.S. nuclearpolicy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous.” See www.Democrats.com/node/4511 (May 7, 2005).

52 See Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare(Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, 2014).

53 Contrary to what is commonly assumed in the U.S., the IAEA—conducting the mostthorough nuclear monitoring of Iranian facilities—has always reported that Iran “couldhave” the potential for weaponization, but this has never amounted to evidence butrather speculation about the future. For recent IAEA reports on Iran, see www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/Iran.

54 Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has repeatedly disavowed the notion of his countrydeveloping nuclear weapons. Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly in Sep-tember 2013, Rouhani stated: “No nation should possess nuclear weapons. As long asnuclear weapons exist, the rise of their use, threat of use and proliferation persist. Theonly absolute guarantee is their total elimination.” See www.en.alalam.it/news/1520393.

55 Julian Borger, “Israel’s Secret Nuclear Arsenal”.56 For an excellent discussion of the great disjuncture separating U.S. and Israeli national

interests, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S.Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007), pp. 335–48.

57 Blix, Disarmament, p. 45.


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5THE NEW IMPERIAL ORDER

If it is true that World War II changed everything, surely one of its most endur-ing (and authoritarian) legacies is an ever-expanding National Security State(NSS). As combat operations in the Pacific came to an end in September 1945, anew axis of international conflict—the Cold War—soon came to the fore. InWashington the enemy shifted overnight, from fascism and Nazism to a pur-ported worldwide Communist threat centered in the Soviet Union, which laterextended to China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere. The erstwhile Soviet ally,which suffered most terribly from German militarism (with at least 20 milliondead), suddenly loomed as the most fearsome challenge to peace and democracy,a totalitarian monster prepared to take over the world.

By 1945 the leading and virtually supreme power, with a monopoly on theBomb and military bases scattered across the planet, the U.S. embraced an inter-national posture of strong vigilance, its leaders more obsessed with threats tonational security than at any time in history. The Good War had given way tothe Cold War, driven by ideological hostility to the new-found Communistmenace. (Some precursors were of course visible—for example, the post-WorldWar I “Red Scares”.) The warfare state quickly took on a life of its own,embedded in a world of covert operations, espionage, high-tech surveillance,government secrecy, and armed interventions. Wartime operations had left abroadened political terrain, allowing for considerably more elite flexibility; thefield of power was qualitatively enlarged. Sheldon Wolin writes: “After 1945,‘war’ was akin to a tabula rasa on which opinion-makers were free to constituteits meaning in terms that pretty much suited their purposes, allowing them to setthe character of public debate and to acquire a vastly-enlarged range of govern-mental powers—powers that, when they did not violate the Constitution,deformed it.”1 The warfare state rested not only on a permanent war economy

and empire of military bases but on an expanding security managed by thenewly-constituted imperial presidency.

From Good War to Cold War

History shows that a National Security behemoth was driven largely by ColdWar politics that would define U.S. foreign policy into the early 1990s, when theCommunist enemy gave way to a new global threat—Islamic terrorism. Elitefixation on “security” was a result not so much from American internationalweakness and vulnerability as from precisely the opposite: a protection of U.S.economic and geopolitical supremacy arising from the new postwar constellationof forces. Hegemonic among leading powers, the U.S. emerged fromWorld War IIlargely unscathed, its cities intact, its losses minimal, its economy booming, itsglobal position solidified. Other powers, including Russia, suffered massivehuman and material losses and found their economies in shambles, requiringmany years, if not decades, of reconstruction. In 1945 Washington possessed two-thirds of world gold reserves, produced half of all international goods and services,and maintained a uniquely thriving export trade. Yet, instead of relinquishing itswartime footing, the world’s largest military machine remained intact despitefurtive moves toward retrenchment. With no genuine military threat in sight, alargely manufactured Communist plague would serve perfectly to legitimate apermanent U.S. warfare system.

American obsession with a largely contrived Soviet menace, sold in the poli-tical and popular culture as an evil “worldwide Communist conspiracy”, workedto negate full-scale demobilization. With every advance of the Cold War inmotion—its sources visible as early as 1944—developments followed in rapidsuccession: U.S. military expansion in Europe and Asia, the 1947 Truman Doc-trine announcing Washington readiness to intervene anywhere to achieve its eco-nomic and geopolitical interests, the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War(1950–53), onset of McCarthyism fueled by a domestic Communist danger,Soviet unveiling of its own atomic bomb. Events of the late 1940s and early1950s seemed to confirm the most extreme fears disseminated by Cold Warparanoia. This was an emphatically bipartisan agenda—Democrats and Repub-licans both subscribing to the same anti-Communist hysteria, ensuring that Con-gressional funding for the war economy and security state would be readilyavailable.

By the late 1940s the U.S. had in fact an abundance of enemies to be targeted—not only the Soviet Union, but a new Communist regime in China, Communistgovernments in Eastern Europe and North Korea, radical insurgencies in Africa,Indochina, and Indonesia, mass Communist parties in Italy, France, Finland, andChile. With unprecedented global reach, American power now looked toenhance “security” in ways never before imagined. Repercussions of the afore-mentioned “Red Scare” crackdowns on left-wing protest were quite modest

130 The New Imperial Order

when compared with the anti-Communist frenzy that followed World War II. Ina short time, the previously limited capabilities of the FBI and local police wouldbe augmented by new federal agencies, including the CIA and NSA, that weredestined to become basic mechanisms of Cold War mobilization. As the securityapparatus gained new ideological and institutional leverage during the 1950s,American power at the summits would expand accordingly.

Under the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, the warfarestate would exceed all generally-understood limits to its domestic and interna-tional power. Under the mounting influence of atomic politics, the Cold War,and the security-state, the power structure became increasingly removed from anysemblance of democratic governance, its modus operandi driven by a mania forsecrecy, flexibility, and control—by a desire for its own rules and norms of globalbehavior. Then as now, American citizens knew little or nothing about wide-spread CIA and NSA activities, nor were they “entitled” to know. The ubiqui-tous threat of Communist villains sufficed to legitimate and protect a stronglyauthoritarian politics. As self-proclaimed champion of the “free world”, mainbulwark against unimaginable tyranny, the U.S. was in a position to perpetuate itsown oligarchical rule, always behind a liberal-democratic façade.

Before his death in April 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt envisioned apostwar world more accessible to U.S. global interests than it had been in theyears before Pearl Harbor—a view inherited by the Truman presidency. SinceWashington looked toward a new world order congruent with its own interestsand rules, other powers, including the Soviet Union, were expected to sub-ordinate their own agendas to this new order. The main American goal wasmaximum control of international markets and resources, which of coursedepended on a capacity to deploy military force freely across the globe. In the late1940s the U.S. moved decisively to establish primary influence over such nascentinstitutions as the U.N., World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, using itsatomic monopoly to ultimate advantage—so long as it lasted. A depleted and self-absorbed nation, the Soviet Union—whatever its considerable military power—was largely confined to the margins, kept on the defensive. The Cold War wasoverwhelmingly a product of U.S. geopolitical aims rather than response to animputed worldwide Communist onslaught.

It was actually this very Soviet weakness—the basis of Stalin’s famous obsessionwith “catching up” to the U.S. industrially, technologically, and militarily—thatfed into the Cold War and a boundless American mania for defeating Com-munism. The biggest actual threat, perceived or real, was to U.S. global hegemonyrather than to its territorial integrity or institutional order. The Soviets in fact lentonly modest support to local insurgencies (in Greece, Turkey, Indochina) andnon-ruling Communist parties (in Italy, France, Chile). And it was the U.S., notthe Soviet Union, that erected a sprawling empire of military bases, some geo-graphically close to the Soviet Union. This hardly kept U.S. leaders fromdepicting the Soviet Union as an imperial juggernaut dedicated to world

The New Imperial Order 131

conquest. While the Truman Doctrine was meant to give the U.S. maximuminternational leverage (while demanding the Soviets remain at home), it was onlywithin the buffer zone of Eastern Europe that Josef Stalin retained an armed-forces presence, fully intelligible in the aftermath of the Nazi horrors. For themost part, the Soviet Union was happy to collaborate with the West on postwarEuropean reconstruction (including even the Marshall Plan) and internationalagreements (such as atom-sharing), but such overtures were casually dismissed byWashington.

The mounting fixation on intelligence and surveillance—and swollen pre-rogatives of an imperial presidency—has depended on the boundless potential ofelectronic technology, vital not only to the Pentagon and law enforcement but toeavesdropping power at the NSA and kindred federal agencies. The move towardlarge-scale information collection and processing, first visible at the Office of SpecialServices (OSS) during World War II, shaped the national-security edifice fromthe early 1950s onward. While the fifties decade has been described as the “goldenage of espionage”, in reality the period was just an embryonic manifestation ofwhat would come in later decades.

Early postwar America was saturated with frenetic and irrational anti-Soviethostility, starting with the familiar myth that Soviet “conquest” of Eastern Europewas a sign of an aggressive imperial agenda. (This was in fact part of the sameWorld War II legacy that facilitated U.S. domination of Western Europe.) ThePentagon, for its part, wanted to retain high levels of military spending—the verymotive that, in great measure, drove profit-seeking contractors into the anti-Soviet camp. Further, reports at the time indicated that Truman—apparentlyinsecure over his political status—looked to strengthen his presidency by showinghe could forcefully stand up to Soviet leaders. Throughout his tenure in the WhiteHouse, extending to the end of the Korean War, Truman exhibited little will-ingness to enter into agreements with the Soviet Union. A centerpiece of theCold War, after all, was that Communists “could not be trusted”.

For the U.S., the Cold War was from the outset fueled by a public sense ofcrisis and emergency—the Communist threat forcing a strange merger of “war”and “peace” marked by extreme military vigilance. The security apparatus had tobe rapidly expanded, within a framework created by Truman’s 1947 NationalSecurity Act that, among other things, gave birth to the CIA. Drawing from thework of the OSS and Manhattan Project, executive power would increasinglydepend on secrecy and related authoritarian practices. Here Garry Wills com-ments: “the National Security State was riddled with illegalities from theoutset … [and] was in multiple ways unaccountable to Congress or the people,was secret and secretly-funded, resorting to subversion, sabotage, and assassina-tion.”2 What Eisenhower inherited from Truman would be streamlined duringthe 1950s, when surveillance, espionage, and covert operations became fullynormalized though still hidden from the American public. Indeed politicaldebate—in Congress and elsewhere—was nowhere to be found.


One Democrat—John F. Kennedy—turned out to be perhaps the most dan-gerous of Cold Warriors, his brief presidency defined by an ethos of crisis andemergency and geared toward military encounters. A centerpiece of JFK’s reignwas his obsession with defeating the “worldwide Communist offensive”, whichtook the form of confrontations in Europe, Cuba, and Indochina. JFK approa-ched U.S.-Soviet competition as an epic struggle for world domination, heigh-tened through the (entirely fallacious) claim of Soviet military superiority. AsBruce Miroff writes, Kennedy’s dedication to global counter-revolutionary strat-egy consumed his presidency—a strategy regarded as central to American histor-ical destiny.3 JFK hoped to build “the most powerful military force in history”,warning of ominous new threats to the “free world”. That Kennedy brought anenlightened liberalism to the White House remains one of the great myths of thetwentieth century, Richard Walton observing: “As Congressman and SenatorKennedy was never a liberal, and as President he prosecuted the Cold War morevigorously, and thus more dangerously, than did Eisenhower and Dulles.”4

During Kennedy’s term, aggravated Cold-War conflict helped embolden theimperial presidency that JFK’s own personality seemed to relish and U.S. globalambitions seemed to require. Budgetary allocations for the Pentagon, nuclearweapons, the CIA, and NSA skyrocketed during the early 1960s to meet eachnew “crisis”—first Berlin, then Cuba, then Vietnam, then Cuba again, thenVietnam again. JFK had a special preference for covert operations: it was the CIAthat organized the Bay of Pigs invasion, carried out repeated assassination plotsagainst Fidel Castro under Operation Mongoose, set up the brutal Phoenix Pro-gram in Vietnam, and schemed to overthrow Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diemin 1963, among projects favored by JFK’s Harvard advisers. NSA surveillanceactivities escalated during the Kennedy years. Two notably egregious cases ofmilitary aggression—against Cuba and Vietnam—were followed by a third con-frontation (the Cuban Missile Crisis, discussed earlier) that nearly brought theworld to nuclear catastrophe. The postwar American warfare legacy, includingthe protracted Indochina horror, owes more to JFK than to any other president.

There is little need here to survey the records of all subsequent White Houseoccupants: it should be enough to note that the NSS trajectory continued steadilyupward and largely unimpeded. By the 1960s the NSS—and of course the war-fare state itself—had become a self-replicating behemoth, an institutionalizedfixture within American society. Of course the Vietnam War fed that momentumthroughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, reinforcing both military Keynesianismand ideological anti-Communism that were so central to the Johnson and Nixonpresidencies. From the outset, the Cold War generally relied on gross exaggera-tion of the Soviet threat, with the U.S., as mentioned, taking the lead in virtuallyevery escalation of the arms race. Indeed the Soviets had always lagged wellbehind, their gross national product (GNP) typically half that of the U.S. andtheir global presence comparatively limited, economically and militarily, RobertAldridge writing: “During almost four decades of the nuclear age it has been the


United States which has led virtually every escalation in weapons productionwhile the Soviet Union, for the most part, tried to catch up.”5 At the time of theKennedy administration, for example, American “estimates” of Soviet armed-forces strength were flagrantly overblown. After Stalin’s death in 1953, more-over, Soviet leaders were showing an inclination to negotiate with the West,toward an arms-control agreement congruent with its doctrine of “peacefulcoexistence”—only to be rebuffed by the U.S.

Cold-War ideology would prevail in the U.S. until the Soviet implosion in1991, when the warfare state quickly shifted focus—from worldwide Communismto Middle Eastern rogue states and terrorism. Passing of the Cold War would thusresult in only modest (and temporary) reductions in American military spending,despite indications of a “peace dividend”. Earlier, in the 1980s, with glasnost andperestroika at the forefront of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformism, any semblance of aSoviet economic or military challenge had already greatly receded—yet this neverdeterred Reagan, his strident foreign policy fueled by the ascent of neoconservatives,from injecting hysteria into the public sphere over a reputedly “evil Empire”. Aweakened, reformed, more pliable Soviet leadership was framed in the politicaland media systems as a mortal threat to the U.S., even Western Civilization. Aweakening “enemy” was being resuscitated at a time when the “Vietnam Syn-drome” had deeply infected the public sphere. In this milieu Reagan—supposedchampion of small government—was able to preside over a vast buildup of thePentagon and security apparatus, with record federal expenditures.6

With the warfare state so firmly consolidated, it should have been little surpriseto witness the transition from Cold-War fixation on Communism to a obsessionwith global terrorism as a rapid and seamless process. In fact the Soviet collapseoccurred simultaneously with the first “new crisis”—the 1990 Iraq invasion ofKuwait followed by the Desert Storm events in early 1991 that initiated con-tinuous U.S. military intervention in the region. For nearly two decades, acrossfour presidencies, Iraq would become the centerpiece of U.S. geopolitical strat-egy, fueled by combined economic, political, and military objectives. From thefirst Bush presidency through Clinton, the second Bush, and Obama, Washingtonwould remain on semi-permanent war footing, its counter-terrorism mobilizationjustifying arms buildup, nuclear readiness, high-level intelligence and surveillanceoperations, and of course military action. The newer enemy would be moredispersed and amorphous than was true of the Soviet Union, China, and worldCommunism, but it would be equally “global” and challenging to a world orderheld intact by the leading superpower.

The war on terrorism, with attention devoted to the Middle East and Muslim/Arab threats—mostly associated with Iraq and Iran—had already been an urgentpriority of neocons, though after 9/11 their agenda was taken up by wider con-servative and even liberal sectors. During the 1990s, in the aftermath of DesertStorm and leading up to Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, the NSS was operating atpeak levels. With punishing economic sanctions and stringent U.S.-enforced


inspections, the CIA took advantage of U.N. cover to mount clandestineactivities—including sabotage, intelligence, an attempted coup against SaddamHussein—as preparation for regime change. The NSA and CIA infiltrated Iraqwith impunity, effectively monitoring its governmental and military commu-nications systems to soften any resistance to invasion. Referring to this mid-1990speriod, Dilip Hiro writes: “The key element in intelligence gathering was thehigh-technology eavesdropping equipment, where the Anglo-American spyagencies were streets ahead of their counterparts in the Western world, not tomention Iraq.”7 U.S. security operations were in fact stepped up after the 2003invasion, continuing into the Obama presidency, at which juncture new insur-gencies would call forth heightened counter-terrorism operations in Iraq, Syria,Yemen, Pakistan, and other parts of the region.

Initiatives by the Bush and Obama administrations took a renovated securitycomplex to yet higher levels, beyond peak Cold War activity: 9/11, the U.S.intervention in Iraq, years of occupation and resistance, repeated Israeli assaults onGaza, the Western targeting of Iran, and finally growth of such terrorist groups asal-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS). By 2015 the War on Terrorism, having brieflyreceded during the Arab Spring, was reinvigorated, dominating U.S. foreignpolicy. Formation of the lavishly-funded Homeland Security Department andpassage of the USA Patriot Act, outgrowth of 9/11, laid the basis of more war-making—not to mention often illegal—CIA, NSA, and Pentagon intelligencework. Post-9/11 American moves in the Middle East served to intensify blow-back while posing new threats to personal freedoms. Revisiting Wills’ prescientobservation, once the postwar system took on a logic of its own, the idea of:“turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State[would be] a hard, perhaps impossible, task.”8

The two reputedly most serious threats to American global power since WorldWar II—Communism and terrorism—share much in common despite their vastlydifferent origins and modus operandi. Both are of course international and unlimitedin scope, requiring boundless U.S. military vigilance. Second, both have been atthe center of resistance to American imperialism, however problematic their strate-gies and minimal their successes. Third, both have contributed to a national senseof crisis and emergency, underpinning a merger of “peace” and “war”. Fourth,terrorism like Communism is said to represent an evil so great that its very modusoperandi—violence, disruption, treachery—defies ordinary description. Fifth, thecapacity of both to subvert American global interests has been consistently exag-gerated. Finally, both have served admirably to justify Pentagon buildups, nuclearpreparedness, empire of bases, and an unprecedented security apparatus.

Rise of the Imperial State

While postwar consolidation of the warfare state is usually taken as catalyst of animperial presidency, a more accurate framing would be “imperial state”, as that


encompasses a power structure going well beyond the White House or executivebranch as such. However conceptualized, history reveals the development of aconstellation of forces—economic, political, cultural, global—that has pushedAmerican society inexorably toward concentrated elite power since World War II.The implications for democratic politics, most notably for the role of Congress inforeign policy, have been rather daunting. And it has been mostly conservatives,proud celebrants of “limited government”, who have labored most diligently toeffectively bolster an authoritarian executive which they correctly understand isneeded to manage U.S. global affairs.

During World War II, as noted, full-scale mobilization produced a militaryKeynesianism that would remain a fixture of the American state-capitalist econ-omy into the present. The War Production Board adopted a variety of crucialfunctions: budgetary allocations, planning, resource mobilization, industrialstructuring, wartime rationing, and so forth. Through such Board initiatives—unprecedented in their scope—government, corporate, and military interestsorganically converged around tightly-shared wartime objectives. One result ofthis historic transformation was an oligarchic structure dependent on the warfaresystem and security complex. Although war itself naturally brought considerablerisks and costs for American society as a whole, for business elites it meant new-found wealth and power, new sources of capital accumulation. Today, more thanever, state power and the permanent war system remain intimately connected,providing the executive with more flexibility, domestically and internationally,than founders of the U.S. Constitution surely intended. Leading sectors of theNSS, including not only the Pentagon and law enforcement but the CIA andNSA, have long been vital to such flexibility.

The many “war measures” deemed imperative during World War II would beextended throughout the postwar era. The Cold War demanded ongoing“national emergency” with its special presidential capacity to act—an expandedpower framework President Truman used to maximum advantage. Truman grewfond of issuing executive orders—that is, bypassing Congress—to meet an osten-sibly surging “Communist menace”.9 Atomic politics especially required abun-dant measures of presidential secrecy and dispatch. As Truman insisted in 1950:“The circumstances of the present crisis make any debate over prerogatives andpower essentially sterile if not dangerous to the success of our foreign policy.”10

In other words, public debate over questions of American global interventionswas largely ruled out—a case in point being the U.S. decision to become engagedon the Korean peninsula, and ultimately war against Korean and Chinese forces.

By 1950 an already thriving NSS was shrouded in secrecy, the executive con-trol of information flows becoming vital to intelligence and surveillance. Everyadvance of Communist influence, real or manufactured, was accompanied by acorresponding growth of federal power, Wills commenting that: “If everything isan emergency, all power is emergency power.”11 With literally millions of clas-sified documents, collected and processed by the Pentagon, CIA, and (later) NSA,


the storehouse of secret communications was sure to expand with each passingyear, whoever occupied the White House. Not surprisingly, U.S. postwar mili-tary ventures typically occurred in the absence of meaningful Congressionalinput—and of course there were many such ventures, from Korea to Indochina,Central America, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Once Washington chose toexercise its self-proclaimed “right” to intervene freely around the world, it wouldneed a powerful state apparatus.

Viewed thusly, the Truman Doctrine is best understood as the first real flexingof the “imperial presidency”, the basis for U.S. interventions in Greece, Italy, andKorea while Soviet leaders were immobilized by their crushing domestic chal-lenges. These were carried out by executive order, the president assuming his roleas Commander-in-Chief, as Congress was effectively bypassed, despite its theo-retical power to “declare war”. In fact no president since FDR, following PearlHarbor, has gone before Congress to declare war against a foreign country. Eventhe 1973 War Powers Act, an outgrowth of the Vietnam disaster, has done littleto constrain the imperial state, emboldened by what Peter Irons refers to as“blank-check politics”, commenting: “since the late 1940s, Congress has vir-tually abdicated its Constitutional war powers to the imperial presidency”.12

These examples (and there are many others) demonstrate just how archaic theConstitution has become in the warfare-state era.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq reveals White House authoritarian-ism in its most brazen form—starting with the 2002 Congressional green lightbased on fraudulent reports about threatening Iraqi “weapons of mass destruc-tion” (WMD). The Bush administration moved with arrogant disregard for theU.N. Security Council, U.N. Charter, and international-law prohibitions againstmilitary intervention except for national defense. “Preemptive war” resulted inhorrific casualties, infrastructure devastation, and massive economic costs of war,not to mention U.S. recasting of Iraqi domestic institutions to suit its owninterests—another violation of international law. At the time of the 2003 inva-sion, Secretary of State James Baker, appearing before the Senate, remarked: “Weshould not have a constitutional argument, it does not seem to me, about whe-ther or not the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the constitutionalauthority to commit forces. It has been done going all the way back, I think, toWorld War II.”13 Baker was of course right: U.S. military aggression had becomepostwar normalcy, fitting imperatives of the NSS and warfare state.

During Bush’s presidency, the phony theory of “unitary executive” wasinvoked no less than 82 times to legitimate unrestrained White House initiatives,mostly in foreign policy.14 Signing statements, which allow the president tosidestep Congress, were the norm even as Republicans would later scream inprotest over Obama’s (many fewer) resorts to precisely the same device. Secrecyto conceal government and military decisions was an article of faith among neo-cons and most Republicans, including the Bush-Cheney architects of war. Con-sistent with dramatic NSS expansion after 2000, George W. Bush will likely be


remembered as the most brazenly authoritarian president in modern Americanhistory.

Integral to the warfare state, the very science and technology that reinforcesmilitary, intelligence, and surveillance capabilities was bound to strengthenmechanisms of state power. The system erected during World War II was builton mobilizing human, material, and technical resources as part of the generalmilitarization of American society, which in turn rests heavily on instruments ofsocial and ideological control. Such technological rationality extended from theManhattan Project to development of nuclear arsenals, introduction of newweaponry, space explorations, security build-ups, and innovations such as roboticsand drones. In this way modernity as “progress” would become an instrument ofdomination and violence on a world scale. The imperial state—working fully at oddswith the requisites of political democracy and public welfare—managed to flourishfrom one president to the next, one crisis to the next, one enemy to the next.

Empire and Technowar

A key imperative of the leading superpower—and its labyrinthine power structure—is the constant flow of information enabled by ongoing technological moder-nization, including a communications system made possible by generous publicinvestment in what might be described as “technowar”. The imperial systemworks tirelessly to maintain its advantages by means of every conceivable form oftechnology. Since World War II the broadening “power imaginary”, suited to anenlarged U.S. global presence, has depended on forms of technology adequate tosustaining that presence. A foundation was built during World War II, mostcentrally through atomic research but also through many other innovations:missiles, precision bombing, jet aircraft, radar, new surveillance methods, com-munications intercept devices, to name some. It is well known that the electronicdimensions of warfare came into vogue after 1942. The later appropriation ofcomputer technology, with its all-purpose functions, would help further rationalizeevery aspect of military life.

The continuous growth of intelligence and surveillance networks since the late1940s coincides with the larger proliferation of federal agencies—the CIA, NSA,DIA, DEA, IRS, and DHS among others—that commonly partner with lawenforcement and some foreign organizations. Most agencies operate in secrecy,most have little public accountability, and most cast a simultaneous domestic andinternational presence. Advances in communications technology endow suchagencies with the virtually limitless capacity to collect, store, process, and interpretdata concerning most realms of public (even private) life. Two all-encompassinghistorical developments—the Cold War and War on Terrorism—have provided arationale for the largest security complex on the planet, involving not only thePentagon but an ensemble of government contractors, corporate lobbies, thecommunications sector, think tanks, and universities.15


The most notorious of these agencies has long been the CIA, created by Pre-sident Truman in 1947 as part of the National Security Council, which essentiallyinaugurated the Cold War. Its modus operandi entails worldwide clandestineoperations—mainly either to support friendly governments or overthrow“unfriendly” ones. While theoretically “secret” to protect its “black” (often ille-gal) work abroad, the CIA has for many years been a focus of enterprising jour-nalistic and scholarly writing that has brought much of its shadowy and nefariouswork to light.16 The CIA has operated as something akin to the president’sclandestine army, answering to no one outside the White House inner circle,Chalmers Johnson pointing out that: “The CIA belongs as much to the presidentas the Praetorian Guard once belonged to the Roman Emperor.” Its stock-in-trade includes every espionage tool available: political assassination, deathsquads, torture, infiltration, sabotage, surveillance, drone attacks. It has conductedwars, espionage, insurrection, regime change, and general mayhem in suchcountries as Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Chile, South Korea,Italy, Ukraine, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

More than other NSS sectors, the CIA functions as a pillar of the warfare state,its pursuit of threats to American power carried out at scattered locales across theworld. It organizes widespread illegal activities, many surely leading to blowback—that is, resistance to U.S. interests. CIA abduction teams in Europe and theMiddle East have been uncovered, as has extensive drug-trafficking to supportfriendly terrorists (for example, the Contras in Nicaragua during the mid-1980s).A perpetual-crisis atmosphere gives the agency plenty of targets, which since 2001are overwhelmingly located in the Middle East. Only after the Church Com-mittee was set up by the Senate at the end of Nixon’s term was oversight of theCIA even possible, but still the “Praetorian Guard” remained much far too strongand elusive for truly effective accountability.

We have seen how the CIA, working with many partners, helped lay thegroundwork for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here and across the Middle East theagency has surely contributed to the rise of Islamic jihadism from the early 1980sonward, above all through its support of rightwing movements in Afghanistan,Bosnia, Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan. In Bosnia throughout the 1990s, the CIA gavecritical logistical and financial aid to a mixture of secessionist and insurrectionaryforces, including death squads, to incite civil war and destroy the secular Serbiangovernment of Slobodan Milosevic. Once the parameters of U.S.-inspired jihad-ism became problematic, by the late 1990s, CIA targets were turned around, nowincreasingly fixated on Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria.

As the national-security complex grows more integrated and complex overtime, the partnership between the military and “civilian” agencies (DEA, IRS,DHS, etc.) tightens to match the requirements of global intelligence and surveil-lance. That partnership extends to hundreds of corporations that do business with thePentagon, dozens of private military contractors (PMCs), and many universitiesand think tanks engaged in military-related work.


Technowar is further driven by computer systems that enhance battlefieldintegration, communications, surveillance, and sophisticated projects like robotics.The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), set up in 1958,remains crucial to the ongoing rationalization of warfare, beneficial to both mili-tary proper and the NSS. Thanks to its sprawling network of labs, many locatedat universities, the U.S. easily leads the world in military-related R&D, whichdraws easily from the academic fields of physics, chemistry, engineering, astron-omy, and aeronautics. Some labs and research sites also rely heavily on such dis-ciplines as media and communications studies, while computer-science researchunderlies virtually everything. As technowar improvements point toward a morerationalized, electronic, information-driven battlefield, the objective is moreambitious, including space exploration, global surveillance, drone capabilities, cyber-security, cyber-warfare, and more lethal weaponry as well as video game-basedtraining.

The NSS gained added momentum—with commensurate new power andfunding—after 9/11, and particularly after formation of the DHS in 2002. WritesNick Turse:

The post-9/11 creation of an entire industry and culture of “homelandsecurity” has ushered in an era of military-industrial transformation. Witheach passing month, the Complex (and its attendant minicomplexes) growslarger and embeds itself ever more deeply in American society, becomesmore like a real version of the Matrix with every passing day.17

He adds: “the military has increasingly come to see the United States as akin toone of its garrisoned, if not fully occupied, nations overseas.”18 Turse refers,appropriately, to rise of the “homeland security complex” resting on a familiarconfluence of government, corporate, and military power.

If the Cold War was spurred by anti-Communist frenzy, that frenzy scarcelyemanated from a sense of genuine threat to domestic order. With the events of9/11, however, the War on Terrorism could be readily viewed as an urgentresponse to observable assaults on national sovereignty, something akin to anotherPearl Harbor. Indeed 9/11 seemed to confirm a Hobbesian view of the world heldby neocons and hawks—one saturated with chaos and mortal danger, demandingmilitary force and passing off legal and political constraints as nuisances. At thisjuncture, the business of homeland security was sure to expand rapidly, dependentas always on lavish public funding: DHS spending increased from $41.8 billion in2002 to $65 billion in 2006 to more than $70 billion in 2013,19 as homelandsecurity itself grew into a hugely-profitable mega-industry. The DHS was initiallycomprised of 22 agencies and bureaus, including the DEA, Federal EmergencyManagement Agency (FEMA), the DEA, Department of Treasury, FBI, and theImmigration and Naturalization Service (INS), all working in tandem while at thesame time partnering with such agencies as the CIA and the NSA.


As with the larger NSS, homeland security depends on a tight military-businesspartnership dedicated to “protecting against and responding to threats and hazardsto the nation.” The biggest private contractors include the familiar giants Ray-theon, Bechtel, Northrop-Gruman, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and GeneralDynamics. A DHS fixture is the Office of the National CounterintelligenceExecutive (NCIX), charged with counter-intelligence and counter-security worknow more pressing with the dramatic upswing in cyber-attacks. Along with theFBI, NSA, and DHS, the NCIX conducts widespread surveillance on “persons ofinterest”: terrorists, political activists, sympathizers of targeted groups, criminalssuch as drug offenders. The capacity for political abuse under the guise of fightingterrorism is too obvious here to require elaboration.

The astronomical DHS budget provides a clue to its vast organizational reach.Located at the department’s main operational center are the FBI, CIA, NSA,DEA, and other federal agencies—all connected to state and municipal lawenforcement and, in some cases, foreign intelligence. Such a massive securitybureaucracy contains the logic of its own expansion, fueled by interventionsabroad that, as we have seen, can generate new cycles of blowback. With eachtechnological advance, moreover, the system appears better able to reproduceconditions of its sustainability. Federal budgetary allocations speak a powerfultruth: as total homeland-security spending for 2014 reaches beyond $70 billion,the overall post-9/11 total is fast approaching one trillion dollars, aside from whatis earmarked for the Pentagon, other agencies, and local police forces.

Technological innovations in the converging fields of aviation, robotics, com-puter science, surveillance, and weaponry have led to a rapid increase in dronewarfare, used for lethal purposes in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, andSomalia. Managed by the Pentagon and the CIA, drone operations are embracedfor their supposed efficiency and precision—and of course their minimizing ofAmerican casualties—yet after many years of unmanned aircraft strikes the realityis one of repeated, often random civilian killings. As larger fleets of remotely-operated aircraft are deployed for surveillance and combat, restraints on militaryforce are thereby loosened, especially as they are usually kept secret, outsidepublic debate. (Kreps piece) Drones have given rise to a paradigm shift in howintelligence is gathered and combat operations are conducted. Where such war-fare violates a nation’s sovereignty, as is inevitably the case, such transgression ofinternational law evokes little anguish in the corridors of American power. Theuse of unmanned aircraft in war is in fact hardly new: the practice goes back toGerman use of V-1 and V-2 rockets as guided missiles against Britain duringWorld War II.

No sector of American society has benefitted more than the NSS from theexpanded “power imaginary” resulting from World War II and solidified duringthe Cold War. Despite recurrent fears of overreach and occasional Congressionalprobes, the NSS has long remained a durable fixture of American public life, withadded momentum since 9/11. Now, as during the 1940s, there is no shortage of


enemies to be vilified and fought. “Homeland security” is sure to remain anational obsession as long as Washington is committed to its global military pre-sence, as long as superpower ambitions are projected across the Middle East andaligned with Israel. As continued episodes of jihadic violence demonstrate, threatsfrom blowback can surface anywhere, any time. If, as James Risen suggests:“America remains on combat footing in the global war on terror”, then the U.S.will likely be in a state of perpetual warfare, with technology assuming a moredecisive role with the passing of time.20

As Risen and others have noted, the homeland-security complex—as with theNSS in general—offers a boondoggle for major contractors that capitalize on theever-present “business of fear”. Risen writes: “A decade of fear-mongering hasbrought power and wealth to those who have been the most skillful at hypingthe terrorist threat. Fear sells.”21 As noted, the NSA, DHS, DEA, and Pentagonlong ago forged close and lucrative partnerships with corporate interests. Like thephenomenon of terrorism itself, “security” turns out to be amorphous, ubiqui-tous, and global, its techniques more invasive—public surveillance cameras, elec-tronic monitoring and eavesdropping, personal tracking, border controls, andcyber technology. Hundreds of federal, state, and local agencies rely on someform of electronic surveillance. The post-9/11 years especially have witnessed arapidly-escalating digital arms race, and with it a pervasive sense of technologicalvulnerability. In 2013, governments across the globe were spending $77 billionon cyber-security alone—a figure destined to skyrocket in coming years. In theU.S. corporations such as Raytheon, Microsoft, AT&T, and Lockheed-Martinhave been awarded generous federal contracts to bolster cyber-security at a timewhen more than 3,000 American institutions have had their computer systemsviolated.22

Routine and intrusive surveillance adds to public fear and passivity, since oneof its oft-forgotten functions is to promote ideological conformity. In thiscontext—taking into account the ascent of social media—a large percentage ofAmericans has come to accept surveillance as a matter of both “security” (neces-sity) and patriotism (belief), underlying what Christian Parenti aptly describes asthe “modernization of social control.” He writes: “Constant surveillance bringsforth loyal citizens, trained soldiers, obedient patients, productive workers, anddocile, useful bodies.”23 Nor does the Internet or social media constitute a safehaven from perpetual monitoring and tracking, despite frequent claims to thecontrary. In No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes: “The Internet has longbeen heralded as an unprecedented instrument of democratization and liberal-ization, even emancipation. But in the eyes of the U.S. government, this globalnetwork and other types of communications technology threatens to undermineAmerican power.”24

It was World War II that brought propaganda, in the U.S. as well as Japan andGermany, to the forefront, merging Good-War ideology, communications tech-nology, and popular culture (especially film) within an explosive matrix of


patriotism and militarism. Inspired by such movie directors as John Ford andHoward Hawks, this effort would have a strong, lingering influence on Americanmass consciousness. During years of Cold War and the war on terrorism, thatlegacy—thanks to technological refinements—was expanded and rationalizedbeyond all expectations. The modern NSS can be framed as essentially “post-Orwellian” to the extent it transcends the parameters of state-managed ideologi-cal controls. Today “propaganda” has become the province of corporations, massmedia, and popular culture not to mention universities, schools, think tanks, andlobbies.

Meanwhile, we have reached a point in history where the very notion ofprivacy—understood in its larger social and political context—has become ratherarchaic, meaningless. Constitutional freedoms, though cherished by liberals andconservatives alike, have come to be regarded as little more than abstract princi-ples. Insofar as all realms of public existence can be thoroughly monitored, theywind up subject to the whims and interests of an emboldened power structure.Surveillance practices by definition are nowadays increasingly normalized withinthe daily operations of the warfare state and security apparatus—so normalized, infact, as to undermine democratic accountability, a mode of control so ubiquitousas to be nearly invisible.25

The NSA: “Collect It All!”

Surely no fixture of the U.S. intelligence apparatus better captures the scope—and dangers—of the NSS than the National Security Agency, founded in 1952just as the Cold War was reaching its peak. From the outset, the NSA was con-ceived as a global eavesdropping network requiring the most elaborate technol-ogy. While ostensibly “super-secret”, in recent years the NSA has gained publicattention following the 2013 defection of Edward Snowden, whose personal sagaand revelations are dramatized in Laura Poitras’ excellent Oscar-winning doc-umentary Citizenfour and in Greenwald’s aforementioned book, No Place to Hide.Earlier NSA history was thoroughly explored by James Bamford in a series ofbooks that received far less exposure than they deserved, the latest being TheShadow Factory (2008).26

The NSA lies at the heart of the surveillance labyrinth, a “deep state” of theAmerican power structure yet to be fully unraveled. Poitras’ film, for its part,centers around eight tension-filled days Snowden spent at a Hong Kong hotel,where his stunning revelations are turned into dramatic footage along with aseries of reports by Greenwald and others for the London Guardian on U.S. spyprograms that are more intrusive—and far more domestic—than was generallybelieved. With these programs, according to Snowden, “we are building thebiggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind”, adding that, despiteaccumulated evidence of NSA intrusions into both private and public life, protestin the U.S. is scarcely visible: Congress, the White House, mass media, and


general public have remained virtually silent in the face of escalating threats tocivil privacies and freedoms.

The Snowden narratives depict a system, NSA at the center, of nonstop secretmonitoring and tracking of people across the world, with little accountability andan over-stated rationale of protecting “national security” and fighting terrorism(where results to date have been rather slim). In the film we see a post-9/11technological matrix that vacuums up billions of electronic transactions daily andlocates millions of people (including American citizens) by means of cell phoneand other GPS coordinates. In partnership with such corporations as Microsoftand Verizon, the NSA routinely shares sensitive data with the DEA, CIA, FBI,DIA, IRS, and DHS, on the trail of terrorists, drug traffickers, assorted criminals,and those suspected of being connected to radical groups. One highly-problematic(and surely illegal) outgrowth of agency data-processing is a massive watch-listidentifying more than a million “threats”, funneled through the shadowy Ter-rorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), and maintained by the TerroristIdentities Group (TIG).

With sprawling acres of supercomputers and vast storage centers, the NSA hasdramatically augmented its surveillance capabilities since 2001. Its “metadata”collection now exceeds that of dictatorial systems envisioned by the worstOrwellian nightmares. Writes Greenwald: “The archive of documents EdwardSnowden had assembled was stunning in both size and scope. Even as someonewho had spent years writing about the dangers of secret U.S. surveillance, I foundthe sheer vastness of the spying system genuinely shocking, all the more sobecause it had clearly been implemented with virtually no accountability, notransparency, and no limits.”27 Snowden absconded with tens of thousands ofNSA documents covering the years 2011, 2012, and 2013. We learn that bymeans of the infamous PRISM and the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT networksthe NSA has been able to tap into Internet servers, satellite-based communica-tions, fiber-optic cables, phone systems, and of course personal computers, withsurprising impunity. In Citizenfour we are informed that in 2013 alone the NSAcollected 124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion pieces of computerdata on unsuspecting targets around the world, including theoretically off-limitsdomestic targets.

The largest of all data behemoths, the NSA respects few boundaries—political,legal, or ethical—in its surveillance operations, especially since 9/11. There are ofcourse limits to exactly how much information the agency can effectively process,much less interpret, but the NSA objective (stated by former director GeneralKeith Alexander) remains what it has traditionally been—to “collect it all”. NotesGreenwald: “Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimatelysimple conclusion: the U.S. government had built a system that has as its goal thecomplete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.”28 To accomplish thisfearsome task, the NSA has built far-reaching “strategic partnerships” with per-haps 80 global corporations, legitimated by the Patriot Act and monitored poorly,


if at all, by Congress, the courts, and a few public watchdogs. The very practiceof secrecy shields the NSA from unwanted public intrusions, including the legalprocess: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) system provides littlemore than the appearance of court approval.

The aforementioned PRISM program, installed by President Bush in 2007 toelevate the War on Terrorism, relies heavily on boundless data-mining shared bythe NSA and corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Apple, alongwith numerous federal and local agencies. Telephone and computer informationcan be simply turned over to the NSA, usually without much legal (or political)fuss. By 2014, moreover, the NSA was pouring resources into the hacking oftargeted computer systems, often using malware to disrupt, infect, or “take over”a troublesome site. Through its Computer Network Exploitation (CNE), theagency is said to have broken into more than 100,000 computer systems world-wide by late 2014.29 Meanwhile, under General Alexander’s relentless leadership,the NSA set up its own Google-style search engine for gathering information onmillions of Americans thought to have some involvement with a terrorist group.A program called ICREACH allows the agency to share huge stores of sensitivedata with myriad intelligence and law-enforcement organizations, some in foreigncountries. The criteria for inclusion in such databases remain excessively broadand ill-defined; further, once someone is placed on a list it can be very difficult tobe removed.

By early 2015 the NSA had secured its status as something of a rogue agencywithin the warfare state, essentially free to pursue its surveillance missions withlittle fear of having to answer for transgressions. Notes Greenwald: “The NSAdoes not need any specific reason or rationale to invade people’s private com-munications.”30 Ominously, the space for serious and repeated civil rights viola-tions expands with each passing year, parallel with the war on terrorism. Mostviolations of privacy—including personal files, watch lists, and no-fly provisions—are clear infringements of the Fourth Amendment, though few supposed freedom-bearers (for example, Tea Party representatives) seem troubled. Obviously, Muslims,Arabs, and others engaged in protest activities comprise by far the most salienttargets of NSA eavesdropping. Among Snowden’s many revelations is the tigh-tening relationship between the NSA and Israeli intelligence groups, concernedwith joint targeting of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—though Bamfordhad explored that connection in A Pretext for War. 31

Since 9/11 federal agencies have stepped up efforts to not only expand controlof information flows but keep the public in the dark about their operations. JamesRisen, in Pay Any Price, refers to an ongoing “war on truth”, adding:

Of all the abuses America has suffered at the hands of the government in itsendless war on terror, possibly the worst has been the war on truth. On theone hand, the executive branch has vastly expanded what it wants to know:something of a vast gathering of previously private truths. On the other


hand, it has ruined lives to stop the public from gaining any insight into itsdark arts, waging a war on truth. It all began at the NSA.32

As Risen notes, hysteria over terrorism has given the NSA and its partners insurveillance greater room to operate, while increasing cyber-attack threats offeryet more opportunities, resulting in a “new cash cow for defense contractors.”33

Clandestine NSA overreach poses sharp questions about the character of poli-tical life in the U.S., especially post-9/11. Where government agencies employtechnology beyond the reach of laws, policies, and conventions, what politicalleverage can ordinary people hope to secure over the machinery of state power?Can the “deep state” of modern communications like that of the NSA, more far-reaching with each technological advance, avoid serving elite domination?Despite earthshaking revelations of Snowden and other whistleblowers like Wil-liam Binney, feeble public resistance to technological powers in the U.S. ispalpable and alarming. Congress, for its part, has done nothing to restrain thejuggernaut, while the Obama administration is apparently rather comfortable withNSS operations that have been attacked as un-Constitutional. Politicians are ever-fearful of being denounced as “soft on terrorism” or “weak on national security”.One problem here is that NSA programs are now so “deep”, so shrouded inmystery, that hardly anyone seems able to penetrate the high-tech fortress enoughto fathom the surveillance complex—much less how to reverse it. And of courseNSA work is highly classified, including even its budget (estimated at more than$20 billion for 2014).

Public scrutiny has always been weak and ineffective when it comes to theNSA. As Citizenfour shows, those recently in charge of agency operations—General Alexander and General James Clapper—have blatantly lied to Congressabout the extent of NSA domestic spying. Internal reforms have been entertainedbut little of substance has changed. In November 2014, meanwhile, VermontSenator Patrick Leahy put forth a bill simply to place limits on NSA access todomestic phone records, a tepid reform that nonetheless failed to muster enoughvotes to cut off debate. The USA Freedom Act, as it was called, was apparentlytoo much for most freedom-loving Republicans, whose celebration of “privacy”and “limited government” vanishes when it comes to mega-data collection theyconsider is needed to fight terrorism.

There is a further question as to whether “deep” surveillance operations can bebrought under popular control by even well-motivated reforms. Progressives havelong embraced the dream of a democratic Internet and related media infused withthe spirit (and content) of electronic populism—allowing for broadened publicgovernance—yet the American power structure has immense advantages intechnological, material, and institutional resources over any potential challenger.The NSA itself, with all its super-computers and integrated global network, caneasily trump lesser organizations, movements, and protest efforts, suggesting thelikelihood of counter-forces strong enough to take on the behemoth would


appear slight. There is one certainty here: those at the summits of power, thosewho manage the security apparatus, have no desire to relinquish the Godlikepowers they wield through a technological arsenal comprised of global listeningposts. Quite the contrary: their messianic goal is to expand that power, to “collectit all”, without the slightest regard for Constitutional or other political and legalrestraints.

At one point in Citizenfour Snowden concedes that technological regulations ofthe fortress within the U.S. (or any individual country) will be checkmated unlessthose regulations become global and systemic—an unlikely scenario given presentinternational conditions. Of course Snowden knows better than most that com-munications technology by its very nature is both ever-changing and unbounded,resisting all temporal boundaries; its very logic is to adapt and expand, resistingbarriers set by mortal politicians. This is emphatically true for “deep” entities likethe NSA, which is fiercely protective of its power, legitimacy, and secrecy. Itfollows that U.S.-initiated reforms, even should Congress overcome a long-standing fear and lethargy, are sure to be neutralized by the time any legislation issigned into law. In the end, government, corporate, and military elites perchedatop the security order will happily continue business-as-usual until challenged bymore powerful counter-forces. Their hegemonic status is much too embedded inthe war economy and security state, which depend as never before on an endlessstream of electronic information, personal tracking, and institutional controls.

A Post-Orwellian Society

As in other spheres of American public life, World War II ushered in a new eraof military intelligence and governmental surveillance—first driven by the historicstruggle against fascism and Nazism, then by the Cold War, later by the War onTerrorism. Before the early 1940s, American intelligence was limited and frag-mented, consuming few resources with little capacity for surveillance. Technol-ogy, after all, was comparatively rudimentary in the 1930s while threats tonational security were scarcely visible; there was nothing akin to an NSS. In1942, war measures called for establishment of the OSS, charged with broadintelligence and surveillance work that would give way eventually to the CIAand NSA, key agencies of the postwar U.S. security apparatus. Although the OSSas such was disbanded in 1945, the task of collecting, storing, and analyzinginformation on foreign (and domestic) threats would fall to a reconstitutedsecurity apparatus.

While the conclusion of World War II seemed to produce a new unipolarworld order made possible by the Axis defeat, the outcome was somewhat dif-ferent: the Cold War was shaped by a growing mood of fear and insecurity overimminent Communist threats emanating from the Soviet Union. To varyingdegrees, this mood has remained ever since, an indispensable feature of the per-manent war system. The more fearsome the threats, however magnified, the


more urgent the need for a powerful NSS. At this juncture a new security com-plex was faced with the task of keeping pace with a constantly-expanding warfarestate. Soon enough the NSS evolved into a self-perpetuating, institutionalized systemof bureaucratic power. Its crucial instruments—covert action, sabotage, surveil-lance, assassinations, sanctions, military interventions—have been widely used byall twelve American presidents since 1945.

The underlying rationale of the most powerful security apparatus ever built isfear of national enemies, whether Nazis or Communists, rogue leaders or insur-gents, terrorists or drug traffickers. The real danger posed by these enemies hasgenerally been far overblown: the U.S. retains the largest military force in theworld, possesses the deadliest nuclear arsenal, is surrounded by water and friendlycountries, and has long managed (aside from 9/11) to preserve its territorialintegrity. Such challenges do of course help legitimate a military-industrial com-plex that brings unimaginable wealth and power to the ruling interests. Thesprawling intelligence and surveillance networks have in fact done little to deterterrorism, especially since U.S. foreign policy gives rise to so much blowbackthrough its very modus operandi. Sweeping postwar NSS operations, obviouslymore ambitious since 9/11, have rarely been forced to target mortal challenges toAmerican territorial integrity. Neither Communism nor terrorism could be thereason the U.S. currently spends on its military power roughly half what the restof the world combined spends. Instead of “national defense”, it makes bettersense to frame this wasteful mobilization of resources as a function of manifestlyU.S. global objectives.

As the cycle of militarism and terrorism escalates, driven by explosive conflictsin the Middle East, the NSS readily keeps its ideological rationale intact. Underthese conditions, the expanded role of technological rationality charted by the-orists like Herbert Marcuse helps to reinforce elite domination while narrowingthe public sphere of political debate and democratic inputs. The same technologythat is indispensable to the security apparatus—indeed the entire warfare state—reinforces a public worship of power, hierarchy, and expertise that works againstcritical thought and oppositional politics. One sign of the times: after many yearsof U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, with repeatedly disastrousoutcomes—and after more than two decades of a counter-productive War onTerrorism, the American public has become increasingly depoliticized, also owingto the corporate colonization of politics. Marcuse’s thesis that technologicalrationality shrinks the “universe of discourse”, giving rise to social and politicalatomization, seems validated by recent history, as the warfare state continuouslyreproduces authoritarian values and structures.34

The NSS behemoth has brought forward powerful images of a dystopianfuture embedded in modes of technology long viewed within the Enlightenmenttradition as a great engine of human progress. One struggles to imagine how aswollen, bureaucratic, parasitic warfare state might ever be compatible with evenmodest levels of participatory citizenship. The deep legacy of liberalism, which


upholds individualism, self-reliance, pluralism, and a lively public sphere, has beenseverely compromised by the steady growth of corporate and military power. AsGiroux writes: “Democracy implies an experience in which power is shared,dialogue is connected to involvement in the public sphere, competency is linkedto intervention, and education enables a public to expand the new technologies,capabilities, and social forms that inform public life.”35 Along with powerlessness,loss of personal autonomy and civil freedoms is the inevitable condition of publiclife in such a society. Meanwhile, the heady promise of national security andsocial welfare made possible by massive intelligence and surveillance operations islikely to bring just the opposite—heightened mass fear, insecurity, and disillusion-ment, further aggravated by the devastating cycle of militarism and terrorism in aHobbesian world.

Notes

1 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of InvertedTotalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 32.

2 Garry Wills, Bomb Power, p. 99.3 Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David MacKay, 1976), pp. 108–10.4 Richard Walton, Cold War and Counterrevolution, p. 233.5 Robert Aldridge, First Strike!, p. 256.6 In 1980, the year before Ronald Reagan entered the White House, U.S. military

spending stood at $407 billion. In his last year in office (1988), that number increasedto $603 billion—or roughly 30 percent of total federal expenditures. Clearly, Reaganwas no real advocate of small government. See www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data.

7 See Dilip Hiro, Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (New York: Nation Books, 2002), p. 108.8 Wills, Bomb Power, p. 239.9 Ibid., p. 132.10 Ibid., p. 107.11 Ibid., p. 133.12 Peter Irons, War Powers (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2005), p. 269.13 Cited in Wills, pp. 193–94.14 Ibid., p. 219.15 Nick Turse, The Complex (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008), p. 35.16 See Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis, p. 95.17 Turse, The Complex, p. 270.18 Ibid., p. 255.19 See www.nationalpriorities.com (2014).20 James Risen, Pay Any Price (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), p. 216.21 Ibid., p. 203.22 Los Angeles Times ( January 7, 2015).23 Christian Parenti, Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror

(New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 9.24 Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014), p. 169.25 For an excellent analysis of the modern surveillance society, see Henry Giroux,

“Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State”, Truth-Out (February10, 2014).

26 James Bamford, The Shadow Factory (New York: Doubleday, 2008).27 Greenwald, No Place to Hide, p. 90.28 Ibid., p. 94.


http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data

http://www.nationalpriorities.com

29 Ibid., p. 116–17.30 Ibid., p. 141.31 See James Bamford, A Pretext for War (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), pp. 404–22.32 Risen, Pay Any Price, p. 230.33 Ibid., p. 265.34 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 157–59.35 See Giroux, “Totalitarian Paranoia”, in Truth-Out.


6THE ROAD TO GLOBAL DISASTER?

The guiding motif of preceding chapters is that World War II drasticallychanged everything, forever—its continuing repercussions yet to be fullyunderstood or played out. Consequences of the ultimate Good War, fought todestroy the evils of fascism and Nazism, would be simultaneously global anddomestic, cultural as well as economic, political, and military. As discussedearlier, the Good War unleashed forces that would constitute a new historicalmatrix: systematic warfare against civilians, invention and use of the Bomb,rise of technowar, normalization of global conflict, media spectacles of deathand destruction, the Holocaust, full-scale societal mobilization for war. For theU.S., the immediate postwar years brought a thriving war economy, expandingsecurity state, an empire of bases, and a Cold War leading eventually to thegeneral militarization of society. Hovering over the landscape, of course, wasthe dreaded (but also cherished) atomic bomb, a super weapon capable ofdestroying much if not all of human civilization within minutes. More than ahalf-century later, the American warfare state would still be robust, a site ofapocalyptic possibilities in a world of escalating militarism, blowback, andterrorism.

In a great twist of historical irony, some defining characteristics of the defeatedfascist enemy—authoritarian state power, corporate oligarchy, militarism, imperi-alism, racism—would find their way into the American power structure, locus ofwhat has become the most awesome war machine in history. As the Good Warhad been the most popular of all U.S. military engagements, its barbarism(including above all use of the Bomb) was broadly accepted and even celebrated.As the Good War gave way to the Cold War, any ultimate sense of “closure”that might have comes with the Allied victory never arrived, as a mood ofuncertainty, fear, and paranoia swept American society.

Massive changes that followed the unspeakable horrors of World War II gainedtraction with the onset of the Cold War, consolidation of the warfare state, andthreat of nuclear Armageddon that increased once the Soviets developed theirown atomic weaponry. The appearance of what might be called “noir culture” inthe late 1940s—rooted in an emergent and influential film tradition but havingfar greater social relevance—was hardly a coincidence. If the war had indeedgiven rise to some of the darkest currents of American life, then noir was surelyone of its enduring cultural expressions. Nicholas Christopher, writing in Some-where in the Night, comments: “In 1945, it is as if the war, and the social eruptionsin its aftermath, unleashed demons that had been bottled up in the national psyche.”1

Those “demons” would inhabit an urban milieu rife with violence, crime, socialbreakdown, poverty, and corruption—all exacerbated by the militarization ofAmerican life.

Christopher refers to an expanding dark underside of American society, ende-mic to a postwar urban condition where an orderly and functioning surfacecity—the very repository of an enlightened modernity—only thinly concealed“its shadow, the nether-city, rife with darker impulses and forbidden currents, aworld of violence and chaos.”2 A similar mood swept across Europe (notablyFrance) during and immediately after World War II, deepening the popularity ofsuch existential philosophers as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone deBeauvoir, and Andre Gide.3 It was a universe where the rationalized structuresand processes theorized by the sociologist Max Weber would coexist uneasilywith the anarchic disorder imagined centuries earlier by the political theoristThomas Hobbes. It was as if World War II had never been fully brought to aclose.

The pervading “normalcy” of postwar American life was riddled with theviolence, chaos, corruption, and myriad forms of criminal behavior that seemedto emanate from so much of the wartime experience. World War II had intro-duced patterns of military behavior—saturation bombing of cities, indiscriminateattacks on civilians, racist atrocities, use of inhumane weapons, vicious propaganda—that in surface American discourse had been deemed rather taboo. Noir culturegave cinematic representation to a ruthless and violent capitalism, crime sprees,gun mania, and a power structure riddled with corruption. As the U.S. emergedin 1945 as the most powerful nation (and empire) the world had ever known, itwas also saturated with a culture of warfare in the midst of growing domesticprosperity and the supposed benefits of international hegemony. The associatedfear and paranoia, consistent with film noir itself, reflected “a hostile environmentthat has been shaped to a great degree, physically and spiritually, by one ofhistory’s most ‘uncivilized’ acts: Hiroshima.”4

Postwar America would become the setting of fearsome new enemies, demo-nic monsters that would require both domestic and international vigilance. Notsurprisingly, fear and anxiety would be leading motifs of Hollywood moviesrevolving around a narrative of Good against Evil—not in only combat pictures

152 The Road to Global Disaster?

but in Western, sci-fi, horror, crime, and action/adventure films—resonant withthe larger political culture. The need to fight Reds, to dispose of villains por-trayed as monstrous and ubiquitous, became a staple of public discourse, under-pinning a permanent war economy, security apparatus, empire of bases, andnuclear arsenal placed on first-strike alert. The capacity to project enormousmilitary firepower would become central to national identity, reinforced by anarrogant U.S. exceptionalism with deep roots in American history. In Christo-pher’s words: “Nuclear weapons are not just a manifestation of political impulsesand supposed military imperatives: they are a product of our culture.”5 It was thisawesome nuclear power, originating in the seminal Manhattan Project, thatendowed American global presence with its Godlike character.

This stubbornly dystopic side of American history—including its wartimelegacy—was embedded in violence even as politicians, Democrats and Repub-licans alike, would uphold entirely idealized visions of peace and order. It was aviolence unchained, moreover: unlimited, modernized, more lethal with thepassing of time. Technowar would be, in the final reckoning, one of the mostdurable legacies of World War II. And what could be more unlimited,“modern”, and lethal than the two atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan?What could be more barbaric? In fact the area-bombing campaigns the U.S.waged against Germany and Japan, incinerating entire cities, would come close tothe super-weapon in its potential for indiscriminate destruction. Christopherwrites: “The fact that the Second World War was the most mechanized—andbrutal—in history provided an inflammatory wellspring for fears about the [post-war] city as destroyer … fanned by the automation of warfare—guided missiles,‘smart’ bombs, computer-directed ballistic missiles—and the terror it inflicts uponurban civilians.”6 Could this pervasive legacy of death and destruction fail to leaveits horrible imprint on postwar America?

After World War II, the modern city became a labyrinth of turbulence,alienation, poverty, and violence—the “dark” side of American life gaining newthrust with each escalation of the Cold War, warfare state, and nuclear arms race.The threat of imminent nuclear catastrophe was especially sharp during the 1950s,the very decade of peak anti-Communist hysteria. All this was dramatically cap-tured by film noir classics of the period, from Gun Crazy (1950) to Touch of Evil(1958)—later followed by such dystopian movies as Taxi Driver (1976), Chinatown(1977), Blade Runner (1982), and Pulp Fiction (1995). More than anything, suchcinematic narratives illustrated a steadily disintegrating social and political orderwhere surface norms of democracy, order, and progress barely concealed anunderlying reality of chaos and violence. After 1945, it would always be a “tale oftwo cities”.

In the aftermath of World War II, the spectacle of mass death and destruction—increasingly visible in American media culture—would take on new meaning in asociety where military power was closely aligned with growth, modernity, andprogress, not to mention national identity and power. Technology, expertise, and

The Road to Global Disaster? 153

efficiency would likewise be crucial factors behind U.S. military supremacy;new episodes of savage warfare—in Korea, Indochina, Central America, Iraq—would in fact have little unsettling effect on the national psyche, leaving aside theover-inflated “Vietnam Syndrome”. A federal government shrouded in deceitand secrecy would likewise assume a veneer of routine and normalcy.

What might be referred to as an iron cage of militarism became a definingfeature of postwar American politics, extending to the present: the warfare stateflourishes, propelled by growth-driven military Keynesianism. The proposed2015 warfare-state budget—for the Pentagon, intelligence, homeland security,war on drugs, and related programs—easily surpasses one trillion dollars, far abovepeak Cold War levels (roughly $400 billion at 2015 levels) of 1965 and 1985.7

While Congressional Republicans were demanding a “more robust defense”, thisexpenditure dwarfed what other, reputedly hostile, nations were spending: Chinaat $112 billion, Russia at $68 billion, Iran at $17 billion, North Korea at $6.2billion.8 As of 2015, moreover, the U.S. remained the only country in the worldwith an extended military presence outside its borders, including nucleardeployments in Europe and elsewhere, naval forces across the seas, a string ofbases adjacent to Russia and Iran, and dozens of CIA and NSA sites as launchingpads for surveillance and covert operations. Any strictly military or “defense”rationale for such extravagant allocation of human, technical, and natural resources—both wasteful and destructive in the extreme—has never been persuasively setforth.

The warfare state is now so deeply embedded in American public life thatideological supports are virtually automatic, for both elites and the generalpopulation—across the hegemonic political spectrum. A powerful and nearly-monolithic consensus has been disturbed only briefly, during the Vietnam Warera of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the sixties movements raised funda-mental questions about the nature and purpose of U.S. global power. Aside frombrief interludes of antiwar protest (as in early 2003, just before the Iraq invasion),U.S. military interventions have continued, often for many years, mostly unde-terred by popular opposition. The Cold War was in fact universally acceptedby the American public, among Democrats and Republicans alike. One expla-nation lies in the great appeal of American patriotism, bolstered by a nationalexceptionalism that reached its heyday during World War II. A deeperexplanation lies in the huge material advantage that both corporations and muchof the workforce derives from military Keynesianism. Seymour Melman,insightful critic of “Pentagon capitalism”, has observed: “Military spending,though wasteful in some respects, is beneficial waste on the whole. The eco-nomic benefit is to be measured in terms of short-term job creation and incomeflow.”9 This system generates super profits for hundreds of Pentagon contractorsand subcontractors which have long been integral to the war economy. Melmanadds:


In a permanent war economy military activity is large and continuing, andmilitary products are counted as ordinary economic goods. We live in awarfare state in which civilian and military boundaries have been fading, andmilitary matters have a dominant role in public life.10

What Melman noted in the mid-1980s (and earlier) remains even more pervasivetoday.

Since the warfare state has become so firmly institutionalized, opposition to ithas been nearly impossible to sustain. Antiwar or “peace” mobilizations, forexample, typically seize on momentary events such as wars, rarely going so far asto address the structural foundations of the war economy, security state, andempire of bases. Protests thus recurrently come and go, leaving the warfarefoundations completely intact. To this point Melman argues:

A peace movement in such a society can no longer limit itself to criticism ofdirect military combat. For this is no isolated condition but rather the con-tinuous consequence of the dominant role of the war making institutions inpublic life.11

To have enduring consequences, therefore, antiwar mobilizations will have totarget the main centers of power, but this has scarcely been the postwar modusoperandi for such movements.

Meanwhile, the very authoritarian character of military institutions and culturehas produced a steady erosion of liberal-democratic politics—a trend long agoanalyzed by C. Wright Mills, who identified a power elite detached from theflow of popular interests and demands, mired in an insular “higher immorality”.12

Writing in the late 1950s, Mills wrote of a system overtaken by the corporate andmilitary interests that had expanded dramatically at the time of World War II.Such concentrated domestic power would be endemic to what Robert J. Liftonwould later call the “superpower syndrome”, fueled not only by the warfare statebut by a Pentagon strategy of nuclear supremacy. It was nukes, after all—by farthe largest arsenal of warheads—that would endow postwar Washington withunlimited, doomsday military force, rendering it virtually unchallengeable. Forthe U.S., as Lifton notes, nukes evolved into the main “currency of power”,whether that power was overt or hidden.13

If World War II introduced the Bomb to Japan and the rest of the world, italso gave rise to more general features of technowar, including high-poweredaerial terrorism. With nuclear capabilities perforce held in abeyance, the U.S.would find opportunities to unleash its massive air force on several countries,leaving a horrendous toll of civilian casualties in Korea, Indochina, Panama,Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Viewed thusly technowar emerged as indeedthe more concrete, immediate “currency of power”—the most awesome expres-sion of modernity. Consistent with the dazzling spectacles unveiled in the media


and popular culture, Washington would introduce its aerial killing machine withincreasing fury from Korea to Iraq.14 Despite official claims of precision bombing,such warfare was directed not only against military targets but against civilianpopulations, public infrastructures, and related objects. In most cases the capacityof far weaker nations to defend against such technowar was feeble to nonexistent,as already had been the case with Japan at the end of World War II.

The explosive combination of imperial power and technowar has allowed theU.S. to operate freely within the parameters of Mills’ “higher immorality”—thatis, to attack targeted enemies anywhere in the world with relative safety andminimum risks. The Gods of technowar have permitted American ruling elites tocarry out their wars with impunity, as they operate by means of remotely-guidedmissiles, smart bombs, drones, and other high-tech weaponry—usually directedagainst those with weakened defenses, especially where attacks were preceded byeconomic sanctions (as in the Balkans and Iraq). Viewed thusly, the most pow-erful war machine in history is able to move according to its own insular logic.This is nothing but the product of a dark, violent, ruthless politics and culturethat, as we have seen, achieved is first systematic expression during World War II.

From Communism to jihadic terrorism, the postwar years have witnessed aperpetual recycling of wars to vanquish demonic enemies, whose very modusvivendi was supposedly to destroy freedom and democracy. The warfare statethrives on a ready supply of monsters, especially those with dark skins, mostlyinhabitants of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Here, oddly enough, thetechnowar embellished by the superpower and the imputed savagery of villainousOthers are tightly linked, the former needed not merely to extinguish the latterbut to justify its very existence. The more brutal the enemy, the clearer therationale for all-out war of the sort that legitimated the Good War. Since 9/11,of course, the target has been Arab or Muslim-based terrorism with roots in theMiddle East.

Such political demonization, filtered through a complex propaganda systemembedded in government, the military, media, think tanks, and public-relationsfirms, has fueled the warfare state since 1945. It reached more extreme levels atthe time of the Gulf War (1990–91), when Iraq—erstwhile U.S. ally—was tar-geted as an especially barbaric villain, deserving comparison with the Nazis, aready object of media hysteria, public fear, and patriotic mobilization. DesertStorm reached an especially brutal end in spring 1991, with a systematic high-tech massacre along the “Highway of Death”, where tens of thousands ofretreating Iraqi civilians and military personnel were trapped and annihilated byU.S. aerial bombardment. One preferred method of attack, then and later, wasApache helicopters armed with laser-guided Hellfire missiles. Doug Kellner writesof a savagery that:

stands out as an example of systematic extermination and is the perfectexpression of technocratic war … by wiping out anything that moves … [the


result of] the massive production of death and extermination of the Iraqimilitary and whoever happened to be in the way of the U.S. Armada ofWinged Death.”15

Such indiscriminate mass killing carried out by a vastly-superior military force wasof course widespread during World War II, and then recycled by the U.S. inKorea and Indochina. For Iraq and the Middle East, the Desert Storm nightmarewould precede yet another two decades of military assaults, with massive civiliancasualties—laying the groundwork for blowback on an unprecedented scale.

These events only reinforced deep trends already at work in American societytoward concentrated government, military, and corporate power. As regionalpowers concerned mainly with some measure of independence from great-powerdomination, both Iraq and Iran would provide convenient targets for war plan-ners at the White House and the Pentagon. With a drastic narrowing of demo-cratic leverage over foreign policy, elites could sustain maximum flexibility inpursuit of ambitious geopolitical objectives. Sooner or later, democratic politicswas destined to erode in the face of mounting national chauvinism, militarism,and (by the late 1990s) blowback.

While fascism was of course defeated and overthrown at the end of WorldWar II, its main constituent elements—the ideological matrix of political regimesin Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere—seem to have resurfaced begin-ning in the 1990s, perhaps most visibly in the U.S. What might be called the“fascist equivalent” can nowadays be located within certain liberal-democraticsystems, not outside, a departure from the more extreme authoritarianism ofclassical fascism, where dictatorship, state power, and a strong leader were glor-ified. As Roger Griffin writes in The Nature of Fascism, the classical ideologyupheld militarism and war as a source of national regeneration and identity—vitalto collective rebirth against forces of evil and decay. Warfare facilitated a unifyingpatriotic myth-making replete with grandiose visions of national triumph andglorification of the “Volk” or “popolini”—that Griffin subsumes under the con-cept “palingenetic nationalism”.16 For historical fascism, this meant a movement,party, and regime fighting to overcome humiliating defeats and failures of thepast, with decadence transformed into renewal, weakness into strength, frag-mentation into unity. In many ways the fascism that emerged in Europe betweenthe two world wars gave birth to the first modern warfare state.

The ideological syndrome that Griffin identifies as basic to earlier fascistexperience has surfaced, in different expressions, within American society sincethe 1990s, if not before, as such critics as Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolinargue.17 With the American warfare state having solidified its dynamic rolewithin the political landscape, strong currents of authoritarianism, militarism,imperialism, and racism were sure to be strengthened—precisely what definedearlier incarnations of fascism. In each case, moreover, a corporate oligarchyfound fertile terrain, aligned with the state and military. In both cases an


aggressive foreign policy would target “inferior” groups (Slavs and Jews, Muslimsand Arabs). In each case, further, militarism became a “way of life” reshapingvirtually every realm of society, as mortal enemies pervaded the global anddomestic scenes. As for the U.S., several factors underpinned this fascistic evolu-tion: the “Vietnam Syndrome”, fear of global decline, the rise of jihadic terrorism(blowback) surrounding the 9/11 events. From the 1990s onward, the U.S. wasapparently in the throes of its own “palingenetic” moment, best reflected inmedia culture by the Rambo phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s—the machowarrior, defying all obstacles and setbacks, bent on national revenge, rebirth, andvictory (getting to “win this time” in Vietnam).

Within the dominant public sphere, corporations and the military were able toincreasingly colonize space for political activity, setting clear limits to electioncampaigns, legislative debate, and governmental policy-making. Political languageoften recalled the mood of World War II, focused on Japanese treachery at PearlHarbor, opposition to “appeasement”, racial fear-mongering, a struggle of Goodagainst Evil. The media fully embellished this mood, visible in such films as Argo,ZeroDarkThirty, and American Sniper, not to mention the routine flow of Holly-wood movies and video games celebrating military conflict.18 And of course thewar on terrorism, signaling a crucial turn in U.S. foreign policy, would furtherdeepen this political culture.

A leading superpower with a readiness to intervene militarily anywhere waslikely to create the ideal conditions for blowback, resistance to American globalpower. As virulently conservative interests in the U.S. solidify their power andwealth, the thrust of national exceptionalism—embraced by the Tea Party, neo-cons, and large sectors of the military and intelligence establishment—continuesto guide American geopolitical behavior. In its stealthy, high-tech pursuit ofglobal supremacy, Washington pushes against constraints on its foreign and mili-tary goals, evident in its frequent contempt for U.N. resolutions, the NuclearNon-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), International Criminal Court (ICC), and var-ious Geneva protocols, not to mention its unwavering support of Israel. Interna-tional law turns out to be an impediment to U.S. imperial goals, rather than thefoundation of a peaceful world order.19

The concept of “blowback”, first systematically outlined by Chalmers Johnsonin his book Blowback (2000), captures the overriding logic of explosive interna-tional conflict today—and, with it, a possible road to extended warfare engulfingseveral nations. While often mentioned, Johnson’s seminal argument remainspoorly articulated in the U.S. today, where the resonant culture of imperialismblocks clarity and understanding. For Johnson, blowback (typically framed assome type of terrorism) stems from operations of “an empire based on the pro-jection of military power to every corner of the world and on the use of Amer-ican capital and markets to force global economic integration on our terms, atwhatever costs to others.”20 Most Americans, even nowadays, seem completelyunaware that Washington is at the center of a global system of economic and


military domination. As Johnson notes, “there is a logic to empire that differsfrom the logic of a nation, and acts committed in service to an empire but neveracknowledged as such have a tendency to haunt the future,” Johnson adding:“What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turns out to be blowback fromearlier American operations.”21 Even before the events of 9/11, Johnson couldwrite that: “what U.S. officials denounce as unprovoked terrorist attacks on itsinnocent citizens are often meant as retaliation for previous American imperialactions.” Further: “All around the world today it is possible to see the ground-work being laid for future forms of blowback.” At the time, Johnson notedominously but correctly: “Blowback itself can lead to more blowback, in a spiralof destructive behavior.”22

Several years later, in Nemesis, Johnson could write, consistent with his initialthesis:

[After 9/11 m]any Americans began to ask—as President Bush did—‘Whydo they hate us?’ The answer was not that some countries [or groups] hate usbecause of our democracy, wealth, lifestyle, or values but because of thingsour government did to various people around the world. The counterblowsdirected against Americans seem, of course, as out of the blue as those air-planes on that September morning because most Americans have no frame-work that would link cause and effect. The terrorist attacks of September 11are the clearest examples of blowback in modern international relations.23

As Johnson indicates here and elsewhere, the sources of blowback are to be foundin both Washington and the Middle East—above all in the U.S. destruction ofIraq that began in 1990–91. Sadly, however, the political and media establish-ments have managed to divert public attention from the worst consequences ofU.S. global behavior—notably, its contributions to jihadic terrorism and otherforms of anti-imperial resistance that in fact were largely invisible before DesertStorm. Such is the ideological power of national exceptionalism.

If blowback assumes multiple expressions—terrorism, insurgency, sabotage,rogue operations—its origins are to be found mainly, if not solely, in oneimposing quarter: U.S. imperial power, with an important assist from Israel. Overthe past quarter century, blowback has derived in great measure from Americaninterventions in Iraq: two wars, harsh economic sanctions, bombing campaigns,occupation, and post-occupation military operations. After spending an estimatedfive trillion dollars on these accumulated offenses, Washington left a once-vibrantcountry in economic and political ruins, a dysfunctional society overcome bychaos and anarchy, immersed in religious and ethnic strife, and lacking cohesivepolitical institutions. The full casualty total will probably never be known, butestimates of 1.4 million killed, four million wounded, and 4.5 million displacedwould probably not be too exaggerated.24


Some Iraqi cities and towns—for example, Falluja—were turned into rubble,resembling modern Stalingrads, as U.S. occupying forces used maximum armedpower to crush local insurgencies. In Falluja and elsewhere, the supposedly “lib-erating” military used depleted uranium, napalm, anti-personnel bombs, whitephosphorous, and intense bombing raids. Civilians were targeted, directly orindirectly, being indistinguishable from “terrorists”. Tens of thousands of Iraqiswere harassed, detained, incarcerated, and tortured at centers dispersed around thecountry (not only at Abu Ghraib). While (illegally) dismantling Iraqi economicand governing institutions, the U.S. installed a puppet government that largelyexcluded Sunni participation while giving special power to the Shia and Kurdishpopulations.

As early as 2004, American forces were facing widespread, and increasinglyfierce, resistance across Iraq—above all in overwhelmingly Sunni areas north andwest of Baghdad. Such resistance was fueled by U.S. moves to completely dis-mantle the governmental and military structures associated with Saddam Hussein.Such were the dynamics of blowback that were well along even before the 2003invasion (a response to both Desert Storm and more than a decade of harsh U.S.-imposed sanctions). The occupation forces sought to quell opposition by imposinga harsh regimen of detentions, torture, and executions that was orchestrated bythe CIA, Army, and Special Police commandos that had more or less free reignover the Iraqi landscape. As U.S. troops were hit with increasing numbers ofattacks—reaching as many as 150 daily by 2006—this regimen was intensified,basically guaranteeing further local hatred and blowback. High-tech violence wasunleashed by Washington to crush “terrorism”, mostly to no avail. Mass arrestscombined with both police and military atrocities escalated from 2004 to 2008,while several major cities (including Ramadi, Falluja, Mosul) remained largelyoutside the sphere of American occupation, a bulwark of what would laterbecome Islamic State (ISIS). More than a decade after the disastrous U.S. invasionof a sovereign nation, weakened and unthreatening, the prevailing Americandiscourse is that Iraq has simply been overrun by “terrorists” and “extremists”driven by “sectarian violence”.

By 2014, Washington was confronted with an insuperable quandary—allowblowback to run its course while ISIS continued to expand, or become moremilitarily engaged (possibly with troops on the ground) with the predictableoutcome of heightened blowback. During 2014–15 the U.S. was spending tensof billions of dollars to provide a new Iraqi army with sophisticated weapons,vehicles, and facilities, only to see everything vanish in the midst of an advancingISIS and retreating local forces. In fact ISIS was able to bolster its own militarystrength by capturing vast stocks of weapons and ammunition along with hum-vees, trucks, anti-tank guns, and artillery pieces—military strength further galva-nized by the group’s extensive popular support among the Sunni population,which allowed for the relatively easy capture of Mosul, Ramadi, Falluja, andother cities. The American response? Pour in more resources and send more


military “advisers” in the futile hope that U.S.-supported troops could somehowemerge victorious, that the logic of blowback might eventually be broken.

Such blowback had intensified even after the Obama administration moved towithdraw U.S. military forces and private contractors. The legacy of bloodyethnic strife, insurgency, and terrorism would forever be an outgrowth of U.S.military intervention: according to Iraq Body Count, no fewer than 17,000 civi-lians were killed in 2014 alone.25 Iraq might never fully recover from unimagin-able destruction endured at the hands of an imperial power driven by itslongstanding economic and geopolitical objectives. The ongoing horrors ofAmerican-instigated warfare in that country would be hard to over-state, espe-cially in the midst of seemingly endless strife, violence, breakdown, and insur-gency. The American public remains in the dark about what their military hasdone to a nation that was attacked recklessly and illegally; surely little attentionhas been paid to that savagery in the corporate media. The prevailing narrative isthat Middle Eastern violence and terrorism is a function of “ethnic strife” andjihadic tendencies that go back many centuries. To date no U.S. government ormilitary leader has been held legally accountable for what must be considered theworst war crimes of the twenty-first century.

Blowback from years of economic, political, and military assault is of courseeasily understood by Iraqis—and surely by most Arabs and Muslims in theregion—even though, as noted, the American public remains clueless, most stillbelieving that any opposition to the U.S. must come from jealousy over Amer-ican affluence and freedoms. Meanwhile, Iraq-centered blowback flourishes inthe rapid growth of jihadic groups, including al Qaeda and ISIS, which has takenover large areas of Iraq and Syria while expanding into Yemen and North Africa.Americans are both astonished and outraged in the face of such developments,especially as the groups recruit many thousands of militants and supporters fromthe region as well as Europe and North America.

Those outraged at the brutality of groups like ISIS and al Qaeda seem willfullyunaware that such groups never appear in a political vacuum; they follow alogic, which stems from the truism that acts of brutality—especially wheninflicted from alien cultures—inevitably generate acts of brutality in response.Modernized weapons of death hardly go unnoticed by their victims, or at leastthe survivors. Of course resistance to war, militarism, and repression occupies anentirely different moral framework than the decision to inflict such brutality inthe first place. Everyone, it appears, understands this dynamic perfectly when itcomes to the European-wide resistance to the Nazis during World War II: whatmight nowadays be described as “terrorism” swept countries like Italy and France,where hundreds of thousands of partisans fought not only the Nazis but theirmany civilian collaborators, whose fate involved torture, murder, and otherhorrors.

The reality is that for every U.S. (or British or Israeli) bombing raid and missileattack, new sympathizers and militants spontaneously appear—and during 2015


those raids and attacks were on the increase, meaning new blowback would feedoff earlier blowback, as Johnson had predicted. The deadly cycle of Westernmilitarism and jihadic terrorism, endemic to blowback, seems more irreversiblewith each passing year. Horrified by reports of large-scale jihadic violence,including beheadings, the American mass public—after many years of anti-Muslim media images—has been deluded into thinking that new, more aggressivemilitary actions will solve the problem. On the contrary: history suggests that,given the logic of blowback, such actions (as noted above) can only dramaticallyworsen the problem.

The standard narrative in American political and media culture is that jihadicgroups associated with Middle-East based terrorism are pure, undistilled evil—that people attracted to such groups must be brainwashed. Terrorism, accord-ingly, is driven by nothing more than irrational hatred, pathological violence.Once blowback dynamics are taken into account, however, the appeals of jihad-ism, not only in the Middle East but elsewhere, can be understood as a normalfunction of political motivation. Recent objects of hatred, vilification, and dis-crimination in many societies, Muslims often face alienation and oppression in theWest, feeding resistance. Causes of blowback include not only violence againstMuslim nations and communities perpetrated by the U.S. and Israel, but wide-spread disenchantment of Muslim populations across Europe and North America.Since the 1990s Muslims in such urban centers as London, Berlin, Paris, NewYork, and Chicago have experienced some degree of radicalization, many grav-itating toward what the leading narrative refers to as “extremism”. Tens ofthousands of Muslims respond to calls—often through social media—foradventure, duty, and sacred commitment, what is called “making hijra”.

Muslims often feel that Western countries are openly at war with their religionand culture—something reflected in movies, TV shows, video games, and ofcourse daily news reports. In her Rolling Stone article, “Teenage Jihad”, JanetReitman explores the great depths of alienation felt by young Muslims in Chi-cago, where many respond enthusiastically to jihadic messages on social media,one girl quoted as saying: “I simply cannot sit here and let my brothers and sistersget killed with my hard-earned money.”26 Like thousands of Islamic teenagers inthe U.S. and Europe, she connects with other, similarly alienated Muslimsthrough Internet sites including Facebook. According to Omer Mozaffar, anIslamic scholar at Loyola University in Chicago: “If you’re a Muslim-Americanteenager, America has been at war with the Muslims for as long as you’vebeen conscious. That’s just the frame around how they see the world.”27 In thiscontext, President Obama’s familiar reference to a “war of ideas” in the struggleagainst jihadic terrorism is bound to fall on deaf ears. It is precisely in the realm ofideas—which cannot obscure the massive violence that the U.S. and Israel (oftenwith European backing) bring to the Muslim world—that Western initiatives aredestined to fail. The more such violence continues, the greater the expanse anddepth of future blowback.


The U.S. imperial agenda now thoroughly infects both the political and pop-ular culture. A recent case in point: the 2015 blockbuster movie American Sniper(directed by Clint Eastwood), which depicts the supposedly heroic exploits of amass killer in Iraq. Within two weeks of release the film garnered more than $200million in revenue, also winning consistently high critical praise along with sev-eral Oscar nominations. In his Truthdig commentary on the movie, Chris Hedgeswrites:

American Sniper lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gunculture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have the innateright as a ‘Christian’ nation to exterminate the ‘lesser breeds’ of the earth, agrotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity.28

He likens the picture to Nazi propaganda which “exalts deformed values ofmilitarism, racial self-glorification, and state violence.” Reflecting on thedynamics of blowback, Hedges adds: “The movie never asks the seminal questionas to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the first place.” Thereis, of course, a further, more probing question: by what political, legal, or ethicalrationale could Americans be justified in attacking, occupying, and destroying acountry that never posed even the remotest threat to their national security?

American Sniper shows the trigger man, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, as fighting anepic crusade against evildoing Muslims, who in the case of Iraq had nothing to dowith 9/11 and had no arsenal of WMD. The Muslims in question never joinedthe ranks of “insurgents” or “terrorists” until after the U.S. had invaded anddestroyed their country. In Kyle’s world, all Iraqis were inhuman “savages” whofully deserved to be eradicated, Nazi-style. Throughout the film Eastwood carriesforward precisely the same message, never pausing to consider the outrageousillegality and immorality of the war itself. In Hedges’ words:

Mothers and sisters in Iraq don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqiwomen breed to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osamabin Ladens. Not one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted—man, woman,or child. They are beasts.29

From this vantage point, the readiness to glorify militarism and war—to embellishviolence as national catharsis in the legacy of Rambo—becomes virtuallyautomatic.

According to Kyle—and presumably Eastwood—the ritual killing of unsus-pecting Iraqis from windows and rooftops was more than a military obligation; itwas an exhilarating, thrilling mission. The U.S. went to Iraq to fight pure evil. Inhis memoir, the sniper wrote: “That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s whya lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages’. I only wish I hadkilled more.” Kyle obviously viewed all Iraqis as the “enemy”. The film exalts


him as a courageous figure—good Christian, loving husband and father as well asexpert marksman, though understandably facing enormous stress after four tours ofduty in Iraq. Following the 1980s example of films about the VietnamWar, AmericanSniper duly focuses on the homefront—on traumas suffered by invading Americantroops rather than the much greater horrors endured by their victims. After all,basic to imperial culture is that all opposition to U.S. military force must be“Godless”, evil, irrational. In the midst of such exaltation of Kyle’s murderousdeeds Hedges concludes: “The innate barbarity that war and violence breed isjustified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag, and a pervertedChristianity that blesses its armed crusaders.”30

In fighting and destroying “savages” in Iraq—and elsewhere in the MiddleEast—the killing of defenseless civilians (whose primary concern is to protecttheir own families and communities) is conveniently justified. No argument needbe set forth: Americans naturally stand for freedom and progress, even if othersfail to grasp the fundamental truth. American Sniper was turned by the mediasystem into a simultaneous cultural and political event. As the film appearedbefore rapturous audiences, dramatizing how Kyle was revered in both life anddeath, Iraqi society was descending into further chaos and violence, blowback onthe rise. One wonders how many Americans could make any connectionbetween this celebrated movie and events on the ground in Iraq. While U.S. airstrikes were delivering harsh blows to insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, Syria,Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, with inevitable civilian casualties, episodes ofviolent resistance were simply on the upswing: recorded incidents of rebellion(totaling some 1,500 in 2000) have escalated to more than 10,000 in 2014.31

Meanwhile, the warfare state has become such an institutionalized fixture ofAmerican society that any significant departure from an aggressive militarismseems implausible. Still infected with an ethos of perpetual war, the nation—andnot only its elites—remains addicted to armed combat in foreign countries. Thisis not strictly a matter of economic interests and political objectives, but resonatesacross the popular culture, reflected in the great mass appeal of a film like Amer-ican Sniper. As Henry Giroux observes: “Violence in American society hasbecome its heartbeat and nervous system, paralyzing ideology, policy, andgovernance, if not the very idea of politics.”32

Since 9/11 there have been few American politicians or government officialsprepared to grasp the cycle of militarism and terrorism, imperial assault and jihadicresistance. Consistent with the narrative of American Sniper (and comparablemovies like Argo), “terrorism” will always be the work of evildoers bereft ofhumanity, devoid of ordinary human motives and desires. Any politician hopingto get elected, or remain in office, must accept this simplistic discourse. ThusHillary Clinton, presidential candidate and likely Democratic nominee for 2016,said in early 2015: “The values of tolerance and openness, those were the valuesunder assault in Paris. [Referring to the Charlie Hebdo massacre.] It is not just amatter of law enforcement or military action. We are in a contest of idea and


values”, reaffirming again the “clash of civilizations” thesis. “We must fight thedistorted and dangerous strain of extremism within the Muslim world.” Inopposition to the new barbaric upsurge, she adds, the U.S. maintains an enligh-tened outlook based on human rights, rule of law, international diplomacy, andof course democracy. A rabid supporter of U.S. interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan,and Libya, Clinton intoned:

Let me underscore the importance of the United States continuing to lead inthe Middle East, in North Africa, and around the world … the United Statesis the most extraordinary force for peace and progress the world has everknown.33

Such fiction would be rather amusing were it not almost universally shared by theAmerican public, which is woefully uninformed about U.S. imperialist warslaunched in its name. More ominously yet, such exceptionalist “ideas and values”are precisely those which fuel new cycles of militarism and terrorism, in Iraq andelsewhere. Even as fear and hysteria over growth of ISIS and kindred groupsmount, similar fear and hysteria—familiar staple of the warfare state—festers overthe contrived Iranian threat.

It has been said that the war on terrorism, which actually strengthens every-thing its architects claim to be fighting, has become a sort of virus that infectsentire societies. The “war”, in other words, is not only a matter of foreign andmilitary-policy decisions, but encompasses an outlook dictated by fear, hatred,anger, and paranoia. After 9/11, the U.S. and Israel have essentially fused intoone geopolitical entity on the global stage, pursuing Middle Eastern hegemonyagainst all challengers—and those challengers, of course, are uniformly Muslim,defined as “jihadists”, “extremists”, and “terrorists”, even as the bulk of violenceoriginates in the U.S. and Israel, states that happen to enjoy a nuclear monopoly inthe region. Once the U.S. decided to withdraw its troops from Iraq, attention inWashington quickly shifted to Iran, a country already in the crosshairs of Israel,American neocons, and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—andtargeted with “regime change”, following Iraq, under the pretext of fighting nuclearproliferation. Motivated by common attitudes of national superiority, bearers of a“higher civilization”, and great repositories of democracy, the U.S. and Israelturned to confront Iran as the ultimate site of “anti-Western” evil: support forterrorism, a Nazi-like regime, aggressive foreign policy, nuclear weapons ambition,even a desire to ignite another Holocaust. None of these contentions is remotelytrue, yet American media is thoroughly infused with this kind of warmakingpropaganda.

The hard-won agreement between Iran and six Western powers, finalized inJuly 2015, to impose restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program brought quick andfierce hostility from Israel, its American lobby, and Congressional Republicans—all apparently far more committed to regime change (most likely through war)


than to securing a breakthrough deal since, after all, Iran is already the mostthoroughly monitored country in the world. John Bolton, former Americandelegate to the U.N., argues that the agreement is bankrupt: the Iranians getsanctions relief (in the amount of $50 billion) while they get to retain a nuclearprogram that will soon become weaponized. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)fully embraced this same position as he pledged to vote against Congressionalsupport of the agreement. Both Schumer and Bolton favor much harsher sanc-tions that, in the unlikely case they would not force Iran to abandon its nuclearprogram, would surely be a prelude to war. Bolton, for his part, seemed toendorse an Israeli strike, complaining: “We now have to rely on a tiny ally to dothe job for us”.34 What Bolton, Schumer, and others in their camp really wantis to maintain Israeli military domination in the Middle East. It is hardly a secretthat Iran belongs to the NPT and is fully within its right to possess (peaceful)nuclear facilities, while Israel (with its huge nuclear arsenal) stands fully outsidethe NPT and is the real outlaw state, the real driving force behind proliferation.Further, while Iran is fully open to the most intrusive monitoring, Israel remainsclosed off, impervious to global norms.

In fact warfare against Iran has long been on the U.S./Israeli agenda, driven bythe same faulty premises employed to justify war against Iraq. The reality is thatIran has not attacked any of its neighbors but, on the contrary, has been on thereceiving end of Western interventions going back to the anti-democratic coupof 1953 that installed the Shah’s long and brutal dictatorship. Meanwhile, theU.S. and Israel combine for unchallenged military domination of the Middle East:both possess hundreds of nuclear warheads ready to be launched against Iran at amoment’s notice. The U.S. has invaded and occupied two neighboring countries,has encircled Iran with dozens of bases in neighboring countries, and continues(despite ongoing negotiations) to threaten Tehran militarily over its “nuclearcapabilities”—“capabilities” that, as we have seen, are possessed by dozens ofnations never yet targeted. Meanwhile, in violation of international law, Iran hasbeen hit with some of the harshest economic sanctions ever imposed on a society,putting a stranglehold on trade, banking, energy, and other leading sectors. As of2015 hardship had fallen on the general Iranian population, justified by whatGareth Porter calls a “manufactured crisis”.35

The nuclear dimension of the current international predicament was exploredmore fully in Chapter 4. For the present, the world should be alarmed by thegreat potential for a worsening of global conflict that could lead to all-out warand accelerated blowback engulfing the Middle East and beyond. Ruling interestsfavoring war—sectors of the U.S. military establishment, Israel, neocons, myriadconservatives, the Israel Lobby—will be difficult to counter, as nothing short ofregime change in Tehran will satisfy their unwavering ambitions. No viable dip-lomatic solution acceptable to Israel exists, short of dismantling all Iranian nuclearfacilities, even though such facilities are fully legitimate within the NPT frame-work. Total Iranian capitulation on this battleground issue is highly unlikely.


Warfare, on the other hand, virtually ensures that the region—perhaps much ofthe world—will be headed toward protracted war, with massive economic,political, and military repercussions.

Any future global disaster, should it come, will most likely result from thespiraling cycle of militarism and terrorism, which by 2015 was sharply escalatingto include newer areas of the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. This cycleis sure to be intensified by the frightening consequences of global warming:increasingly severe storm systems, resource depletion, prospects of drought andflooding, rising ocean waters, deterioration of many urban centers—consequencesthat political elites in the advanced capitalist nations have shown little capacity toconfront. The militarism side of this dialectic involves longstanding joint U.S./Israeli pursuit of Middle-Eastern domination, the goal nothing short of extirpat-ing all last vestiges of opposition (as in Iran). The U.S. and Israel remainuniquely isolated at the U.N., outside international law and hostile to such insti-tutions as the NPT and ICC—such assault on the principle of universalityrepresenting yet another outgrowth of World War II. Under these conditions,could escalating blowback possibly be avoided? Could mounting insurgencies inIraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya lose traction and momentum? Thedepressing reality is that every month Washington and Tel Aviv move ahead withbusiness-as-usual—aerial bombardments, aid to corrupt governments, drone strikes,covert operations, economic sanctions, oppression of Palestinians—blowback gainsnew life, while imperialist culture remains fully in denial.

The pronounced rightward ideological shift in the U.S. and Israel has simplyadded more fuel to this inferno, ensuring that the cycle of violent confrontationwill be reproduced endlessly and disastrously. Further, as terrorism is aligned withmore localized and dispersed forms of warfare, the imperial managers are driveninexorably toward more sophisticated technowar, including high-explosive aerialbombardments to mesh with robotics, drone attacks, and cyber warfare. In aworld where the leading powers have no respect for universal rules and laws,where national exceptionalism trumps general principles, a Hobbesian state ofnature replete with Mills’ “higher immorality” will be difficult to hold off, as hasalready been the case throughout the Middle East and parts of North Africa. Anymilitary attack on Iran by the U.S. and/or Israel would take this nightmarishscenario to new levels, bringing to the fore—possibly as catastrophe—the epic“clash of civilizations” some Western commentators have long anticipated.36 Byall accounts, we are reminded that a barbaric enemy stands in the way of every-thing that is human and enlightened: if American Sniper serves that gruesomefunction in the case of Iraq, it was the Oscar-winning Argo that in 2012 set fortha cinematic image of Iranians as worthless criminals, deserving whatever horrorsmight befall them.

It takes little imagination to see that targeting a deeply-nationalistic populationof 70 million would push blowback far beyond anything previously imagined,with rampant global chaos and violence a near certainty. One obvious result of


such reckless and criminal aggression would be a drastic crisis, perhaps collapse, ofthe world economy, where militarism and terrorism would surge, each feedingoff the other, with dire global consequences. A scenario of this sort would likelyfurther empower and legitimate the American warfare state in all its glory—andin all its fury.

Notes

1 Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997),p. 37.

2 Ibid., p. 36.3 See William Barrett, Irrational Man (New York: Doubleday, 1962), Ch. 1.4 Christopher, Somewhere in the Night, p. 49.5 Ibid., p. 53.6 Ibid, p. 89.7 Defense Monitor (April–June, 2014).8 Ibid.9 Seymour Melman, The Demilitarized Society (Montreal: Harvest House, 1988), p. 31.10 Ibid, p. 42.11 Ibid.12 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, p. 343.13 Robert Jay Lifton, The Superpower Syndrome, p. 132.14 See Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992),

pp. 406–10.15 Ibid., p. 410.16 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 79.17 On historical developments favoring the growth of an American fascism, see Chris

Hedges, American Fascists (New York: Free Press, 2006) and Sheldon Wolin, Democracy,Incorporated, Chs. 2, 3.

18 On the general motif of an American culture of militarism centered on Hollywoodfilmmaking, see Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine, Ch. 1.

19 On the perpetual conflict between U.S. global interests and the requirements ofinternational law, see Philippe Sands, Lawless World, Ch. 3.

20 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), p. 7.21 Ibid., p. 8.22 Ibid., pp. 9–10.23 Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Henry

Holt and Co., 2006), p. 2.24 For a general estimate of Iraqi casualties in the years following the American invasion,

see Dahr Jamail’s overview in Truth-Out (April 14, 2005).25 See www.IraqBodyCount.org. For an historical view of the post-invasion violence, see

Patrick Cockburn, “The Bloody History of Baghdad”, CounterPunch (April 5, 2014).26 Janet Reitman, “Teenage Jihad”, Rolling Stone (April 9, 2015), p. 42.27 Ibid., p. 46.28 See the extended review of American Sniper by Chris Hedges, “Killing Ragheads for

Jesus”, in Truthdig ( January 25, 2015).29 Ibid.30 Ibid.31 See Patrick Cockburn, “The Bloody History of Baghdad”, CounterPunch (April 5,

2014).32 Henry Giroux, “Remembering Hiroshima”, Truth-Out (September 12, 2014).


http://www.IraqBodyCount.org

33 Hillary Clinton’s speech is resported in Truth-Out (February 7, 2015).34 John Bolton’s op-ed piece on Iran can be found in the Los Angeles Times ( July 26,

2015). For a similar perspective, see Eric S. Feldman, et al., “The Dangers of a NuclearIran”, Foreign Affairs ( January–February, 2011).

35 Gareth Porter,Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Charlottesville,VA: Just World Books, 2014).

36 The most notable of these authors is Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).


POSTSCRIPT

Good-War Propaganda

Among its many novel consequences for postwar American politics and culture,World War II gave birth to a vast and highly-effective propaganda apparatusensconced in the warfare state. While “propaganda” has always been regarded assomehow alien to the American experience, something more familiar with dic-tatorships, it has in fact thrived in the U.S.—not, however, as a classic, state-controlled system of ideological manipulation, but rather as a deeply-ingrainedculture of militarism embedded largely in the corporate media. Above all, this hasmeant a powerful role for Hollywood cinema, prolific conveyer of Good-Warmotifs since the 1940s, in both documentaries and feature movies. To this pointThomas Doherty writes: “More than any other war—more than any othertwentieth-century American experience—it [World War II] was motion-picturefriendly. The magnetic pull of the war years wasn’t merely the attraction ofadventure, romance, or high melodrama but the consolation of closure and theserenity of moral certainty. For Hollywood and American culture the SecondWorld War would always be a safe berth.”1

Although Hollywood had in previous decades been fascinated with wars andspectacles of violence, graphic renditions of warfare were actually few and,moreover, rarely glorified American combat ventures abroad. The closestapproximation to wartime propaganda was the endless cycle of Westerns showinga patriotic, triumphant U.S. Cavalry facing off against weak and outnumberedenemies in nineteenth-century “Indian Wars”. But such pictures, while essentiallypropagandistic, were not only crude in both technology and content but were ofcourse domestic, processed by mass audiences as simply part of U.S. historicaldevelopment. The “Great War”—World War I—was never especially popularamong Americans or a source of patriotic fervor, its unprecedented (and futile)battlefield death and destruction hardly the stuff of glorified military adventures.

The two most noteworthy Hollywood productions about World War I (The BigParade and All Quiet on the Western Front) fell squarely within the “war-is-hell”category, neither being remotely patriotic or militaristic. The widely-read Hearstnewspapers had been well-known for inventing and popularizing “yellow jour-nalism” at the time of the Spanish-American War (1898 to 1900), bringing thepublic into a state of jingoistic frenzy, but these initiatives never gave rise to afull-fledged propaganda system of the sort that grew out of World War II.

One crucial difference between earlier U.S. war-promotion efforts and theirGood-War equivalent was the sheer scope of media culture involved (especiallyfilm), during and especially following World War II. Indeed Hollywood cinemawas becoming ubiquitous, a medium that had reached new levels of popularityduring the 1930s, a phenomenon integrated into the life of virtually every com-munity, neighborhood, and home. Moreover, in the form of movies (and laterTV), media culture developed into a venue of both information and entertainment,enabling it to mostly disguise its propagandistic character. On the one hand,documentaries would be typically received as factual or historical, devoid of pre-judice or bias; on the other hand, features would be processed as entertainment, amode of distraction or escape, whatever their well-designed (and biased) socialcontent. As forms of electronic media, further, both movies and TV could beroutinely transmitted as spectacles, larger-than-life encounters—and this is preciselywhat lent Good-War propaganda its special force in the decades after 1945.

Yet another key difference was the alignment of a war-driven media culturewith expanding U.S. global power after 1945. A growing culture of militarism,perpetuated by the corporate media, would eventually serve American warfare-state objectives admirably, fueled by the tightening partnership of business inter-ests, government, and the Pentagon. As for Hollywood, a wide variety of moviegenres—not only combat but Westerns, sci-fi, horror, and action/adventure—would celebrate strong patriotic and warfare motifs, which inherited their forceand legitimacy from the World War II legacy and its skillful pioneers in the art ofpropaganda. This would be a far remove from heavy-handed bureaucraticinitiatives like those associated with Orwellian brainwashing.

If World War I turned out to be a nightmarish version of battlefield stalemateand futility—a conflict largely shunned by the press—then World War II wouldcome to symbolize heroic warrior virtues on behalf of noble, democratic idealsrooted in American history. A new system, merging government, business, andmedia, came to the fore in the wake of Pearl Harbor, dedicated to marketing all-out warfare against the unspeakably evil Axis powers. George Creel, director ofthe newly-formed Committee on Public Information (CPI), said the task ofwartime cultural work was to spread the “gospel of Americanism” to everycorner of the world. Vital to this operation would be the big Hollywood studios,now to be appropriated as the most pervasive (and influential) of ideologicalvehicles.2 As U.S. war mobilization proceeded full-force in 1942, the new pro-paganda enterprise took three forms: a series of government-supported

Good-War Propaganda 171

documentaries including the Why We Fight series, dissemination of combat-themed feature pictures, and a constant outpouring of short informational or“training” films to be viewed mainly by armed-services personnel (more thaneleven million throughout the war). Their accumulated ideological impact wouldbe unprecedented, indeed overwhelming.

By 1942 Hollywood had enlisted as the most powerful cultural institutionbehind the war effort, as (in Doherty’s words): “the motion picture industrybecame the preeminent transmitter of wartime policy and lightning rod for publicdiscourse.”3 In fact World War II was rapidly becoming the most media-friendly,most widely-documented event in human history. All the studios enthusiasticallydevoted their resources to what was clearly understood as war propaganda—movies helping mobilize both civilians and military personnel thoroughly behindthe war. At this time a strong and enduring partnership between Hollywood andthe military was cemented: actors, directors, writers, musicians, and others plun-ged into the anti-fascist crusade, solidifying a relationship that would continueacross the postwar era.

Frank Capra’s legendary Why We Fight series (1942–45), viewed by tens ofmillions of Americans, lent documentary expression to official Washington poli-cies: the U.S. and its allies were fighting a war to save democracy and freedom, torid the world of a tyrannical disease known as fascism. Capra and his associatesproduced several critically-acclaimed films, including A Prelude to War (1942),War Comes to America (1945), Know Your Enemy—Germany (1945), and KnowYour Enemy—Japan (1945). These productions were strongly jingoistic—formulaicpictures dramatizing the noble struggles of ordinary Americans to defeat a ruthlessenemy prepared to conquer the world. John Ford, with help from Walter Hustonand Gregg Toland, released the documentary December Seventh (1944), depictingan innocent, peaceful Hawaiian “aloha culture” under “sneak attack” by thetreacherous Japanese. Here again the enemy was portrayed as barbaric, two-faced,and scheming—driven by sheer evil. President Roosevelt considered all thiscultural work as indispensable to American combat victories in Europe and thePacific.

As John Dower writes, the Why We Fight series and related fare were “classicsof wartime cinematic propaganda”, exemplary mechanisms of the Good-Warideology.4 All scripts for these documentaries had to be approved by no fewerthan 50 military and civilian agencies. Once completed, the films were requiredviewing for millions of troops, whose dedication to fight would presumably beheightened by exposure to a number of rousing “torch of freedom” pictures.Dower adds that the Pacific Theater emerged in Hollywood propaganda as aspecial locus of xenophobia and racism. In Know Your Enemy—Japan, regarded assomething of a technical achievement, Japan is presented as a nation of madmen,a monolithic mass of people swept up in a nonstop orgy of militarism andimperialism.5 Distinction that might have been relevant for Europe (betweenfascists and others, for example) did not apply to the Japanese: the lust for

172 Good-War Propaganda

violence and conquest was uniform, extending well beyond the elites and militaryforces to ordinary people.6 As Dower suggests, this utterly racist outlook fed anexterminationist impulse that transcended the quest for revenge after PearlHarbor. Wartime propaganda was such that the “yellow enemy had to be totallydestroyed”, comprising a target of “genocidal rage”.7

If the Japanese were monolithically evil—as both Hollywood documentariesand feature movies consistently affirmed—then the U.S. military would be in aposition to carry out its Pacific crusade with few moral, legal, or political con-straints; an entire nation, in other words, could be essentially annihilated. It wasthis very outlook that allowed American forces to incinerate 66 Japanese cities in1945, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. And it was thissame outlook that underpinned the atomic destruction of Hiroshima andNagasaki, where hundreds of thousands of civilian residents were thought toclearly deserve extermination. Thanks in no small measure to the creativepower of Hollywood cinema, American support for such near-genocidal policies—shared among both elites and the general population—was unfortunatelywidespread.8

In the Pacific Theater, as opposed to Europe, racist propaganda served todehumanize, allowing for a major descent into barbarism. Here Dower notes:

it was argued that great destruction and suffering should be inflicted on Japannot simply as punishment, or because this was essential to end the war, butrather because only by turning Japan’s cities to ashes could the Japanesepeople as a whole be purged of their fanatic, militaristic sense of national andracial destiny.9

Every man, woman, and child in Japan was fair game for killing, consistent withthe murderous views held by many U.S. government and military officials.

By 1942 Hollywood studios were already producing a stream of combat-themed feature movies that were scarcely less formulaic than the documentariesof Capra and Ford. Most were saturated with Good-War narratives and imagesdriven by an ethnic melting-pot of American forces taking on a ruthless andfaceless enemy in the epic struggle against tyranny. World War II allowed thestudios, dedicated mainly to cinematic entertainment, to carve out somethingakin to a national mythology extending far beyond the combat genre as such.War movies, for their part, were made quickly and mechanically, often incor-porating actual battlefield footage to augment a desired sense of wartime “rea-lism”. Watched by tens of millions of Americans at local theaters and militarybases, such films as They Were Expendable (1945), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), TheMemphis Belle (1944), Bataan (1943), and Destination Tokyo (1945)—often withfirst-rate directors and casts—probably did more to rouse patriotic sentimentbehind the war effort than the more staid, official documentaries.10 Creel’sfamous diktat that Hollywood cinema be mobilized to spread “Americanism”


throughout the world surely fell short, but its domestic success would be hard tooverstate.

The Good-War formula for both documentaries and features varied little, fromstudio to studio, film to film, year to year. First, the pictures generally putforth valiant and diverse American military units facing the most daunting ofchallenges—a fierce, savage, usually cunning enemy, whether on the ground, inthe air, or on (and under) the seas. Second, a rich and fascinating ethnic mixtureof Americans usually engages a racially homogeneous (and massive) opponent.Third, familiar U.S. military protagonists—generals, admirals, commanding offi-cers, grunts—were nearly always cast as male heroes, virulent and aggressiveenough to dispatch a vicious enemy. Fourth, American technological (and lea-dership) supremacy countered a backward and primitive adversary forced to relyon sheer numbers (or “hordes”) on the battlefield. Fifth, the combat experiencewas cinematically transmitted as an ultimately glorious and exhilarating spectacle,while also bloody and costly. (The risks and costs were understood as beingmore than worth the investment.) Sixth, war was inevitably fought (and won) inthe service of “higher values”—democracy, religious freedom, peace, even “civili-zation” itself. Finally, the inspiring and unifying motif of ultrapatriotism—a formof American civic religion—dominated the screen, enlivening everything it touched,from bombing runs to submarine operations to battleship encounters that endedwith the last sea battles of World War II. This Good-War syndrome would cometo shape large sectors of Hollywood filmmaking for succeeding decades.

For at least twenty years after World War II, combat pictures—most withcompelling Good-War motifs—would be a staple of the Hollywood studios. Thefilm industry managed to translate a cruel and bloody war into something of anationalist pageant, not only in dozens of battlefield sagas but in other genres:historical dramas, action movies, sci-fi features, horror fare, and of course Wes-terns. These would serve both cultural and material (profit-making) objectives.Many were naturally adapted to the Cold-War milieu, where the “enemy” wasnow the Soviet Union (and other Communist states). Aside from commercialfare, such World War II documentary celebrations as the Victory at Sea series(1952) would reach mass audiences during the 1950s and beyond. Doherty notesthat “the pivotal year for the postwar combat film is 1949, distant enough toforget the bad, close enough to recall the buzz.”11 That year saw the release ofSands of Iwo Jima, Twelve O’Clock High, Figher Squadron, Tokyo Joe, and Home of theBrave.

It would be Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne as a Marine hero in one ofthe most spectacular battles of the war, that would probably best symbolize theGood-War legacy for a postwar generation. Out of the ashes of this saga Wayne,as Sergeant Stryker, emerged as an iconic war hero, Lawrence Suid writing thatlargely on the basis of Wayne’s powerful role in Sands Americans have found aman who personified the ideal soldier whose “military images [continues] … topervade American society and culture.”12 According to Suid, Wayne “did


become the symbol of the American fighting man, the defender of the nation”,adding that “Wayne became the model of the action hero for several generationsof young males, representing the traditional American ideal of the anti-intellectualdoer in contrast to the thinker.” Indeed Wayne “became just as much a militaryhero, a frontier hero, and a supporter of God, country, and motherhood” as othertraditional U.S. icons, while “Marines often cited Wayne’s portrayal of [Sergeant]Stryker as the reason for their attraction to the Corps.”13 Suid concluded that“Wayne’s influence reached not only enlisted men but also the decision-makersand officers in the field.”14

Later Hollywood combat features, though fewer in number, would carry for-ward elements of the Good-War tradition, lending cultural supports to the war-fare state at a time when democracy and freedom were regarded by those at thesummits of power as being under siege (by world Communism). Somewhat lessformulaic and more cinematically refined, this newer cycle of World War IIfilms, though still popular, brought more complex, refracted war experiences tomass audiences, from The Longest Day (1962) to The Dirty Dozen (1967), theOscar-winning Patton (1970), and Midway (1976). Two noteworthy departuresfrom the standard military treatment—From Here to Eternity (1951) and The CaineMutiny (1954)—only served to better illuminate the dominant pattern.

If the 1980s and early 1990s witnessed an emphasis on Vietnam-War eramovies—generally far removed from the Good-War formula, for obvious rea-sons—the 1990s and beyond marked a dramatic return to World War II narra-tives and images, now transformed into bolder media spectacles. In part this wasHollywood’s valiant attempt to help the U.S. finally extinguish the “VietnamSyndrome” as a national symbol of defeat and humiliation. It came at a time,moreover, when U.S. global power was facing new challenges (framed as “ter-rorism”) centered in the Middle East. Through the lens of media culture, that theU.S. would be celebrated as a beacon of progress, modernity, and enlightenmenthad been taken for granted in the 1940s. A return to Good-War themes, espe-cially when converted into great media spectacles, would presumably allowAmericans to feel more enthusiastic about their national identity—about U.S.global ambitions and the need for perpetual violence to support them.

As the Hollywood studios revisited tried-and-true cinematic formulas, execu-tives and producers could depend on solid box-office revenues that matched asense of ideological renewal. In a more chaotic Hobbesian world, the return toWorld War II would feel rather comforting, perhaps uplifting. Some of the mostlucrative films of the period turned out to be legendary combat spectacles:Schindler’s List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001). Thesewere exquisitely personalized dramas focused on Americans fighting villainousGermans and Japanese, typically against insurmountable odds. Other less-acclaimed pictures included Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), Memphis Belle (1990),Thin Red Line (1998), U-571 (2000), and Windtalkers (2002)—most striving tomerge Good-War motifs with an aura of historical authenticity. Of these, only


Thin Red Line departed significantly from the established combat-picture pattern,framing the battle of Guadalcanal as strongly dystopian, marked by unusualcruelty and violence on both sides.

Cinematic efforts to romanticize World War II—as part historical saga, partmedia spectacle—would in great measure be associated with the prolific work ofSteven Spielberg, director of no fewer than seven films revolving around theGood War, embracing crucial dimensions of American popular culture: mediatechnology, the entertainment venture, sense of national optimism, warriormythology.15 One case in point is Saving Private Ryan, which soon became acombat film classic, bringing to mass audiences emotionally-charged scenes of atriumphant U.S. military on D-Day at Normandy. If there was ever an historicalmoment when American forces could feel justifiably proud of their military deedsthis was surely it, and Spielberg endowed that moment with a sense of graphicimmediacy. In the milieu of the 1990s (and later), Hollywood set out to re-createa strongly positive national mood to extinguish the pessimism and cynicism of thepost-Vietnam era, as well as an ethos of postmodern ambiguity—and Spielberg’scinema was the perfect vehicle.

For Spielberg, a deep historical nostalgia was rooted in the 1940s, the war, thebattle against fascism, and the “greatest generation”. To lay the groundwork forhis spectacular war footage, Spielberg studied old World War II documentariesproduced by Capra and Ford, and this footage often found its way into suchmovies as Empire of the Sun (1987), Always (1989), Schindler’s List, and SavingPrivate Ryan. In fact Spielberg constantly looked for methods to enhanceauthenticity, an approach shared by some earlier filmmakers of the combat genre.

Spielberg’s body of war films offers portraits of despicable villains, exemplifiedby the brutal, sadistic Nazis of Schindler’s List and the ruthless camp commandantof Empire, Sergeant Nigata. Here, as throughout Spielberg’s movies, World War IIis reconstituted as one mammoth historical drama in which the horrors offascism—the darkest expression of the human condition—are finally crushedby benevolent (usually American) military forces. It is precisely this wartime dia-lectic that so many U.S. political and military figures sought to relive for thepresent era, which of course has introduced an entirely different set of mortalenemies.

Spielberg’s cinema thrives on an inspiring heroism born in the midst of warfareand given expression through the audacious deeds of ordinary folks, part of theAmerican liberal mythology earlier visible in the productions of Capra, Ford, andother Hollywood auteurs. There is the youthful, innocent protagonist named Jimin Empire, the familiar GI Joe figure in Always, the panicked but tenacious massesfighting a Japanese “invasion” of Los Angeles in 1941 (1979), the “accidentalhero” Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, the everyman Captain Miller in PrivateRyan. Some of Spielberg’s main characters can be viewed as something akin toanti-heroes, though still agents of struggle against tyranny, militarism, and sava-gery. This virtue, moreover, connects to social forces much larger than particular


leaders or heroes: combat units, families, communities, a people or a nation, allintegral to the Good-War legacy.16

In Private Ryan, perhaps Spielberg’s best movie, we encounter a great patrioticmoment in twentieth-century U.S. history—a moment when (starting with theNormandy landings) all the pain and sacrifice, all the military mobilizations andnationalist propaganda, produced an end to the Nazi scourge. (The fact that theGermans had already been effectively defeated by the Soviets on the EasternFront, not to mention the diverse national contributions at Normandy, has beenreadily obscured by the power of Spielberg’s Good-War narratives.) The moviebegins and ends with a billowing American flag, emotional tribute to the thou-sands of fallen soldiers whose suffering and death made possible a glorious out-come. Release of the film in 1998 coincided with a media-generated rediscoveryof World War II, as Spielberg’s cinematic work intersected with a series of best-selling books by cheerleading writers like Stephen Ambrose. The director actuallyvisited Normandy no less than five times. In Private Ryan, as in several otherSpielberg pictures, expressions of moral, psychological, and social renewal, tied topatriotic upsurge, are captured and dramatized with remarkable effect. Spielberg’slast combat extravaganza would provide inspiration for a Good-War TV miniseries,Band of Brothers, which appeared in 2001. In War of the Worlds (2005)—featuringan alien invasion—Spielberg expands his interest in war as a spectacle to higherlevels, in this case far removed from World War II.

Spielberg’s work contains a certain dualism: the horrors of war are celebrated,made larger than life, while shown in all their bloody realism. Military violence isfirst glorified and then, in the same process, fully legitimated. The graphicdepiction of battlefield combat is ultimately followed by its promotion. In histechnologically-superb spectacles of the Good War, Spielberg has probably donemore than any other contemporary filmmaker—probably more than any othermedia or political figure—to shape American views of military culture with itsemphasis on patriotic warfare.

The glorification of military violence developed and refined cinematically byCapra and Ford during the 1940s—and best appropriated by Spielberg in recenttimes—has been extended by producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director MichaelBay, the team behind Pearl Harbor (more fully discussed in Chapter 1). The workof Spielberg, Bruckheimer, and Bay clearly fits the parameters of postwar U.S.foreign and military policy. Driven by a rekindling of patriotic energy, Holly-wood has brought to the screen iconic moments of World War II: Pearl Harbor,Normandy, the Holocaust, Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima. Although the film-making has been more elaborate, costly, and technically-sophisticated, the worknonetheless stands as a great achievement of modern war propaganda.

Much the same could be said of the lengthy cycle of Rambo films, starringSylvester Stallone as John Rambo, that embellish a warrior ideology with deeproots in American history. Like theWayne character in Sands of Iwo Jima, the Stallonefigure—determined to single-handedly reverse the Vietnam defeat—expresses a


compelling national mythology. The Rambo phenomenon strongly influencedHollywood filmmaking from the early 1980s to the end of the George W. Bushera. In fact Rambo performed a feat thought impossible—he transformed theVietnam debacle into something of a Good-War experience.

Bruce Franklin has observed that Rambo “incorporates one of America’s mostdistinctive cultural products, the comic-book hero who may seem to be anordinary human being but really possesses superhuman powers that allow him tofight, like Superman, for truth, justice, and the American Way, and to personifynational fantasies.”17. In four cinematic spectacles Rambo emerged as the quin-tessential action-hero, able to prevail against the stiffest odds, ready to take on anyenemy force. Beyond other cinematic enterprises of its time, the Rambo seriesconnects with the militaristic, xenophobic, patriarchal Zeitgeist of the Reaganyears, which of course was rediscovered after 9/11. Even today, the Rambofigure embraces virtually every traditional American right-wing fantasy: stu-pendous male heroics, ultra-patriotism, weapons fetish, return to the frontierethos, reversal of battlefield defeat, conquest of evil adversaries.18

With the jihadic attacks on 9/11, the ascent of George W. Bush to the U.S.presidency, and launching of the War on Terrorism—combined with escalatingWashington interventions in the Middle East—media propaganda would assumenew challenges. There were now, of course, plenty of new demons to fit theideological requirements of the warfare state and its imperial ventures (as inIraq)—mostly Arabs and Muslims, many of whom are also in conflict with thestate of Israel. Already in the 1990s, as mentioned, Hollywood had turned itsattention from one enemy (Communism) to another ( jihadic terrorism), andthis trend would only accelerate after 9/11, as Arabs and Muslims became easytargets. Widely-viewed anti-terrorist fare in the 1990s included Die Hard with aVengeance (1995), Executive Decision (1996), The Peacemaker (1997), Air Force One(1997), The Siege (1998), and Rules of Engagement (2000). These films, and manyothers, involved American superhuman efforts to intercept or foil planned ter-rorist attacks by Middle-East based jihadic groups. And their story lines were justas formulaic and predictable as those of standard Good-War pictures.

The post-9/11 years would continue with such movies as The Sum of All Fears(2002), From Paris With Love (2010), followed by such Good-War pictures asArgo (2013) and ZeroDarkThirty (2013), which carry forward Islamophobicstereotypes discussed at lengths by Jack Shaheen.19 Argo, directed by Ben Affleck,offers a harsh, dehumanizing view of Iranians at a time when Iran has comeunder sustained pressure (including military threats from the U.S. and Israel) overits entirely legal nuclear program. Dramatizing CIA attempts to liberate sixAmericans in post-revolutionary Tehran, the film grossly distorts the eventsdepicted while overlooking the historical context in which ongoing U.S. inter-ventions shaped the larger political panorama. This did not prevent Argo fromwinning Best Picture Oscar for 2013. As Rob Williams aptly observes:


in the world of American cinematic triumphalism [historical] details are easilyreplaced by more Hollywoodesque endings, complete with obligatorynational high-fiving, scorekeeping, and nose-thumbing toward Tehran; thefilm’s final few intoxicating nationalist minutes would make any pro-Americanpublic relations professional sit up and cheer.20

He adds: “In the final analysis, we can thank Argo for perpetuating destructiveMiddle-Eastern stereotypes, distorting history, and eroding cross-cultural under-standings among peoples.”21 When it comes to issues related to war and theglobal scene, that precisely has been the very long—and usually effective—Hollywood legacy. As the War on Terrorism intensifies against strengtheningjihadic organizations in the Middle East and North Africa, media propaganda—taking a cue from Good-War scenarios—assumes new meaning. As for Holly-wood movies, their elaborate technology and cinematography has the power tomove audiences emotionally, all the more so in the Internet age when war nar-ratives and images are readily available online, often concealing their propa-gandistic functions. As Williams rightly notes: “Most American moviegoerscannot be bothered with so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ about how U.S. filmprojects advance a larger imperial agenda. Filmmakers and their audiences oftenargue that movies are just mindless eye candy for purely entertainment pur-poses.”22 Yet if a picture like Argo bolsters American foreign-policy agendas whiledemonizing all Iranians, a film like ZeroDarkThirty—a drama about locating andkilling Osama bin Laden—“situates” whatever the U.S. chooses to do in theMiddle East (including torture) against a backdrop of 9/11 and the generalsavagery of terrorists.

The more recent pro-war extravaganza, American Sniper, discussed at lengthearlier, performs the same ideological functions—providing a cinematic fusion ofRambo, Rules of Engagement, and Argo. Such pictures celebrate not only male-warrior fantasies but a fierce xenophobia driven by a combination of technowarand revenge, born of those earlier World War II documentaries and features.Within such a flourishing culture of militarism the warfare state generates itscrucial popular consensus.

If World War II today retains its status in American public life as the ultimateGood War, the historical reality was—and is—far more complex. The war wasindeed “good” insofar as it meant the destruction of fascism in Germany, Japan,Italy, and elsewhere. Yet it was never the epic struggle of democracy againsttyranny, or civilization against barbarism, that political and media culture have soritually embraced. To be sure, the defeated regimes were bastions of authoritar-ianism, militarism, and racism—their departure from the global scene to be fullycelebrated. At the same time, World War II had little to do with these issues, foreven in the 1940s American power rested on a foundation of corporate oligarchy,a bourgeoning warfare state, sharp racial divisions, and aspirations for internationalhegemony. Across succeeding decades such features of militarized state-capitalism


in the U.S. (aside from racism) have only expanded and deepened. As for the waritself, there were plenty of horrors and atrocities committed on all sides of theprotracted conflict. The very notion of a Good War nowadays, therefore, haslittle more than propagandistic significance, within and outside of Hollywoodcinema: most crucially, it serves to legitimate the warfare state and, with it, U.S.global power.

Notes

1 See Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II(New York: Columbia University Press, 193), p. 271.

2 Ibid., p. 89.3 Ibid., p. 5.4 See John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race, Power, and the Pacific War (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 15–16.5 Ibid., p. 19.6 Ibid., p. 27.7 Ibid., p. 36.8 Ibid., p. 54.9 Ibid., p. 56.10 Doherty, Projections of War, p. 85.11 Ibid., p. 272.12 Lawrence Suid, Guts and Glory (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), p. 116.13 Ibid., pp. 129–30.14 Ibid., p. 132.15 See Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and

Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), pp. 144–45.16 Ibid., p. 147.17 H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 194.18 Boggs and Pollard, Hollywood War Machine, pp. 137–38.19 See Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northhampton,

MA: Olive Branch Press, 2001).20 Rob Williams, “Screening the Homeland: How Hollywood Fantasy Mediates State

Fascism in the U.S. of Empire”, in Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, Censored 2014(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013), p. 301.

21 Ibid., p. 302.22 Ibid., p. 297.


INDEX

Abe, S. 40Adorno, T. 13Affleck, B. 178Afghanistan 6, 53–5, 57, 71–2, 78; atomic

weapons 106, 108, 120; civilians 82;global power structures 93; new imperialorder 137, 139; technowar 141; WWIIrepercussions 155, 164–5, 167

Africa 78, 130, 132Albright, M. 94Aldridge, R. 133Alexander, K. 144–6Algeria 3Allies 69, 90–1, 151Ambrose, S. 177American Civil War 111American Enterprise Institute 73, 87, 123American Israel Public Affairs Committee

(AIPAC) 87–8, 123, 165American Jewish Committee 123annihilationism 31–3, 37–8, 69–71, 73, 75,

79, 104–5, 110–12, 156, 173Apple 145Arab Spring 135Arabs 12, 61, 68, 72–3, 124, 134, 145, 156,

158, 161, 178Arendt, H. 10Argentina 125arms race 2Aron, L. 73Asia 1–2, 17–19, 22, 30, 34–41; Asian

tigers 38; atomic weapons 104, 106–7;

civilians 75–6, 78; global powerstructures 63, 65, 67–9, 71–3;mobilization 56–7; new imperial order130; strategic pivot 17, 33–41; WWIIrepercussions 156

Asia-Pacific 18–20, 22, 31, 38–41, 69, 71Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank 40AT&T 142Atlantic 29Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) 114,

123atomic weapons 2, 6, 31, 33–4, 101–28;

Asia-Pacific 41; civilians 75–6, 78, 80;global power structures 64–5, 70–1, 86,91; mobilization 46, 50, 56, 58; newimperial order 129–31, 136; propaganda173; technowar 138; WWIIrepercussions 151–3, 155

austerity 56, 116Australia 35, 39Axis 17, 29, 44, 47, 64, 68, 91, 147, 171

Baghdad tribunal 96Baime, A.J. 45Baker, J. 137Balkan states 71, 94–5, 108, 137, 156Bamford, J. 143, 145El Baradei, M. 107Bay, M. 21, 23–4, 177Bay of Pigs 51, 104, 133Beauvoir, S. de 152Bechtel 56, 141

Belgium 3, 118Ben Bella, A. 3Berlin blockade 65, 133Bilmes, L. 53Bin Laden, O. 163, 179Binney, W. 146biological weapons 70, 84, 111Blix, H. 118–19, 124blowback 8, 57, 120, 135, 139, 141–2, 148,

151, 157–64, 166–7Blum, W. 51Board of Admirals 22Boeing 54, 56–7, 141Bolton, J. 166Bosnia 71, 81, 94–5, 139BOUNDLESS INFORMANT network 144Brazil 125Britain 3, 30, 32–4, 37, 44; atomic weapons

114, 118; global power structures 64, 76,84–5, 90–1; mobilization 46; newimperial order 141; WWII repercussions161

Brown University 53Bruckheimer, J. 21, 23, 177Bundy, M. 37bureaucracy 2, 5, 7, 14, 35, 38, 55–6, 91,

114, 141, 148, 171Bush Doctrine 67Bush, G.H.W. 86, 134Bush, G.W. 4, 6, 51, 53–4, 67, 82, 85, 96,

105–7, 116, 134–5, 137, 145, 159, 178Butler, S. 47–8

Caldicott, H. 115Cambodia 37, 71, 78–80, 92, 112Camus, A. 152Canada 82, 114capitalism 5, 9–11, 13–14, 18, 34–5; Asia-

Pacific 38–9; global power structures 63;mobilization 44–6, 48–50, 54, 56; newimperial order 136; propaganda 179;WWII repercussions 152, 154, 167

Capra, F. 34, 69, 172–3, 176–7Caribbean 51Carter, A. 41Carter, J. 86Castro, F. 3, 51, 105, 133Central America 53, 57, 64–5, 71, 78, 93,

137, 154Central Asia 74Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 51, 58,

131–3, 135–6, 138–41, 144, 147, 154,160, 178

Chavez, H. 126Chemical and Metallurgy Research

Replacement (CMRR) 117chemical weapons 52, 55, 71, 74, 78–80,

84, 102, 111–12Cheney, R. 137Chiefs of Staff 78, 103, 111Chile 131, 139China 1, 3, 6, 20, 28–9; Asia-Pacific 33–7,

39–41; atomic weapons 107, 111–12,115, 117, 125; global power structures64–6, 68, 78, 85; mobilization 51, 61;new imperial order 129–30, 134, 136;WWII repercussions 154

Chomsky, N. 7Christians 12, 163–4Christopher, N. 152–3Church Committee 139Churchill, W. 37Cigar, N. 94cinema 21–3, 25, 152–3, 167, 170–80civilians 1–2, 6–7, 22, 27, 29; Asia-Pacific

31–3, 36; atomic weapons 102–3, 105,110–11, 115; global power structures69–70, 74–86, 88–9, 92–3; mobilization44, 46, 52, 61; new imperial order 141;propaganda 173; WWII repercussions156–7, 160–1, 164

Clapper, J. 146class 11, 15Clifton, E. 87Clinton, B. 19, 85, 87, 134Clinton, H. 88, 164–5cluster bombing 80, 83CNN 73Cockburn, A. 88Cold War 1, 4, 10, 34–7, 49–52; atomic

weapons 103–5, 114, 116–17, 126;global power structures 64–6, 73;mobilization 54, 58; new imperial order129–36; post-Orwellian society 147;propaganda 174; technowar 138–41,143; WWII repercussions 151–4

collateral damage 77, 80Colombia 57, 78, 93colonialism 11–12, 36–7, 39, 43, 66, 68,

96, 122Commission on Weapons of Mass

Destruction 118–19Committee on Public Information (CPI) 171Communists 4, 9, 34–7, 39, 50–2; atomic

weapons 104–5, 110–11, 126; globalpower structures 65, 68, 70–3, 78, 84;

182 Index

mobilization 54, 58–9; new imperialorder 129–36; propaganda 174–5, 178;technowar 140, 147–8; WWIIrepercussions 153, 156

Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) 145computer technology 2, 25, 59, 115, 138–46,

153Congress 2, 5–7, 9, 18, 29; Asia-Pacific 40;

atomic weapons 108, 114–15, 117, 123,126; global power structures 64, 66, 73,86–7; mobilization 43–4, 47, 49, 52, 55–6,59; new imperial order 130, 132–3,136–7; technowar 141, 143, 145–7;WWII repercussions 154, 165–6

Congressional Budget Office 116conspiracy theories 179Constitutions 5, 8, 13, 15, 40–1, 49, 59,

66, 129, 136–7, 143, 146–7contracts 36, 40, 45–7, 53–4, 56–7, 115,

132, 138–9, 141–2, 146, 154, 161Contras 139Cook, F. 7, 47–8, 56corporate interests 1–5, 7–16, 22, 38, 40;

atomic weapons 114–15, 117; globalpower structures 65; mobilization 45–9,53–4, 56–7, 61; new imperial order 136;propaganda 170–1, 179; technowar138–40, 142–9; WWII repercussions151, 154–5, 157–8, 161

Costs of War Project 53covert operations 29, 35–6, 52, 57, 65;

atomic weapons 104, 120; global powerstructures 72, 83, 85–6, 92–3, 95; newimperial order 129, 132–3, 148; WWIIrepercussions 154, 167

Creel, G. 171, 173Croatia 71, 81, 94–5Cuba 3, 19, 36, 51–2, 84–5, 89, 102, 104–6,

129, 133Cuban Missile Crisis 51, 104–6, 133Cumings, B. 36Czech Republic 125

Davies, M.W. 68Defense Advance Research Projects

Agency (DARPA) 140Dellums hearings 80Democrats 3, 5, 7, 16, 44, 49, 84, 102, 130,

133, 153–4, 164Department of Energy 115Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

55, 135, 138–9, 141–2, 144Department of Treasury 140

depleted uranium (DU) 55, 78, 81–3, 160Desert Storm 81–2, 134, 156–7, 159–60Doherty, T. 170, 172, 174Doolittle Raid 23–4double standards 57, 67, 89, 93, 107, 119,

122, 124Douglas, W.O. 79Dow Chemical 46Dower, J. 31, 34, 61, 69–71, 75–6, 109–10,

172–3draft policy 43, 45drones 54, 56, 59, 82, 138–41, 156, 167Dulles, J.F. 52, 133

East Asia 7Eastern Europe 130, 132Eastwood, C. 163eavesdropping 132, 135, 142–3, 145ecology 55, 58, 82economic growth 6, 19, 38, 40, 44–5, 47–8,

50, 56, 64–5, 84–9, 154Egypt 118Eisenhower, D. 3, 5, 46, 49, 52, 54, 131–3El Salvador 92elites 8, 10, 13–15, 17–18, 35; atomic

weapons 101–3, 109, 111–12, 114–15,117, 121–2; global power structures 66;mobilization 47–50, 55–7, 59, 61; newimperial order 129–30, 136; propaganda173; technowar 146–8; WWIIrepercussions 154–7, 164, 167

Endicott, S. 78, 111–12Engelhardt, T. 74Enlightenment 148espionage 22, 120, 129, 132, 139, 143–4,

146ethics 88, 103, 109, 122, 144, 163EurAsia 41Europe 1–3, 7, 12, 14–15, 21; and Asia-

Pacific 30, 40; atomic weapons 104,117, 121–2, 125–6; civilians 75, 78–9,82; global power structures 63–6, 68, 71,73, 94–5; mobilization 43–4, 46, 56–7,60; new imperial order 130, 132–3;propaganda 172–3; sanctions 86–7, 89;technowar 139; WWII repercussions152, 154, 157, 161–2, 167

evangelicals 12exceptionalism 4, 11, 13, 66–7, 77; atomic

weapons 107, 110; global powerstructures 84, 89, 93–4, 97; WWIIrepercussions 153–4, 158–9, 165, 167

existentialists 152

Index 183

Facebook 162fascists 4, 9–16, 32–3, 38, 43; atomic

weapons 122; global power structures63, 67–9, 72; mobilization 50, 54; newimperial order 129; post-Orwelliansociety 147; propaganda 172, 176, 179;WWII repercussions 151, 157–8

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 131,140–1, 144

Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA) 140

Federation of American Scientists 118Fermi, E. 103Finland 125firebombing 31–3, 41, 76, 153Fleischer, R. 21–2Ford, H. 45Ford Island 19Ford, J. 21–3, 31, 143, 172–3, 176–7Ford Motor Company 45–6Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

(FISA) 145Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 86fossil fuels 58, 125Foundation for Defense of Democracies 123Fourth Amendment 145Fox Studios 21, 73France 3, 30, 37, 63–4, 66; atomic weapons

118, 121, 123, 125; global powerstructures 85, 90; new imperial order131; WWII repercussions 152, 161

Franklin, B. 178Fukushima disaster 125Fuller, B. 77

Gandhi, M. 3Gaza 93, 122, 135, 145General Dynamics 54, 57, 141General Electric (GE) 46General Motors (GM) 45–6Geneva Accords 52Geneva Convention 88Geneva Protocols 2, 89, 111, 158Georgia 74Germany 1, 11, 15, 30, 32–3; atomic

weapons 102, 118, 125; civilians 75–6;global power structures 63–4, 66, 68–9,94; legality 90–1; mobilization 43–4,46–7; new imperial order 129;propaganda 175, 177, 179; technowar141–2; WWII repercussions 153, 157

Gharib, A. 87Gibson, W. 80, 112

Gide, A. 152Giroux, H. 113, 149, 164global disaster 151–69global power 51, 63–101, 115, 131, 133;

new imperial order 136, 139, 142, 146–8;propaganda 171, 175, 180; WWIIrepercussions 154, 158, 165

global warming 58, 167globalization 5, 38Godlike power 66, 102, 109–14, 147, 153,

156Goebbels, J. 9gold reserves 50, 130Good War 1–4, 17, 21, 23, 26; Asia-Pacific

31, 33–5, 39; atomic weapons 112;civilians 77; global power structures 60–1,66, 68; mobilization 47; new imperialorder 129–35; propaganda 170–80;technowar 142; WWII repercussions151, 156

Google 145Gorbachev, M. 134Gordon, J. 85–6GPS 59, 144Graham, L. 88Grayling, A.C. 77Great Depression 1, 48, 50, 64Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 30Greece 36, 64, 66, 92, 131, 137Greenwald, G. 143–5Grenada 92Griffin, R. 12–13, 157Gross, B. 13–14gross domestic product (GDP) 6, 44, 64–5, 86gross national product (GNP) 43–4, 48, 133Guatemala 36, 92, 139Guevara, C. 3Gulf Wars 57, 59, 85, 93, 156

Hagerman, E. 78, 111–12Hague Conventions 75, 91Hague tribunal 94–6Haiti 84, 92Harvard 52–3, 133Hawaii 18–22, 27–30, 34–5, 39, 41, 69, 71,

172Hawks, H. 21, 143Hearst, W.R. 171Hebdo, C. 164Hedges, C. 7, 12, 14, 60–1, 113, 157, 163–4hegemony 5, 7, 22, 33, 35–7; Asia-Pacific

39; atomic weapons 101–2, 120, 122,124, 126; global power structures 89–90;

184 Index

new imperial order 130–1, 147;propaganda 179; WWII repercussions154, 165

Hellfire Missiles 156herbicides 37, 79Hersh, S. 80Higgs, R. 55higher immorality 48, 61, 63–100, 155–6, 167Highway of Death 156Hiro, D. 135Hiroshima 2, 31, 33, 41, 70; atomic

weapons 101–4, 109–10, 113, 118;global power structures 76, 80, 91;propaganda 173; repercussions 152

Hitler, A. 11, 46, 67, 71Ho Chi Minh 3Hobbes, T. 3, 8, 13, 67, 140, 149, 152,

167, 175Holland 118Hollywood 17, 21, 23, 25, 31, 34, 60, 68,

73, 152–3, 158, 170–80Holocaust 2–3, 14, 93, 122, 151, 165, 177Hong Kong 143House of Representatives 80human rights 8, 67, 77, 89–90, 93, 97, 165Hungary 125Hussein, S. 67, 72, 85, 96–7, 135, 160Huston, J. 21Huston, W. 172hypermasculinity 163hysteria 31, 50, 73, 97, 105, 130, 134, 146,

153, 156, 165

ICREACH program 145illusions 26–30Immigration and Naturalization Service

(INS) 140imperialism 3–5, 7–9, 11–13, 15, 18–20;

Asia-Pacific 22, 28, 31, 33–41; atomicweapons 102, 104, 106, 114, 126;civilians 77, 83; global power structures63, 66–9, 71, 73–4, 97; legality 90, 93;mobilization 47, 49–51, 54–61; neworder 129–50; propaganda 172, 178–9;rise of 135–8; sanctions 88; technowar138–43; WWII repercussions 151–3,155–9, 161, 163–5, 167

Independent Commission of Inquiry 81India 3, 58, 87, 89, 106–8, 118, 120, 125Indian Wars 69, 170Indochina 4, 28, 34, 36–7, 51–2; atomic

weapons 102, 110; civilians 79–80, 82;global power structures 64, 68–9, 71;

mobilization 55; new imperial order130–3, 137; WWII repercussions 154–5,157

Indonesia 3, 35–6, 38, 57industrialization 38, 75infrastructure 2, 6–7, 32–3, 40, 46; atomic

weapons 111, 114, 117; civilians 78, 81–2;global power structures 70; legality 92;mobilization 48, 54–6; new imperialorder 137; sanctions 85–6, 88; WWIIrepercussions 156

intelligence 6–7, 21, 28, 30, 40; atomicweapons 104, 113; mobilization 53–5,57–9; new imperial order 132, 134–6,138–9, 141, 143, 145, 147–9; WWIIrepercussions 154, 158

International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA) 87, 107, 118, 120–1, 123–5

International Criminal Court (ICC) 97,158, 167

International Criminal Tribunal for theformer Yugoslavia (ICTY) 94–6

international law 3, 29, 41, 75, 82, 84, 88–98,103, 111, 115, 118, 123–4, 137, 141,158, 166–7

International Monetary Fund 131Internet 59–60, 142, 144, 146, 162, 179interventionism 4, 7–8, 13, 18, 36–7;

atomic weapons 113–14, 123; globalpower structures 64, 67, 72, 77, 81–3,86, 92–6; mobilization 43, 51–7; newimperial order 129, 134–7, 141, 148–9;propaganda 178; WWII repercussions154, 159, 161, 165–6

Iran 36, 54, 58, 72–4, 84; atomic weapons102, 105–8, 116–26; global powerstructures 86–9, 92–3; Iran Central Bank87; Iran Sanctions Act 87; new imperialorder 134–5, 139; propaganda 178–9;WWII repercussions 154–7, 159–61,165–7

Iraq 4, 6, 53–5, 57, 67–8; atomic weapons102, 106, 108, 110, 120, 124; civilians81–3; global power structures 71–2, 78,93, 96–7; Iraq Body Count 161; legality92; new imperial order 134–5, 137;propaganda 178; sanctions 84–9;technowar 139, 141; WWIIrepercussions 154–7, 159–61, 163–7

Iraq Higher Criminal Court (IHCC) 96Irons, P. 137Islamic State (ISIS) 8, 57, 72, 135, 160–1, 165Islamophobia 178

Index 185

isolationism 19–20, 29, 40, 44, 50, 64, 84, 167Israel 3, 43, 57–8, 72–3, 78; atomic

weapons 106–8, 118, 120–6; globalpower structures 85–9, 93; new imperialorder 135, 142, 145; propaganda 178;WWII repercussions 158–9, 161–2,165–7

Italy 1, 10–12, 15, 47, 63–4; atomicweapons 118; global power structures69; new imperial order 131, 137, 139;propaganda 179; WWI repercussions157, 161

Iwo Jima, battle of 27, 41, 174–5, 177

Japan 1, 4, 6, 11, 14–15; and Asia-Pacific17, 19–41; atomic weapons 102–3,109–10, 113, 125; civilians 75–6, 80;global power structures 63–4, 66, 68–71,86; legality 90–1; mobilization 44, 46–7,58; propaganda 172–3, 175–6, 179;sanctions 84; technowar 142; WWIIrepercussions 153, 156–8

Jews 2, 73, 122–4, 158jihadism 8, 139, 142, 156, 158–9, 161–2,

164–5, 178–9Joffe, R. 109Johnson, C. 7, 35, 51, 57, 139, 158–9, 162Johnson, L.B. 37, 49, 52, 133Jones, J. 22

Kaiser Industries 45–6Kanzler, E. 45Kellner, D. 156Kennedy, J.F. 37, 49, 51–3, 55, 84, 104–5,

131, 133–4Kerry, J. 121Keynesianism 2, 6–7, 38, 43, 45, 48–51,

54, 56, 114, 133, 136, 154Khrushchev, N. 104–5Kimmel, H. 20, 29–30Kissinger, H. 39, 80, 112Kochler, H. 88Kohler, R. 116Korea 4, 34–7, 50–2, 55, 61; atomic

weapons 102–4, 110–12; civilians 77–82;global power structures 64–6, 68–71,92–3; new imperial order 130, 132,136–7; WWII repercussions 154–7

Kosovo 71, 81, 94–5Kovel, J. 112Kovic, R. 60Kurds 160Kuwait 72, 134

Laos 37, 71, 77, 79–81, 92, 112Laqueur, W. 14–15Latin America 1, 40, 57, 67, 104, 156Lawrence, E. 101Leahy, P. 146Leahy, W.D. 103Lebanon 57LeMay, C. 32–3, 70, 76lend-lease program 44Letman, J. 41Libya 78, 93, 165, 167Lifton, R.J. 66–7, 109, 115, 155Lincoln, A. 55Lindqvist, S. 80Lockheed-Martin 54, 56–7, 117, 141–2Loyola University 162

MacArthur, D. 34, 36, 41, 70, 76, 78, 111McCarthyism 130McCollum, A. 29–30, 84McKinley, W. 18–19McNamara, R. 37, 52, 112, 119malware 145Mandel, M. 95Manhattan Project 2, 58, 101–2, 109, 112,

114, 132, 138, 153Manifest Destiny 8, 18, 31, 109Mann, M. 14Mao Zedong 3Marcos, F. 35Marcuse, H. 9–10, 112, 148Marshall Plan 132Mason, T. 25–6media 2, 4–5, 7–12, 15, 19; Asia-Pacific 24,

34, 38; atomic weapons 103, 105–6,116–17; global power structures 67, 69,71–3, 87, 94–7; mobilization 47, 49, 54,57, 60; new imperial order 134, 140,143, 146; propaganda 170–2, 175–9;social media 142, 162; WWIIrepercussions 151, 153, 155–6, 158–9,161, 164–5

Melman, S. 7, 49, 154–5Mexico 4, 14, 57, 125Microsoft 142, 144–5Middle East 1, 3, 5, 54, 57; atomic

weapons 106–8, 118–20, 122–4; globalpower structures 63, 65, 67, 71–3, 85,93; new imperial order 134–5;propaganda 175, 178–9; technowar 139,142, 148; WWII repercussions 156–7,159, 161–2, 164–7

Midway, battle of 27

186 Index

militarism 3, 11–13, 15, 28, 31–3; Asia-Pacific 38, 41; atomic weapons 112–13,121–2; global power structures 63, 66–9,74–5, 86, 89, 94; mobilization 48–50,52, 57, 60–1; new imperial order 129,143, 148–9, 151, 154, 157–8, 161–5,167–8; propaganda 170–3, 176, 178–9

military bases 3, 35, 37–8, 43, 58; atomicweapons 113, 120; global powerstructures 66, 73; new imperial order129–31, 135; propaganda 173; WWIIrepercussions 153–5, 166

military spending 8, 43–4, 47–8, 50–60,64–5; atomic weapons 116–17; newimperial order 132, 134; technowar140–2, 146, 148; WWII repercussions154, 159–60

military-industrial complex 3, 5, 17, 30, 34;Asia-Pacific 38; atomic weapons 113–19;mobilization 44, 48, 54; new imperialorder 140–2, 147–8; technowar 149;WWII repercussions 155, 157–8

Mills, C.W. 5, 7–8, 10, 13, 47–9, 56, 61,66, 109, 155–6, 167

Milosevic, S. 67, 71–2, 82, 94–5, 139Miroff, B. 37, 105, 133mobilization 1–3, 8–9, 13, 15, 43–62; Asia-

Pacific 18, 29; atomic weapons 114; newimperial order 134, 136, 138, 148;propaganda 171, 173; WWIIrepercussions 151, 156

Moore, B. 15Moscow Treaty 106movies 9, 17, 21–5, 31, 34, 60, 72–3, 143,

152–3, 158, 162–4, 170–80Mozaffar, O. 162Murdoch, R. 9Musharraf, P. 107Muslims 12, 61, 68, 72–3, 95, 124, 134,

145, 156, 158, 161–5, 178Mussolini, B. 11, 13My Lai massacre 71, 80myths 26–30, 60–1, 66–7, 69, 72, 77, 97,

123–4, 133, 157, 176

Nagasaki 2, 31, 33, 41, 70, 76, 91, 101–3,110, 173

napalm 32, 36–7, 46, 69, 77, 79–80, 83,111–12, 160

national debt 6, 44National Missile Defense (NMD) 108National Nuclear Security Administration 117National Security Act 132

National Security Agency (NSA) 58–9,131–3, 135–6, 138, 140–7, 154

National Security Campus 117National Security Council 139National Security State (NSS) 129–30,

132–7, 139–43, 146–8Native Americans 68–9, 71Nazis 2, 9, 11, 13–15, 30; atomic weapons

122; global power structures 72, 90–1,94; mobilization 45; new imperial order129, 132, 147–8; propaganda 176–7;WWII repercussions 151, 156, 161, 163,165

Nelson, D. 46neoconservatives 53, 67, 87, 134, 137, 140,

158, 165–6neoliberals 5, 40Netanyahu, B. 121, 123–4New Deal 43new imperial order 129–50NewsCorporation 9Ngo Dinh Diem 133Nicaragua 36, 84, 92, 139Nixon, R.M. 37, 39, 52, 80, 104, 133, 139noir culture 152–3Noriega, M. 67Normandy landings 21North Africa 57, 161, 165, 167, 179North America 14, 18, 161–2North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(NATO) 40, 65, 71–4, 81–2, 86, 94–5,108, 117–19

North Korea 36, 58, 78, 105, 107, 112,116, 130, 154

North Vietnam 80Northropp-Grumman 54, 57, 117, 141Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT)

58, 87, 89, 93, 105–8, 115–26, 158,166–7

Nuclear Posture Review 102, 116–17nuclear technology 2–3, 6, 9, 36–9, 101–28;

civilians 80; global power structures 64–5,69–70, 73–4, 77, 84, 87, 89; legality 93;mobilization 43, 50–1, 53–4, 56–8, 61;new imperial order 133–4, 138;technowar 148; WWII repercussions153–5, 165–6

nuclear-industrial complex 113–19Nuremberg tribunal 2, 4, 75, 89–97

Obama, B. 6, 15, 39–40, 51, 54, 85, 88, 106,116–17, 121, 125, 134–5, 137, 146, 161–2

Oceania 19

Index 187

O’Donnell, K. 37Office of Management and Budget 51Office of the National Counter-intelligence

Executive (NCIX) 141Office of Price Administration (OPA) 44Office of Special Services (OSS) 132, 147oil 19, 28, 30, 51Okinawa 27, 35, 37, 39–41, 64oligarchy 5, 10, 35, 47, 49; atomic weapons

115–16, 126; mobilization 56–7, 61;new imperial order 131, 136;propaganda 179; WWII repercussions151, 157

oligopoly 57Operation Mongoose 133Operation Northwoods 51Oppenheimer, J.R. 102Orwell, G. 143–4, 147–9, 171Others 68, 71, 156

Pacific 2, 17–22, 24–31, 33–41, 44;civilians 75–6; global power structures63–4, 68–9; mobilization 46, 60; newimperial order 129; propaganda 172–3;sanctions 84

Pakistan 53–4, 57, 71–2, 89, 107–8, 118,125, 135, 139, 141, 164

Palestinians 73, 122, 124, 145, 167Panama 78, 81, 92, 155Parenti, C. 142Parenti, M. 72, 82Patriot Act 135, 144Paxson, R. 14peace movement 155Pearl Harbor 4, 17–34, 38–41, 44, 66;

atomic weapons 113; civilians 76; newimperial order 131, 137; politicaldemonology 69; propaganda 171, 173,177; repercussions 158; technowar 140

Pentagon 2, 6, 9, 23, 35–6; Asia-Pacific 39;atomic weapons 104, 106, 108, 114–15,117, 120; civilians 81; global powerstructures 58–9, 64–5; mobilization48–56; new imperial order 132–6;technowar 138–9, 141–2; WWIIrepercussions 154–5, 157

Persian Gulf 4Persico, J. 91–2pharmaceuticals 46Philippines 19–20, 28, 34–6, 38–9, 41, 66,

69, 71, 139Phoenix Program 133Poitras, L. 143

Police Paramilitary Units (PPUs) 59political demonology 67–74, 156, 178–9pollution 58Polynesia 22popular culture 2, 21, 27, 31, 60, 69, 71,

130, 142–3, 156, 163–4, 170–80Porter, G. 120, 166post-Orwellian society 143–4, 147–9poverty 11, 60, 82, 86, 88, 152–3power imaginary 8, 49–50, 56, 114, 138, 141power relations 15, 17, 43power structures 1, 3, 5, 7–11, 19; Asia-

Pacific 28; atomic weapons 102, 104,114; global 63–100; mobilization 43, 47,54, 59; new imperial order 131, 136,138, 143, 146, 148–9; WWIIrepercussions 151–2, 155

primitivism 28, 34, 68, 71, 73, 110, 174PRISM network 144–5private military contractors (PMCs) 139profit 9, 22, 45–8, 53–7, 115–17, 125, 132,

140, 154, 174propaganda 9, 11, 15, 21, 23; Asia-Pacific

31, 35, 38–9; atomic weapons 123;Good War 170–80; mobilization 49, 51,57, 60; new imperial order 142–3;WWII repercussions 152, 156, 165

Protestants 12Puerto Rico 19Putin, V. 73–4, 106

al Qaeda 8, 72, 82, 135, 161Quaddafi, M. 67

racism 11–12, 14, 19, 22, 28; Asia-Pacific31, 33–4; atomic weapons 110–11, 113,122; global power structures 66, 68–71,76; mobilization 60–1; propaganda 172–3,179–80; WWII repercussions 151–2,157–8, 163

radiation 55, 58, 76, 81Rambo phenomenon 71, 158, 163, 177–9Raytheon 54, 56–7, 117, 141–2Reagan, R. 5–6, 53, 86, 108, 134, 178reconstruction 1, 93, 130, 132Red Scare 129–30, 132refugees 55, 76, 82regime change 51, 85–7, 93, 120, 124, 126,

135, 139, 165–6Reitman, J. 162reliable replacement warheads (RRWs) 115Republicans 3, 5–7, 12, 16, 44; atomic

weapons 102, 126; global power

188 Index

structures 84; mobilization 49, 55–6;new imperial order 130, 137, 146;WWII repercussions 153–4, 165

research and development (R&D) 2, 54,115, 140

Rhee, S. 35–6Richardson, J. 20Ridgway, M. 70, 78Risen, J. 142, 145–6Rogin, M. 69, 74rogue states 68, 105, 134, 148, 159Rome Statutes 97Roosevelt, F.D. 18, 20–1, 28–30, 34, 37,

41, 43–6, 48–9, 55, 63, 84, 101, 131,137, 172

Roosevelt, T. 18–19Rostow, W. 37Rouhani, H. 122rules of engagement 2, 70, 73, 75, 77–80,

88, 97, 103, 110–11, 167, 178–9Rumsfeld, D. 97Rusk, D. 37Russia 4, 6, 14, 40, 52; atomic weapons

105, 108, 116–18, 122, 125–6; globalpower structures 73–4, 85; new imperialorder 130; WWII repercussions 154

sanctions 57, 72, 81, 83–9, 92–3; atomicweapons 102, 107, 120–1, 123, 125–6;new imperial order 134, 148; WWIIrepercussions 156, 159–60, 166–7

Sands of Iwo Jima 174–5, 177Sands, P. 90Sardar, Z. 68Sartre, J.-P. 152saturation bombing 32, 37, 52, 69, 71;

atomic weapons 102, 110, 112; globalpower structures 76, 78, 80, 88, 91;WWII repercussions 152

Saudi Arabia 82Saving Private Ryan 176–7Schumer, C. 166scorched-earth campaigns 37, 70, 78, 80Senate 52, 87, 133, 137, 139, 146September 11 2001 8, 12, 53–4, 56, 66–7;

atomic weapons 106; global powerstructures 72, 82; new imperial order134–5, 140–2, 144–6, 148; propaganda178–9; repercussions 156, 158–9, 163–5

Serbia 68, 71–2, 81–2, 86, 89, 94–5Shaheen, J. 72, 178Shia Muslims 160shock-and-awe campaigns 82, 88

Short, W. 29–30Slavs 158Snowden, E. 143–7social media 142, 162Somalia 92, 139, 141South China Sea 41South Korea 14, 35–6, 38–9, 57, 125, 139Southeast Asia 20, 61Soviet Union 1, 4, 24, 33, 38–9; atomic

weapons 103–5, 115–16, 126; globalpower structures 63–6, 73–4, 90–1;mobilization 46–7, 50–4; new imperialorder 129–34, 137; propaganda 174,177; technowar 147; WWIIrepercussions 152

space programs 108, 119, 138, 140Spain 4, 11, 18, 157Spanish-American War 171Spielberg, S. 176–7Spratly Islands 41spying see espionageStalin, J. 64, 73–4, 131–2, 134Stallone, S. 177Star Wars 6, 108statism 5–6, 33, 35, 38, 56Stimson, H. 103Stinnett, R. 29–30, 84Suharto 35Suid, L. 24, 174Sukarno 3Sunni Muslims 83, 160superpowers 1–4, 6–8, 11, 32–3, 39; Asia-

Pacific 41; atomic weapons 101–3, 120,126; civilians 77; global power structures63–7, 97; legality 89–98; mobilization43, 47, 49, 61; political demonology 74;sanctions 88–9; technowar 138, 142;WWII repercussions 155–6, 158

Supreme Court 79surveillance 8, 35, 39–40, 54, 56–9; atomic

weapons 104, 108, 113, 120; globalpower structures 85, 87; new imperialorder 129, 132–4, 136, 138–49; WWIIrepercussions 154

SWAT teams 59Sweden 125Syria 54, 57, 74, 135, 139, 161, 164, 167

Taiwan 14, 35, 38Taliban 82, 106taxation 6, 44–5, 53–4, 56, 65, 97, 116Taylor, T. 96Tea Party 7, 12, 59, 145, 158

Index 189

technowar 2, 75–6, 79–81, 101, 110–12,114–15, 138–43, 151, 153, 155–6, 167,179

Tennessee Valley Authority 125terrorism 2, 4, 8–9, 12, 32–3; Asia-Pacific

36; atomic weapons 105, 107, 110, 112,122–4; global power structures 68, 72–3,75–6, 88, 92, 95; mobilization 53–4, 56–7,59; new imperial order 130, 134–5,138–49; propaganda 175, 178–9;repercussions 151, 155–6, 158–65, 167–8

Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment(TIDE) 144

Terrorist Identities Group (TIG) 144Tet Offensive 80Thailand 35Tito, J.B. 3Tokyo tribunal 2, 4, 75, 89–91, 96Toland, G. 21–2, 172torture 69, 71, 75, 79, 94, 112, 139, 160–1,

179Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 40–1Truman Doctrine 51, 64, 67, 130–2, 137Truman, H. 32–3, 36–7, 49, 51, 64–5, 67,

70, 78, 102–3, 110–11, 132, 136, 139Turkey 64, 66, 104, 118, 131turning points 20–6, 96Turse, N. 140

Ukraine 73–4, 139United Nations (UN) 2, 36, 43, 63, 71;

atomic weapons 107, 110, 119, 124;Charter 67, 85, 91–3, 95, 124, 137;General Assembly 85, 89, 93; globalpower structures 89–90; new imperialorder 131, 135; Resolution 242 93;Resolution 757 86; sanctions 86, 88;Security Council 74, 84–5, 88, 121, 137;weapons inspectors 118; WWIIrepercussions 158, 166–7

United States (US) 1–15, 17–20, 151–4,156–68; atomic weapons 101–28;civilians 74–83; DEA 138–42, 144; DIA138, 144; economic warfare 84–9; globalpower structures 63–100; illusions 26–30;IRS 138–9, 144; mobilization 43–61;myths 26–30, 60–1, 66–7, 69, 72, 77,97, 123–4, 133, 157, 176; new imperialorder 55–61, 130–2, 134–7; NSC-68Report 65; nuclear-industrial complex113–19; political demonology 67–74,156, 178–9; propaganda 170–80;sanctions 85–9; Strategic Command 116;

technowar 138–40, 142–4, 146–8;turning points 20–6; USA Freedom Act146; USAF 81; war crimes 89–98; warsof annihilation 31–3, 37–8, 69–71, 73,75, 79, 104–5, 110–12, 156, 173

Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR) 89

universality 3–4, 67, 90–4, 118–21, 124,126, 167

University of California 101, 115

Venezuela 126, 139Verizon 144–5veterans 6, 53, 55, 59–60, 65, 80Victor, G. 30Vietnam 3, 12, 22, 36–7, 51–2; atomic

weapons 102, 112; civilians 77, 79–81;global power structures 68, 71, 92–3;new imperial order 129, 133, 137;propaganda 175–7; technowar 139;WWII repercussions 154, 158, 164

Vietnam Syndrome 135, 154, 158, 175

Wall Street 6, 57Wallace, R. 23–4Wallerstein, I. 7Walton, R. 52, 133war crimes 2, 32, 72, 81–2, 84, 89–98, 111,

161War Department 44War on Drugs 6–7War Powers Act 137War Production Board 44, 46, 136War on Terrorism 8, 53, 56, 58, 107; new

imperial order 134–5, 138, 140, 142–3,145, 147–8; propaganda 178–9;repercussions 158, 165

war on truth 145–6warfare state 1–8, 10–17, 34–5, 37–8, 48–9;

atomic weapons 102, 109, 112, 114,116–17, 120; civilians 74–83; economicwarfare 84–9; global power structures65–6, 97; legality 93; mobilization 45,47, 50–5, 61; new imperial order 55–61,129–31, 133–8; nuclear-industrialcomplex 113–19; political demonology68, 74; propaganda 170, 178–80;technowar 139, 141–3, 145, 148; WWIIrepercussions 151–7, 161, 164–5, 168

wars of annihilation 31–3, 37–8, 69–71, 73,75, 79, 104–5, 110–12, 156, 173

warscapes 74Washington, G. 55

190 Index

Washington Institute for Near EasternPolicy (WINEP) 87, 123

Wayne, J. 174–5, 177weapons of mass destruction 4, 33, 46, 70,

78, 86, 89, 92, 101–28, 137, 163Webb, M. 59Weber, M. 152West Bank 93, 145Western Civilization 4, 37, 52, 70, 73, 78, 134Westinghouse 46white phosphorous 80, 83, 160Why We Fight 34, 60, 172Wikileaks 40Williams, P. 94Williams, R. 178–9Willmott, H.P. 20, 24, 27Willow Run 45–6Wills, G. 58, 104, 132, 135–6Wilson, W. 55Winter Soldier hearings 71, 80Wolf, N. 11Wolin, S. 7–8, 11, 13, 49, 65–6, 129, 157World Bank 131World Trade Organization (WTO) 84World War I (WWI) 4, 12, 19, 43, 48, 75,

129, 157, 170–1

World War II (WWII) 1–5, 8, 15, 17–22,26–7; Asia-Pacific 29, 31, 33–4, 36, 38,40–1; atomic weapons 101–2, 108,110–14, 119, 122, 126; civilians 74–5,77–8, 80, 83; global power structures63–5, 67, 93; legality 89–90, 92;mobilization 43–4, 47–51, 54–6, 58,60–1; new imperial order 129–32,135–8; political demonology 68–70, 72,74; post-Orwellian society 147;propaganda 170–7, 179; repercussions151–8, 161, 167; sanctions 84;technowar 138, 141–2

xenophobia 47, 61, 172, 178–9

Yemen 57, 71–2, 135, 139, 141, 161, 164,167

Young, M. 81Yugoslavia 3, 68, 71–2, 78, 81–2, 84, 86,

92–5, 102, 155

Zinn, H. 7Zinnemann, F. 21Zionism 122

Index 191

origins of the warfare state: world war ii and the transformation of american politics

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