06/13/14 – William Astore – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Back in my day, we weren't at war all over the country, all over the whole world, all the time.
Back in my day, we didn't have government cameras on every street corner.
Back in my day, we didn't use an NSA-tracked smart card for our every single purchase, which logs our location everywhere we go.
And back in my day, things were bad, but not like this.
And anyway, I'm feeling old.
I got a lot of gray hairs on my chin, I admit.
But things are changing so fast now that it's almost like my childhood was all in black-and-white film or something in the 1980s compared to the way things are.
And that's sort of the theme of this great article by William Astore and Tom Englehart.
It ran at TomDispatch.com, and now it's at AntiWar.com.
Drafted by the national security state, the militarized realities of Fortress America.
Welcome back to the show, William.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Yeah, those were the good old days, right?
You know, no cameras everywhere.
You know, it does seem like, you know, I grew up in the 70s instead of the 80s, but it's been amazing to me, as you know from reading the article, how militarized we've become in the last 10 or 15 years.
Yeah, well, it's really something else.
And the thing of it is, too, at the root of it all, I guess, or a major part of it, is that the lowliest private is our highest idol.
And so to criticize the foreign policy at all, I mean, even if you're not really feeling it, you're just not supposed to come out against it.
Because to come out against it is to betray and stab that young private in the back.
And so, you know, it's all reinforced by everyone having to stop and clap at the airport and all this kind of thing.
Where if the lowest military man is our highest, most respected member of society, then what does that make everybody above him in rank?
And what does that make the rest of us?
You know, it changes the whole balance of everything because otherwise, you're spitting on the guys like when they came home from Vietnam, right?
It's that black and white of an issue.
Those are your two choices.
Right, right.
And of course, as you know, most of that spitting that occurred on the Vietnam veterans is more legend than reality.
But you're absolutely right.
You know, I mentioned in my article that when I joined ROTC in 1981, you know, I was walking the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts in my uniform.
And, you know, everyone wasn't clapping me on the back, telling me I was a hero.
You know, this is right after the Vietnam War.
You had movies like Coming Home and Apocalypse Now.
And people were more skeptical of the military as well we should be.
I mean, that's part of American history.
Our history for the first 200 years or so was that, you know, we didn't really want a large standing military.
We were distrustful of that.
But of course, after World War II, and then particularly within the Reagan years, with the Reagan buildup, and then the whole myth that we won the Cold War, you know, primarily through military might.
You know, that whole idea has supported now, you know, now everyone to the lowliest private is a hero just for putting on a uniform.
Right.
Yeah.
And it just legitimizes the whole thing.
Even, you know, I remember Pat Buchanan, who absolutely opposed both Iraq wars.
Once the war started in the spring of 2003, he said now everyone who opposed it has to shut up and not oppose it anymore, because otherwise it's just so ingrained in all of us.
Right.
And after all, they are risking their lives under the assumption anyway, most of them, that, you know, the rest of the adults in the democracy figured out whether this was worth it or not back before.
So they're only doing what's the right thing to do, right?
That's what the green uniform means, is that the democracy said that this is okay.
Exactly.
And part of it as well is that our foreign policy, as you know, Scott, it is a foreign policy that's now pretty much run by the military.
I mean, the Pentagon and the Defense Department dwarfs the State Department.
So you really can't criticize our country's foreign policy, exactly because it's our foreign policies implemented by the military, by those privates and corporals and airmen and sailors.
And so, you know, and those are the ones we are supposed to support without question.
This mantra of support our troops, you know, it's not a bad idea.
Like you said, you know, a lot of them did volunteer.
A lot of them are working class, lower middle class.
They signed up for the military in many cases because they just wanted a decent salary and health care.
But some of them are motivated by patriotism.
And so, you know, there is a lot of societal pressure put on us, as well as the reality that our young people are looking to serve our country.
It's unfortunate that in many cases they're being put to, you know, being sent to wars, being sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, into places where they really can't make a difference.
For, you know, to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
Right.
I think this is something that, you know, we hear this from a lot of vets, but the most obvious cases are whistleblowers.
Snowden, although he did wash out of basic training with broken legs, but still he told the same story, you know, volunteered for the army.
And then after discharge, you know, being washed out of the army, he went to join the CIA and the NSA, believing in the mission.
Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning had basically the same story.
Sergeant Bergdahl, not so much the whistleblower, but recently in the news here.
These guys all have as a shared narrative that they believed in this stuff.
And then they got there, or then they, you know, waited around and saw how it was actually playing out.
I think Snowden talks about he saw the CIA blackmail a Swiss banker who hadn't done anything to anyone, but they just were going to ruin his life in order to get at this other guy kind of thing.
And he just thought, well, that's not fair play.
And, you know, Manning, of course, was ordered to participate in the kidnapping and torture of dissidents against Nouri al-Maliki and this kind of thing.
And so what happens is there's this, there's a lifetime of commercials viewed during football games where all this is just great and perfectly acceptable.
And it's the consensus that it's all great and perfectly acceptable.
And yes, we're going to help these people, whatever.
And then they get there, they have a little bit of experience with it, and, you know, people react in different ways about it.
The moral injury, as it's called, when they realize that it's just not true.
They're in fact involved in an entirely different mission.
So it seems to me completely understandable.
In fact, that has happened from the very beginning.
That was Pat Tillman's story, was he started raiding Noam Chomsky and stuff.
He was going to come home and be an anti-war activist.
Right, right.
Yeah, it's a shame what happened to Pat Tillman.
And the cover-up, you know, the cover-up of that Friendly Fire incident, you know, it just really was a black mark against the Army, you know, the way that was covered up.
I mean, you know, for a military man like myself, you know, military, we're supposed to be about integrity.
And to see that kind of betrayal, you know, not only the Friendly Fire incident, but then the lying to the parents and trying to paper over that crime by giving Pat Tillman a Silver Star.
I mean, that was just, that was a horrendous, you know, it was a betrayal of trust by the Army, sadly.
Yeah, well, I mean, it seems kind of the marker of the, a good marker of the beginning of this era, where basically the whole thing is a giant waste.
At best, it's a waste.
It's, you know, really you look at it, especially this week, you can't really call it a wash or anything.
It's net negatives for pretty much everybody involved.
Yeah, I mean, what's really disappointing is, is that, you know, we obviously sent, you know, hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq.
Many of them were trying to do, you know, a decent job.
They're trying to do the best they knew how, and yet now you have the events unfolding in Iraq, where, you know, all those American efforts to try to build an Iraqi Army, you know, and the billions of dollars that we spent trying to do that just seems to be, you know, money that was just, you know, just no results.
Just wasted.
Yeah, well, 30,000 of them turned and fled when 800 men came with pickup trucks.
Well, you know, it's easy, it's easy, it's easy to create an army and to give them weapons, but an army needs a cause.
They need something to believe in or they won't fight.
Exactly.
And that seems to be something that, a lesson we can't learn.
Right.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with William J. Astore, retired lieutenant colonel of the Air Force, and Tom Dispatch, regular.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Hillary Mann Leverett coming up in the next segment to talk with us about the war in Syria and Iraq.
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issuing a call to arms, highest-ranking Shiite cleric in the world there.
So, Chapter 3 or 4 or 5 or whichever you call it is just getting cranked up now, I'm afraid.
Hillary Mann Leverett in just a little while.
Right now, we're talking with William Astore.
I'm sorry, William.
I forgot how to say your last name right.
Will you help me so I stop screwing it up, at least for today?
It is a story.
A story, okay.
Thank you and sorry.
Okay, so he's an Air Force officer, retired Air Force officer.
He writes great anti-war stuff for Tom Dispatch.
That's tomdispatch.com, Tom Englehart, of course.
And we rerun pretty much all of Tom's stuff at antiwar.com under his name.
And this one is in the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com.
It's called Drafted by the National Security State.
It's about how, well, since the end of the draft and the creation of the so-called professional military, you say that really the entire society has been conscripted.
This militarism has been built into the rest of society sort of as a consequence of the end of the draft and the beginning of the professionalization of it.
How exactly does that work?
Yeah, it's been a subtle process.
You know, I don't think, it didn't start right away.
You know, after the Vietnam War, there was a time when America was more critical of the military.
But I think beginning in the 1980s, beginning with Ronald Reagan, and then, you know, the defense buildup, the winning of the Cold War.
And then, of course, you recall, Scott, the idea that after the Cold War, we were going to be cashing in the peace dividend.
You know, we wouldn't have to have a large military.
And I think that was a crucial point right there.
When that did not happen, and instead, we got involved with the first Iraq War.
And then, of course, the biggest thing of all was the attack on 9-11.
You know, after 9-11, with Bush and Cheney, obviously, the whole idea became, you know, we as a society must support our military.
You must support the troops.
Which is another way of saying that when we send the troops into harm's way, you can't criticize our foreign policy because you're stabbing the troops in the back, which is exactly what you said earlier.
It's very clever, very subtle.
And at the same time, as you know, we've been building up our police forces.
We've been arming them with, you know, of all things, those mine-resistant, you know, those anti-mine MRAP vehicles, so that now your local police force might not only have automatic weapons, but tanks designed for the Iraqi battlefield.
All kinds of signs like that.
You know, more and more movies coming out that are pro-military.
Video games like Call of Duty, which are also, you know, pro-military.
Recruitment vans showing up.
You know, I lived in Pennsylvania for a time.
You know, Air Force recruiting vans showing up at the Little League World Series with video games to entice the kids into the back.
All of these vans so that they play the video games at the same time, you know, feel good about the Air Force so that, you know, maybe in six years they sign up.
So all of these things have been going on.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, one of the things, and I don't know if it's even really like this anymore, but especially in the 1990s, I know on the Discovery Channel, on the Learning Channel, all the time it was always just the hardware of war.
Where if you're a red-blooded American male, check out this kick-ass fighter jet.
And just never even mind anything about who they might be killing.
I mean, it just completely goes without saying how perfectly legitimate all this is.
Whatever the cost of this aircraft carrier we're showing you, whatever the cost of any of this stuff, of course, it's all perfectly justified.
But man, wouldn't you like to go Mach 3?
Me too, dude.
Yeah, it's the pornography of violence, really.
And part of that was the whole top, you know, I guess I got started with Top Gun, with Tom Cruise, the Iron Eagle movies, all these movies that basically glorify military hardware.
And what you never see, obviously, or rarely see on the American press, is any kind of depiction of the results of the use of these weapons.
You never see dead bodies.
I mean, you remember when, under Bush and Cheney, that they wouldn't even show American caskets, flag-draped caskets, coming home.
You know, they forbade the images of those.
It's like, it's this antiseptic version of war.
Unfortunately, you know, war reduced to a video game, which is another way of glorifying it as something fun.
Well, and you know, the problem with that too, especially the video game thing there, is that, as that becomes more and more of a reality with the drone wars around the world, as the US government spreads its enemies around the world with its drones, basically, it also, it seems like, creates a real problem for us, maybe for more of the long term, if we get used to thinking that that's perfectly, you know, a perfectly legitimate way to fight a war, just flying remote-control planes around, bombing people on the ground who can't possibly shoot back, and ignoring completely how that looks to everyone else in the world.
Oh, I see, you guys have fancy remote-control planes, that even if we could hit them, you don't even have a pilot in them, while we've got, you know, World War I rifles or whatever.
That's a, not that war is supposed to be a fair fight necessarily, but that sort of seems like the very poorest sportsmanship in world history, in a way, kind of thing, and it seems like it really blackens the definition of what America means to the rest of the world, especially those particular victims, and really in the minds of the American people too, about who we are and what we're about after all of this, and after not rolling it back after all of this.
Absolutely, you end up, in a way, you end up with the corruption of the American soul, or at least the compromise of American principles.
I mean, I think of, you know, I'm a big fan of the Godfather movies, you know, I think of Michael Corleone, you know, trying to kill all of his enemies, you know, so much so that he eventually kills his own brother, Fredo.
I mean, this is not the way to solve your problems, is going around and, you know, and killing everyone.
And even the Godfather and the Mafia realize that if you do this, you end up just corrupting your very existence.
Right.
Well, and it may be too late now, you know, I keep thinking about, you know, how obvious the anti-war message is at this point, and how right it is, and then I turn on TV, and just like any time there's a crisis, immediately they just turn to the generals, and to the same old talking heads, and the same old people who are going to recommend the same old bombing campaigns, and there's just, we're just going to keep on like this.
Nobody's even, nobody with any power influences ever held accountable in media or in politics, and so we just keep rolling on.
Well, we have to keep fighting, and that's what you, that's what you kind of do on your show.
At least you alter, you offer alternative viewpoints.
Well, I'm sure trying, I sure appreciate you helping me out.
It's William Astori, everybody.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks, Scott.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here.
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