All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're going to finish up the show here today with Gareth Porter, my friend and reporter from Interpress Service, and of course we republish all of it at Antiwar.com/Porter.
This one you can find all over the place.
It's called From Military Industrial Complex to Permanent War State.
It's a piece on the anniversary of Ike Eisenhower's too little too late on the way out the door, but here's what I left you to deal with, speech.
Welcome to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, so what is this military industrial complex anyway?
That sounds like a conspiracy theory or something.
Congress makes all the decisions, and they're elected by the democracy to do wonderful good things like we all want.
It's fascinating because it sounds like something that would come from the pen of Seawright Mills rather than from a sitting president, and that's really what makes that speech so fascinating, that something that had taken place during the eight years of the Eisenhower administration were so devastating, so threatening to a president's sense of democratic freedoms and the well-being of this country that he chose, albeit, as you correctly say, too late and really too little in his warning.
He nevertheless chose to warn the American people that they'd better be much more alert to the threat from the military services and from their allies in the private industrial sector.
Of course, we now know that Eisenhower had intended originally to add congressional to that complex, but in the end apparently decided that that would be impolitic and dropped it from the speech.
But in fact, we know that he believed that it was a military industrial congressional complex and that it was members of Congress who were clearly on the take from the contractors who aligned with the military services who constituted the cutting edge or a cutting edge of the problem.
So again, it was indeed too little and too late that Eisenhower delivered that warning.
All right, now, there was a giant Soviet Union, as Eisenhower said in his speech, and he said, we must all live every day with the Cold War as our number one concern forever.
And that was really the false premise that all this was based on, although how false was it?
Because after all, there was a Soviet Union and a whole bunch of hydrogen bombs and Maoist China and all that, too, right?
Yeah, it was real, but it was also faked.
It was also hooked up, and Eisenhower knew that better than anyone else.
And I'll explain why very quickly.
Eisenhower lived through a period when the military services were extremely aggressive in, of course, advocating their own vested interests, and how they did it was to basically puff up the Soviet threat in ways that were completely dishonest, and Eisenhower understood that, having been in the military, knowing how the military services operate, that their ethical standards were perhaps not as high as one would like.
He understood that they were perfectly capable of lying about the Soviet threat, and that's exactly what the Air Force and the Army both did.
The Air Force, of course, invented the bomber gap in the mid-1950s, that is, the idea that the Soviets were forging ahead of the United States in long-range strategic bombers and that Eisenhower better order a crash program in American strategic bombers so that we can catch up and go ahead of the Soviets again.
That was all hooked up, it was all fake, and Eisenhower knew it.
And then later in the 1950s, after Sputnik, the Air Force came up with the missile gap, which was, again, complete fabrication.
There was never any intelligence to support that idea.
The other services in the CIA expressed appropriate skepticism in their reports, in their intelligence reports on that period, and Eisenhower understood intuitively that the Air Force was lying and refused to buckle under to their pressure to create another emergency program of missile development.
That was a big part of the JFK campaign in 1960, was that the Republicans had been lax and allowed there to be this missile gap, and Nixon couldn't refute it, because he was the Vice President, and he knew for a fact it was not true, but only based on things he couldn't talk about, and so Kennedy beat him over the head with it repeatedly.
And of course, the Democrats having aligned themselves with the Air Force in particular, and the Army as well, and I haven't talked yet about the Army's campaign against Eisenhower, because Eisenhower had cut the Army budget very severely and forced them to reduce their military manpower, whereas in fact the Army wanted to build up their manpower so that they could be prepared to fight brush wars on the periphery of the Soviet Union and China.
That was their strategy, that was their ambition, and Eisenhower said, absolutely not, we're not going to do that.
He was absolutely against any possibility of intervention in these peripheral areas like Vietnam, and the Army never forgave him, and in fact did their own campaign like the Air Force did to accuse him of being soft on defense and of giving the Soviet Union this unfair advantage and leaving us open to aggression on the periphery.
Again, he refused to buckle under, and again, the Democrats came into power and gave the Army and the Air Force pretty much what they wanted, part of which was to basically send troops to South Vietnam in 1961 when the issue came up.
Kennedy, of course, said he didn't think that it was worth a war.
He was at an NSC meeting on November 15, 1961, but he buckled under to pressure from not just the military but his national security team, the civilians as well, and DOD and state and CIA and National Security Council, and agreed to a compromise which allowed them to fight their counterinsurgency war there for the next couple of years and continue to build up the number of advisors, and that included Air Force pilots who were not advisors at all but were carrying on actual warfare in South Vietnam.
So that was the beginning of an escalation, which then culminated in further pressures on Lyndon Johnson from the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and again the same outfit, the same set of civilian advisors to get him to agree to bomb North Vietnam, which everyone knew, of course, was a ticket to a long war in Vietnam.
Well, part of this, though, especially when we're talking about the Kennedy and Johnson years, we have these so-called democratic wise men and all this, and we have their ideology of liberal internationalism, collective security, and America as the leader of the world, and replacing the British Empire as the people go around killing you for your own good all the time.
And this is a big part of Democratic Party politics, not exclusive from the Republicans, but worth focusing on as part of modern American post-World War II liberalism, is let's have war all the time.
Right, but I want to make sure that people understand that behind or below the ideology, which is the most popular way of analyzing U.S. national security policy after World War II, there is fundamental institutional vested interest.
The people who run the military services, the people who run the CIA, the people who run the State Department, the people who run the National Security Council, they're all puffed up by being associated with big Cold War programs.
This is where the prestige was, this is where the power was within the U.S. government, within U.S. society, and, of course, all those people wanted a share of that power, of that prestige.
Of course, it's going to be for those Cold War programs.
And it's simple economics, too, in that it's tax money.
So the congressmen don't mind giving it away to whoever, because it's not their money.
They get it free with force all the time.
They get it out of the pockets of the people, and they're doing just fine.
And the point I want to make is a point I know you've made many times, but it bears repeating as often as we can do it, and that is that this whole game of Cold War and then post-Cold War national security policy is a game of winners and losers in this country.
The winners are the people who are the managers and the people who carry out the policies, except for those who die on the ground in the foreign wars, and the losers are the American people.
Well, now, it seems like we're at a point I can't get over the whole national debt, and you know that the $14 trillion is just what they talk about here and there, but that's excluding this, that, and the other thing and whatever.
And it seems like we're headed toward a real crisis, and it also seems like the elite classes, Gareth, are just in a state of total abandon, like it's just a fire cell.
They just want to liquidate whatever's left here, and I don't know where they think they're going, but it seems like they're not really so much interested at all in even preserving the goose that lays the golden eggs for them, the American society and its wealth that affords all this empire and provides all that tax money we were just talking about.
You've got a political elite that is in a state of permanent denial about the consequences of their own irresponsibility, and therefore one cannot expect anything from those people that is not forced on them by what Eisenhower basically called for, which is a citizen movement to assert their own interests, and that's what has been missing from this picture for so many years, and unless we do organize such a citizen movement, obviously this is going to continue until there's nothing left.
Well, and it really does.
I think I used to never believe the kind of thing that you're just talking about, but I think I do now kind of accept that really this is often based on complete denial, where these people who do these most horrible things that I think of as just being all a bunch of Dick Cheneys in the most malevolent sense, really, no, they're all a bunch of dupes.
They all might as well be hosting some talk show on CNN for all their work.
That's all they understand about things, and so they do these things.
They think they're doing the right thing, building hydrogen bombs all day or whatever.
They can rationalize these things, no problem.
Yeah, and as I think Andrew Bacevich quite correctly points out, I mean it's the talk show hosts on CNN who are really part of that elite, and they're kind of interchangeable pawns in the whole system.
I mean they're pawns in the sense that they're used by the most powerful people to sort of forward the whole enterprise, and they get their own little cut of the prestige and power and the perks of power that go with being a face on TV and going along with the power elite, and so they're useful idiots in that sense.
But the idea is that this is a vast political elite which is made up of industrial, media, military, and political figures, all of whom are sharing in this ill-gotten power and wealth that has been generated for the purpose of, quote, national security, unquote.
Right.
Well, you know, the economics of this are so poisonous, too.
You think about the cliché $900 toilet seat for the Navy or whatever.
Well, if you make toilets but you're not in the business of selling them at $900 a piece to the Navy, then you lose in the market.
Your toilet competition will reign supreme in the toilet market.
You must be corrupt.
It's sort of like if you know that this is all a big bubble and that all these low interest rates and endless housing expansion is never going to last, and you know better, you still have to expand your concrete company because all your competition is, and their volume is driving down their price, and the only way you can compete is if you take that low interest loan to expand your capital base to, and all your goods, you're forced to participate in the bubble economy just to make it as long as till the bubble pops.
It's all forced intervention in the way things are supposed to be by the central state.
You're extending this, of course, well beyond the military bubble here.
Yeah, but it's the state in general, and of course the banks and the military state have always been one.
I mean, you look at the origin of the Council on Foreign Relations after World War I.
It was just the Rockefellers basically and the Morgans saying, okay, we're going to make sure that anybody who's an expert or has anything really to say about foreign policy is an internationalist interventionist like us, and they've dominated.
These are the representatives of the Chase Bank and Standard Oil, and their interests become the ideology of American empire going way back.
I mean, there, of course, I will have to enter in something of a dissent because I still believe that at the center of this development of what I now call the permanent war state, which is a more sinister version of the military-industrial complex, the interests of militarism still are central.
The interests of the business community in the militarist enterprise are marginal.
Always have been, always will be.
This is still about power, not about money, in terms of the objective of the foreign wars.
That is to say, there's no money to be gotten from being in Iraq besides just spending the money on war.
That's where the money is.
Yeah, the money's all going out.
It's not coming in.
That's right, exactly.
So, I mean, I just want to continue to emphasize the vested interest of the military itself and the military services and the people who cluster around those military services because they are able to claim such a huge share of national, federal resources that, of course, they're going to generate in Congress and in the private sector huge empires of alliances.
So, I mean, in the end, you come back to the fact that the American people have bought, have been sold a bill of goods about the fantastic value of military power and its projection abroad.
And, of course, that serves, again, the interests of an elite rather than the interests of the American people.
Yeah, well, you know, the problem is really that they're not all Blackwater soldiers like in that movie War, Inc.
You know, the fact is that when Dick Cheney runs Halliburton, all he can do is just lose money and try to get some Pentagon contracts, you know, building Camp Bonsteel in Kosovo and that kind of thing.
But once he's vice president, then he has the entire American Army and Marine Corps and the flag and the yellow ribbon and the whole propaganda machine and everything to mobilize for his narrow interests.
Yeah, and I just want to come back again and again to this point that the military services are the epicenter of this system.
They are the ones who have driven it in the sense that their political allies, like the Cheneys and Rumsfelds who come in with an elected president, but who have at the heart of their enterprise is their desire to work with the military services to increase the U.S. military presence abroad and to increase the use of force for all kinds of related reasons.
That's what their game is all about.
So, now, what you're saying really is, in a sense, I'm oversimplifying, of course, kind of never mind all that extra stuff.
We're really living in Catch-22 where it's just about, you know, each colonel willing to do anything to get an extra little medal or stripe on his shirt or whatever.
Well, I think that's exactly correct.
And, in fact, I'll tell you a little personal story that's really trivial, but I think it nicely illustrates the trickle-down effect of the perquisites that go with being part of the permanent war state.
I was at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C., a few years ago.
Actually, it was mid-2001.
I've saved it ever since and will continue to use this as an illustration.
Two young women were talking rather loudly next to me at Starbucks.
One of them was bragging about her husband who worked in the Pentagon, obviously a young fellow early in his career, and she was bragging that he travels abroad like a two-star general.
And so that was the kind of perquisites that they were very proud of, which, again, in a trivial way illustrates just the way in which the system works to sort of have these perquisites of power and prestige that are handed down from one level to the next to keep everybody in line.
Right.
Well, you know, there was just this story out of the U.K.
There was an article on Spiked Online about it, about the former British ambassador to Afghanistan who made all these very candid statements to the parliament, I guess in secret, but then all the documents came out.
And basically what he said was that the only reason that the United Kingdom is involved in the Afghan war at all, it's not even to placate the Americans.
It's so that the military has something to do.
Right.
And they were saying, oh, okay, we're getting out of Iraq, but now what are we going to do?
We don't want to have to abolish any divisions.
And he actually talked about a particular counterinsurgency strategy in Helmand Province that was simply about, well, what the hell are we going to do with all these soldiers?
Let's send them to Helmand Province, and that it was at the very best not designed to be counterproductive or productive at all and certainly was counterproductive.
And that's exactly the problem with NATO.
I mean, they didn't have anything to do.
And so, you know, the NATO guys in the U.S. government and in the U.S. military, of course, arranged to have Afghanistan turned over to NATO because we had to give these people something to do so that they would have a reason to continue to exist.
Otherwise it would go out of business, and there would be fewer places to send U.S. generals and fewer ways to get your stars and your stripes as high-ranking U.S. officers.
Well, I mean, it seems to me the only solution really here is to abolish the executive and legislative and judicial branches of government.
I mean, no IRS, no judges to put you in jail, no Congress to pass all these taxes or to create a central bank that can inflate the money supply in order to pay for all this madness, and then finally these guys will be bankrupt.
Well, I mean, you have two choices here.
If you understand that this system is an automatic ticket to basically the continued running down of the economy, the continued wrecking of the society, and all of the social and other ills that would attend that process, that do attend that process, you can try to – well, there's three choices.
One, you can do what you're suggesting, which is to try to abolish the executive branch.
I don't think that's going to have much traction in this society or any other society.
No, Americans love their presidents.
Just love them to pieces.
The second choice is to actually organize a powerful movement that can, in fact, force the issue of ending the permanent war state by saying, you know, you're not going to support this, we won't elect anybody to office, and to basically use that power, which has not been used thus far for that purpose.
The third one is to actually escape the system and go somewhere else.
Yeah.
Everybody always says go to Costa Rica, but that place is ruled by the U.S. Marine Corps, right?
No, it's not ruled by the U.S. Marine Corps.
It's probably more ruled by Chinese businessmen than the U.S. Marine Corps.
Well, at least they're interested in making money.
That was one of the WikiLeaks, right, was the Americans and the Russians competing who can bribe the Kyrgyz into letting us keep our Manas Air Base there, or not, or whatever.
And the diplomats' assumption that the Chinese must be trying to bribe their way into putting a base there, too, and competing with this assumed Chinese bribe that never existed.
And the Chinese explain that, no, man, we're about briefcases full of cash and shaking hands, you know, the American way.
Right, right.
And the American diplomats were absolutely, like, just, you know, discombobulated.
They didn't understand that, what do you mean you're not trying to build an air base here?
And they were saying, no, we don't want to expand militarily across the world.
Leave that to you guys.
Well, I mean, all I'm saying is that there's two smart businessmen, those Chinese.
There's two business choices, flight or fight.
Flight or flight, I guess is the way you put it.
All right, well, so how do we fight then?
Short of just convincing everyone to be an anarcho-capitalist, which I guess I can't do.
I don't think you can do that.
Okay, so falling short of the actual solution, what do we do?
Well, I think we have to begin with the organizations that we already have, not try to discourage people from continuing to work in the organizations that already exist, but have an effective overall sort of umbrella arrangement, coalition of organizations that understand the seriousness of the threat of the permanent war state, and have a common strategy and a common analysis, which requires that we all convene at some point in a big conference and really talk this through and come to a meeting of the minds.
Right now, people who are activists are sort of split along many different kinds of lines and have no common analysis or strategy.
And that, of course, is the beginning of an effective movement to unite around a strategy and an analysis.
And I think we have to have something that people can do.
We have to have something to point to that people can do that's the objective.
And I think that has to be a very clear alternative policy and alternative budget for the military that lays it all out very clearly and very succinctly and concretely and says, okay, here's what millions of Americans are going to have to say.
We're going to support this.
If there's somebody who wants to run for office, they're going to have to say that they will vote for this before they will get any support from the people who are going to be touched by this movement.
And that's the only way it's going to work.
Right.
Well, you know what?
This has, of course, always been the goal of antiwar.com.
We're pretty much plumb line libertarians, and yet we're as ecumenical as we can possibly be.
And a lot of times we'll have, you know, Dan Ellsberg and Pat Buchanan have articles right there next to yours, right there on the front page.
And we're very interested in at least changing people's minds about their kind of partisanship and the exclusive nature of their ideas and how they can't get along with other Americans in the way that it's portrayed on TV, all this right-left and what have you, because it seems to me like, you know, the left and the right agree on a lot of horrible things.
They also, the best parts of the left and the right, agree with us libertarians.
I'm talking about me, not you.
I know you're not a libertarian.
I didn't mean to imply that.
But the point is, agree with us on the most important issues.
They're antiwar.com type people.
And what counts is, most importantly, stop the mass murder all the time, save the Bill of Rights, and stop paying welfare to General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman and Lockheed and Goldman Sachs and the rest of them.
Now, we can build a bipartisan consensus around that.
Stop doing these wrong things.
And, you know, I guess it ain't Nader, but it ought to be a good, like, very Naderite, that is principled, progressive, ought to run with Ron Paul.
And we need to, that needs to be the goal, is to bum rush one party, force all the warmongers and tax mongers out of the Republican Party, make them all be good Democrats like they are anyway, and have the Republican Party be in the Ron Paul-ian mold, an abolitionist party, repealing the 21st century as fast as possible, the only mandate for peace, freedom, and no more welfare for people who are already rich.
And, you know, there are so many good journalists and writers and activists who already have their priorities straight here.
And we have this Come Home America project started by Kevin Zeese that has the participation of so many good writers and activists already.
And I'm really hoping that this can be the core of the new anti-war alliance.
Maybe 2011 is the year for it, for people to finally get sick and tired of this empire.
Yeah, we have to start coalescing around the most basic common themes that matter in this country.
And without stopping and reversing the permanent war state, nothing else good can happen in this country.
That's the simple fact.
So I think you're absolutely on the right track.
It's such an ironic and annoying thing to me that this central issue, America's relationship with the rest of the world, the most important thing, the germ of every bad thing going on in our government and mostly in our society, as James Madison would have put it, is the least important issue to the American people.
We live in the New World way over here on the other side of these oceans, and we might as well have our own little planet here.
And a lot of people, man, they just can live their lives and not even know what goes on outside their hometown and not even care.
And in fact, I'm all for that, people being free to live however they want.
But the problem is, none of these things matter.
People say they're opposed to the wars, but not really.
They're more opposed to missing their favorite show than they're opposed to the war.
Well, yeah, and I mean, we shouldn't sell short the fundamental desire of the American people to be free of the weight of the permanent war state.
And I cite in my article recent polling data that shows that when people are given an opportunity to say what should be cut in the federal budget, they cut the military budget by about a third.
I mean, that's far beyond what any politician has ever been willing to talk about so far.
So, look, the people are way ahead of the political elite in this country on this issue.
That's the fundamental reality.
Well, as you say, there are all these different groups.
How do we get them organized to not just sign on to one letter but to sign on to one big thing?
I mean, I know if I was a billionaire, Gareth, I would throw a giant shindig and there would be a giant portrait of Mark Twain in the background and it would be around this Come Home America thing.
And I would try my best, I would pay whatever it costs to get Cindy Sheehan and Pat Buchanan up there on the stage together and to have Ron Paul give the keynote speech and have it be no more of this left and right liberal conservative partisanship.
Our issues are peace, the Bill of Rights, and an end to all corporate welfare, period.
Right?
Well, we have to have exactly that kind of alignment.
We need $500,000 million to organize around the country.
And if we had that with a loyal core of people who have the understanding, we could change this.
I believe that.
And I think, frankly, a huge problem that we face right now is that whether it's on the left or on the right, there's a very strong sense that nothing can be done, that this power that we've seen in action in the last decade particularly is so strong that there's nothing that ordinary citizens can do.
And I've seen this registered over and over again in comments to things that I've written.
It's a very serious problem.
And I think we have to go directly, we have to attack that sense of powerlessness as a first step.
We have to give people a sense that there are things that haven't been tried, that haven't been done, that could work.
Yeah, and I'm sorry for the part I play in reinforcing that sense of powerlessness.
It's just I got it.
I mean, the best thing I can think of is to call journalists on the phone where other people can overhear it.
But other than that, I've got no idea how to change this.
I mean, it's a huge challenge under the circumstances to have a notion of what could be done that would change things.
But we have to try it.
And I sound much more optimistic than I really am at the core of my being.
I mean, I have a great deal of pessimism about the way things are going.
But if you want to get something done, you have to act as though it can be done.
That's the fundamental principle at work here.
Well, my operating premise for right now is that most people don't care about politics much unless it's an election year.
And I don't think that this would ever work or anything.
But I would like for this to be the awesome, spectacular failure, for it to be something like a Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich thing, and just have them insist that Obama and Palin run together since they agree on everything terrible.
Let's stop pretending that these people have any differences between them whatsoever.
They all agree completely with a weekly standard way of running the national government, and that is not what we want.
And it'll be peace and freedom on one hand and the war party of death and slavery and taxation and murder on the other.
I think that would be an excellent outcome if we could have a party that had Obama and Palin on one ticket, and then we had the anti-permanent war state party on the other side as its opponent.
I think that would be an excellent way to go.
Wouldn't that be funny?
But of course, that's why it's a two-party system, and they have this left-right device, so that we just can't do that.
The Palinites and the good progressives think that, and there are a lot of Palinites who could be Ron Paulians, if only they were persuaded a couple of times probably, but there are so many good progressives who could never see themselves as allies with those people, and vice versa.
And so this is the dilemma, but I really appreciate not just your journalism as always, Gareth, but your insight into how these things work and hopefully what we can do about it.
Thanks very much.
You're a good friend of this show and to me, and to peace.
Thank you for your interest and your support.
I appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
That's Gareth Porter in a press service at www.antiwar.com.
