States of war, Appeasing the armed forces has become a political necessity

[FrenchieCat]

The Guardian George Monbiot
Tuesday October 14, 2003


Now Bush, of course, is commander-in-chief as well as president, and he has every right to address the troops. But this commander-in-chief goes far beyond the patriotic blandishments of previous leaders. He sometimes dresses up in the uniform of the troops he is meeting.

He quotes their mottoes and songs, retells their internal jokes, mimics their slang. He informs the "dog-faced soldiers" that they are "the rock of Marne", or asks naval cadets whether they gave "the left-handed salute to Tecumseh, the God of 2.0". The television audience is mystified, but the men love him for it. He is, or so his speeches suggest, one of them.

This strikes me as an abuse of his position as commander-in-chief, rather like the use of Air Force One (the presidential aeroplane) for political fundraising tours. The war against terror is a feeble excuse. Indeed, all this began long before September 2001; between February and August that year he gave eight major speeches to the military, some of which were stuffed with policy announcements.

But there is a lot more at stake than merely casting the cloak of patriotism over his corporate welfare programmes. Appeasing the armed forces has become, for President Bush, a political necessity. He cannot win the next election without them. Unless he can destroy the resistance in Iraq, the resistance will destroy his political career. But crushing it requires the continuous presence of a vast professional army and tens of thousands of reservists.

Bush's other big problem, which has quietly tracked him ever since he declared his candidacy, is that he is a draft-dodger who failed even to discharge his duties as a national guardsman, while some of his most prominent political opponents are war heroes and generals.

To win the next election, he may have to beat Wesley Clark, who was the commander of Nato forces during the war in Yugoslavia and is currently the Democrats' favoured candidate. Bush's reverse coup has meant that the Democrats must suck up to the armed forces as well, in order to be seen as a patriotic party. Wesley Clark's campaigning slogan is "a new American patriotism".

The last general to have been appointed president, though as belligerent as any other, understood that there was a potential conflict between his two public roles. As a result, Dwight Eisenhower never wore a uniform while in office, or engaged in the hooting and chest-thumping with which George Bush greets his troops. His warning about the dangers of failing to contain "the military-industrial complex" has been forgotten.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1062523,00.html

[Resistance Is Futile]

1. More interesting bits

when you add together the $368bn for routine spending, the $19bn assigned to the department of energy for new nuclear weapons, the $79bn already passed by Congress to fund the war in Iraq and the $87bn that Bush has just requested to sustain it, you find that the US federal government is now spending as much on war as it is on education, public health, housing, employment, pensions, food aid and welfare put together.

You would expect this sort of allocation from a third world military dictatorship. But all this has come from a civilian leadership. It is not just Bush. Such is the success of his re-ordering of national priorities, not a single Democrat on the congressional appropriations panel dared to challenge the government's latest request.

...

But in America, the armed forces, whether they want it or not, are being dragged into the heart of political life. A mature democracy is in danger of turning itself into a military state.

[izzie]

2. We have become like Rome.

And please do not use Powell's quote of the only land we keep is the land to bury our dead. It is cute but we do take over these countries and run the way their gov. work and better yet how the capital is run. That is business and where the money they make goes.One of the things they must do is buy arms from us. We have let these greedy men sell out our country. Ben was right I do not think we can save it,as people seem to want this.

[teryang]

3. The neo cons will ask for 40 billion more

...in permanent increases to the defense budget as soon as the bill for 87 billion is passed.

Congressman and Senators say they have "no choice" but to pass the $87 billion dollar package. This is empirical evidence that our country is becoming a dictatorship. Some elements of the Army are resentful and chafing under ideological and dictatorial rule much as the German high command in the late thirties but to no avail. This is the historical significance of Clark's campaign regardless of what people think of him as a democratic candidate. Clark emphasized last weekend that the Army is the most "people oriented" of the services. That is why it is under attack by the neo cons who want to downsize it, keep it overseas, and deliver its dollars to defense contractors rather than troops.

We are spending more now in adjusted dollars than at the height of the Vietnam war but we have much smaller numbers in the field and troop rotation is in crisis. Where are all those dollars going????

[dand]

4. Thanks for the post Frenchie

And thank God for the Guardian, I could not get thru the day without it.