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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Doubling down on the imperial
mission By Tom Engelhardt
Okay, folks, it's time for a year-opening
sermon. And like any good sermon, this one will be
based on illustrative texts, in this case from
2006, and inspirational passages plucked from
them. Its goal, as in any such quest, will be to
reveal a world normally hidden from us in our
daily lives.
Every day, it seems,
essential choices are being made in Americans'
names by their top officials, civilian and
military, many
of
whom, as the year ended, only reaffirmed that the
United States is headed down an imperial path in
the Middle East and elsewhere, a path based on
dreams of domination and backed, above all else,
by the principle of force. No matter their
disagreements over the US administration's Iraq
catastrophe, on this, agreement has remained so
widespread as to make all discussion of the basics
seem beside the point. Despite recent failures on
the imperial path, consideration of other paths
remains almost inconceivable.
Naturally,
the continual act of choosing the path the US is
on, and the hardly noticed Pentagonization and
Homeland Securitization of America's own society
that go with it, are never presented to Americans
as such. If no alternatives to what we are doing
are ever suggested, then logic is with the doers,
no matter the staggering problems on the horizon.
In fact, what we Americans do in the world
- how, for instance, we choose to garrison the
planet - is seldom presented as a matter of choice
at all. Either it has been forced on us by "them"
- the rogues, the jihadis, the madmen, the evil
ones - and so is the only path to our obvious
safety (as defined by our betters in Washington);
or it's so obvious that nothing needs to be done
but reaffirm it. As in all Washington debates at
this moment, what's truly important is simply to
decide how to make that imperial path less rocky
and those dreams of domination that pass for US
"security" more achievable (or even, as in Iraq,
less noticeably catastrophic).
End of
introduction to sermon. Now to the illustrative
texts and examples.
Expand the mission
For my first text, let me take an e-letter
that the college-age daughter of a friend received
the other day from a US Marine Corps (USMC)
officer-selection officer, inviting her to "an
awesome summer training program called the Platoon
Leader's Course". Think of it as Marine Corps
summer camp. No uniforms ("This is not ROTC!" -
Reserve Officer Training Corps), but reasonable
amounts of moolah. Here's some of what was on
offer to her, part of a desperate military's
Iraq-era appeal to citizenly duty:
You will earn approximately $2,400
(six weeks) or $4,000 (10 weeks) plus room and
board during the training. How's that for a
summer job? ... You will not incur any
obligation to the Marine Corps even after
completing the training. (You can choose whether
or not to continue with the program) ... Tuition
assistance will be available to you after you
complete training this summer. You could
potentially earn $8,000 to $25,000 for school,
depending on graduation date.
Imagine! The US Marine Corps is
willing to pay young people to go to a
uniform-less summer camp to test their "leadership
potential", with no commitment to the corps
necessary. Consider that; then consider what was
certainly President George W Bush's only
significant decision of the holiday season past -
to expand the US military permanently by as many
as 70,000 troops.
Now, as in some old math
problem, the question is: How do you connect these
two points? (Hint: Not with a straight line.)
Faced with a public shot across the bow in
testimony before the US Congress by Army Chief of
Staff Peter J Schoomaker, who warned that the US
Army "will break" under present war-zone rotation
needs, Bush responded on December 19. He brought
up the "stressed" nature of the US Armed Forces
and, while still officially hesitating about his
"way forward" in Iraq, said, "I'm inclined to
believe that we do need to increase our troops -
the army, the marines. And I talked about this to
Secretary [of Defense Robert] Gates, and he is
going to spend some time talking to the folks in
the building [the Pentagon], come back with a
recommendation to me about how to proceed forward
on this idea." All this was, he added, "to meet
the challenges of a long-term global struggle
against terrorists".
Ah ... that makes
things clearer.
Of course, to get those
new "volunteer" officers and men, who have
generally been none too eager to volunteer for the
army and the marines in the midst of a disastrous,
faraway, increasingly incomprehensible set of
double wars, you'll have to pay even more kids
more money to go to no-commitment summer camp;
and, while you're at it, you'll have to lower
standards for the US military radically.
You'll have to let in even more volunteers
without high-school diplomas but with "moral" and
medical "waivers" for criminal records and mental
problems. You'll have to fast-track even more new
immigrants willing to join for the benefits of
quick citizenship; you'll have to ramp up already
high cash bonuses of all sorts; you'll have to
push the top-notch ad agency recently hired on a
five-year contract for a cool billion US dollars
to rev up its new "Army Strong" recruitment drive
even higher; you'll certainly have to jack up the
numbers of military recruiters radically, to the
tune of perhaps a couple of hundred million more
dollars; and maybe just for the heck of it, you
better start planning for the possibility of
recruiting significant numbers of potential
immigrants before they even think to leave their
own countries. After all, it's darn romantic to
imagine a future US all-volunteer force that will
look more like the old French Foreign Legion - or
an army of mercenaries anyway.
All in all,
you'll have to commit to the fact that your future
soldier in your basic future war will cost
staggering sums of money to hire and even more
staggering sums to retain after he or she has had
a taste of what "leadership potential" really
entails.
Put another way, as long as Iraq
remains a classic quagmire for the US Army and
Marine Corps, any plan to expand the US military
to make it easier to fight such wars in the future
threatens
