[Mb-civic] A Mercenary Society (that's us, folks!)

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-08/23jensen.cfm

  A Mercenary Society

By Robert Jensen

The failed war in Iraq -- and its effect on the U.S. military -- has the 
potential to spark the U.S. public to fundamentally rethink the role of 
force in U.S. foreign policy, and one of the central questions for the 
future of the United States is whether this questioning can mature and 
deepen.

Can we in the so-called “lone superpower” face that we are now a 
nation of mercenaries?

As the bad news from Iraq continues to worsen by the day, it looks as 
if the Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard all will miss their 
annual recruitment goals. A 2004 study commissioned by the Army 
found that recruiting has been undermined by casualties, objections to 
the war, and media coverage of such events as the Abu Ghraib 
scandal.

These statistics signal an important shift, especially when combined 
with anecdotal evidence suggesting that it is not just an aversion to 
physical risk that is curtailing enlistment but an understanding that this 
war isn’t worth the risks. At the same time, however, public opinion 
polls reveal confusion and contradictory trends as well. Recent polls 
show that more than half the public believes the United States can’t 
win the war and can’t establish a stable democracy in Iraq, but surveys 
also indicate that many continue to believe that sending the troops was 
the right thing to do.

This suggests that a majority of the public can recognize that the 
United States has failed in the stated mission but cannot yet see that 
the stated mission was a lie. This was never a war about weapons of 
mass destruction or stopping terrorism (indeed, the war has created 
terrorism, on both sides), nor is it at heart about establishing 
democracy in Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq is -- as all U.S. 
interventions in Middle East have been -- about extending and 
deepening U.S. dominance in the region with the world’s most crucial 
energy resources.

Part of the barrier to a clear understanding of this is the belief that the 
United States, by definition, always acts benevolently in the world. But 
also standing in the way of an honest analysis is the reality that the 
brutal imperialist U.S. policies, while devised by elites, are being 
carried out by ordinary Americans. Can we in the United States come 
to terms with the fact that we are the “good Germans” of our era, 
routinely allowing pseudo-patriotic loyalties to override moral decision-
making? Can we look at ourselves honestly in the mirror when so 
many of us are implicated in the imperialist system?

>From the people who make the weapons to the military personnel who 
use them -- and all the other people whose livelihoods or networks of 
friends and family connect them to the armed forces -- most of the 
U.S. public has some relationship to the military. Any talk of closing a 
military base sparks almost automatic resistance from neighboring 
communities that have become dependent on the base economically. 
Large segments of the corporate sector rely on military or military-
related contracts, and executives and employees alike understand 
what that means for profits and wages.

As U.S. anthropologist Catherine Lutz put it in her book “Homefront,” 
an insightful study of the effects of the militarization on American life: 
“We all inhabit an army camp, mobilized to lend support to the 
permanent state of war readiness
 Are we all military dependents, 
wearers of civilian camouflage?”

The problem is not just that the United States now has a mercenary 
army but that we are a mercenary society.

The problem is not just that our army fights imperialist wars, but that 
virtually all of us are in some way implicated in that imperialist system.

It can be difficult to face the truth about an institution that has so 
deeply insinuated itself into our lives. Since the end of World War II, 
the U.S. power elite have done a masterful job of transforming the 
country into a militarized state with a permanent wartime economy. 
There has always been resistance to that project on the margins, but 
because the United States is an incredibly affluent nation -- and these 
policies promise continued affluence -- there is strong motivation for 
many to ignore the consequences of this militarization.

Ironically, it may turn out that the weak link in this system will be not 
the civilian mercenaries but the military ones. Historically, colonial 
powers have imported mercenary forces to do the dirty work of 
conquest and control. In the United States, our own citizens are being 
forced into that role. If the armed forces’ inability to meet recruitment 
goals continues, the effect may not be simply new constraints on the 
ability of U.S. leaders to fight additional wars but a more widespread 
questioning of the imperial system itself.

Consider these stories, told in the book “Generation Kill” about the Iraq 
war. One Marine told author Evan Wright that a “bunch of psycho 
officers sent us into shit we never should have gone into.” Another 
Marine, upon his return home, was invited to speak to a wealthy 
community as a war hero. He told them: “I am not a hero. Guys like me 
are just a necessary part of things. To maintain this way of life in a fine 
community like this, you need psychos like us to go and drop a bomb 
on somebody’s house.”

How long can an army continue when combat personnel view both 
officers and themselves as psychos? What will happen if that Marine’s 
recognition that imperial wars are fought to protect affluence and 
privilege at home spreads on the front lines of those wars?

U.S. political elites have few options. Barring a serious economic 
collapse that forces more people into the military to survive, 
recruitment will continue to be a problem. Reinstituting a draft is not an 
option; there would be a huge political cost if middle- and upper-class 
Americans were asked to surrender their children to direct participation 
in the military wing of the mercenary machine. The offer of citizenship 
to immigrants who are willing to fight can’t make up the gap.

Right now there is incredible tension in U.S. culture. Many continue to 
hold on tightly to the idea that the service personnel are being killed 
and maimed in Iraq for a noble cause, which is hardly surprising; 
acknowledging that a loved one was killed in the pursuit not of liberty 
and justice, but instead for elite domination, can intensify the already 
deep pain of the loss. Others are abandoning illusions and recognizing 
the motivations of the powerful. Obituaries of dead soldiers talk of their 
“great pride” in serving their country, while a collective sense that the 
Iraq War is nothing to be proud of deepens every day. No one wants to 
demonize the front-line troops -- those with the least power to change 
policy -- but the reality of why the U.S. military fights, along with the 
brutal way in which the wars are fought, become increasingly hard to 
ignore.

Tension can be creative, leading to deeper understanding and 
progressive social change. Or it can be exploited to suppress that 
understanding and block change. Elites almost always attempt the 
latter. The choice that the U.S. public makes is crucial to our future, 
and the world’s.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at 
Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource 
Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of 
Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the 
Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights 
Books). He can be reached at rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu. 

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