LIVING EISENHOWER'S AND ORWELL'S NIGHTMARES

The first decade of the New Millennium – the G. W. Bush years – embodied in every detail Eisenhower’s warning of “grave implications” associated with “lack of balance” and “unwarranted influence” not only of the often-cited “Military-Industrial Complex,” but also the less-mentioned “Scientific-Technological Elite.” Here is part of what Ike said January 17, 1961, three days before leaving office:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. (Emphasis added.)

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. . . .

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (emphasis added).

1984-2008:

Twenty-three years later, many of us noted the year 1984 came and went with little fanfare, tempting some to ponder whether George Orwell had overstated his case. Orwell derived “1984” simply by reversing the last two digits of the year the book was written, 1948, meaning, in effect, don’t take the date literally, I mean sometime in the future. Orwell’s 1984 future arrived a couple of decades later, during G.W. Bush’s administration (2001-2009) characterized by:

• Widespread poverty amidst unparalleled privilege and prosperity for the ruling elite

• Fear of a constant external existentialist threat

• Perpetual war

• Pervasive government surveillance and interrogation

• Incessant public mind control accomplished through media by a repressive state dominated by a privileged elite
  

If Orwell were writing today, Winston Smith would be working for Fox News.

Since Eisenhower’s day, America has waged 3 “Long Wars” – Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. As a U.S. Navy Vietnam vet, it distresses me to point out three hard truths about these wars:

1. Each war was entered into under false pretenses, with inadequate force, nebulous and constantly changing goals, un-analyzed risks, limited public support at home and abroad, and no exit strategy.

2. Each war was un-winnable because:
   

   • The enemy, having nowhere to go, showed resolve and resourcefulness and – dare we say it? – courage.

   • The terrain was cruelly inhospitable, negating much of the American military’s technological advantages, reducing combat to mano-a-mano, where it is numbers that count.

   • The situation remained hopelessly mired in ancient local blood feuds and historic ideological and/or religious antagonisms.
     

3. Both wars in the Middle East have been funded on both sides by American taxpayers and users of oil and illegal narcotics, thereby extending their duration.
   

These are all textbook preconditions for strategically un-winnable Long Wars.

Having “been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” U.S. policymakers committed to sustain it with defense industry buildups and “wars of choice,” providing endless streams of government contracts; swollen corporate profits and dividends; inflated C-suite salaries; and bounteous campaign contributions within what has become the Military-Industrial-Technological-Political Complex (MITP Complex).

In choosing wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the MITP Complex was either incredibly stupid or, more likely, crafty as hell in seeking out resolute adversaries engaged in civil war in inhospitable terrain at such a times as to assure U.S. tactical victories but strategic defeat. Having thus willingly stepped into quagmires, the MITP Complex then confidently relied on Americans’ pride, patriotism and/or disengagement to drag out long and very profitable, if pointless, wars.

It strains credulity to think the frequent episodes of U.S. military crash spending are coincidental, random or entirely exogenous. With wars, long and short, and military buildups occurring during most of the past 45 years, logic would suggest these episodes are planned, in much the same way as the automobile industry plans obsolescence, and for the same reason.

Reviewing President Eisenhower’s list of “grave implications” today, we find all have been realized:

• The U.S. military reportedly spends not only more than the net income of all U.S. corporations, but also more than the militaries of all the other nations combined.

• The total influence of the MITP Complex continues to be felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government. Military offices of procurement routinely farm out work on major projects to virtually every state in the Union, thus ensuring their continuing local support.

• The councils of government are awash in campaign contributions from corporations and wealthy individuals buying “unwarranted influence.” With “Citizens United vs. FEC” the floodgates have been opened for the rich and powerful elite to continue underwriting governments of their liking.

• Power has been misplaced. For the last three decades, power has been dedicated not to the interests of “We The People,” but rather to the enrichment of the political sector’s wealthy “base” of contributors, to the detriment of the middle and lower classes suffering from stagnating real wages, high unemployment, plunging housing prices, foreclosures and bankruptcies.
  

  • The share of national income growth going to the top 10% of income earners, averaging 35% in the post-war period before Reagan, jumped to 87% during his administration, most of that going to the top 1% of income earners who now take in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year and control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Chopping the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent on Reagan’s watch certainly contributed to the shift. The CEO earning $10 million a year, who had to scrape by on $3 million before Reagan, got to keep $7.2 million by the time Regan left office in 1989.

  • Astoundingly, during the first 7 years of George W. Bush’s administration (before the wheels came off the wagon in 2008), fully 98% (!) of the growth in national income was scooped up by the top 10% of income earners, leaving 2% for the rest of us. Hello? ( http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/pages/interactive#/?start=1917&end=2007)

  • This lack of balance has polarized the United States economically and politically, creating the greatest domestic inequality of wealth among all advanced nations while producing legislative gridlock between those seeking to protect the interests of their wealthy benefactors and those committed to a broader distribution of the fruits of prosperity.
    

• Power has also been misplaced militarily by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, soil regarded as holy by Islam. These un-winnable wars of choice create little beyond discord, death and destruction, providing Radical Islam with its most effective recruiting tool. Most importantly, such wars perpetuate the escalation of conflict between Muslims and the U.S. with potentially catastrophic consequences. Such wars appear to be playing into the hands of al-Qaida whose strategy is to “Spread them thin and bleed them into bankruptcy.” (Al-Qaida’s investment in the range of $250,000-$500,000 in 9/11 panicked the U.S. into spending at least a couple of trillion dollars in response. Today the U.S. is in difficult economic and financial straits. Credit downgraded by Standard and Poors credit-rating agency, the U.S. is courting bankruptcy.)

• The Scientific-Technological Elite have teamed up with the Military-Industrial complex to produce ever-more technologically sophisticated (and expensive) weapons the political sector willingly underwrites apparently for much the same reason as Mallory climbed Everest: “Because it’s there.”

• Policymakers, misled as to the accuracy and reliability of “smart” bombs and missiles, order so-called “surgical” strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting in tragic civilian casualties dismissed as “collateral damage,” a Newspeak phrase if ever there was one.

• Agent Orange – the toxic defoliant used in Vietnam, another misbegotten contribution of the Scientific-Technological Elite.

• Liberties enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights have been seriously undermined by the Patriot Acts, enacted as a response to the attack on 9/11, around which conspiracy theories rage.

• Suspects have been abducted and transferred to countries (“extraordinary rendition,” more Newspeak) where “harsh interrogation” techniques, (usually “waterboarding,” a technique hearkening back to the Spanish Inquisition) have been employed, as they reportedly have been in Guantanamo.

• Extra-constitutional wiretapping, record searches and “lone wolf” surveillance have been practiced in ways reminiscent of “Big Brother.”

• An “enemy combatant,” for whom especially harsh rules apply, is whomever the President of the United States so designates, without explanation or trial. Kafka, anyone?

• Peaceful “Occupy” protesters, exercising their First Amendment rights “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” have been nonchalantly pepper sprayed while quietly seated in orderly rows, heads bowed.

• The democratic processes, while ostensibly still functioning, have been severely compromised by priorities distorted by campaign funding, irregularities in tallying votes, gerrymandering, and state-legislated impediments to voter registration. Lest we forget, the pivotal 2000 election was decided by a single vote in the Supreme Court.
  

In foreign policy, the United States seems to have adopted the very qualities U. S. statesmen deplored about the Soviets during the Cold War, namely:

• Regarding international tensions as a normal – indeed a desirable – state of affairs and a precondition to change under an “unfettered capitalist” dialectic.

• Fomenting agitation, revolutions, conspiracies subversion, infiltration and so-called wars of liberation, while never ceasing to proclaim that it is peace-loving – think U.S. in Iran in the 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Congo in 1960, Cuba 1961, Brazil 1964, Ghana 1966, Iraq 1968, Chile 1973, Afghanistan 1973-74 and again in 1978 and the 1980s, Nicaragua 1981-1990, Panama 1989, Haiti 2004, Somalia 2006-2007, in addition to the three aforementioned Long Wars.

Bottom line: Americans today are living the worst fears of President Eisenhower and author George Orwell.

Not by chance did Doonesbury creator, Gary Trudeau, choose a battered Roman legionnaire’s helmet to symbolize President George W. Bush – America has morphed into the modern Roman Empire.

How did it come to this? Stay tuned.
© 2012 D. L. Smith