Permanent War

Burkean scholar David Bromwich has penned a devastating Old Right assault on "the public acceptance of American militarism" that all lovers of the Old Republic (and haters of the un-American Empire) would be wise to read — Serial war as a way of life. The blurb:

From American humanitarian intervention and wars of choice to President Barack Obama's present Af-Pak war - and finally to wars beyond the horizon - wars have become an American way of life. Yet, one cannot continue as free people while accepting the fruits of conquest and domination: the passive beneficiaries of masters are also slaves.

"We are now close to codifying a pattern by which a new president is expected never to give up one war without taking on another," he writes. And he places blame where blame is due: "It was Kosovo more than any other engagement of the past 50 years that prepared an American military-political consensus in favor of serial wars against transnational enemies of whatever sort." A noteworthy excerpt:

Robert Gates put the latest thinking into conventional form, once again, on 60 Minutes in May. Speaking of the Pentagon's need to focus on the war in Afghanistan, Gates said: "I wanted a department that frankly could walk and chew gum at the same time, that could wage war as we are doing now, at the same time we plan and prepare for tomorrow's wars."

The weird prospect that this usage - "tomorrow's wars" - renders routine is that we anticipate a good many wars in the near future. We are the ascendant democracy, the exceptional nation in the world of nations. To fight wars is our destiny and our duty. Thus the word "wars" - increasingly in the plural - is becoming the common way we identify not just the wars we are fighting now but all the wars we expect to fight.

Prof. Bromwich counters, "To speak of a perpetual war against 'threats' beyond the horizon, as the Bush Pentagon did, and now the Obama Pentagon does, is to evade the question whether any of the wars is, properly speaking, a war of self-defense."

He mentions a frightening cause for this neo-American mentality beyond the usual suspects: "our pursuit of refined weapons and lethal technology, or the military bases with which the US has encircled the globe, or the financial interests, the Halliburtons and Raytheons, the DynCorps and Blackwaters that combine against peace with demands in excess of the British East India Company at the height of its influence." It is a cause that should be an alarm for any lover of freedom: "the American military now encompasses an officer class with the character and privileges of a native aristocracy, and a rank-and-file for whom the best possibilities of socialism have been realized."

"A very different view of war was taken by America's founders," Prof. Bromwich reminds us. "One of their steadiest hopes - manifest in the scores of pamphlets they wrote against the British Empire and the checks against war powers built into the Constitution itself - was that a democracy like the United States would lead irresistibly away from the conduct of wars."

So, America’s Anti-Militarist Tradition with its opposition to standing armies has morphed into a neo-American vision eerily reminiscent of the Trotskyite Permanent Revolution.