The Permanent War

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Members of the militarist class have to be gung ho -- otherwise they might wind up facing the fact that to feed their own kids they must kill someone else's. It helps if the enemy looks different or can be seen as subhuman. "We had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did," said Stan Goff, former master sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam. "We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into 'ragheads.' "

In 1965, when Johnson was commencing escalation, I was in seventh grade. "Why are we in Vietnam?" I heard one kid ask. "Because they asked us to help them," another glibly replied. It sounded reasonable at the time. The Vietnam War put clothes on my back and food on the table. By 1970, nearing the apex of President Nixon's bombing campaign, which he disingenuously called "Vietnamization," my father was making a killing -- literally and figuratively -- drawing hazardous-duty pay. And it was hazardous; a fighter plane once ran over his heel. When he came home I was wearing long hair and bell-bottom jeans. My father saw this as a betrayal, and maybe it was. I didn't realize then that having long hair was an antiwar statement.

Thirty-five years later I live in Jacksonville, Florida, a town built largely with defense dollars. Our most prominent congressional representatives are praised for their dedication to keeping bases open and military budgets as high as possible. BRAC (base realignment and closure) is a four-letter word here.

After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, things really started looking bleak for the local economy. Nationwide, nearly 7 million people -- approximately 6 percent of the U.S. labor force, whose jobs depended on defense spending -- were suddenly faced with an uncertain future. The bogeyman was gone. "I'm running out of villains," quipped Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung." Luckily, another credible threat would present itself in time to put the next generation of suburban kids through college.

THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL ESTABLISHMENT hijacked the theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes and misapplied them. In the 1930s, while Marxists pointed to the Great Depression as a sign that capitalism was going down the tubes, Keynes argued that recessions are part of a natural "business cycle" and can be managed. In his 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money he addressed the problem of the Depression. Keynes pointed out that the government, rather than balance the budget every year, could ameliorate capitalism's typical boom-bust cycles by keeping jobs available through deficit spending. Keynes' theories became the foundation for President Roosevelt's New Deal and the basis of economic policymaking worldwide for decades.

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