The Permanent War

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The militarists will make the "war on terror" last as long as they can. Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War effectively extended World War II by another forty-odd years and put trillions of dollars into defense industry coffers -- not to mention putting hundreds of thousands of military brats like me through college. The current crop of defense contractors is gambling that the war on terror will last at least as long.

Today, there are approximately 7.5 million people dependent on the U.S. war machine for their livelihoods -- certainly enough to swing an election. Then there are probably at least as many people in the retail, real estate, automobile, and service industries in military and other regions whose paychecks indirectly depend on defense spending. War is good for their wallets.

In the 2004 presidential election, voters basically had a choice of two pro-war candidates. Democrats declared John Kerry electable -- which is a trope, a figure of speech, a code word that in fact means he's "strong on defense" -- in other words, he isn't the sort of person to cut the military budget and, if anything, is the sort who'd probably expand it. That's what it takes to get the votes of those millions of people who depend on war for a living.

And even among those not directly involved in the war industry, there are still plenty who feel that war is good for the economy. They forget that the economy was in pretty good shape during the 1990s after the Soviet Union disintegrated and cutbacks in military spending were being implemented. When the Cold War ended, Americans began thinking of a "peace dividend" that would free up government funding for domestic spending.

The militarists, of course, didn't regard a peace dividend as encouraging. That's why they came up with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the war in Iraq, and why the right-wing media machine geared up to get rid of Bill Clinton. Despite authorizing bombing campaigns in Iraq, Sudan, and Kosovo, Clinton wasn't pumping out enough military money to suit them. What's more, Clinton didn't buy the PNAC's war in Iraq when it was proposed to him in 1997.

Hard-core militarists like a bad economy. Poverty and insecurity lead to more recruits, which enlarges militarists' numbers and electoral clout. There really is a "poverty draft." My father and all five of his brothers joined up to escape the slums of Roxbury. The military was the only job security they'd ever known. "It was a guaranteed paycheck twice a month," Specialist Edward Platt of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, told the The New York Times in November 2003. "There's not that kind of guarantee anywhere these days." Platt, who enlisted right out of high school, left one of his legs in Iraq.

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