We have a meeting with Brigid Smith on Wednesday, March 29
at 4:30 PM at the Office of Congressperson John Sarbanes, 600 Baltimore Avenue,
Suite 303, Towson, Md. 21204. The main purpose of the meeting is to get a
better understanding of a progressive perspective during the time of a Trump
Administration with Republican control of the House and the Senate. There
would also be an opportunity to raise questions about particular legislation,
but as you know the Democrats have little chance of passing any bills. Please
RSVP to me at mobuszewski@verizon.net or 410-323-1607
if you can attend the meeting. Thanks.
Kagiso,
Max
The
Ugly Numbers of Trauma, Exile and Death Caused by U.S. Wars and Interventions
in the Past 75 Years
March 28, 2017
This
essay is adapted from “Measuring Violence,” the first chapter of John Dower’s
new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two [3].
On
February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl
Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by its
publisher, Henry Luce, entitled “The American Century.” The son of Presbyterian
missionaries, born in China in 1898 and raised there until the age of 15, Luce
essentially transposed the certainty of religious dogma into the certainty of a
nationalistic mission couched in the name of internationalism.
Luce
acknowledged that the United States could not police the whole world or attempt
to impose democratic institutions on all of mankind. Nonetheless, “the world of
the 20th Century,” he wrote, “if it is to come to life in any nobility of
health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century.” The
essay called on all Americans “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our
opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in
consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such
purposes as we see fit and by such measures as we see fit.”
Japan’s
attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States wholeheartedly onto the
international stage Luce believed it was destined to dominate, and the ringing
title of his cri de coeur became a staple of patriotic Cold
War and post-Cold War rhetoric. Central to this appeal was the affirmation of a
virtuous calling. Luce’s essay singled out almost every professed ideal that
would become a staple of wartime and Cold War propaganda: freedom, democracy,
equality of opportunity, self-reliance and independence, cooperation, justice,
charity—all coupled with a vision of economic abundance inspired by “our
magnificent industrial products, our technical skills.” In present-day
patriotic incantations, this is referred to as “American exceptionalism.”
The
other, harder side of America’s manifest destiny was, of course, muscularity.
Power. Possessing absolute and never-ending superiority in developing and
deploying the world’s most advanced and destructive arsenal of war. Luce did
not dwell on this dimension of “internationalism” in his famous essay, but once
the world war had been entered and won, he became its fervent apostle—an
outspoken advocate of “liberating” China from its new communist rulers, taking
over from the beleaguered French colonial military in Vietnam, turning both the
Korean and Vietnam conflicts from “limited wars” into opportunities for a wider
virtuous war against and in China, and pursuing the rollback of the Iron
Curtain with “tactical atomic weapons.” As Luce’s incisive biographer Alan
Brinkley documents, at one point Luce even mulled the possibility of
“plastering Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs”—a terrifying scenario, but one
that the keepers of the U.S. nuclear arsenal actually mapped out in expansive
and appalling detail in the 1950s and 1960s, before Luce’s death in 1967.
The
“American Century” catchphrase is hyperbole, the slogan never more than a myth,
a fantasy, a delusion. Military victory in any traditional sense was largely a
chimera after World War II. The so-called Pax Americana itself
was riddled with conflict and oppression and egregious betrayals of the
professed catechism of American values. At the same time, postwar U.S. hegemony
obviously never extended to more than a portion of the globe. Much that took
place in the world, including disorder and mayhem, was beyond America’s
control.
Yet,
not unreasonably, Luce’s catchphrase persists. The twenty-first-century world
may be chaotic, with violence erupting from innumerable sources and causes, but
the United States does remain the planet’s “sole superpower.” The myth of
exceptionalism still holds most Americans in its thrall. U.S. hegemony, however
frayed at the edges, continues to be taken for granted in ruling circles, and
not only in Washington. And Pentagon planners still emphatically define their
mission as “full-spectrum dominance” globally.
Washington’s
commitment to modernizing its nuclear arsenal rather than focusing on achieving
the thoroughgoing abolition of nuclear weapons has proven unshakable. So has
the country’s almost religious devotion to leading the way in developing and
deploying ever more “smart” and sophisticated conventional weapons of mass
destruction.
Welcome
to Henry Luce’s—and America’s—violent century, even if thus far it’s lasted
only 75 years. The question is just what to make of it these days.
Counting
the Dead
We
live in times of bewildering violence. In 2013, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff told a Senate committee that the world is “more dangerous than
it has ever been.” Statisticians, however, tell a different story: that war and
lethal conflict have declined steadily, significantly, even precipitously since
World War II.
Much
mainstream scholarship now endorses the declinists. In his influential 2011
book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker adopted the labels “the Long Peace” for the
four-plus decades of the Cold War (1945-1991), and “the New Peace” for the
post-Cold War years to the present. In that book, as well as in
post-publication articles, postings, and interviews, he has taken the
doomsayers to task. The statistics suggest, he declares, that “today we may be
living in the most peaceable era in our species’s existence.”
Clearly,
the number and deadliness of global conflicts have indeed declined since World
War II. This so-called postwar peace was, and still is, however, saturated in
blood and wracked with suffering.
It is
reasonable to argue that total war-related fatalities during the Cold War
decades were lower than in the six years of World War II (1939–1945) and
certainly far less than the toll for the twentieth century’s two world wars
combined. It is also undeniable that overall death tolls have declined further
since then. The five most devastating intrastate or interstate conflicts of the
postwar decades—in China, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and between Iran and
Iraq—took place during the Cold War. So did a majority of the most deadly
politicides, or political mass killings, and genocides: in the Soviet Union,
China (again), Yugoslavia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Sudan, Nigeria,
Indonesia, Pakistan/Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Cambodia,
among other countries. The end of the Cold War certainly did not signal the end
of such atrocities (as witness Rwanda, the Congo, and the implosion of Syria).
As with major wars, however, the trajectory has been downward.
Unsurprisingly,
the declinist argument celebrates the Cold War as less violent than the global
conflicts that preceded it, and the decades that followed as statistically less
violent than the Cold War. But what motivates the sanitizing of these years,
now amounting to three-quarters of a century, with the label “peace”? The
answer lies largely in a fixation on major powers. The great Cold War
antagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union, bristling with their
nuclear arsenals, never came to blows. Indeed, wars between major powers or
developed states have become (in Pinker’s words) “all but obsolete.” There has
been no World War III, nor is there likely to be.
Such
upbeat quantification invites complacent forms of self-congratulation. (How
comparatively virtuous we mortals have become!) In the United States, where
we-won-the-Cold-War sentiment still runs strong, the relative decline in global
violence after 1945 is commonly attributed to the wisdom, virtue, and firepower
of U.S. “peacekeeping.” In hawkish circles, nuclear deterrence—the Cold War’s
MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine that was described early on as a
“delicate balance of terror”—is still canonized as an enlightened policy that
prevented catastrophic global conflict.
What
Doesn’t Get Counted
Branding
the long postwar era as an epoch of relative peace is disingenuous, and not
just because it deflects attention from the significant death and agony that
actually did occur and still does. It also obscures the degree to which the
United States bears responsibility for contributing to, rather than impeding,
militarization and mayhem after 1945. Ceaseless U.S.-led transformations of the
instruments of mass destruction—and the provocative global impact of this
technological obsession—are by and large ignored.
Continuities
in American-style “warfighting” (a popular Pentagon word) such as heavy
reliance on airpower and other forms of brute force are downplayed. So is U.S.
support for repressive foreign regimes, as well as the destabilizing impact of
many of the nation’s overt and covert overseas interventions. The more subtle
and insidious dimension of postwar U.S. militarization—namely, the violence
done to civil society by funneling resources into a gargantuan, intrusive, and
ever-expanding national security state—goes largely unaddressed in arguments
fixated on numerical declines in violence since World War II.
Beyond
this, trying to quantify war, conflict, and devastation poses daunting
methodological challenges. Data advanced in support of the decline-of-violence
argument is dense and often compelling, and derives from a range of respectable
sources. Still, it must be kept in mind that the precise quantification of
death and violence is almost always impossible. When a source offers fairly
exact estimates of something like “war-related excess deaths,” you usually are
dealing with investigators deficient in humility and imagination.
Take,
for example, World War II, about which countless tens of thousands of studies
have been written. Estimates of total “war-related” deaths from that global
conflict range from roughly 50 million to more than 80 million. One explanation
for such variation is the sheer chaos of armed violence. Another is what the
counters choose to count and how they count it. Battle deaths of uniformed
combatants are easiest to determine, especially on the winning side. Military
bureaucrats can be relied upon to keep careful records of their own
killed-in-action—but not, of course, of the enemy they kill. War-related
civilian fatalities are even more difficult to assess, although—as in World War
II—they commonly are far greater than deaths in combat.
Does
the data source go beyond so-called battle-related collateral damage to include
deaths caused by war-related famine and disease? Does it take into account
deaths that may have occurred long after the conflict itself was over (as from
radiation poisoning after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or from the U.S. use of Agent
Orange in the Vietnam War)? The difficulty of assessing the toll of civil,
tribal, ethnic, and religious conflicts with any exactitude is obvious.
Concentrating
on fatalities and their averred downward trajectory also draws attention away
from broader humanitarian catastrophes. In mid-2015, for instance, the Office
of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the number
of individuals “forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution,
conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations” had surpassed 60
million and was the highest level recorded since World War II and its immediate
aftermath. Roughly two-thirds of these men, women, and children were displaced
inside their own countries. The remainder were refugees, and over half of these
refugees were children.
Here,
then, is a trend line intimately connected to global violence that is not
heading downward. In 1996, the U.N.’s estimate was that there were 37.3 million
forcibly displaced individuals on the planet. Twenty years later, as 2015
ended, this had risen to 65.3 million—a 75% increase over the last two
post-Cold War decades that the declinist literature refers to as the “new
peace.”
Other
disasters inflicted on civilians are less visible than uprooted populations.
Harsh conflict-related economic sanctions, which often cripple hygiene and
health-care systems and may precipitate a sharp spike in infant mortality,
usually do not find a place in itemizations of military violence. U.S.-led U.N.
sanctions imposed against Iraq for 13 years beginning in 1990 in conjunction
with the first Gulf War are a stark example of this.
An account published in
the New York Times Magazine in July 2003 accepted the fact
that “at least several hundred thousand children who could reasonably have been
expected to live died before their fifth birthday.” And after all-out wars, who
counts the maimed, or the orphans and widows, or those the Japanese in the wake
of World War II referred to as the “elderly orphaned”—parents bereft of their
children?
Figures
and tables, moreover, can only hint at the psychological and social violence
suffered by combatants and noncombatants alike. It has been suggested, for
instance, that one in six people in areas afflicted by war may suffer from
mental disorder (as opposed to one in ten in normal times). Even where American
military personnel are concerned, trauma did not become a serious focus of
concern until 1980, seven years after the U.S. retreat from Vietnam, when
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was officially recognized as a
mental-health issue.
In
2008, a massive sampling study of 1.64 million U.S. troops deployed to
Afghanistan and Iraq between October 2001 and October 2007 estimated “that
approximately 300,000 individuals currently suffer from PTSD or major
depression and that 320,000 individuals experienced a probable TBI [traumatic
brain injury] during deployment.” As these wars dragged on, the numbers naturally
increased. To extend the ramifications of such data to wider circles of family
and community—or, indeed, to populations traumatized by violence
worldwide—defies statistical enumeration.
Terror
Counts and Terror Fears
Largely
unmeasurable, too, is violence in a different register: the damage that war,
conflict, militarization, and plain existential fear inflict upon civil society
and democratic practice. This is true everywhere but has been especially
conspicuous in the United States since Washington launched its “global war on
terror” in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Here,
numbers are perversely provocative, for the lives claimed in
twenty-first-century terrorist incidents can be interpreted as confirming the
decline-in-violence argument. From 2000 through 2014, according to the widely
cited Global Terrorism Index, “more than 61,000 incidents of terrorism claiming
over 140,000 lives have been recorded.” Including September 11th, countries in
the West experienced less than 5% of these incidents and 3% of the deaths. The
Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, another minutely documented
tabulation based on combing global media reports in many languages, puts the
number of suicide bombings from 2000 through 2015 at 4,787 attacks in more than
40 countries, resulting in 47,274 deaths.
These
atrocities are incontestably horrendous and alarming. Grim as they are,
however, the numbers themselves are comparatively low when set against earlier
conflicts. For specialists in World War II, the “140,000 lives” estimate
carries an almost eerie resonance, since this is the rough figure usually
accepted for the death toll from a single act of terror bombing, the atomic
bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The tally is also low compared to contemporary
deaths from other causes. Globally, for example, more than 400,000 people are
murdered annually. In the United States, the danger of being killed by falling
objects or lightning is at least as great as the threat from Islamist
militants.
This
leaves us with a perplexing question: If the overall incidence of violence,
including twenty-first-century terrorism, is relatively low compared to earlier
global threats and conflicts, why has the United States responded by becoming
an increasingly militarized, secretive, unaccountable, and intrusive “national
security state”? Is it really possible that a patchwork of non-state
adversaries that do not possess massive firepower or follow traditional rules
of engagement has, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared in
2013, made the world more threatening than ever?
For
those who do not believe this to be the case, possible explanations for the
accelerating militarization of the United States come from many directions.
Paranoia may be part of the American DNA—or, indeed, hardwired into the human
species. Or perhaps the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War simply
metastasized into a post-9/11 pathological fear of terrorism. Machiavellian
fear-mongering certainly enters the picture, led by conservative and
neoconservative civilian and military officials of the national security state,
along with opportunistic politicians and war profiteers of the usual sort.
Cultural critics predictably point an accusing finger as well at the mass
media’s addiction to sensationalism and catastrophe, now intensified by the
proliferation of digital social media.
To all
this must be added the peculiar psychological burden of being a “superpower”
and, from the 1990s on, the planet’s “sole superpower”—a situation in which
“credibility” is measured mainly in terms of massive cutting-edge military
might. It might be argued that this mindset helped “contain Communism” during
the Cold War and provides a sense of security to U.S. allies. What it has not
done is ensure victory in actual war, although not for want of trying. With
some exceptions (Grenada, Panama, the brief 1991 Gulf War, and the Balkans),
the U.S. military has not tasted victory since World War II—Korea, Vietnam, and
recent and current conflicts in the Greater Middle East being boldface examples
of this failure. This, however, has had no impact on the hubris attached to
superpower status. Brute force remains the ultimate measure of credibility.
The
traditional American way of war has tended to emphasize the “three Ds” (defeat,
destroy, devastate). Since 1996, the Pentagon’s proclaimed mission is to
maintain “full-spectrum dominance” in every domain (land, sea, air, space, and
information) and, in practice, in every accessible part of the world. The Air
Force Global Strike Command, activated in 2009 and responsible for managing
two-thirds of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, typically publicizes its readiness for
“Global Strike... Any Target, Any Time.”
In
2015, the Department of Defense acknowledged maintaining 4,855 physical
“sites”—meaning bases ranging in size from huge contained communities to tiny
installations—of which 587 were located overseas in 42 foreign countries. An
unofficial investigation that includes small and sometimes impermanent
facilities puts the number at around 800 in 80 countries. Over the course of
2015, to cite yet another example of the overwhelming nature of America’s
global presence, elite U.S. special operations forces were deployed to around
150 countries, and Washington provided assistance in arming and training
security forces in an even larger number of nations.
America’s
overseas bases reflect, in part, an enduring inheritance from World War II and
the Korean War. The majority of these sites are located in Germany (181), Japan
(122), and South Korea (83) and were retained after their original mission of
containing communism disappeared with the end of the Cold War. Deployment of
elite special operations forces is also a Cold War legacy (exemplified most
famously by the Army’s “Green Berets” in Vietnam) that expanded after the
demise of the Soviet Union. Dispatching covert missions to three-quarters of
the world’s nations, however, is largely a product of the war on terror.
Many
of these present-day undertakings require maintaining overseas “lily pad”
facilities that are small, temporary, and unpublicized. And many, moreover, are
integrated with covert CIA “black operations.” Combating terror involves
practicing terror—including, since 2002, an expanding campaign of targeted
assassinations by unmanned drones. For the moment, this latest mode of killing
remains dominated by the CIA and the U.S. military (with the United Kingdom and
Israel following some distance behind).
Counting
Nukes
The
“delicate balance of terror” that characterized nuclear strategy during the
Cold War has not disappeared. Rather, it has been reconfigured. The U.S. and
Soviet arsenals that reached a peak of insanity in the 1980s have been reduced
by about two-thirds—a praiseworthy accomplishment but one that still leaves the
world with around 15,400 nuclear weapons as of January 2016, 93% of them in
U.S. and Russian hands. Close to two thousand of the latter on each side are
still actively deployed on missiles or at bases with operational forces.
This
downsizing, in other words, has not removed the wherewithal to destroy the
Earth as we know it many times over. Such destruction could come about
indirectly as well as directly, with even a relatively “modest” nuclear
exchange between, say, India and Pakistan triggering a cataclysmic climate
shift—a “nuclear winter”—that could result in massive global starvation and
death. Nor does the fact that seven additional nations now possess nuclear
weapons (and more than 40 others are deemed “nuclear weapons capable”) mean
that “deterrence” has been enhanced. The future use of nuclear weapons, whether
by deliberate decision or by accident, remains an ominous possibility. That
threat is intensified by the possibility that nonstate terrorists may somehow
obtain and use nuclear devices.
What is
striking at this moment in history is that paranoia couched as strategic
realism continues to guide U.S. nuclear policy and, following America’s lead,
that of the other nuclear powers. As announced by the Obama administration in
2014, the potential for nuclear violence is to be “modernized.” In concrete
terms, this translates as a 30-year project that will cost the United States an
estimated $1 trillion (not including the usual future cost overruns for
producing such weapons), perfect a new arsenal of “smart” and smaller nuclear
weapons, and extensively refurbish the existing delivery “triad” of long-range
manned bombers, nuclear-armed submarines, and land-based intercontinental
ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
Nuclear
modernization, of course, is but a small portion of the full spectrum of
American might—a military machine so massive that it inspired President Obama
to speak with unusual emphasis in his State of the Union address in January
2016. “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth,” he
declared. “Period. Period. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. It’s not
even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations
combined.”
Official
budgetary expenditures and projections provide a snapshot of this enormous
military machine, but here again numbers can be misleading. Thus, the “base
budget” for defense announced in early 2016 for fiscal year 2017 amounts to
roughly $600 billion, but this falls far short of what the actual outlay will
be. When all other discretionary military- and defense-related costs are taken
into account—nuclear maintenance and modernization, the “war budget” that pays
for so-called overseas contingency operations like military engagements in the
Greater Middle East, “black budgets” that fund intelligence operations by
agencies including the CIA and the National Security Agency, appropriations for
secret high-tech military activities, “veterans affairs” costs (including
disability payments), military aid to other countries, huge interest costs on
the military-related part of the national debt, and so on—the actual total
annual expenditure is close to $1 trillion.
Such
stratospheric numbers defy easy comprehension, but one does not need training
in statistics to bring them closer to home. Simple arithmetic suffices. The
projected bill for just the 30-year nuclear modernization agenda comes to over
$90 million a day, or almost $4 million an hour. The $1 trillion price tag for
maintaining the nation’s status as “the most powerful nation on Earth” for a
single year amounts to roughly $2.74 billion a day, over $114 million an hour.
Creating
a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly—and
remunerative.
So an
era of a “new peace”? Think again. We’re only three quarters of the way through
America’s violent century and there’s more to come.
John
Dower is professor emeritus of history at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He is the author of the National Book Critics Circle
Award-winning War Without Mercy and the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Embracing Defeat. His new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two [3] (Dispatch
Books), has just been published.
[5]
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/john-dower
[2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/
[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467236/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Ugly Numbers of Trauma, Exile and Death Caused by U.S. Wars and Interventions in the Past 75 Years
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
[2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/
[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467236/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Ugly Numbers of Trauma, Exile and Death Caused by U.S. Wars and Interventions in the Past 75 Years
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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