You Wanted War And You Got It…For Decades To Come

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Remember, we goaded Gorbachev into a military buildup that the non-capitalist Soviet Republics could not match because they didn’t have blue jeans, Neil Diamond and McDonald’s and we did.  Now we have been goaded by some in Islamic circles into doing the exact same thing, but that logic doesn’t apply to us because we have McDonald’s, blue jeans, and Neil Diamond.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Back to Greenwald:

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“Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this “war” – the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) – should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired’s Spencer Ackerman described the most significant exchange:

“Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ‘At least 10 to 20 years.’ . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today – atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS and AP/DOJ) combined.

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Mike:  As I keep telling you folks, the foreign policy is where the meat and taters of all of this tyranny is.  It is invested, it is manifested, and it is visible to the entire known universe, but that’s just me.

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The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. [Mike: Isn’t war great I think we should have buttons made.] Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat. [Mike: Isn’t that true? Let me highlight that. By the bye, this is what the rest of the world reads about us.]

In January, former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson delivered a highly-touted speech suggesting that the war on terror will eventually end; he advocated that outcome, arguing:

‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.'”

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In response, I wrote that the “war on terror” cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of “terrorism”), and (2) the nation’s most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. [Mike: That’s right, it’s big business and it pays.] Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for “at least” another 10-20 years?

The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles [Mike: That is unless I’m on the air, by the bye, folks. Count your blessings that we’re here today and hopefully will be here tomorrow as well. I’ve yet to be suppressed.] of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan . . .

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Mike:  This is a really good point.  The one call we had at the end of last hour, the gentleman from South Carolina was correct.  The only reason the European empires can boast of their social liberal welfare states and their vainglorious unemployment regimes and early retirement regimes is because they don’t have to defend themselves.  You went to work this morning to go defend the Frenchies.  You went to work to defend the Germans, although I suspect the Germans are probably more than happy to take the task up themselves these days.  I know if I were a German I would be.  The Brits are being defended by us.  The South Koreans are making Hyundais right now thanks to the blanket of security that we provide.  There’s an enormous gargantuan cost associated with all this.

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Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world’s largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

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Mike:  Heaven forfend, no, Glenn, no.  That is a really seriously, I think, provocative and salient point, don’t you agree?  Remember, we goaded Gorbachev into a military buildup that the non-capitalist Soviet Republics could not match because they didn’t have blue jeans, Neil Diamond and McDonald’s and we did.  Now we have been goaded by some in Islamic circles into doing the exact same thing, but that logic doesn’t apply to us because we have McDonald’s, blue jeans, and Neil Diamond.

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Then there are the threats to Americans’ security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as “A Nation at War” and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans, as the US government itself claims took place just recently in Boston (and as clearly took place multiple other times over the last several years.)

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Mike:  Maybe there’s a reason why Greenwald had to move to London to work for Guardian UK.  You’re not allowed to say these sorts of things here in the United States.

End Mike Church Show Transcript