[lbo-talk] The long war [was Re: Fwd: Moyers interviews Andrew Bacevich]

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Apr 11 15:31:35 PDT 2010


"And it is a war in which one-half of one percent of the American people bear the burden. And the other 99.5 percent basically go on about their daily life, as if the war did not exist."

No. We all bear the burden. The money that could go into rebuilding infrastructure, health care, education....etc. is going into this war. The first step forward for a peace movement is to talk about the costs of this war to everyone.

Joanna

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I agree. The quote comes from Bacevitch, not CGE. I am pretty sure CGE agrees with you. I want to point some other parts of what an anti-war movement must do.

I was trying to tease out some of the structural and social costs, which amount to the corruption of the military, the state and the society. It's not as easy to show this side as it is a pie chart with combined military and war spending, v. peace and social spending.

As much as I dislike the military, it's not going to disappear. So part of the anti-war function is to keep the military clean, just and lawful (within), under control and limited in its scope of action. All of these are goals or ideals for a representative government with a military. These ideals have been badly damaged, eroded or disappeared.

I think that damage and corruption is directly related to the military theories of counterinsurgency and their use as the center of its strategic planning and development. What is going on is the militarization of civilian political institutions and simultaneously the politicalization of military institutions. The means arise from the idea of turning a soldier into a policeman in a realm of action where there are no courts, laws, public accounting or oversight.

The above was also part of the anti-war movement of the past coming mostly from the legal wing who dealt with desertion and the military justice system. Some of those people carried on to a new generation. These are mostly off the radar people, lawyers dealing with military prisoner issues today.

Military counterinsurgency actions scooped up thousands of civilians and put them in a military prison system. So now we are arguing how to dispose of them. They should never have been in military custody in the first place. The whole ideology of counterinsurgency is the culprit. It will continue to produce civilian causalities and prisoners who can't be adjudicated in properly constituted civilian courts because the facts of their capture illustrate the vastly mistaken and flawed ideology of counterinsurgency.

CG



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