In the mid-1950s, I was a Boston boy in grade school. I remember vividly, every few weeks, the school alarm would ring and our teacher would tell us to quickly get under our desks. We were taking part in a Pentagon-backed "safety training" program, duplicated all across the US. Ostensibly, we were learning how to survive a Russian nuclear attack. I was too young to question how a two by three foot wooden box would save me from deadly radiation, but old enough to get the message – "BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID."
Since the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks, the "BE AFRAID" message has permeated the consciousness of the majority of US citizens, many to the point of near hysteria.
According to recent polls, almost one-fifth of US adults say they think President Obama is a secret Muslim, while another fifth believe former President George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance. The combined numbers indicate an amazing four out of ten US adults accept as fact, a delusional fiction about their recent history.
The paranoia is not all that surprising, given US history since World War Two. Virtually every decade, a vigilant government, aided by concerned corporate leaders and the media, dutifully and continuously advised a wary public that a new "existential" threat to the "American Way of Life" had arrived on the scene. Each time, we were told to "BE AFRAID."
In the early 1940s, it was the Nazis. In the 1950s, it was commies ready to launch nuclear Armageddon any minute. In the mid-1960s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis fizzled, the threat became encirclement by enemy nations. Fidel Castro was poised to turn Latin America commie, as Ho Chi Min did the same with Southeast Asia. Mao Ts e-tung and Khrushchev were working out a deal to complete the ring. At the same time, closer to home, militant black radicals in concert with white anti-war, anarchists lefties were poised to engage in a violent revolution.
Miraculously, come the 1980s, the US was still standing. Its' adversaries had either proven to be figments of overactive imaginations or, as conservatives claimed, been vanquished. As the 1990s dawned, suddenly, the US was friendly with all its prior enemies. The Soviet Union had imploded and the Russkies gone capitalist. China was the preferred provider of cheap goods for US consumers and lender of first resort of any money needed to buy the stuff. The only thing to fear was consumer indigestion. Except, that is, for the big and influential crowd, whose living depended on the fear business. To them, paraphrasing Franklin Roosevelt - "the only thing to fear was there was nothing to fear!"
Then, in 2001, thanks be to Allah, along came Osama bin Laden. And 19 box-cutter carrying sociopathic jihadists, who represented an infinitesimal sliver of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. "changed everything." Perhaps, the biggest change that came from al Qaeda's spectacularly effective attack was how it set the stage for the greatest encroachment of military-related interests into the lifeblood of the US economy and psyche since the Great War.
In 1960, a prescient President Eisenhower had warned of "the potential for (a) disastrous rise of misplaced power" from the rapidly growing "military industrial complex." It was made up of "an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" in Ike's words. But, his warning went unheeded and the incipient threat he saw now holds the US in its grip.
The term "national security complex" better describes today's hydra-headed monster, which encompasses the mammoth agglomeration of private corporations and public agencies, which carry out the nation's military, intelligence, and homeland-security functions abroad and at home. As this monster has metastasized, since 9/11, more and more functions are carried out under contract by huge for-profit multinational business conglomerates that provide arms, equipment, services, expertise and personnel for overseas and homeland missions – often with inflated costs and scant oversight.
The domestic communications arm of the complex – a hugely effective "Fear Incorporated USA"- includes a spider's web of well-funded opinion-generating institutions. These entities have permeated the nation's media, providing financial, marketing and operational assistance to conservative politicians, friendly academics and pundits and military-connected message manipulators who keep both real and imagined threats top-of-mind among the citizenry.
The "unwarranted influence" Eisenhower foresaw pervades US politics. Every US President dances to the tune of the complex. Those who assumed Obama would turn off the Pentagon's spigot were mistaken. Instead, he has increased defense spending every year he has been in office.
The latest statistics on the nation's gross domestic product for the second quarter of 2010 document how critical the complex is to the US economy. According to the National Bureau of Economic Analysis, fully half of the meager 1.6 percent increase in quarterly GDP came from the spending by the federal government. Of that growth, about half was generated from directly from national security and defense-related spending, rather than the stimulus funding.
When one quarter of the national economic growth derives from security functions, rather than manufactured goods and services for export or domestic consumption, at one level the US can be categorized as a war economy. Only a few lonely voices in national political leadership or in the media ever seriously question whether this is the America its founders envisioned.
Despite the fact that Obama sent tens of thousands of new troops into Afghanistan and manages an aggressive global war against the terrorist threat, his right-wing detractors relentlessly try to make the US public see him as an Islam sympathizer. Just as the Herald's own James Neilson cries out that "the Muslims are coming" on a regular schedule - his US media counterparts have embedded that mantra as a constant on television, radio and in print. Even usually sane citizens have taken the bait. Incredibly, fifty-two percent of US Republicans say the President "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world."
Ron Paul, the gadfly Republican Congressman raises the question of why this anti-Muslim hysteria has gained traction. Then, he supplies an answer - the neo-conservative warriors in and out of government. Paul describes how these arm chair geopolitical strategists who "demand continual war" must constantly manufacture reasons to "justify it." According to Paul, these forces foster hatred toward Muslims and Islam in order to fuel "the driving emotion that keeps us in the wars" that they financially benefit from.
Just how deeply the US National Security Complex has influenced US political thinking was revealed as former President Kirchner told of his conversation with George W. Bush, when both were still in office. Kirchner remembered an exchange about how a country can best grow its economy. Bush didn't say innovation, manufacturing, exports, few regulations or low taxes. He said "war."
Let's hope for the sake of the US people and everyone else, that should Obama turn out to be a one-term President, his successor hasn't studied at the "W" National Security School of Economics. War may be good business for the war businesses, but for everyone else war is hell.