Eisenhower's worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs

[unhappycamper]

Eisenhower's worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs
Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 June 2011 21.00 BST

Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?

Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.

~snip~

It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defence was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" of a military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence on government". A burgeoning defence establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a "military-industrial-congressional complex".) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to "endanger our liberties and democratic processes".

I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today's US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defence industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."

~snip~

These figures merely formalise existing commitments and interests. At the end of the cold war soldiers assiduously invented new conflicts for themselves and their suppliers, variously wars on terror, drugs, piracy, internet espionage and man's general inhumanity to man. None yields victory, but all need equipment. The war on terror fulfilled all Eisenhower's fears, as America sank into a swamp of kidnapping, torture and imprisonment without trial.

[MadHound]

1. Ike's worst fears have been true for decades now,

It has now just gotten so painfully obvious that perhaps, just maybe, the public at large is waking up to the threat.

[leveymg]

2. Eisenhower is more progressive than Obama or Clinton on many issues, particularly economics and reg-

ulation of banks and corporations. He would be appalled by how Chicago School Right-wing ideology has taken over, and would no doubt express intense fear for the nation's course and future.

[Octafish]

3. ''Money trumps peace.'' -- George Walker Bush, Feb. 14, 2007

Of course, members of his family and their cronies have worked to make war profitable since World War I.

[Javaman]

4. The US has been inventing enemies long before Eisenhower.

two off the top of my head started the war against the Native Americans and the other was the Spanish American war.

All Eisenhower did was vaguely define it by pining it solely on MIC.

But Eisenhower was far from being a saint.

He committed crimes under the aegis of "enemies". A few come to mind involving the middle east proxy wars in the 1950's and also in South America for US corporations.

While Eisenhower tried giving us his Mia Culpa for the evils he has done to the world by blaming someone else, the fact is, he was just as big a player in the creation of corporate profit over human rights and the full on establishment of the MIC.

We all seem to forget that he authorized one last fly over of the USSR by a U2 spy plane literally days before he was to meet with Khrushchev.

Yeah, he was a much a prick as the rest of them.

All he said in his last statement, in a nut shell is, "it's someone else's fault, not mine". That kind of bullshit still is heard by every goddamn repuke today.

Eisenhower can go fuck himself side ways in the grave.

[hifiguy]

5. One man took Ike's advice seriously.

His name was John Kennedy, and look what it got him.