Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of President Eisenhower’s famous farewell address that added the term “military-industrial complex” to the national lexicon. The subject of his speech was the first ten years of what has now been sixty years of America on a permanent war footing. Sixty years, think about that for a second. It’s more than a quarter of the entire history of the country. We’re as far from then as they were from 1891! In 1891 there were only forty-four states and there were Civil War veterans still in their forties. Sixty years from now will be the almost impossibly futuristic sounding year of 2071. Somebody not yet born will likely be or have been President.
In commemoration of this grim, decades long anniversary, The American Conservative ran Ike’s full speech along with a series of retrospectives in its February issue. The video of it is a fascinating little historical nugget. Eisenhower flubs enough lines that today’s critics would no doubt shit on him without ever considering the content of what he was saying, yet he never appears flustered or embarrassed, he just picks up from where he misspoke and continues. To a modern eye, it’s odd to see a speech so clearly focused on substance over style.
As with pretty much everything in The American Conservative, the reaction articles run the gamut from thoughtful and informative to shoddy polemic. In the former category is Robert Schlesinger’s piece on the origins of Eisenhower’s speech and how it was drafted. In that latter category is cranky twit Lew Rockwell, who managed to sneak this doozy past the editor:
As a percent of total budget outlays, military spending went from 30 percent in 1950 to 70 percent in 1957. This was the largest peacetime buildup in American history.
Uh, Lew? There was a war on from 1950-53. It’s been in a few history books, and the fact that Congress didn’t officially declare it doesn’t mean we weren’t spending money on it.
In a more thoughtful, but no less anti-militarist, vein, Bill Kauffman quotes the late Senator Patrick Moynihan:
the senator “wondered…whether we any longer knew how” to be a “nation essentially at peace with the rest of the world.”
Moynihan was writing in 1990, which is to say after the Berlin Wall fell but before the Soviet Union collapsed, and before Operation Desert Shield turned into a twenty year long campaign against and in Iraq. Sadly, his words have proved no less prescient that Eisenhower’s. Peace isn’t something we know, and both war and saber rattling have become regular tools of diplomacy instead of last resorts.
In a similar vein, sometime American Conservative author Andrew Bacevich commemorates the same speech in the current issue of The Atlantic. Bacevich recounts not only Eisenhower’s 1961 effort, but a similar speech from 1953, the infancy of his presidency:
“Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower told his listeners, “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
That kind of talk would qualify one as an almost lunatic pacifist in these days where defense dollars are considered sacrosanct. The rest of Bacevich’s piece is the usual military-industrial complex piece (albeit an unusually well informed and thorough version) about just how grotesque and distorted our politics have become thanks to our never ending quest for better and better armaments.
What all of these disparate articles have in common is a unifying thread of nostalgic pining for a lost time. The underlying assumption is that there is a way to go backwards. If we just did X and Y, then we could return to some kind of republican utopia where the government isn’t always finding new and interesting ways to kill and maim people. But, as Eisenhower explicitly said:
American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
If an arms industry is still as necessary an evil in 2011 as it was in 1961, then we have to ask not only how it has grown so large, but how it sustains itself. There are a lot of forces at play, but perhaps the largest doesn’t get much attention, fear. In 1961 it was fear of the Soviet Union, in 2011 it’s fear of terrorism generally, and scary brown Muslims in particular. The difference is that, however overstated the “missile gap” and various other Cold War paranoias were, the Soviet Union was at least a real threat. An unstable, nuclear armed empire ruled by a few unaccountable and wheezing old men isn’t something you can simply dismiss.
By contrast, today the gargantuan beast that is the union of arms and industry stands in opposition to only phantom enemies. In monetary and human terms, al-Qaeda and similar organizations are gnats on America’s ass, and the threat they pose is more theatrical than practical. For proof, consider what would happen if al-Qaeda were destroyed tomorrow and Bin Laden’s head found its way to a pike outside the Pentagon. Would all those defense contractors throw a big victory party and then close up shop, leaving us to spend the money on more useful things? Or would they continue their business largely unaltered, as they did after the Soviet Union collapsed?
That they would take the latter course is so self evident that it makes even asking the question a bit absurd. No doubt some new agent of fear will be found, be it China, India or just some tin pot dictatorship, and the need for ever more expensive means of death and destruction will be justified once again. Attacking the fear that justifies the military-industrial complex (and the inevitable wars that it produces) is a necessary precursor to any meaningful reform.
So long as politicians can blather away about threats in public while appropriating billions at cocktail hours far from prying eyes, we’ll never get a handle on things. So long as claims that poor, backward, medium sized countries like Iran and North Korea are enormous threats to America are taken seriously instead of laughed off as they deserve to be, there will always be a justification for the next wonder weapon. Eisenhower had the luxury of opposing a real threat. Had it occurred to him that his successors would simply invent one, he might have warned against that too.
