War-Addicted US Afflicted With Imperalist HangoverWilliam Pfaff, Truthdig: The United States has become war-addicted. Since the Korean War, it has been permanently at war... War has become part of the national identity, as well as the national economy, which turns out more weapons and more military high technology than all the rest of the world combined...
When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the Russians who knew the most about the US, Georgi Abatov, then head of the Soviet Union's Institute for USA and Canadian Studies, said to an American, 'We are about to do something terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of your enemy.' He did not realize how simple it was going to be to find replacements.
Chris Hedges, Truthdig: The embrace of any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalistic cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy...
Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality... Since the Second World War, the [US] federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations... It is gilded corporate welfare... Taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system.
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: National Security Advisor James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai's repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages... both used the same image... 'We can't fight with one hand tied behind our back.'...
This is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. 'No hands are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam.' Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image is abidingly odd... Hidden in the image is acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.
