The Military State of America and the Democratic Left

...Dean was rash enough to suggest that the United States ought to work for a framework of international law to support its national security, since this country “won’t always have the world’s strongest military...

...China and Russia follow, with 5.8 percent and 4 percent, respectively...

...As the Iraq adventure has demonstrated, shrewd state manipulation of strategic information makes it possible to defuse criticism and discredit public skepticism, until it is too late...

...In short, the war was a demonstration of American ability and willingness to remove and replace regimes anywhere in the world...

...Yet even for thinkers who identify themselves as being on the Left, acceptance of a hyper-militarized America, and its concomitant role of global enforcer, often passes without question...

...Some of the aims invoked by Packer and O’Leary are beyond reproach...

...Very incrementally, states are losing their unchallenged monopoly to exert large-scale coercion...

...Mobilization of such knowledge in turn requires a high-tech establishment of civilian and military experts whose activities cannot readily be monitored by outsiders...

...indeed, its predictable effect was to promote these things...

...His latest book is Privacy in Peril...

...The tradeoffs are dramatic...

...We see further into the future...

...The malignant militarization of American life reaches well beyond the legislative process, disabling the very public discourse that might make authentic debate on it possible...

...He goes on, in this same article, to envisage a quite different role for those on the Left, like himself, who took what he considered a more enlightened view: The “liberal hawks could make the case for war to suspicious Europeans and to wavering fellow Americans,” he wrote...

...But no less central to his frighteningly plausible vision was the role of unceasing external conflict...

...What about the evils, dangers and conspiracies that constantly threaten this country...

...Aggressive pre-emption of possible future antagonists does not...

...According to the New York Times, Murtha cited the need to create jobs in his home state of Pennsylvania...

...Nearly all of them, I hold, run in collision course to the best aims and directions of the democratic Left...

...The U.S...

...By contrast, we should look with utmost suspicion on military projects touted with grandiose and speculative future payoffs— “wars to end all wars,” efforts to “nudge” whole regions to adopt new forms of government, or to “drain the swamp” of future terrorists...

...Normal, that is to say, by comparison to other prosperous democratic societies...

...This would still leave the United States as one of the most heavily militarized countries in the world...

...Historian and retired U.S...

...In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines...

...Sometimes recourse to force is inevitable...

...Sometime in the years following the Second World War, the ancestors of today’s neoconservatives sold the idea that military expenditure should have an open-ended claim on a huge chunk of this country’s national budget...

...If their sheer presence suffices to justify a hypermilitarized America and concomitant suppression of countervailing voices in domestic life, we are embarked on a long journey in the direction of 1984...

...Anyone can extend the list of such comparisons— showing big U.S...

...It exports surplus foodstuffs to hungry parts of the world while also exporting financial calamity and (even under the Obama administration) torture...

...Early in his primary campaign for president, candidate Obama took a verbal beating for referring to the lives of American forces “wasted” in the Iraq War...

...In so doing, of course, he diminished possibilities for critical public debate that might reduce further waste of life in this and other foreign military exploits...

...But the military and its civilian allies can now thank the well-hyped menace of Islamo-fascism for pulling their chestnuts out of the fire...

...It condemns human rights violations, where doing so threatens no pressing foreign policy goals—just as it commits and condones such violations when deemed necessary for raisons d’état...

...It would allow ample resources to counteract violent threats to American wellbeing, both foreign and domestic...

...On the state side of the equation, we see the rise of vast bureaucracies dealing in essentially secret knowledge—intelligence about military matters and a host of other subjects held vital to national security, yet supposedly too sensitive for public disclosure...

...he inveighed that “the state had sent a disproportionate number of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan compared with the level of military contracts it had typically received...

...For those of us who opposed the war, there is obvious relief at the conclusion—we hope—of a conflict that has consistently brought out the worst in this country...

...To some of us, an invasion that leaves such possibilities simmering after six years of American-sponsored death and destruction itself seems more than a little irresponsible...

...But one could hardly deny that we could do much, much better—make Americans healthier, better informed and educated, and less likely to wind up in prison— by redirecting a major slice of the resources now supporting the military and other coercive activities...

...For in order to make itself the kind of country capable of “projecting power” anywhere in the world, as America has done so unsuccessfully in Iraq, it has had to impose vast demands and distortions upon its own domestic life...

...We on the democratic left should be first to support such changes...

...As Orwell warned, the state may change the menu of deadly enemies from year to year but continue the same strictures on public inquiry and dissent...

...A Peculiar Country The United States accounts for nearly half of all the military expenditures of all countries in the world—41.5 percent as of 2008, according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute...

...coercion to manage Iraqi domestic politics...

...By these lights, American failure to crush retrograde regimes anywhere amounts to appeasement...

...We are the indispensable nation...

...Such justifications must never come from the democratic Left...

...In an ironic reverberation of this scurrilous attack, Kerry went on to see his own strong military record in Vietnam distorted and turned against him in the subsequent presidential campaign...

...Its key inspiration is a particularly aggressive form of American exceptionalism...

...More important: the continuing mission of the United States as maker and breaker of regimes around the world remained unquestioned...

...Most dangerous of all is the view of America as some sort of avenging angel of global righteousness, such that American failure to rain down military destruction on retrograde regimes becomes tantamount to supporting them...

...The shocking logic at work here asserts itself over and over among apologists for American military dominance...

...A study by economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz reckons total costs rising to as much as three trillion dollars, once all longterm obligations of caring for veterans of the conflict are reckoned...

...the willingness of national courts to indict and prosecute highly placed human rights violators in other countries, notwithstanding claims of sovereign immunity...

...Similarly, truly multilateral efforts to quell evident humanitarian emergencies—mass killings, widespread ethnic cleansing, avoidable starvation, and epidemics—should win our support...

...But at the same time, those on the democratic Left look to the future with unease...

...In international affairs, as in civil life, some particularly destructive personalities and processes can only be blocked with coercion...

...Orwell’s Vision No modern vision of overweening state power has shaped our sensibilities more than George Orwell’s 1984...

...The Alternative: A Normal Country So what can the democratic Left offer as an alternative to the endless agenda of American world domination...

...But let us never believe the neocons and their allies, for whom all interventions are of a piece...

...As I write in the fall of 2009, this country is embroiled in a national debate of rare intensity and bitterness over efforts to create comprehensive national medical insurance that will serve all Americans...

...It is capable of doing noteworthy good, such as supporting campaigns against HIV/AIDS in Africa...

...One thinks of the desperate rationalizations of a morbidly obese person contemplating gentle suggestions for a diet: “Don’t make me do it...

...But, a look at the proposals put forward there makes it clear that the thinking that gave us the American invasion of Iraq in the first place has not gone away...

...It sounds like a reverberation of this country’s military stance...

...Torture and extra-legal imprisonment are now acknowledged as routine instruments of U.S...

...If the United States just keeps trying, it may yet get it all right...

...If the United States is not in a strong enough position to take risks on behalf of such ends, what country is...

...Murtha was outraged at not getting more...

...This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no part of this country’s repertoire—an aggressive war of choice...

...These wars are wrong because of the destruction and distortions that they spread both abroad and at home...

...The one thing we can be sure of is that the supply of ugly movements and regimes around the world shows no sign of running short...

...Political programs are defined as much by the risks they are willing to accept as by the values they seek to promote...

...Like those forest fires so intense that they generate the very winds that fan them, grassroots lust for military expenditures burns wildly out of control...

...Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia...

...military budget is just there...

...I might wither away and die of starvation...

...In the words of British criminologist Vivien Stern, the United States has become “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach” to crime control...

...Or maybe America somehow just happens to be inhabited by a lot of people with a taste for foreign and domestic violence—who simultaneously also have a preference for mediocre or poor medical, educational, and other services...

...Contra Madeleine Albright, the United States is not “the indispensable country...

...We could well begin with an extremely modest proposal: retooling the United States as a normal country...

...Communities invest their young people by sending them off to deadly adventures abroad...

...pullout to oppress others...

...The Bosnian operation aimed at separating antagonists, stopping massive ethnic cleansing, and forcing the Bosnian Serbs into a peace agreement...

...To her credit, Albright’s effusions in this direction stopped short of support for invading Iraq—something that cannot be said for the so-called liberal hawks...

...Still, leaving before America sets things straight would be irresponsible...

...Often conveying the doctrine are code words referring to special “responsibilities” of the United States to guarantee world “stability...

...The logic of this interpretation leaves one breathless...

...The statement that America’s global military dominance cannot possibly be eternal is no more than obvious...

...The quotable Madeleine Albright once again gave quintessential expression to this mindset: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about,” she chided Colin Powell in 1993, “if we can’t use it...

...It counsels more government openness and broader public engagement in governance, even while acknowledging that these things can go wrong...

...One result is that government claims about matters of vital public concern, from weapons of mass destruction to terrorist dangers, are not easily challenged in public debate...

...Federal agencies reflexively—and successfully— invoke national security as a pretext for blocking investigation of a shocking array of authoritarian measures, including government surveillance over U.S...

...That this idea could not safely be uttered out loud by a serious contender for the presidency demonstrates how far this country’s pervasive militarism has distorted public life...

...But it is easy to cite a few basic standards...

...It is that no country should exercise such disproportionate, unilateral sway...

...In a dangerous world, any course of action bears risks...

...Such conditions can facilitate terrorism, conceivably on a scale well beyond what the world has yet witnessed...

...We hear this kind of thinking in its most outofthe-closet form from neoconservatives—who gave us the Iraq invasion in the first place...

...This country must now manage the political forces set in motion by its invasion according to O’Leary’s exacting formula: defend the federalist constitution, keep resurgent Sunni and Shiite forces from each other’s throats, and preserve the autonomy of the Kurds...

...At home, the effects are even more insidious...

...By some estimates, the United States spends more on its military than the next twelve nations combined...

...Versions of this idea are pervasive among thinkers—American foreign policy elites, and those who would guide them—who would disclaim identification with the neocons...

...James B. Rule is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime member of Dissent’s Editorial Board...

...But the availability of that idea in the language of American politics enables whoever holds sway in Washington to demonize any regime that gets in America’s way as the Evil du jour, hence a legitimate target for made-in-America mayhem...

...So voracious are the domestic constituencies of American militarism as to threaten even the ability of the executive branch to manage military affairs...

...Yet the deeper, mostly unstated assumptions underlying these authors’ proposals ought to strike a chill throughout the democratic Left...

...The Spring 2009 edition features a section of articles under the rubric “Leaving Iraq...

...Who can say when we will emerge...

...Or, as Madeleine Albright, then U.S...

...Yet Obama got off much easier than candidate Howard Dean four years earlier in the primaries...

...The best gift this country could give the world is, indeed, support for a global rule of law that might relieve the world of the future of the burdens of today’s reliance on organized violence...

...Government has grown more closed...

...We have entered an era of national political life dominated by a garrison mentality...

...The sense of all this, from Packer’s standpoint, becomes clear when you recall his efforts to discredit Americans’ resistance to the war in the months before it began...

...not because the Iraqi Army was disbanded...

...Decisions to invoke military force should never be easy...

...returns on these investments come in the form of military contracts directed to the home districts...

...But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control...

...Not because too few troops were dispatched...

...By now, nearly everyone realizes what more thoughtful commentators noted in 2002...

...Just to get the ball rolling, consider reducing the proportion of American GDP devoted to military purposes by half—to roughly three hundred billion dollars per year, or about 10 percent of the national budget...

...Dean was right...

...There are just too many unappealing regimes and movements around the world for them all to be targeted...

...Most important, a lurch toward normalcountry status would make it easier for America and Americans to support one of the most significant recent trends in global affairs...

...His opponent John Kerry’s camp immediately pounced on the latter statement as casting doubt “about [Dean’s] capacity to serve as Commander-in-Chief...

...For those of us who challenge this view, the invasion of Iraq was wrong for fundamental political and—indeed—moral reasons...

...The extraordinary thing is that the trade-offs between military expenditures— bracketing them as “defense” is preposterous— and those supporting a strong domestic life seem never to be debated as such...

...Prisoners captured in U.S...

...It refuses to let American fixation on worldwide dominance to serve as an excuse for not building a strong nation at home—that is, for neglecting health, employment, environmental responsibility, and education...

...As long as it remains in place, that overweening power will combine with exceptionalist fantasies to fuel messianic enterprises like the Iraq War...

...Apocalyptic visions like Nitze’s, soon embellished by the insinuations of Senator Joseph McCarthy, fueled an open-ended program of permanent militarization that continues down to the present...

...The aims and the scale of military efforts were vastly different in these two cases...

...At the same time the United States stands virtually alone among wealthy democracies in not ensuring universal health care for its people...

...Certainly the United States bears profound responsibilities to protect Iraqis at risk from their collaboration with or employment by American forces—and for that matter, to help repair damage to the country’s infrastructure resulting from the invasion...

...Signs of these changes include efforts to create international authority over war crimes...

...George Packer, for example, inveighs against those seeking a quick exit for American forces...

...Just the same, he notes, “After the United States exits, an Arab civil war may re-ignite, as well as Kurdish-Arab conflict...

...It seeks to build, however incrementally, supranational structures of authority and conflict-resolution—as against reliance on unilateral intimidation and worse...

...none of the more than one hundred such aircraft now in existence has ever flown in war...

...The younger Bush made up for his father’s mistake, though he did so for the wrong reasons...

...The result is that we have come to live in a rather peculiar country...

...America’s violent remaking of Iraq would have been entirely acceptable, it seems, if only Friedman’s sensibilities could have guided it...

...The America occupiers have sometimes proved “blindly repressive,” he allows—but sometimes, apparently, not repressive enough...

...One is globalism—the growth of an ever-moretightly connected world, so that people, ideas, technologies, and even weapons move about the earth more and more readily...

...But in fact, these trends could hold the keys to curtailing the vast toll of state-sponsored violence that reached its climax—at least, we hope—in the twentieth century...

...If C. Wright Mills were alive and writing for Dissent, he might label such thinking crackpot empiricism...

...That was the appeal of the liberal hawks, as they canvassed for support for the war at its outset: if you liked American-sponsored peacekeeping in Bosnia, what objection could there be to a reprise of that operation in Iraq...

...militarism...

...Its health outcomes, in matters like infant mortality and life expectancy, are mediocre to poor for any industrialized country—inferior in some respects to much poorer countries like Cuba, Greece, and Jordan...

...Under it, America would remain a major military power...

...The purpose was to extirpate a regime that the United States had built up but that had morphed into an obstacle to this country—and to replace it with one that would represent a more compliant instrument of American purpose...

...America devotes some 4 percent of its GDP to military expenditures, proportionally a bit more than Russia and a bit less than China—but far more than France or the United Kingdom, both of which devote around 2.5 percent...

...But that country could any day be redefined (with some justification) as a threat to the civilized world...

...ARGUMENTS The Military State of America and the Democratic Left JAMES B. RULE The invasion of Iraq was a defining moment for the United States...

...We stand tall...

...And the United States should play its part—no more, no less...

...At this writing, Barack Obama and his holdover secretary of defense have just succeeded in defeating congressional efforts to appropriate some $1.75 billion to produce seven additional F-22 fighter planes...

...To judge from his words, he has no difficulty in principle with the notion of remaking Iraq by outside military force: “Reasonable historians should judge … that removing the genocidal Baathists was overdue,” he avers...

...Obviously, authentic self-defense provides compelling reason for force...

...The United States leads the world against these enemies of civilization...

...The outrage at any such suggestion is predictable...

...Its aim was not to stop some wider conflict or to prevent ethnic cleansing or mass killings...

...It supports democracy in many corners of the world—South Korea today, for example—and suppresses it elsewhere, as in Chile in the 1970s...

...Not because it was mismanaged...

...Above all, America has to get over the fantastical fixation on its status as the world’s master military enforcer, both the obsession with maintaining that status and the frightening conviction of moral superiority that seems to go along with it...

...We’ve got Muslim fundamentalism, a resurgent China, failed states, nuclear proliferation … We’ve got, we’ve got … Islamo-fascism...

...China rises and falls in Washington’s official designations—sometimes a feared twenty-first-century competitor, more recently an ally in the quest for Asian “stability” and indispensable supporter of the U.S...

...economy...

...No one can absolutely rule out the possibility that a steady diet of aggressive American military action abroad might forestall disasters yet unseen...

...But it would also make vast resources available for more constructive purposes, ranging from universal medical coverage for Americans to investment in renewable energy to support of global initiatives to control of curable diseases in the world’s poorest countries...

...Nor can anyone deny that relentless surveillance of domestic communications, or invocation of national security to rebuff all challenges to the exercise of government power could, conceivably, help block further terrorist acts on U.S...

...But its roots in American history lie at least as far back as notions of Manifest Destiny...

...And who can say what new military exploits, or domestic restrictions, will be proclaimed essential to repress these demons of the future...

...Accepting this view of America as the ultimate and rightful arbiter of global affairs—as master hegemon or world superpower, to use less upbeat terms—triggers the weightiest implications and consequences...

...The democratic Left properly welcomes the risks of broader and deeper democracy, at home and abroad...

...Perhaps America simply happens to be abnormally vulnerable to military threats and domestic misbehavior not experienced elsewhere...

...soil...

...Some higher power—fate, Divine Providence, or special “moral clarity”—has created opportunities, indeed obligations, for America to set things straight on a global scale...

...The essays focus on the moral and political quandaries of America’s departure from a country that it did a great deal to break, but where its ability to repair things is rapidly diminishing...

...Along with conflicts in Iraq and elsewhere, the open-ended “War on Terror” has undermined invaluable restraints on executive power...

...ambassador to the United Nations, stated, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America...

...But nor, for that matter, can anyone authoritatively deny that such measures might actually make matters much worse...

...Today we focus especially on the work’s eerie anticipations of pervasive surveillance in the service of domestic repression...

...Pakistan under its last dictator was a stalwart participant in the so-called War on Terror...

...At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia...

...civilians...

...Heatedly defending these appropriations, largely directed to his own district and supporters, was Democratic representative John Murtha...

...Often it plays the role of loose cannon in international affairs, if not that of a swaggering, ignorant, neighborhood bully...

...The administration held that this expenditure was simply not cost effective...

...And certainly this country should do everything possible to prevent regional, communal, and ethnic groupings from exploiting a U.S...

...Among nations, they countervail against one of the subtle but hopeful tendencies in the world today—the movement away from sole reliance on brute state power to resolve international conflict and toward supranational authorities, multilateral decision-making, and establishment of powers above the level of states...

...To acknowledge this much hardly requires adopting the mirror-image caricature of the United States as the Great Satan, source of all the world’s troubles...

...operations—many believed to have only the most dubious involvement in action against this country— have been held for many years without trial...

...These are the subtle shifts toward attenuation of exclusive prerogatives of states in general—in favor of other forms of global authority...

...You’re proposing abandonment of our allies, disengagement from the rest of the world—indeed, isolationism...

...But in the summer the president was unable to block inclusion in the spending bill of more than two billions dollars’ worth of other unneeded military contracts...

...We on the democratic Left must be quick to take risks on behalf of these ends— because the alternative risks of endless, deadly international conflict and narrowing attention to domestic well-being are far more alarming...

...A few decades ago, Iraq was America’s ally...

...they might even be able to explain the connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism …” Brendan O’Leary, another contributor to Dissent’s Spring 2009 “Leaving Iraq” section, also stresses responsibility...

...more lately, it reappeared as part of the axis of evil...

...Even in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, no one in high places has declared repetitions of such exploits “off the table”—to use the expression favored by this country’s foreign policy elites...

...The problem is not that America only uses its power perniciously...

...and the rising role of NGOs and other grassroots actors in challenging human rights violations and other atrocities...

...The country’s elected representatives are stuck—or so they claim—on the cost of providing such care: something under one trillion dollars over the next ten years, according to some estimates...

...There has to be a better way— as we on the democratic Left should be the first to proclaim...

...But when it comes to domestic mayhem and incarceration, America excels...

...But making good on any of these estimable goals, as the authors seem to realize, will be a very big order—especially given America’s record thus far...

...This is a prescription for American war-making all over the globe, into the indefinite future—and for predictable collateral damage to justice, well-being, and the rule of law at home...

...Still, according to NSC 68, it now found itself in ‘deepest peril’, with ‘the destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself’ suddenly looming as a real possibility...

...Even under a reputedly liberal president, we have reason to worry about new versions of Iraq—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or venues yet undisclosed...

...Obviously playing to the sensitivities of Dissent readers, he concludes that “much as we might wish [the war] had never happened at all, America will have obligations as well as interests in Iraq for a long time to come...

...The balance of power among Iraq’s domestic forces could easily be upset, he holds, and valuable progress undone, without a longlingering presence of Americans as enforcers...

...policy—and a supposedly liberal administration is seeking to block full disclosure on these matters...

...It was wrong because wars of this kind are always wrong—aggressive, opportunistic wars of choice, aimed at revamping entire countries to fit the dictates of the invaders...

...Meanwhile, America’s chronic war footing in the twenty-first century has fueled grave degradation in protections for civil liberties and public dissent...

...In all things, it seems, the United States goes to extremes...

...Here, too, the Obama administration has declined to make a clear break from the authoritarian doctrines of its predecessor...

...No doubt some commentators would regard such juxtapositions as mere coincidence...

...Their problems with the Iraq invasion—and implicitly, future American military exploits of the same kind—have to do with execution, not the larger vision of American power that inspired the enterprise...

...The antiwar movement, he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in December, 2002, “has a serious liability … it’s controlled by the furthest reaches of the American Left...

...Included in this reduction should be all unacknowledged expenditures for services of mercenaries and other off-the-books manifestations of U.S...

...That momentum seemed at least potentially in jeopardy after the embarrassing collapse of the Soviet Union—embarrassing when we learned that the Evil Empire had actually been running on empty for some time...

...Neoconservatives will of course deride such tentative developments as insignificant in juxtaposition to the fixed and eternal (as they see them) forces of realpolitik...

...Who can say with confidence what demonic qualities will be ascribed, perhaps quite accurately, to any of America’s present-day allies, with the next shake of this country’s foreign-policy kaleidoscope...

...We are, in short, at the head of the pack in our contribution to worldwide military activity...

...Such logic can never be applied systematically...

...Confronted by mass killings, unilateral invasion, imminent threat to one’s own territory, widespread ethnic cleansing, and other preventable disasters, all nations should be prepared to act together in response...

...To its credit, Dissent has not joined the rush to avert attention from the endgames of the Iraq conflict...

...not because the occupation was incompetent, corrupt, and often criminally negligent...

...But the Iraq War alone may already have cost that much, though how much, exactly, is hard to say...

...Many trends since Orwell’s lifetime have aggravated the hazards that he anticipated...

...He, too, means by this continued readiness to apply U.S...

...The invasion of Iraq sought extirpation of an entrenched regime, followed by top-to-bottom remaking of the country’s political institutions and practices...

...And it appears, alas, that there will always be intellectuals ready to supply high-minded rationales for such efforts...

...It has astonishingly high rates of violent crime and the world’s largest prison population—2.3 million...

...No serious candidate for the Presidency,” the Kerry campaign darkly warned, “has ever before suggested that he would compromise or tolerate an erosion of America’s military supremacy...

...When any country gets seriously in the way of American power, the global responsibilities of this country are apt to require action like that taken in Iraq...

...Army colonel Andrew Bacevich attributes this historic turn largely to the influence of Paul Nitze, author of the classified report drafted for President Harry Truman known as NSC 68: Five years after the end of World War II, the United States stood at the very zenith of its own power and influence...

...Still, O’Leary allows that the invasion hasn’t quite unfolded as he might have wished: “… grotesque mismanagement of regime-replacement … unnecessary and arrogant occupation … incompetence of American direct rule… numerous errors of policy and imagination … in the horrors and brutalities that have followed...

...Set upon at once by the opposition, he quickly apologized...

...It is not even an indispensable country...

...Its rate of high school completion is a lackluster nineteenth among countries of the world, with similarly undistinguished levels of academic achievement among schoolchildren...

...Their words strike an eerie resonance with those of Thomas L. Friedman, before the invasion occurred: he favored George W. Bush’s “audacious” war plan as “a job worth doing,” but only “if we can do it right...

...Obviously, no one can specify exactly how much farther ahead this country would be toward goals of broad social well-being were it freed from its extraordinary commitments to large-scale coercion...

...At other moments it blocks meaningful efforts to fight climate change, opposes restrictions on land-mine use, and supports twenty-first-century Zionism in the form of present-day Israeli appropriation of Palestinian territories...

...In the courts, doctrines of the “inherent power” of the president during wartime have undone vital checks on executive power...

...But halving our military budget would encourage longoverdue national debate about the wisest uses of this country’s substantial remaining military resources...

...This modest proposal in no way requires categorical disengagement from global concerns...

...investments in military and other coercive activities, in contrast to measures of domestic well-being ranging from uninspiring to ghastly, compared to other wealthy countries...

...We are not there, but the direction of movement is unmistakable...

...By now, we should all know better...