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against the war in Iraq. But what the hell, it's all about perception, isn't it?..or is it denial? I don't know. I suppose the only real criteria is who you think would make a good President, but that isn't it at all is it? Pax Americana, The Roads Not Taken excerpted from the book Dark Ages America The Final Phase of Empire by Morris Berman WW Norton, 2006, paper 2. An expanded military budget means lots of business for American defense industries and weapons manufacturers. We can see how this works if we take a closer look at the dramatically expanding role that militarization has come to play in American political and economic life. It is sobering to realize that in the 1920s and 1930s, the United States deployed an army that was roughly the size of Portugal. Today, America has a quarter of a million troops and civilians stationed in 130 countries. It is, by far, possessor of the largest military establishment in the world and is the world's largest arms exporter. (The U.S. share of the global arms trade doubled after the Cold War ended, so that America now sells roughly half of all the weapons sold worldwide.) By 1990, Pentagon property was valued at nearly $1 trillion, the equivalent of 83 percent of all of the assets of all u.s. manufacturing industries. With an annual budget (during that time) of $310 billion, the Pentagon was (and presumably remains) America's largest company: 5.1 million employees, 600 fixed facilities nationwide, more than 40,000 properties, and 18 million acres of land. Indeed, the Pentagon's economy is twice as large as all of Japan's. In 1997, the government spent $37 billion on military research and development, nearly two-thirds of what the entire world spent on the same. In 1998, while the entire world spent $864 billion on military forces, the American fraction of this was nearly one-third. Although it is true that during the 1990s military expenditures amounted to only 3 or 4 percent of the GDP, the figure is misleading, because when we look at the discretionary budget, the fraction is huge: nearly 50 percent during Fiscal Year 2001 (the last Clinton budget). Indeed, Gore Vidal claims that during the Reagan years the military, fraction of the discretionary budget was nearly 90 percent, and we are, as of this writing, set to go through the roof once again: in the wake of September 11, Bush's $2.13 trillion dollar budget (which would put the country $80 billion in the red) would increase the Pentagon's annual account to $451 billion by 2007-more than the budgets of the next fifteen largest militaries combined. As of 2003, the U.S. was spending more than $400 billion per year on defense and another $100 billion a year for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The scholar who has done most to trace the history of these developments is the late Seymour Melman, in books such as Pentagon Capitalism and After Capitalism. After World War II, he writes, the DoD dominated the affairs of more than thirty thousand industrial laboratories, and the government became the largest financier of research and development in science and technology. From 1952 to 1994, the annual increases made available to the Pentagon exceeded the combined net profit of all American corporations. After 1991, the war economy was maintained at over $250 billion per year in military budgets, and from 1940 to 1996, leaving $5.8 trillion spent on nuclear weapons programs aside, military outlays totaled $17 trillion (measured in 1996 dollars). The sum of all new weapons plans announced by the Pentagon during 1996-97 amounted to more than $1.5 trillion, and some DoD officials estimated that the actual cost could be twice as great. The truth, says Melman, is that the DoD is the largest industrial entity in the United States, and the president is its CEO.As for the militarization of foreign policy, the Washington Post's Dana Priest has documented the increasing tendency of American leaders to turn to the military to solve political and economic problems. "This," she writes, "has become the American military's mission and it has been going on for more than a decade without much public discussion or debate." The latest version of this, of course, is the plan to vanquish terrorism, about which General Anthony Zinni told Priest, "there is no military solution to terrorism." But certainly the Republican leadership doesn't want to hear this. As for the Democrats, it is ironic, says Priest, that Clinton had such an "antimilitary" reputation, given the fact that he relied so heavily on the military to do his foreign policy for him. He sent Zinni to India and Pakistan, for example, to defuse tensions between the two countries, and then to Jordan to negotiate the handover of terrorists. A gulf, says Priest, had developed between America new leadership role in the world and what the country civilian leaders were willing to do to fill it. Quietly, and behind the scenes, the military stepped into that gap, and on Clinton watch "the military slowly, without public scrutiny or debate, came to surpass its civilian leaders in resources and influence around the world." Clinton even began to assign the military tasks such as humanitarian disaster relief and disarmament programs. As we know, Clinton's successor basically discarded diplomacy in favor of military "solutions," but as Priest points out, the pattern had already begun as far back as the 1970s and 1980s. Thus politicians "asked infantry and artillery officers and soldiers to help build pluralistic civil societies in countries that had never had them. They required secretive Special Forces to make friends with the nastiest elements in foreign militaries and turn them into professionals respectful of civilian authority." The invasion of Iraq in 2003-when no weapons of mass destruction were in fact present-and the assignment of the rebuilding of the country to the U.S. armed forces indicate just how far this process has gone. It was, in particular, after the Gulf war that the US. military evolved into a global constabulary, a kind of imperial police force. Between 1989 and 1999, the country engaged in forty-eight open military interventions, as opposed to sixteen during the entire period of the Cold War. Thus Andrew Bacevich notes that after the Cold War, there was a greater reliance on coercion as an instrument of foreign policy, with "the emergence of a new class of uniformed proconsuls presiding over vast quasi-imperial domains." What we saw under Clinton, he goes on, was the appearance of American troops in all sorts of out-of-the-way locales, many of them hitherto remote from even the loosest definition of U.S. interests: periodic demonstrations of U.S. capability in places like Kuwait and Kazakhstan; emergency interventions to set things right in Somalia and Haiti; the establishment of quasi-permanent garrisons in Bosnia, Macedonia and the Persian Gulf; and the continuous dispatch of training missions and liaison teams throughout Latin America and the former Soviet bloc. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Berman_Morris/Pax_Americana_DAA.html
Selection of Top Arms-Purchasing Countries
between 1996 and 2000
(1990 prices)
from the book
The Arms Trade
by Gideon Burrows, 2002
Recipient country total amount of weapons purchased in US$ millions
1996 1998 2000 1996 to
2000
Taiwan $1,313 $4,022 $445 $12,281
Saudi Arabia $1,728 $2,529 $92 $8,362
Turkey $1,143 $1,766 $704 $5,664
South Korea $1,566 $870 $708 $5.334
China $1.047 $88 $2.085 $5,231
India $804 $547 $429 $4,228
Egypt $918 $515 $580 $3.619
Israel $75 $1,300 $270 $2,890
Pakistan $476 $579 $206 $2,626
Kuwait $1,240 $191 $104 $2,063
UK $235 $379 $866 $1,694
Malaysia $49 $37 $52 $1,445
Brazil $453 $145 $244 $1,346
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