BY GIOVANNI TAPANG, Ph.D.
LAST February 4 and 5, commuters, student and people’s organizations participated in a public consultation with the Light Rail Transit Administration (LRTA) and the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC). The public consultation was held by the LRTA with regard to the fare hike that it approved for the light rail transit (LRT) and the metro rail transit (MRT) systems.
The LRTA-DOTC study team that recommended the increase claim (without citing how they arrived at the figure) that the full cost fare for LRT/MRT ranges from P35.77 to P60.75, which is far from the current fare of P 12.30 to P 14.20. From this the LRTA-DOTC team projected that government “subsidies” for the LRT/MRT that reached P13.85 billion last year will balloon to P17.06 billion this year if there will be no fare adjustment. This increase of “subsidy” is why the LRTA-DOTC thinks we should increase the LRT/MRT fares.
The oppositors under the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) pointed out several reasons why the LRT/MRT fare hike is not necessary. One of the points they raised was how much does it actually cost to run and maintain the MRT/LRT system.
The Bayan position paper gives an estimated P9.11 cost for operation and maintenance for the MRT line. This means that an MRT customer is already paying P 0.89 to P 5.89 more than what is necessary to maintain the MRT. This calculation is based on the farebox ratios or the proportion of the fare revenues to the total operational costs of the trains. The farebox ratios for the LRT1 and LRT 2 has averaged 1.39 and 1.01 respectively. This means that the revenues cover already the total operating and maintenance cost of the train systems.
If the train revenues are already enough to operate the trains, why is there a need for such a large “subsidy” in the first place? The Bayan position paper is clear on pointing out the culprit. First, there is the government guaranteed payments to the Japanese, Czech and local banks that financed the project. On top of these guaranteed debt payments, the government has also guaranteed that the MRT consortium will get 15-percent return on investment (ROI) per annum. In 2009, the previous administration had to buy out 76 percent of the MRT for a $800 million lump-sum payment in order to terminate this ROI guarantee.
Haven’t we learned the lesson from the privatization of the power industry? We should recall that the current high electricity rates, one of the highest in Asia, is due to the pass-on rates to consumers. These are partly due to the same type of government guarantees to foreign investors.
The infamous PPA or the purchased power agreements comes to mind. We pay for onerous transactions that are in the end detrimental to consumers. In the case of the LRT/MRT, we pay not just for the ride but also for the bad deals made by the government.
Bayan made it clear in their position paper that the issue of debt is important because of two things—(1) the debt burden has been made onerous because of questionable and disadvantageous build-operate and transfer (BOT) contracts such as in the MRT and (2) it is the obligation of government to service these debts through the people’s taxes and not through user fees. They further said that it is government’s duty to lessen, not increase, this burden of the people.
Who will be hit by this fare hike? Nearly 70 percent of commuters during weekdays earn below P 10,000 a month and about half are ordinary employees and workers. This social segment benefits from a cheap and accessible mode of transportation. Raising the rates takes this option away from them.
The socio-economic role of an urban railway apparently did not escape the notice of the LRTA-DOTC study as they noted that: “Most urban railway systems in the world are not financially viable, but are implemented for their socio-economic benefits. Our Manila Light Rail Transit (LRT) systems promote the use of high-occupancy vehicles, thereby reducing traffic congestion on the corridors served, local air pollution and greenhouse gases emissions. Besides the substantial savings in travel time cost of LRT riders, the LRT systems reduce infrastructure investment in Metro Manila road expansion.”
With this in mind and the fact that the train revenues already cover the costs of operation, we do not see why the LRTA should proceed with this fare increase.
What government should do is to review these projects that were funded by onerous debts and bloated by corruption and cancel them if necessary. There are other non-rail revenues that it can creatively explore which can augment the earnings of the train lines instead of increasing the burden of ordinary Filipinos.
Agence France-Presse
The latest findings of a rolling survey carried out for decades by the government's Food and Nutrition Research Institute reflect the general poverty rate and the boom-and-bust economic cycles of the country.
The latest data, which is for 2008 but was only released on Thursday, showed 33.1 percent of 100,000 students surveyed across the country suffered from chronic malnutrition.
This was due to them not eating enough food over a long period and led to them being shorter than they should be, although the survey did not publish specific heights.
"Being under height is a result of a long period of inadequate nutrition," Eva Goyena, a science research specialist at the institute, told AFP on Friday.
The chronic malnutrition rate had risen slightly from 32 percent in 2005, the last time the survey was carried out, but was down from a high of 44.8 percent recorded in 1990.
The 2008 study found that Philippine students aged between six and 12 consumed an average of 599 grams (21.13 ounces) of food a day.
Half of the food was steamed rice, while 76 grams were fish and 33 grams were milk products.
"This is really inadequate because rice is mostly carbohydrates for energy and there are more protein-rich foods than fish," Goyena said.
She said a long-term diet of this type would lead to the child becoming stunted.
The malnourished children were deficient in key nutrients such as iron, Vitamin A, calcium and iodine, according to Goyena.
Chronic malnutrition begins in infancy, the study suggested, with more than eight in 10 Philippine toddlers aged between six months and five years not eating enough to meet the recommended daily energy and nutrient intake.
Acute malnutrition, which reflects more recent setbacks such as illness or failing to eat properly over the past week, stood at 25.6 percent in 2008 among school children, up from 22.8 percent in 2005.
‘Walk the talk’, Aquino told on logging ban
INQUIRER.net ;
Clemente Bautista, Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment national coordinator, said “big political families have interests in logging operations.”
Bautista cited as an example the commercial logging permit issued to the San Jose Timber Co., owned by Senator Juan Ponce Enrile. The permit is good until 2023 and covers 95,770 hectares of forestlands on Samar Island.
“We challenge the administration to walk its talk by canceling the logging permits awarded to Senator Enrile’s logging company, which is destroying the natural forests of Samar,” he said.
Eastern Samar Representative Ben Evardone confirmed that Enrile’s firm has logging concession in Samar, but added that it is no longer operational.
Aquino has issued EO 23, declaring a “moratorium on the cutting and harvesting of timber in the national and residual forests” in the country and creates an anti-illegal logging task force to implement the ban.
The President issued the order in the wake of the successive rains and flooding in parts of Visayas and Mindanao that caused deaths, displacement of thousands of families and destruction of crops and property.
Bautista said that since EO 23 clearly stated that logging operations will no longer be allowed in natural and residual forests, the government should immediately cancel the permits of big-time loggers such as in the Sierra Madre Mountain range in Luzon, Mt. Hilong-Hilong in Agusan del Norte, Mt. Kitanglad in Bukidnon province, and others.
Citing records of the Forest Management Bureau (FMB), Bautista said that in 2008, 1.4 million hectares of the country’s forests were covered by different logging agreements, like Timber Licensing Agreement (TLA) and Industrial Forest Management Agreement (IFMA).
The Philippines has only 7.2 million hectares of remaining forest as of 2003, according to Kalikasan.
Bautista also said that EO 23 does not address other major factors causing deforestation, such as corruption within the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and local government units.
At the same time, he said the order still allows logging in plantation forests, which he said should also be preserved.
Based on FMB’s data, logging companies with IFMA, TLA and other logging permits were able to reforest only 97,741 hectares since 1976. Bautista said this was “insignificant” compared to the millions of hectares of natural forests destroyed.
Still, Bautista believed that a genuine implementation of the order “will stop large commercial logging operations and slow down deforestation in the country.”
By Riza T. Olchondra
Philippine Daily Inquirer; 02/15/2011
MANILA, Philippines—Mining companies and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) are opposing calls by civil society groups for the government to stop large-scale mining projects in Palawan.
“There is a mining law that regulates the operations of large-scale mining companies. There is also a process that has to be followed in all phases of mining operations—from exploration, development, mining and decommissioning,” Artemio Disini, chair of the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines (CMP), said in a text message.
Disini said civil society organizations (CSOs) and environmentalist groups pushing for the closure of active mining projects must observe this process.
Environment Secretary Ramon Paje said the government “cannot completely stop mining, especially those projects that went through the process and were approved from the ground up to the national level.”
“That would be confiscatory and contrary to law,” Paje said.
Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment has urged the government to not just cancel mining applications in Palawan to stop the destruction of its forests but also to stop large-scale foreign mining projects in the province and the rest of the country.
Palawan hosts several big mining projects, including Rio Tuba, Coral Bay and Berong.
Multimillion-dollar industry
Mining investments in the Philippines reached $955.85 million last year, according to government data. This was just 80 percent of the adjusted 2010 target of $1.2 billion.
In May last year, the then Arroyo administration projected $1.429 billion in mining investments for 2010.
So far, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) has canceled more than 600 mining applications for “infirmities, lack of activity, or lack of requirements,” Paje said.
Leo Jasareno, the MGB director, has said that the government plans to resolve all pending mining applications by the end of 2011, after which it will bid out the available properties to fresh applications.
The government hopes that this would ensure that only investors with financial and technical capability would get hold of mining projects.
Inactive mining claims
Paje disagreed with groups claiming that the purging of inactive mining claims and the suspension of processing of new mining applications would have little effect in protecting the environment.
“We are promoting sustainable mining practices, which is precisely why we want only those who can mine responsibly to operate in our country,” he said.
Those who want Palawan or any other area to completely stop mining may appeal to the host local government, which implements Republic Act No. 7611, or the Strategic Environmental Plan for Palawan Act, or to Congress, which passed RA No. 7942, or the Philippine Mining Act of 1995, Paje said.
He noted, however, that Palawan’s strategic environmental plan was already guiding mining and other industries in the province.
In fact, he said, large-scale mining projects were easier to monitor and were following environmental terms that are not imposed on small-scale miners.
Sustainable mining
“We have laws and we have industries. We want to strike a balance and that’s why we (in the DENR) are promoting sustainable mining. It is not in our power to go against the law or to change it,” Paje said.
Several mining executives welcomed the “cleansing” process in the government’s refusal to accept new mining applications, but others feared it might be a “double-edged sword” for the industry.
MRC Allied president Benjamin Bitanga told reporters that the suspension of new mining applications and purging of inactive ones would attract “serious investors,” including financiers and international partners.
Benguet Corp. president Benjamin Philip Romualdez said miners were also concerned about the flipside of such a development—that any resulting spike in investor interest would draw unwanted attention to themining industry.
“Yes, active mining permits and contracts would be much more valuable but then when something is more valuable, it could also make it hotter, more prone to issues and controversy,” said Romualdez, who is also president of the CMP.
“We in the industry will, of course, do what we can to promote good projects. We just hope to avoid unnecessary controversies. Let’s just hope for the best,” Romualdez said.
Mining investments are projected to surge to $3.417 billion in 2011, $3.855 billion in 2012, and $1.995 billion in 2013.
The Philippines expects mining investments to reach $17.35 billion by 2016 as the government streamlines the process of granting permits for the industry and promotes the country as an investment haven, according to the DENR.
Christian V. Esguerra
Philippine Daily Inquirer;
If ex-Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Angelo Reyes indeed got P50 million in alleged send-off gift (“pabaon”), his two successors were supposedly more resourceful.
Retired Lt. Col. George Rabusa alleged on Thursday that former Gen. Diomedio Villanueva was allocated around P160 million while ex-Gen. Roy Cimatu got P80 million as part of the “pabaon” system.
But Rabusa, a former military budget officer, said he was not sure if Villanueva indeed received the P160-million gift, which he said he had raised from the old “provision for command-directed activities” (PCDA) budget at the AFP.
He said he gave the amount in increments of around P10 million on several occasions to his former boss, then Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia, the military comptroller.
“I had doubts,” he said in the Senate blue ribbon committee hearing. “I was tempted to ask General Villanueva, but protocol-wise, it seemed that I would bypass General Garcia, so I just let it go.”
But Rabusa said he eventually got the chance to inquire with Villanueva in a phone conversation after his boss had retired. He said he was then asking for financial support, but Villanueva begged off, saying he no longer had money.
“Sir, hindi ba binigay sa’yo ni Gen. Garcia yung P160 million? (Sir, didn’t General Garcia give you the P160 million?)” he recalled asking Villanueva, who supposedly replied: “Ha? (What?)”
Rabusa said in Filipino: “He was surprised like he didn’t know about it. So I don’t know now where the P160 million went.”
The amounts for send-off gifts allegedly allocated for Villanueva, Cimatu, and Reyes—who all did not show up at the hearing on Thursday — were contained in a Powerpoint presentation prepared by Rabusa.
Rabusa was assisted by a new witness, Lt. Col. Antonio Ramon “Sonny” Lim, who used to be his deputy at the budget department at the general headquarters in Camp Aguinaldo.
Lim, who occasionally wiped off tears, asked to be made a state witness and be given immunity from cases that might be filed against him in connection with his revelations.
At one point, Rabusa sought to boost his morale and reminded him in Filipino: “I suffered a stroke but here I am testifying.”
Lim corroborated Rabusa’s account that the latter had delivered at least P160 million to Garcia in different batches. Lim admitted that he was the one who would arrange (“kamada”) the bulky cash in an expandable envelope for every delivery.
“We placed them in an expandable long envelope,” he said.
Senators took turns in extracting corroboration—or any significant comment—from Garcia, but to no avail. Garcia repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination.
An angry Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, who had brought Rabusa and Lim to the committee hearing, threatened to have Garcia detained.
“Mr. Chair, if this will be the answer of this general all throughout and the Ombudsman cannot jail him, let us be the one to do that,” he said in Filipino.
Estrada was particularly incensed when Garcia refused to answer whether he indeed received P160 million intended for Villanueva.
After a brief break, Sen. Teofisto Guingona III, committee chairman, said citing Garcia in contempt and detaining him would be decided in an upcoming caucus among committee members. He said the hearing had no quorum to decide on the matter.
Rabusa said he had been instructed by Garcia to set aside P160 million for Villanueva’s retirement. According to a bank document included in his presentation, P95 million was first deposited on July 19, 2001 while another P65 million was kept in the bank on Sept. 12 that same year.
The total deposit had earned a P4.1-million interest by the time he made the last withdrawal on April 16, 2002, according to the document signed by one Bernie Tocmo, manager of the Security Bank branch in Herrera, Makati.
Rabusa said he decided to close the account in anticipation of the formal creation of the Anti-Money Laundering Council.
During Villanueva’s time, Rabusa said the chief of staff wanted the PCDA fund “preserved.” In his previous testimony, he said the fund operated like pot, which was allegedly the source of “start-up” and retirement gifts for chiefs of staff.
Rabusa identified mechanisms within the AFP, which allowed the budget group to supposedly “convert” cash and raise the PCDA fund. Each time, a unit or office that became party to conversion allegedly got a percentage in commission.
He said a “James Bond 007” conversion style involved the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, which supposedly got 10 percent of the amount converted.
Of the 10-percent commission, 1 percent went to the accounting officer and 2 percent to the resident auditor, according to the whistle-blower.
The blue ribbon committee decided to summon Divina Cabrera, former ISAFP resident auditor, in the next hearing, which was tentatively set on Monday.
In two other “bombshells,” Rabusa alleged that Reyes once authorized the purchase of P200 million worth of howitzer ammunition from Thailand without the benefit of a public bidding.
Rabusa said the purchase was financed by savings from the salary of military personnel. But he admitted that the purchase did not necessarily mean that the soldiers did not get their salary.
Instead, the money used represented the savings from the salary budget released by the Department of Budget and Management. Savings are made if the DBM allocated for, say, 115,000 troops, but the AFP actually had only 100,000.
The second exposé was about the allegedly questionable purchase of “unmanned aerial vehicles” worth $2 million during the time of Cimatu as chief of staff. As in the howitzer ammunition purchase, Rabusa said the procurement did not go through public bidding.
Rabusa said the UAVs bought from an Israeli company recommended by a retired official later “crashed” when used in actual operation.
Gil C. Cabacungan Jr.
Philippine Daily Inquirer;
The annual budget for salaries in the Armed Forces of the Philippines was more than double the amount actually paid to military personnel during the term of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, providing AFP officials with a slush fund of up to P180 billion from 2002 to 2010, a lawmaker said Monday.
Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Neri Colmenares said that he was “shocked” by the discrepancy between the number of troops declared by the Department of National Defense (DND) at budget hearings in Congress and the actual number of soldiers and personnel.
Whistle-blower George Rabusa, a former military budget officer, said at a Senate hearing two weeks ago that the personnel services account in the annual DND budget was the main source of the slush fund from which huge sums for the personal use by the AFP chief of staff and other officials were drawn.
“Where did all this money go and in all these years did Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo know nothing about it? If we are to add the amount of the discrepancies since 2002 to 2010, we would get a whopping P179,358,942,000. This is hardly a trivial sum. What is worse though is that this is just on the personal services. The maintenance and other operating expenses (MOOE) and the capital outlay anomalies are not even included yet,” Colmenares said.
Based on data provide by Colmenares, the DND was allocated between P32.268 billion and P50.355 billion annually from 2002 to 2010.
Colmenares said that of this amount, only P13 billion to P24 billion was used to pay the soldiers and other staff (whose number ranged between 134,449 and 143,993 positions from 2002 to 2010).
Colmenares pointed out that the discrepancy between the allocated and actual use of personnel services funds ranged from a low of P17.702 billion in 2005 to a high of P24.25 billion in 2002.
“Major Gen. Carlos Garcia’s P303-million ill-gotten wealth seems to be mere small change compared with the billions being siphoned from the Department of National Defense budget itself. As early as the budget preparation, corruption is already involved from the over statement of the number of troops to the conversion of funds,” Colmenares said.
By ANDREW BACEVICH
Counterpunch; Posted by Bulatlat.com
In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.
The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War — this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.
What are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much. Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive. The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: the Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into meaningful victory.
Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America’s forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.
The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There, American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.
Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale — nowhere more so than in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.” When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level. By comparison, Detroit’s much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.
Impregnable Defenses
All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.
Yet the defense budget — a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se figures as an afterthought — remains a sacred cow. Why is that?
The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable. Exemplifying what the military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting layers.
Institutional Self-Interest: Victory in World War II produced not peace, but an atmosphere of permanent national security crisis. As never before in U.S. history, threats to the nation’s existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude first born in the late 1940s that still persists today. In Washington, fear — partly genuine, partly contrived — triggered a powerful response.
One result was the emergence of the national security state, an array of institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate) this atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status, prerogatives, and budgetary claims. In addition, a permanent arms industry arose, which soon became a major source of jobs and corporate profits. Politicians of both parties were quick to identify the advantages of aligning with this “military-industrial complex,” as President Eisenhower described it.
Allied with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed tax dollars into appropriations, corporate profits, campaign contributions, and votes was an intellectual axis of sorts — government-supported laboratories, university research institutes, publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms (many staffed by former or would-be senior officials) — devoted to identifying (or conjuring up) ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always assumed to be serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to them.
The upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any national security “debate” all share a predisposition for sustaining very high levels of military spending for reasons having increasingly little to do with the well-being of the country.
Strategic Inertia: In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing American policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity.” Here we have a description of American purposes that is far more candid than all of the rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or exercising global leadership.
The end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly privileged position. Not for nothing do Americans remember the immediate postwar era as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity. Policymakers since Kennan’s time have sought to preserve that globally privileged position. The effort has been a largely futile one.
By 1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a notable dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of military power held the key to preserving America’s exalted status. The presence of U.S. forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to intervene, whether overtly or covertly, just about anywhere on the planet would promote stability, ensure U.S. access to markets and resources, and generally serve to enhance the country’s influence in the eyes of friend and foe alike — this was the idea, at least.
In postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable success. Elsewhere — notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and (especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East — it either produced mixed results or failed catastrophically. Certainly, the events of the post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that this presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the threat posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. If anything, adherence to it is exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.
One might think that the manifest shortcomings of the presence/power-projection approach — trillions expended in Iraq for what? — might stimulate present-day Washington to pose some first-order questions about basic U.S. national security strategy. A certain amount of introspection would seem to be called for. Could, for example, the effort to sustain what remains of America’s privileged status benefit from another approach?
Yet there are few indications that our political leaders, the senior-most echelons of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion outside of government are capable of seriously entertaining any such debate. Whether through ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination, the pre-existing strategic paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if by default do the high levels of military spending that the strategy entails.
Cultural Dissonance: The rise of the Tea Party movement should disabuse any American of the thought that the cleavages produced by the “culture wars” have healed. The cultural upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on Vietnam remains unfinished business in this country.
Among other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus, forged during World War II, about the meaning of patriotism. During the so-called Good War, love of country implied, even required, deference to the state, shown most clearly in the willingness of individuals to accept the government’s authority to mandate military service. GI’s, the vast majority of them draftees, were the embodiment of American patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the country.
The GI of World War II had been an American Everyman. Those soldiers both represented and reflected the values of the nation from which they came (a perception affirmed by the ironic fact that the military adhered to prevailing standards of racial segregation). It was “our army” because that army was “us.”
With Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war’s supporters argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the commands of the state. Opponents of the war, especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise. They revived the distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state. Real patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.
In many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found themselves caught uncomfortably in the center of this dispute. Was the soldier who died in Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap? Who deserved greater admiration: the soldier who fought bravely and uncomplainingly or the one who served and then turned against the war? Or was the war resister — the one who never served at all — the real hero?
War’s end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved. President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force, predicated on the notion that the country might be better served with a military that was no longer “us,” only complicated things further. So, too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide war heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain) routinely lost to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent or exceedingly slight (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), yet who demonstrated once in office a remarkable propensity for expending American blood (none belonging to members of their own families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It was all more than a little unseemly.
Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious. What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if the answer was none — the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer — then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?
Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative — to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work — people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation’s “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition of self-fulfillment.
In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.
Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum. In theory, such support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars. In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation’s treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.
Misremembered History: The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.
American politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist tradition. Leading proponents included luminaries such as George Washington and John Quincy Adams. That tradition found its basis not in principled pacifism, a position that has never attracted widespread support in this country, but in pragmatic realism. What happened to that realist tradition? Simply put, World War II killed it — or at least discredited it. In the intense and divisive debate that occurred in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost, their cause thereafter tarred with the label “isolationism.”
The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should respond to some ostensible threat — Iraq in 2003, Iran today — replays the debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941. To express skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist. Few politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.
In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s — always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric — even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.
Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?
Like concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these four factors — institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural dissonance, and misremembered history — insulate the military budget from serious scrutiny. For advocates of a militarized approach to policy, they provide invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.
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