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Civilians Control the Military
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by Bill Sorem, W A M M
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We’ve been trained to believe in the civilian control of the military. It’s a good thing and we have it. I’ve been a believer for years. Big bad military dictators forced countries to do wicked things. As I recall, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler were civilians who assumed command of their military. That didn’t stop them from doing evil things.
Then of course there’s one of our most recent presidents strutting across an aircraft carrier flight deck with his custom codpiece aviator’s uniform.
I believed the military chain of command flowed in an unbroken line from the commander in chief through the individual services chiefs on down the lowly schlubs who fired the weapons, turned a wrench or swabbed the deck. Nice and tidy and clear. All managed by a civilian Congress securing the purse strings. Executive brilliance in the White House, military genius across the river in the Pentagon (with a civilian secretary of defense), and an alert, intelligent Congress managing finances. You believe that, don’t you?
Reality is not always as advertised. The Bush regime wandered around for 8 years in a non-reality of their creation. The real world was too inconvenient.
Well, the reality appears to be that we do indeed have civilian control of the military. However, the civilians reside in none of the above referenced places. The true control emanates from K Street in Washington, DC. K Street, the holy kingdom of the lobbyists. It is also the southern end of the Wall Street - K Street axis that controls so much of our allegedly representative government.
In the past the lobbyists have forced the Pentagon to build destroyers the Navy doesn’t want, fighters the Air Force doesn’t want. We maintain almost 1,000 overseas military bases; few if any have anything do with our security or the security of the oft-unwilling host country. They have to do with Exxon, Mobil, Shell, and the usual oil suspects. Or they are at the insistence and the financial convenience of Halliburton, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, GE, Alliant, and the rest of the military parasites. Or the arms merchants like the Bush, Kissinger, Baker, Rumsfeld ventures.
The recent Defense Department budget claims to reduce some major expenses. Those with oxen that might be gored have coughed up bundles of congressional payoffs and pressures to preserve their cash flow. The greed of the congressional-industrial complex again takes precedence over any national security issues or even military strategy.
Yes, civilians do control the military, just not the ones we the people designated. This doesn’t diminish the insanity of our military; it merely gives it more depth and intransigency. We face the usual ideological resistance to peace; we also face huge financial resistance. In a way, the financial mountain is harder to climb, our opponents live only in greed, so moral arguments fall on deaf ears.
My take is that we need to make the moral arguments louder and more persistent. |
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Cost of War
Air strikes and artillery barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the dead.
Analysis carried out for the research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 percent of those killed in air raids by the U.S.-led coalition were children and 46 percent were women. Fatalities caused by mortars, used by American and Iraqi government forces as well as insurgents, were 42 percent children and 44 percent women.
Twelve percent of those killed by suicide bombings, mainly the tool of militant Sunni groups, were children and 16 percent were females. One in five (21 percent) of those killed by car bombs, used by both Shia and Sunni fighters, was a child; one in four (28 percent) was a woman.
The figures, compiled by academics at King’s College and Royal Holloway, University of London, show that hi-tech weaponry has caused lethal damage to those in the population who would be furthest away from the conflict.
—(4/16/09, www.independent.co.uk)
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© 2009 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete May 2009 Index - click here
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