by Lawrence Rockwood -

Tom Engelhardt: The American Way of War: How Bush’s War Became Obama’s, (Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2010).

In 1973, America’s seminal military historian Russell F. Weigley published The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. In his epic work, Weigley described a transition in the American “national consciousness” on war from a distrust of standing armies and anything short of unconditional victories to the military-industrial complex, military stalemates in Europe, and even potential military defeats in such places as Vietnam. This year, Tom Engelhardt has published a book with the same title, this time describing the “national consciousness” of America’s post-9/11 victimhood hysteria.

In his introduction, Engelhardt describes the post 9-11 military paradigm as “War is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography,” and a paradigm in which “We all partake.” “In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.” In this he is correct about the current “American Military Mind,” although he is mistaken about its date of onset, one that goes back far before 9-11.

Engelhardt was not the first to take on this cowardly hysteria of post-9/11 American victimhood. Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, within weeks of the 9-11 attacks, described those who died in the attack as "little Eichmanns." However, Churchill’s remarks were sloppy. He made the common mistake of conflating legitimate non-combatant status with a state of innocence. Unlike Eichmann, his global capitalists technocrats were not uniformed combatants, no manner how guilty many of them were of supporting global economic injustice. Churchill’s sloppiness played right into the hands of the proponents of the national hysteria.

A few weeks later, ABC decided not to renew Bill Maher's contract for Politically Incorrect in 2002 after he stated the most obvious truth that “Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. “ It would be almost a decade until someone like Englehardt would take on this cowardly national hysteria.

In 2001, what Englehardt described as a “tiny band of fanatics who planned September 11 essentially lucked out” by creating an event that in the American Mind would be of more importance than the killing of 800,000 noncombatants in Rwanda, the million in Sudan / Congo, the 1.5 million in Cambodia, or even the eleven million in the European Holocaust. Nothing testifies to this than the “The Billion Dollar Gravestone” that is the cost of the museum and memorial being built for the 2976 dead at ground zero in New York City.

He points to the “Global War on Terror’s greatest achievement” “was to turn us into “a Nation of Cowards” by letting an exaggerated threat of terrorism lead us to abandon our rights. He could have placed this national cowardice in a greater historical profile that includes our government’s making war more safe and convenient for its citizens by ending the draft, using mercenaries like Blackwater, and using drones in which no American “kid” is on board to be shot down. This goes back to the old Nixon claim that there would be no American anti-war movement if there was no American draft and if we keep Americans in body bags to a minimum there will be a minimum of interference by the American people in their government’s killing sprees abroad.

Later in the book, Englehardt does fall back into Chomskyite “manufactured consent” school of military – political analysis so dominant in the anti-military discourse of the American left since Vietnam: turning generals like General Stanely A. McChrystal into exceptional bad guys rather than banal functionaries; special operations and counter-insurgency personal are more inhumanly demonic than conventional forces; and the most silly, the Pentagon is behind G.I. Joe doll marketing. As a former counter-intelligence officer, this conflicts with my experience and I find it hard to take the logic of this line very seriously. Americans are NOT involuntary imperialists, we are imperialists by choice. Americans are NOT involuntary barbarians, we are barbarians by choice.

On Feb 9, 2010, Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Fox News claimed that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, “they killed a million people.” The Soviet Union also invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia too, why did not a million causalities accrue there? The difference was American policy or, more specifically, one American policy when it comes to the lives of Europeans and another for the lives of those in the Third World. American policy led to one million deaths in Afghanistan before our military ever formally invaded that country. The sad fact is there is no question that we are not going to stop killing after we bring our kids home. The issue on the American Way of War is that the American people prefer to kill the way they killed in the eighties than the more participatory style we have been engaged in over the last decade.