Democracy in the Garrison State

excerpted from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

Democracy in the Garrison State

p200
The Limited Reach of Electoral Decisions

To America's economic elites, foreign policy is considered a straightforward expression of their right to control decisions about investment, growth, and profits. For more than a century, American foreign policy has been synonymous with the building of an empire. Business elites have not tolerated interference with this process. For this reason, foreign policy making has been gradually removed from domestic democratic processes. Since the Second World War, foreign policy making has involved a relatively small group that routinely operates behind a screen of secrecy and deception.

These developments were pushed along by both political parties. Since the anticommunism hysteria in the years following the Second World War, a bipartisan consensus has existed on foreign policy, with at least three consequences. First, meaningful political discourse has been almost absent about foreign policy issues. At election time, debates about foreign policy amount to contests to see which of the candidates is "toughest" on communism or "communist"-sponsored insurgencies in various countries. Second, as a result voters have never been presented with alternatives outside the Cold War consensus. And third, so many foreign policy decisions have been placed beyond public scrutiny-only surfacing periodically in public "scandals"-that almost all of what passes as official information about foreign policy is manufactured by government agencies for its propaganda effect.

Expanding the Empire

After the Second World War, there was a fundamental redefinition of "normalcy" in American political culture, away from an historic distrust of a large standing military to acceptance of its necessity. From this time forward, any meaningful debates among political and economic elites over whether to finance a peacetime military presence were quickly resolved. The presence of a constantly expanding, well-coordinated military establishment, together with an industry feeding off military spending, was thought to be essential for maintaining American dominance in the postwar world.

Elites made the decision not to return to prewar levels of spending after the Second World War and the Korean War. In constant dollars, the military budget increased by more than ten times between the peacetime years 1940 and 1956. Much of the post-World War II expenditures went for new armaments-notably, nuclear weapons and delivery systems and technologically sophisticated airplanes and ships. The number of military personnel sharply escalated. In 1940, the Untied States maintained only 485,000 men and women under arms, with an additional 256,000 civilians to support them. In 1950, there were over 1.5 million persons in uniform and over 960,000 Defense Department (DOD) civilian employees. By 1975, about 2.15 million people served in the armed forces and there were an additional 1.1 million civilian employees. After falling slightly in the wake of the Vietnam War, civilian employment rose again by 1985 to a level surpassing that of 1978.

As early as 1939, political and economic elites, in collaboration with the executive branch of government, began planning the permanent expansion of the military in order to make possible systematic U.S. intervention in the Third World. Lawrence Shoup's underappreciated research into the activity of a group of business, intellectual, and political elites reveals how the "responsibilities" of the post-war period were not thrust upon, but were actively sought by a group of economic and political elites who wanted to expand and consolidate an American empire.

In September 1939, more than two years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the influential New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) approached the State Department about collaborating on a secret, long-range study of the implications of the European war and how it would affect the role of the United States in world affairs after its conclusion. Financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and with the support of the State Department, various committees began their work, which became known as the "War Peace Studies."

The foreign policy planners first tried to determine whether continued control of the Western Hemisphere would be sufficient to maintain U.S. prosperity and self-sufficiency if Germany were able to control Europe. They concluded that only if the United States expanded its sphere to embrace possessions of the British Commonwealth and the Far East could sufficient access to markets and raw materials be guaranteed. In strict secrecy, the CFR committees and their State Department allies, a group of elites who would have tremendous influence on foreign policy for the next thirty years, defined the U.S. national interest as the economic dominance of two-thirds of the world.

In October 1940 one CFR study group bluntly declared its purpose "to set forth the political, military, territorial and economic requirements of the United States in its potential leadership of the non-German world area including the United Kingdom itself as well as the Western Hemisphere and Far East." The same memorandum indicated that from the start the policy planners considered a permanent military establishment not as an instrument to deter aggression, but as an instrument of empire building. It declared that the "foremost requirement of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power is the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament." In 1939, elites thought that German hegemony over Europe might be tolerable, but Japanese competition in the Far East was not. On this basis the CFR recommended that the government aid China and embargo Japan, two policies subsequently adopted by President Roosevelt.

The elites planning postwar foreign policy conceived a world in which American interests might be compatible with a continental Europe controlled by the Nazis; after all, many U.S. leaders regarded Hitler as a useful check on the Soviet Union, and some admired him. But as Japan brought more of Asia under its control and as Germany threatened to militarily defeat Britain and, perhaps, seize control of Britain's vast empire, the CFR committees concluded, eight months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that the defeat of the Axis was both inevitable and necessary. But in preparing for a war with Japan, the Economic and Financial Study group of the CFR ,suggested to American political leaders that their actual aims-to build an empire-should be covered over with the idea that America was seeking only to protect its immediate interests:

If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect.

The actual aims proposed by the group were manifestly clear. As one member of the project put it in 1940, it would be necessary to "cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a pax-Americana.

After the formal entry of the United States into the war in December 1941 the CFR and the State Department continued to refine their plans for the postwar period. The work was carried out in secret because both the Council and the State Department recognized that public knowledge of U.S. plans to dominate the Third World (as it was later to be called) could harm America's relationships with other nations that were helping in the fight against the Axis. Equally important, the foreign policy elites knew that it would be damaging to morale at home if the American public learned that its leaders had much more than the defeat of fascism in mind.

An elite consensus was forged that unified the goals of military officers government officials, and corporations involved in military production. From the very start, the articulation of a public ideology of idealism was considered to be an essential feature of foreign policy planning. Henceforth, America's foreign policies would be rhetorically dedicated to stopping the "international communist conspiracy" and also rhetorically designed (as the opposite side of the coin) to foster democracy and freedom.

George Kennan, a significant intellectual shaper of the postwar order, recognized that a public commitment to high ideals could boomerang later. In a top-secret memorandum drafted in 1946, Kennan laid out the rationale for caution:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population....We cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.

In a similar vein, forty years later Lt. Colonel John Bacevich, a West Point graduate and International Affairs Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relataions, described the motives of U.S. foreign policy in 1986:

We can see today that the Army's primary task down to the present has continued to be precisely what it was in Korea: the application of force to maintain the global status quo that emerged from World War II. While the United States does not claim a formal empire...the Army since 1945 has played the historical role of an imperial defense force, called on repeatedly to protect far-flung American interests threatened by global brush fires by the winds of political change.

Bacevich said that the Army should plan to act as an interventionist force instead of maintaining the fiction that it existed to provide national security. But this would have to be presented to the public "inoffensively, using terms suited to American political discourse" because "an American Army proclaiming itself to be an imperial police force would have difficulty garnering public or congressional support. That statement holds as true today as it would have for the 1950s."

For decades, principles of human rights, democracy, and international law have endured as the guiding rhetorical ideals of America's foreign policy. But the yawning chasm separating these proclaimed ideals from the actual goals underlying foreign policy have been difficult to hide. Because of this discrepancy, soon after the Second World War elites took steps to remove foreign policy from domestic political processes. The most important devices employed-destined to grow more elaborate with every presidential administration-entailed policies of deception and secrecy.

The Foundations of the National Security State

Unlike the post-World War I "return to normalcy," the post-World War II period was marked by the institutionalization of significant "emergency" measures originally adopted to fight the war. Much of this process was accomplished through the National Security Act of 1947. The propaganda apparatus was consolidated in the hands of he U.S. Information Agency; "covert operations" and intelligence gathering were brought together into a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), though these functions have since spread to all the military branches and into the National Security Council and even the White House; a single Defense Department and a Joint Chiefs of Staff were established to coordinate the independent branches of the military; and the National Security Council (NSC) was created to advise the president on foreign affairs.

A less noted feature of the act established a National Security Resources Board, which, supplemented by the Armed Forces Procurement Act of 1947 and the National Industrial Reserve Act of 1948, laid the legal foundations for an intimate interaction between military agencies and private industry-the so-called "military-industrial complex." The impact of this legislation was to institutionalize a permanent condition of mobilization for war, breaking with the pre-World War II assumption that the first day of mobilization would be the day that Congress declared war.

This legislation was enacted even though government and military planners believed at that time that the United States would indefinitely maintain an enormous military superiority over the Soviet Union, a nation that had suffered 22,000,000 casualties during the war and which was incapable, even if so inclined, of mounting an effective attack on the United States or Western Europe. The United States alone possessed the atomic bomb. Although the planners erred in believing that their own country would maintain an indefinite monopoly over this technology, not until the late 1960s would the Soviet Union reach any kind of parity with the United States in nuclear weapons.

The institutionalization of militarism under the guise of national security was a logical expression of the aspirations articulated by the Council of Foreign Relations before and during the Second World War. This development was recognized by the historian Charles Beard, who charged in 1948 that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately led the nation to war and knowingly violated the Constitution to do so. Beard warned at that time that Madisonian principles of checks and balances were in Jeopardy and that the executive branch would gain control of foreign policy and war making in the postwar period through the expansion of state secrets.

It is tempting to interpret military growth and foreign policy adventures after the war as the inevitable components of a grand conspiracy among elites to build and consolidate the American empire. But a conspiracy theory must be cautiously applied even though there is overwhelming evidence that postwar policies were determined in a conscious and coordinated fashion, for it must take into account the genuine divisions that existed among elites about how to handle the Soviet Union. Roosevelt himself seemed to adopt the position that the Soviet Union was entitled to a sphere of influence of its own after the war, and he proceeded to emphasize policies, such as strongly supporting the United Nations, that would have consolidated a grand area for the United States excluding Eastern Europe.

To the ideological right of Roosevelt were influential policy makers like Averill Harriman and George Kennan, who saw the Soviet Union as an expansionist power that needed to be contained without the constraints that might be imposed by a United Nations. Their containment strategy envisioned a military buildup complemented by aggressive diplomatic and economic initiatives. More thoroughly conservative advisers like Dean Acheson favored provocative military measures. Even further to the right stood fanatical anticommunists and opportunists like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who argued that the Soviets had penetrated the halls of government within the United States and who advocated "rolling back" the Soviet area of domination rather than merely "containing" it. (Nixon, however, became more pragmatic as his career progressed.)

Even if Roosevelt had not died and been succeeded by the hawkish Harry Truman, developments at home and abroad would probably have accelerated militarization and propelled U.S. foreign policy rightward. The desire by both liberals and conservatives to purge the labor unions and the Democratic party of leftist influence undermined elites who favored a pragmatic orientation towards the Soviets. Stalin's pathological behavior toward his real and imagined political opponents strengthened those who sought to recast the Soviets in place of Nazi Germany as the incarnation of an evil empire that could be deterred only by an aggressive foreign policy backed by a worldwide military presence.

The theory of "totalitarianism" helped legitimate the new national security state by providing the theoretical underpinning for casting the Soviets in the role of aggressor. Proponents of the theory argued that Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany were alike because both regimes were characterized by a single party dominated by a charismatic dictator driven by an imperialistic ideology, who used terror and imposed state control over the economy and communications system. It did not seem to matter to promoters of the "Communist conspiracy" theory that there were fundamental differences between the histories and regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union (or that many right-wing policy makers in the United States continued to feel sympathy for the Nazis). The theory was useful in creating an image of an aggressor who would this time be deterred, not appeased-a new enemy that was particularly dangerous because it sought to spread an anticapitalist ideology.

Within the United States, those who sympathized with socialism, Marxism, or communism, or even with civil rights groups, were defined as threats to the security of the nation. Legislation like the Smith Act of 1940, a wartime act aimed at Nazi sympathizers, was now turned not only on Communists but on anyone suspected of holding leftist ideals. In 1950, the Internal Security Act was passed, requiring communist or "sympathetic" organizations to register with the Attorney General, who possessed the authority (under the Smith Act) to declare certain organizations a threat to national security for allegedly advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government. This provision was routinely applied to organizations that had never advocated such a position. Together with the National Security Act of 1947, these pieces of legislation remain as the cornerstone of the government's authority to suppress internal dissent under the guise of national security.

In 1948, bombers capable of striking the Soviet Union with atomic weapons were placed in Britain, and General Lucius Clay, who headed American occupation forces in Germany, tried to convince President Truman to provoke a war with the Soviets. But the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949 raised doubts about whether the United States could confront the Soviets without fear of unleashing atomic warfare. The planners were forced to return to the drawing boards.

The result was NSC-68, a document that became the Magna Carta of postwar national security doctrine. It laid a blueprint for moving beyond the concept of defense to the idea of aggressively challenging Soviet interests by any means short of declaring war. In the document, secretly approved by the National Security Council in 1950, foreign policy planners argued against negotiating differences with the Soviets until a new, more terrifying weapon, the hydrogen bomb, could restore unquestioned U.S. military supremacy. In the meantime, it advocated an alliance system dominated by the United States and a buildup of conventional military strength so that U.S. objectives could be met short of resorting to nuclear arms.

Military planners and political leaders realized that implementing this grand design would require mobilizing the American people into a permanent state of quasi-war. Accordingly, an emotional substitute for an official state of war would have to be devised. In 1944, Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and later Director of Defense Mobilization under President Truman and Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower, warned in an internal memo that "the revulsion against war not too long hence will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For | that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent war economy.'' Almost forty years later, Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, argued that "democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of a sense of danger. And every time we create the impression that we and the Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish that sense of apprehension."

The Elite Consensus on Militarization

For more than forty years there has been a remarkable degree of consensus among U.S. elites that the nation should preserve a high level of readiness to go to war. Presidential candidates of the two major parties have tried to outdo one another in advocating military preparedness. In the 1960 presidential election campaign, John F. Kennedy said there was a "missile gap" favoring the Soviet Union, twenty years later, the Republicans claimed that the Democrats had allowed American defenses to decline. For voters, the choices have been conducted within extraordinarily narrow limits. From 1945 until 1989, when Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev declared his policy of perestroika and the Eastern Bloc governments began to fall, no Democratic or Republican presidential candidate questioned the premises of the Cold War-that the national defense must be constantly strengthened to deter the Communists.

The ideas sustaining the "Cold War," wherein the superpowers have deterred each other from actually going to war by maintaining a balance of terror (MAD, or "mutually assured destruction"), developed only gradually. In the l950s, foreign policy planners urged a military buildup not as much for deterring as for preparing for an attack on the Soviet Union. In 1955, the Air Force adapted the concept of "Force in Being," which meant maintaining a permanent state of readiness and logistics to fight. "Force in Being" included preparations for initiating a nuclear war. This capacity was supported by a new document adopted by the National Security Council NSC 162/2, which said that the United States would "consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions" in the event of war. President Eisenhower went even further. Concerned that an indefinite arms race might increase the prospects for dictatorial government in the United States, the president suggested in a September 1953 memo to the Secretary of State that we might "consider whether or not our duty to future generations did not require us to initiate war at the most propitious moment that we could designate." When the Army, concerned that emphasis on technology was reducing its mission and budget, objected at a National Security Council meeting that nuclear war was not inevitable, Eisenhower responded, "Since we cannot keep the United States an armed camp or a garrison state, we must make plans to use atomic bombs if we become involved in a war." It is in this context that President Eisenhower delivered an oft-quoted speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

Eisenhower did not go far enough to satisfy the growing number of business, academic, and military figures who advocated and profited from an expanding and permanent military establishment. Advocates of an accelerated military buildup felt thwarted by the method of budgeting under which the amount allocated to military spending was determined after domestic needs were satisfied. The Korean War provided the necessary pretext for military expansion in the early 1950s, but with the end of the war in 1954 and the waning of McCarthyism it was becoming more difficult to maintain momentum. In the late 1950s, a political battle developed between the advocates of accelerating the arms race and those moderates, including President Eisenhower, who continued to fear the impact of a permanent military-industrial complex on domestic politics.

Though it remained far above prewar levels, in the aftermath of the Korean War military spending gradually fell. The militarists vainly struggled to convince Eisenhower and his key advisors to reverse the trend. An opportunity presented itself in 1956, when Eisenhower agreed to establish an ad hoc committee of private citizens to study a proposal for the government to spend $40 billion over a number of years to erect shelters to protect the population from nuclear fallout. The committee, composed of businessmen and academic specialists with close ties to military personnel and large defense contractors, was chaired by H. Rowan Gaither, a lawyer who was also chair of both the Ford Foundation and the Air Force's main "think tank," the Rand Corporation in California. Almost all members of the committee were private consultants to the National Security Council.

The committee took upon itself the task of expanding its mission beyond Eisenhower's mandate by investigating other uses for the $40 billion. When finished, the "Gaither Report" used the same arguments originally advanced in NSC 68 to argue for a military buildup and to accuse the Eisenhower administration of "complacency" in the face of the Soviet "threat." It exerted pressure on the administration to maintain not only the capability to initiate a nuclear war, but to undertake covert actions against guerrilla insurgencies and to fight a large-scale conventional war. It advocated a boost in military spending to $48 billion per year, $10 billion more than the amount recommended by the Eisenhower administration. The committee said that military "needs," irrespective of domestic priorities, should henceforth be identified as the standard for determining the Pentagon's budget.

The Gaither committee's recommendations were based on its assessment of how much spending would be needed to offset what it saw as a constantly expanding Soviet military capacity. The committee, however, vastly overstated the Soviet buildup. It predicted, for example, that the Soviets would develop and deploy enough intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1960 to destroy American retaliatory capability In fact, however, by 1961 the Soviets had deployed only ten missiles. The United States, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, would be the first country to massively deploy such missiles.

The Gaither committee s report remained classified, but militarists discovered that selective disclosure of military secrets could tilt public debate in their favor. Parts of the report were deliberately leaked to the media and sympathetic politicians. Democrats were particularly eager to use the report s findings to discredit the Republican administration. In the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy invented an alleged missile gap to embarrass Vice President Nixon. After he was elected, Kennedy brought the militarists into his administration and put their recommendations into effect.

Considering that the Democrats and liberals were as committed to military spending as the Republicans and conservatives, it is hardly surprising that Eisenhower s warnings about the growing power of the military-industrial complex have fallen on deaf ears. Today, over 30,000 companies are engaged in military production. During the Second World War, production was carried out in 1,600 federally owned plants; only fifty-eight currently are owned by the government. Each year, more than 15 million contracts (over 52,000 each day) are signed between government and private companies. In fiscal 1985, the United States spent almost $1,100 per person on the military, in contrast to its European allies, which spent an average of $250 per person. In the mid-1980s, about $146 billion in private military business was generated by the Pentagon each year. During the Reagan administration, spending for military research increased 62 percent above the rate of inflation, while funding for civilian research fell by 10 percent.

Grossly exaggerating the Soviet buildup long has comprised the principal strategy for building political support for military spending. In the 1950s, the public was told that the Soviets would have 600 to 700 long-range bombers by 1960. When 1960 came, the USSR had 190. It was said that the Soviets would have 500 to 1,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1961; the USSR had only ten by that time. In the 1960s, the warning went out that the USSR would soon have 10,000 interceptors in a nationwide antiballistic missile system. But the Soviets actually deployed sixty-four, almost all of them designed to hit bombers rather than missiles. In the 1970s the official government line was that new highly accurate Soviet SS-l9 missiles could destroy all U.S. land-based missiles. Actually, the SS-l9 proved far less accurate than originally claimed.

Estimating actual Soviet military expenditures likewise has been a politically loaded enterprise. The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency estimated Soviet spending at $233 billion for 1980 and $248 billion for 1983, but the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated Soviet military spending at $154 billion for 1980 and $162 billion for 1983. The source book World Military and Social Expenditure utilizes a method that results in somewhat higher estimates than those of the Stockholm Institute, but these comparisons still show that U.S. military spending far exceeds Soviet spending. For 1982, the sourcebook estimated U.S. expenditures at $196 billion, 6.2 percent of the Gross National Product. Soviet expenditures were estimated to be $170 billion, amounting to 10.9 percent of the USSR s smaller GNP. Total NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) expenditures were estimated at $310 billion, 5 percent of combined GNP, compared to Warsaw Pact total expenditures of $187 billion, 9 percent of GNP.' In 1983, the CIA admitted that earlier estimates ran about double its new, revised estimate and that the USSR had not actually increased its military spending during the Carter years (1977-1981) at all.

Even if Mikhail Gorbachev continues to deprive American hawks of a convenient enemy, the militarization of the economy has created a complex system of dependence on military spending that will not easily be broken. Only nine of the 3,041 counties in the United States received less than $1,000 from the Defense Department in 1984. With so many constituents on the military payroll, few congressional representatives can afford to attack waste and fraud vigorously or to I challenge the Pentagon s priorities without fear of retribution. In 1983, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger accused Congress of tacking nearly $3 billion worth of unnecessary items onto the Pentagon budget. Roughly 3,275,000 jobs in the United States are in defense industries, up from 314,000 in 1940. There are almost 1.5 million military retirees in addition to the 3,295,000 people on the civilian and active military payrolls. The link between corporations and the military is solidified by the retention of retired officers as employees of private contractors. Employed by 157 major military contractors were 1,350 former high-ranking military officers, plus 316 former high-ranking officials of the Defense Department.

The boom in military expenditures and the extraordinary profits to be made have shifted the priorities of many companies not previously associated with military production. Profits for arms suppliers rose from an average of 19.4 percent from 1970 to 1979 to 23.3 percent from 1980 to 1983; for durable goods as a whole, in contrast, profits fell from 14.4 percent in the 1970s to 10.6 percent in 1980 to 1983. Thus, the profits gap between commercial and military businesses widened enormously. In response, such companies as Singer, IBM, Goodyear Tire, AT&T, and Westinghouse turned to military production. In 1975, Singer, famous for sewing machines, earned only 15 percent of its revenues from aerospace electronics; by 1985, it earned 80 percent from that source. Morton, once famous for salt, has become Morton-Thiokol, builder of rocket engines.

The considerable influence of the military-industrial complex with Congress has been reinforced by the system of campaign financing. Political action committees representing the largest twenty defense contractors increased their contributions 225 percent during the first six years of the Reagan administration. Military agencies are prevented by law from forming their own lobbies, but they have found functional substitutes in legislative liaisons, maintained at taxpayer expense. The influence of the military lobby is further enhanced by the fragmentation of congressional oversight and the presence of hidden subgovernments that bring lawmakers, contractors, and military agencies into mutually beneficial alliances. Public scandals about contractors defrauding the government have led to proposals to consolidate congressional oversight, but this is unlikely to be successful because of the desire of senators and representatives to chair key committees and win elections.

Even the most seamy, costly, and threatening political scandals since the Second World War have so far failed to slow the transformation of American society into a garrison state. This was demonstrated in the political aftermath of the Vietnam

The "Vietnam Syndrome"

By 1945, Indochina had been a part of the French empire for almost three-fourths of a century. After the war, the French colonialists faced a determined effort by Vietnamese patriots, led by the Communist party and Ho Chi Minh, to resist a reimposition of colonial rule. The fact that the Communist party dominated the anticolonial forces made the rebels entirely unacceptable to U.S. political and military leaders. The United States committed itself to supporting France, and after France's military defeat in 1954 the United States initiated a gradual process of intervention.

Against all logic and evidence, some military planners and foreign policy specialists in the Reagan administration asserted that an inadequate military effort had brought about the American defeat in Vietnam. More than 3 million U.S. soldiers served in Vietnam, including 524,000 at the peak of the war in 1969 (plus 86,000 additional air force and naval personnel based offshore and in Thailand). From 1965 to 1975, the U.S. spent between $159.4 billion (DOD's estimate) and $239.6 billion (U.S. Senate estimate) on the war. The 14,392,302 tons of explosives (more than used against Japan in the Second World War) left more than 25 million craters in a country smaller than the state of California and reduced all North Vietnamese cities south of Hanoi to rubble. More than 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of herbicides (including 11 million gallons of Agent Orange) were used to destroy the croplands and half the forests in the country. Some 58,655 U.S. troops were killed. More than 2,000,000 Vietnamese-one-ninth of the population-were killed.

The Vietnam War differed from the Korean War in a crucial respect: Conscription and the high cost in lives generated discontent at home, but an antiwar movement also emerged. Ordinary citizens, at first led by college students and youth became dissenters. They were followed by large numbers in the intellectual community, then Journalists, and finally by liberal politicians. The FBI, the CIA, and other units of the national security apparatus selectively persecuted protesters. Unlike the McCarthy crusades of the 1950s, however, open and systematic repression backfired. The antiwar protests threatened to mushroom into a broader movement for social change that might have knit together civil rights activists, feminists, the youth movement, and liberal elements in the labor unions and the Democratic party. This was too high a price to pay for continuing the war. Even Richard Nixon, who built his early career on the political hysteria of McCarthyism, eventually accepted the necessity of a strategic retreat.

The political fallout from the war troubled elites. A rising cynicism and distrust of basic institutions threatened political stability. Especially undermined was the linchpin institution of the national security state, the presidency. To justify the war, Presidents Johnson and Nixon had resorted to "secrecy, control and manipulation of information, deceit, and spying on and interference with the legitimate exercise of the political rights of American citizens." This was a judgment offered not by critics of U.S. policy but by the authors of a study conducted by the National Defense University. These actions constituted logical extensions of past governmental strategies to keep foreign policy secret and beyond citizen influence This time, however, the pattern of deceit became boldly illuminated by media publicity. Under normal circumstances this would not have happened ... but the exposure of government secrets and spying became one component of the Watergate scandal.

In 1971, secret documents were leaked to the New York Times revealing that President Johnson and other people in the government had repeatedly lied about Vietnam. Congress reacted to the "Pentagon Papers" scandal by imposing new legal constraints on the president's war-making authority, most notably in the War Powers Act of 1973, which required the president to report to Congress when U.S. forces were committed to activities in which combat was a strong possibility. The act also required congressional approval to maintain troops in such a combat position for more than ninety days and authorized Congress to demand their immediate withdrawal by means of a resolution.

Other legislation placed new restrictions on the activities of the FBI and the CIA. Congressional oversight of the CIA was strengthened after Senate investigations revealed extensive domestic spying, involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile, a CIA-directed "secret war" in Laos, use of assassination in covert operations, and CIA activities to undermine elections in Chile and in several other countries.

These new restrictions on the executive branch's ability to conduct foreign policy making in secret endangered the carefully constructed post-World War II elite consensus about the need for a big military budget, unrestricted executive authority, and the legitimacy of intervening in the affairs of other countries. Elites were convinced that foreign policy simply could not be opened up to public debate. If this happened, their freedom to pursue interventionist strategies would surely be compromised.

The defeat in Vietnam was a learning experience for the American people that left them with little enthusiasm for more wars. In 1974, only 48 percent of those responding to a national poll were willing to defend Japan with military force in case of Soviet attack and only 37 percent was willing to defend other major allies. By 1980, the figures would rise to 74 percent and 68 percent, respectively, but even as late as 1982 enthusiasm for intervention in the Third World was notably lacking-for example, only 20 percent of the public favored the use of military force to prevent a guerrilla victory in El Salvador.

President Carter attempted to adjust to this new atmosphere by recognizing the limits of what could be accomplished by military force. Carter found himself under attack from conservatives for having negotiated the eventual return of the Panama Canal to Panama and for concluding a new arms control agreement (SALT 2) with the Soviets. A combination of his own confused ideology, major revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, economic recession at home, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hastened Carter's conversion to militarism. In the last two years of his term, Carter cut domestic spending and increased military expenditures, planned new missile deployments in Western Europe, announced a new doctrine committing the United States to war in the Middle East in case revolutions threatened any Western allies, and began training a "rapid deployment force" for use against Third World revolutions.

Carter's presidency was still on the skids when an Iranian mob, angered by years of U.S. support for the Shah's violent dictatorship in their country and encouraged by an opportunistic, fundamentalist religious elite, seized the American embassy in Iran and held its inhabitants hostage for more than a year. The media kept the hostage story before the public night after night (this was the origin of ABC's program Nightline). A botched rescue attempt during the 1980 campaign contributed to Carter's difficulties. There can be little doubt that the episode contributed to his defeat.

The hostages were released literally as Ronald Reagan took the oath of office (There is some evidence that Reagan struck a deal with the Ayatollah during the 1980 campaign not to release the hostages until after the election in exchange for a promise of future arms shipments. This may have been the first step in what emerged later as the Iran-contra scandal. The new president and his handlers recognized that the affair was an excellent catalyst for rallying public opinion behind an aggressive policy agenda that involved reversing the tendency toward congressional influence in foreign affairs, drastically increasing military spending, and waging counterinsurgency warfare through surrogates or mercenary armies in Africa, Southeast Asia Afghanistan, and (most forcefully) Central America.

The Reagan administration came into office determined to reassert the executive branch's ability to conduct foreign policy as it saw fit. A threefold strategy was devised. First, new strategies of intervention were utilized to ensure that foreign policy could be conducted as far from public view as possible. Second, the public was subjected to a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign. And third, the administration undertook to revitalize the military as an instrument of foreign policy.

Government Secrecy and the Reeducation of the Public

Since 1981, an avalanche of literature on so-called "low-intensity conflict" has emanated from military planners and conservative theorists. "Low-intensity conflict"-or "peaceful engagement"-the new phrase favored by the Bush administration-are euphemisms for wars conducted in Third World countries out of sight of the American public which rely on hired mercenaries clandestinely working at the direction of the CIA (this way American soldiers do not die, which upsets the public). Much of the literature advocating this new method of making war takes the view that our constitutional traditions must be bent or redefined in the struggle for American supremacy. Sam Sarkesian, an academic specialist who chairs the Interuniversity Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, asserts that revolution is inherently undemocratic and that counterrevolution must therefore "develop [its] own morality and ethics that justify any means to achieve success. Survival is the ultimate morality." This means that the United States must sometimes support sides in conflicts in which "all of the ingredients for a 'dirty', ungentlemanly, terror-oriented conflict are there; and it is likely to be protracted and increasingly costly." As a consequence, "American policy may support nondemocratic regimes in the name of democracy." To do this, Sarkesian argues that the United States needs a stronger, independent intelligence and covert operations capability. Americans must be "educated" to understand that we must employ or support measures overseas "inconsistent" with our constitutional traditions at home. People like Sarkesian believe that, in the absence of a successful effort to "reeducate" Americans about the nation's best self-interests, the government must act in secrecy.

Based on this logic, the Reagan administration organized a secret government within the executive branch to conduct foreign policy. The people within this group gained complete autonomy from Congress, operated without the knowledge of the public, and even worked outside the established foreign policy and intelligence agencies. In 1986, the administration proposed legislation to repeal the War Powers Act. Congress already had been induced to increase funds to build up the Special Operations Forces (SOF), which are authorized to carry out covert operations not subject to congressional oversight. For both SOF units and the CIA, more emphasis was placed on training in sabotage and "psychological operations."

In 1982, CIA operatives were caught mining Nicaraguan harbors and newspapers published the contents of a CIA manual used to train the contras to carry out sabotage and assassination against civilian targets. Congress reacted by enacting restrictions on CIA involvement in Nicaragua. The administration found a way around the law in the Special Forces, which were coordinated from the National Security Council. The Special Forces employ and train terrorists to carry out acts of violence for political purposes. The victims are not armed opponents but civilians. To prevent these victims from appearing as statistics in State Department human rights reports, civilian victims of the Salvadoran military and Nicaraguan contras were categorized as legitimate military targets in flagrant violation of international human rights treaties to which the United States is a signatory.

The new theorists understood that terrorist attacks against civilians in Nicaragua constituted an explicit strategy that they had helped devise. Neil Livingstone, a self-styled "terrorism expert" with close ties to the Reagan administration, recommended that in order to fight covert wars military units must be trained "to hunt down and kill terrorists" accused of acting against Americans and that "debate be reopened on murder as an instrument of national policy." For Vernon Walters, a top Reagan policy maker and former deputy director of the CIA, the reluctance of the American public to endorse such tactics "could have been" due to "effective covert action...carried out by the Soviet Union against the United States." Walters wrote a scenario in which he imagined a Soviet long-term planning group in 1948 discussing, "with great sophistication and profound understanding of the American national character and of the 'American dream,"' a plan to weaken American resolve to resist their plans for "world domination." He advocated that we use the same tactics as he imagined the USSR has used, especially including psychological warfare and propaganda, and develop in addition the "ability to recognize when covert action is being used against us and the means to thwart it." What did Walters have in mind as the means to "thwart" such ingenious Soviet "propaganda"? One of the documents he authored for the administration urged that psychological operations of the same type used by the United States in other nations "may be necessary" to win the hearts and minds of Americans.

But Walters's recommendations had already been implemented by the Reagan administration. The Pentagon had at its disposal a 1,000-member, $100 million-a-year worldwide public relations operation with which it generated its own propaganda, as it did in the case of the invasion of Grenada when it alleged a much larger Cuban presence and much greater threat to American lives than actually existed. Besides the Pentagon, taxpayer-funded institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy and its Central American branch helped finance "demonstration elections" and friendly human rights agencies in other nations so that favorable "information" could be generated for the human rights reports produced by the State Department.

Public relations has been a principal tool used to rehabilitate the image of the military services. Livingstone, who regularly rang the terrorism alarm bells in the mainstream media, was an executive with Gray and Co., a Washington public relations firm, when he played a key part in the Reagan election campaigns. During the first term, Reagan administration propaganda was coordinated by Michael Deaver. After Deaver's departure, White House chief of staff Donald Regan established a new team, headed by W. Dennis Thomas, which met every day to chart ways to influence public opinion. Thomas summarized the group's philosophy:

The notion absolutely is that you establish themes through repetition. You've got to establish unanimous agreement on the part of those who have to put it forth; then you have to say it, resay it and figure out different ways to say it.

Such a public relations operation actually amounted to a kind of domestic covert operation similar to the operation implemented by the United States elsewhere to influence the internal politics of other nations.

Rebuilding the Military

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military had nearly collapsed as an effective institution during the Vietnam War. Over 1,000 commissioned and noncommissioned officers were "fragged"-that is, assassinated-by their troops. There were more mutinies and refusals to engage in combat than in any previous American war. According to official Army figures, 28 percent of troops in Vietnam used hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. The quality of the officer corps declined. At all levels, fraudulent medals were awarded. The number of awards for bravery actually increased as the level of combat declined.

Without a knowledge of history other than what they were told in high school and through the media, few soldiers understood the war. The enemy used guerrilla hit-and-run tactics and was virtually indistinguishable from the non-combatant population. This fact led to vicious racism and contempt for the Vietnamese people. Black soldiers were less susceptible because of their experience with racism in the United States. Some taped to their helmets the slogan, "No gook ever called me nigger"; a few retreated into their own Saigon enclaves where military police were afraid to follow. For whites and blacks alike, drugs constituted a logical refuge from the horror, and the enemy did not have to supply them. To protect political allies in Thailand and elsewhere, the CIA guarded poppy fields and transported heroin on one of its "company" airlines, Air America.

Some military planners and politicians believed that the problem of discipline lay in the social base of the army, which was disproportionately made up of the poor and minorities. After the war, with the abolition of the draft and implementation of the all-volunteer army, the problem threatened to grow worse, since there was little incentive for middle-class citizens to enroll. Blacks were recruited at a rate three times higher than their proportion in the population. Rates of hard drug use were estimated to have been 35 percent higher than Vietnam levels, and 38 percent of the Army's troops were being released from service after less than three years for "mental, moral or physical reasons."

By the late 1970s, however, substantial progress was made to rebuild the military. An all-voluntary army replaced the draft, and the services' recruitment budgets shot up. The Reagan administration fine-tuned these efforts. In fiscal year 1986, the four branches of the military spent over $1.8 billion on recruitment, an average of nearly $5,400 for each of 333,600 recruits, $1,400 more than the average for the previous year. Advertising alone totaled $216 million, including $60,000 for a rock video featuring break dancing. There were about 15,000 military recruiters, one for every 185 high school seniors in the country. In 1986, there were 227,448 high school students enrolled in Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, compared to a total of 287 twenty years earlier. The Pentagon spent $52.1 million on texts, arms, ~ and uniforms for these students.

Job training and tuition credits accumulated in the military make military service before entering college or the job market the only viable option for many high school seniors, a point hammered home in Pentagon advertising featuring teenage actors discussing career options in the soda shop. Such benefits probably account for a significant proportion of reenlistments, which went up 65 percent from 1985 to 1986. In reality, there is little more to this approach than the traditional method of promising impressionable young people advantages that the services cannot deliver. For all of the emphasis on opportunities for training for high-tech careers, only 17 percent of Army jobs require such skills.

On college campuses, students must now prove that they have registered with the Selective Service to receive financial aid. With tuition rising and nonmilitary aid falling, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) becomes an increasingly attractive option. In 1986, there were 530 active ROTC detachments with 110,872 students, up 50 percent since 1975. At the graduate level, 4,000 students were funded by the Pentagon.

By the mid-1980s, the military was no longer recruiting from the "lower depths" of American society. Of first-time recruits, percent of the 1985 group and 92 percent of the 1986 group had graduated from high school. Although recruitment promises may be inflated, the military is effectively competing with higher education as a major institution providing opportunities for job training. Although the children of elites continue to eschew military service, the lower- to middle-class ranks of society are becoming heavily populated by people who have made the rite of passage through military service.

The propaganda benefits from this rite of passage are not lost upon military planners. In 1977, when the prestige of the military was at a postwar low and disenchantment with the defeat in Vietnam still restrained military adventures abroad Thomas Carr, Director of Defense Education under President Carter, asserted that military service was becoming an increasingly important means for socializing young people:

By 1984, given the involvement of such a large proportion of our young people with military service, the military will have become a major instrument for youth socialization-assuming a large portion of the role once dominated by the family, church, the school, and the civilian work setting.

Young people not exposed to such socialization through military service are subjected to a propaganda barrage that has much the same objective. Television advertising especially concentrated in spot ads shown during sports events, portrays a positive image of military life and of the military image.

The Internal Politics of the Garrison State

On July 4, 1987, as Independence Day celebrations focused on the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution, chances are that most Americans overlooked news reports that Lt. Col. Oliver North and other members of a secret Reagan administration task force had formulated a plan to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in the event of either urban riots or widespread domestic opposition to a military intervention. In such a case, national government control was to be transferred to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and military commanders would have been appointed to run state and local governments.

William French Smith, then attorney general, hushed up the plan, and government officials subsequently brushed aside reports about it, claiming that this kind of contingency planning is an ordinary function of government and a necessary preparation for emergencies, such as nuclear war. But in fact, North and his National Security Council aides had been planning an operation designed to involve the United States in exactly the kind of foreign intervention that might have provoked internal opposition. And the NSC was not merely running amok; Elliot Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (after 1985) and chief public advocate of the Administration's policy toward Central America, was a staunch advocate of an invasion of Nicaragua, as he admitted early in 1989.

The contras, then virtually under North's direction, were to swarm into an area of Nicaragua and declare it "liberated." North knew that this action would inevitably provoke a counterattack by Sandinista forces and that the United State s would be under pressure to commit ground combat troops to rescue its mercenaries (the plan was very similar to the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba in 1961). North, who had begun his career in Vietnam, understood that successful prosecution of a land war in Central America would almost surely require suppression of dissent at home. Part of his plan for accomplishing the necessary repression would have involved the establishment of internment camps, similar to those used during the Second World War to incarcerate American citizens of Japanese ancestry. North could have some confidence in overcoming the legal obstacles to such a plan. After all, the present Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, helped Nixon's attorney general John Mitchell draft a similar strategy to use against people protesting the Vietnam War.

North had already heavily influenced the shape of the Central America debate. For example, pro-contra legislators, including Senator John Danforth, were fond of quoting from a 1981 speech by Nicaraguan Interior Minister Tomas Borge in which he proclaimed the Sandinista revolution as one that "goes beyond our borders " Danforth's quote came from information provided by a white paper, "Revolution Beyond Our Borders," prepared by the Office of Public Diplomacy of the State Department. It failed to quote the rest of Borge's remarks, including the explanation, "This does not mean we export our revolution. It is sufficient-and we cannot avoid this-that they take our example." The oversight is understandable. The unofficial coordinator of the Office of Public Diplomacy was Oliver North.

The Office of Public Diplomacy was actually a small operation compared to the entire public relations campaign being used to sell the Reagan administration's policy. A tax-exempt organization called the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, working with the support of Lt. Col. North and President Reagan, solicited millions of dollars from citizens to coordinate "private" support for the contras. A public relations firm, International Business Communications (IBC), helped in the effort, which was headed by two former government employees.

The American public was the chief target of the IBC and the Office of Public Diplomacy. By relying on "private" donations, the IBC was able to lobby members of Congress, using methods that would have been considered suspect if utilized by public agencies. For example, the IBC organized letter writing and phone campaigns wherein "citizens" would express their opinions to congressmen.

On March 13, 1985, a staff member of the Office of Public Diplomacy sent a memorandum to White House director of communications Pat Buchanan to describe the "White 'Propaganda' Operation" being organized by IBC. He gave five examples of the campaign. One included an op-ed editorial in the Wall Street Journal, written by a history professor who had received funds and assistance provided by "our staff." Two other op-ed pieces appearing in the New York Times and Washington Post were written entirely by the Office of Public Diplomacy, though they were signed by contra leaders. All this was done despite the fact that the 1985 Appropriations Act specifically prohibited using public funds "for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by Congress."

While Congress and the media focused the public's attention on the question of whether or not Reagan knew about the diversion of profits from the sale of arms to Iran to the contras, the larger issue was the existence of a permanent "secret government" that ran not only the contra war but a variety of other covert actions. Many of these actions were actually carried out by secret organizations and networks that supplied their own funding to supplement what they received from the CIA through drug trafficking and arms merchandising. When Congress outlawed military aid to the contras, this network went into action to save the contras. It was a largely private network that operated in coordination with, but not under the control of, American intelligence agencies.

If In the face of an increasingly complex, well-coordinated, and insulated national security apparatus, the information available for public debate about foreign affairs becomes subject to an overwhelming degree of manipulation. Decisions are carried out in secret and the volume of state secrets has mushroomed with every presidential administration. After decisions are made behind closed doors, strategies are devised about how to manipulate mass opinion in favor of decisions or actions already undertaken. Domestic electoral decisions do not lead to governmental policies. Instead, public opinion campaigns are orchestrated to build support for decisions already reached.

The Democratic Facade

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