The Wild Reed: Rallying to End U.S. Militarism

Yesterday afternoon I joined with about 50 others in south Minneapolis to rally against the “endless wars” of the United States government, wars instigated and waged regardless of which of the two main political parties hold power.

Yesterday’s rally was organized by the Minnesota Peace Action Coalition, which includes a number of Twin Cities-based justice and peace organizations, including the Anti-War Committee, Women Against Military Madness, Veterans for Peace, Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, and the Welfare Rights Committee. It was held in the heart of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of south Minneapolis, which is right next to Seward, the neighborhood I've lived in since October 2019. So, yes, I walked to the rally. Cedar-Riverside was actually the first neighborhood I lived in when I came to the U.S. from Australia twenty-seven years ago. Today it’s home to one of the largest Somalian communities in the country, ensuring the nickname “Little Mogadishu.”

In its promotional material, the organizers of yesterday’s rally noted that October 2021 marks 20 years since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, an event which launched a seemingly endless series of U.S. wars and military interventions. These wars explode not only on the streets of foreign cities but also, as the organizers put it, “on the streets at home with militarized policing and growing inequality.”

Of course, related to this “growing inequality” is the obscenely bloated U.S. military budget, which the majority of politicians from both parties unquestionably support year after year.

Richard Eskow recently penned an informative piece on this very issue, noting that:

[Congress recently] authorized a one-year military budget of $768 billion. If that amount remains the same over the next decade, the ten-year cost would come to $7.7 trillion, more than twice the amount of the Democrats’ so-called “sweeping budget package” designed to help working people and address climate change. . . . The massive expenditure for war is not merely a fiscal issue. It reflects a system of governance that values war. That system was produced by a failure of political vision and an electoral process corrupted by corporate money.

Writing in the latest issue of the WAMM (Women Against Military Madness) newsletter, my friend Marie Braun questions where the humanity is in an “exploding national ‘defense’ budget.”

The devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout provide ample reason for our country to reconsider what truly constitutes national security. The massive U.S. arsenal and fighting force deployed worldwide are powerless against grave, non-military threats to national security -- from a raging pandemic to the fact that tens of millions of Americans struggle to pay for food, housing, and healthcare.

. . . Moving money from the military budget to meeting human needs will not be easy because of the many vested interests, especially weapons contractors and their powerful lobbies. And there are military contracts in almost every state.

Frequently when there is an opportunity to get rid of out-dated equipment, the cry from states and local communities is “Jobs! We will lose jobs!” However, it has been known for decades that federal spending on domestic programs in healthcare, education, clean energy, and infrastructure creates more jobs, dollar for dollar, than military spending.

In her 2019 study, Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project at Boston University’s Watson Institute, found that $1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with the jobs $1 billion creates in other areas: 26, 700 in education, 16, 800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in healthcare.

I close this post with some more images of yesterday’s rally calling for an end to U.S. militarism at home and abroad. These images are accompanied by an excerpt from Julian Borger’s article, “How 9/11 Led the U.S. to Forever Wars, Eroded Rights – and Insurrection,” published one month ago today on September 10, 2021 in The Guardian.

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Over the past few weeks, the Biden administration has launched drone strikes against suspected terrorist targets in Somalia and Afghanistan, based on congressional authority dating to September 2001. This week, five terror suspects have been in court for pre-trial hearings now entering their ninth year in Guantánamo Bay, which opened its prison gates in January 2002.

The aftershocks of 9/11 are everywhere. The families of the nearly 3,000 victims are still struggling with the justice department to lift the secrecy over the FBI investigation into the attacks and the possible complicity of Saudi officials. Last week they asked the department’s inspector general to look into FBI claims to have lost critical evidence, including pictures and video footage.

[This year’s] 20th anniversary of 9/11 [. . .] is clearly not just about history. More than a decade since the last attempted al-Qaida attack against the country, America’s society and its democracy are shaped – and arguably badly corroded – by how it responded in the first few weeks after the twin towers fell.

The Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that became law on September 18, 2001 was supposed to give the president the tools he needed to combat al-Qaida. But it is still used as the legal underpinning for drone strikes and other military operations ordered by Joe Biden around the world, most with nothing to do with al-Qaida.

The torture of suspects carried out by the CIA and allowed by legal memos issued by the Bush administration has mired the case of the 9/11 suspects at Guantánamo in tainted evidence, leaving the prosecution unable to move forward or abandon the process.

New books argue that lines can be drawn tracing the spread of disinformation on the internet and the direct challenge to democracy posed by Donald Trump and his supporters – culminating in the January 6 insurrection – all the way back to decisions taken in the febrile atmosphere that followed the attacks on New York and Washington two decades ago.

Their conclusion echoes what civil liberties organisations have been saying for the past two decades, that 9/11 is America’s auto-immune disease: the response did far more damage than the original attack.

“The betrayal of America’s professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror,” Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s non-fiction book critic, [recently] wrote.

[. . .] Spencer Ackerman, the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, argues that the amorphous “war on terror” supercharged and institutionalised enduring strands of white supremacism running through US political history.

Ackerman, a former Guardian journalist, contrasts the political response to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, by the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh, to the al-Qaida plane hijacking attacks six years later.

In the Oklahoma case, Republicans in Congress disputed any suggestion of wider complicity of the far right. To the extent anti-terror legislation was strengthened, it was directed against foreign groups. Patriotism was identified with whiteness.

“One of the most important lessons of the war on terror is that a white man with a flag and a gun is told by the culture of the war on terror that he is a counter-terrorist, not a terrorist,” said Ackerman, adding that a direct line can be drawn between the war on terror and the January 6 pro-Trump insurrection in Washington.

“You can see from the iconography of who is in that crowd, who’s storming the Capitol,” Ackerman said. “There are a lot of people in hard-knuckle gloves and tactical gear basically cosplaying as the warriors that the war on terror and its media portrayals convinced them is the mark of valorous American behavior.”

Some of the excesses of the 9/11 era have been pruned. The National Security Agency is more constrained in its ability to collect bulk phone data, which was ruled illegal by a federal appeals court last year. The Patriot Act has been overtaken by the less ambitious USA Freedom Reauthorization Act.

But even after laws expire, the habits and reflexes of the 9/11 era remain. Karen Greenberg, the director of the centre of national security at Fordham University school of law, calls them “subtle tools”: secrecy, deliberately imprecise legal language aimed at expanding executive power, blurred lines between government agencies, and the overturning of norms. “You can get rid of all these policies, but if you don’t get rid of the tools that created those policies, forget it. It doesn’t matter,” Greenberg said.

“All these things that were created in the name of national security, we’ve seen them time and time again bleed into things that are not about the war on terror and national security.”

Her book Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump argues that the 45th president took advantage of the rupture of norms and the ballooning of presidential power in the 9/11 era in his own assault on democratic institutions.

“This wilful evasion of the limits on presidential power is something we are going to have to figure out how to address sooner rather than later,” she said.