Listening to yet another valedictory speech from Leon Panetta, given yesterday at Georgetown University to an audience of young military and students who seemed to blanch ever more at the alarms the departing Secretary of Defense was sounding was a reminder of the fact that you can usually judge the health of an insititution by the character of the men its leaders choose to administer their policies. Perhaps the Obama administration fears that its new (as yet not approved by the Senate) secretary, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, will not have the same lapdog loyalty always demonstrated by their outgoing man, and wanted to use Panetta's skill at toeing to the party line one last time. One of many Italian American Catholics who now trod the corridors of power (along with their Jewish cohorts) as the old WASP establishment withdraws from the down and dirty of running a troubled empire and retreats ever deeper into their estates and gated communities of Downton Abbey ripoffs replete with rambling golf courses, Panetta is at least as good as his paisan on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, at bearing the flag in a hail of bullets, even if not as amusing. It is fascinating to see how many public servants are now drawn from ethnic groups that for a long time, possibly even now, would never have been allowed into the country clubs peopled by the old guard.The ostensible reason for the speech was to alert the youngsters at Georgetown and the world at large of the perils for the U.S. military of allowing the dread sequester of government expenditures to take place. After listing a host of really bad outcomes, (the possibility of a "cyber Pearl Harbor" caught the media's attention), he cited the perils for the U.S. of not maintaining the strongest military on the globe, of not being able to fight two wars simultaneously, or even of not being able to maintain our "readiness." This last notion is perhaps the most interesting since it can only be interpreted to mean that if anyone questions the fiscal wisdom or necessity of our maintaining close to one thousand military encampments around the globe, they show a lack of regard for our "readiness" to fight wars on every continent and small archipelago on the globe.
Most blatantly stated in the Bush administration's pronouncements of National Security, the notion that we must, as a single national entity, have a military machine stronger than those of at least the next four or five most powerful nations combined, has become part of the American catechism. The Bush document made all sorts of other outrageous pronouncements, most famously, the right to pre-emptively strike at any nation on Earth, but no tenet of the faith is as sacred as our obligation, as patriotic Americans, to sign onto this notion of overwhelming force. Does anyone ever stop to contemplate what circumstances might arise that would make it necessary for us to have such a force, or to fight two major wars? Under what circumstances would we be so isolated from the community of nations that we would be forced, alone, to take on some adversary or adversaries? This is American exceptionalism writ so large as to make questionable the virtual sanity of our leadership.
When England was the last standing obstacle to Hitler's domination of the whole of Europe, we did, (even though it took perhaps a bit too long to come around), come to its defense. The war against Nazi Germany, in spite of American mythology, was a shared enterprise. We were a part of a group of nations; Eisenhower bore the title, not of the Supreme American Commander, but of Supreme Allied Commander. It would be interesting, (though one can probably guess), to get a typical American's reaction to a line or two from a review of a recent Churchill biography, written by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a recent New York Review of Books. Referring to one of the book's authors, Paul Reid, Wheatcroft writes:
"...Reid says that Churchill "knew Hitler could not be crushed without American troops." But the truth is that Germany could not be crushed with American troops. Those other recent histories have been marked by unsparing realism, not least in their most un-Churchillian emphasis on the inadequacy of the British Army as a fighting force (and the US Army also) when faced with the Wehrmact, and on the plain fact that the Third Reich was defeated by the Red Army."
(Red highlight mine.)
Except for one thankfully brief interlude where the United States alone had atomic weapons, the notion that it was possible or desirable for any one nation to have enough power to alone dominate the rest of the world was almost beyond consideration. The prospect should scare any inhabitant of the planet. Even Hitler, with all of his delusions, never believed it possible to go it alone.
The fact that U.S. predominance at current levels has become a badge of one's patriotism is truly alarming. The fact that the richest nation in the world by far, even now, in the midst of a financial crisis, is still capable of fielding such forces, should not be an argument for our continuing to do so. Countless historians have understood that the major reason empires fail is that they overextend themselves militarily. Nations that ignore, as we currently do, the needs of their populations for decent housing, education, health care and, yes, even dignity and social justice, do so at their peril.
Our Defense Department was once called the War Department. Made in 1949, it was a wholesome, wise change in the way a nation should see the role of its men and women in arms. It captured the sprit of a speech made by our nation's greatest soldier at the close of World War II:
A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.
Men since the beginning of time have sought peace.... Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural development of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.
"We have had our last chance."
