Well, of course not. But what's interesting is that in the next decade (or two) our nation's imperial reach will have to be soberly reassessed and reversed. As Democrats, we will be the party that can best come to grips with the moral requirement and increasingly practical need (the money just won't be there) to do both. More later on the consequences if we let neocolonial resistance and/or rival great power military/economic power force what our still democratic society should do itself.
These thoughts are inspired by Tom Engelhardt’s Tomdispatch of January 4, Doubling down on the imperial mission. Right now, and regardless of its position on President Bush's Iraq 'surge', the Democratic Party is not 'there' yet on scaling back the overall imperial mission, as the long quote beginning below (all emphasis mine) continues below the fold:
... a far more basic choice lurks - one rarely alluded to in the mainstream. If we Americans voted on such things - and, in truth, we vote on less and less that matters - the choice ...might be put this way:
Expand the military or shrink the mission?
This is the essential question that goes largely unmentioned - and largely unthought as well. ... In the meantime, money will continue to pour into the Pentagon and the US national-security world generally. ...
Shrinking the mission - choosing some path other than the imperial one (in part by redefining what exactly America's national interests are) - would, of course, address many problems. ... But no one in Washington - not in the Bush administration, not in James A Baker's Iraq Study Group, which recently captured the Inside-the-Beltway "middle ground" on Iraq policy, not in the Democratic leadership - is faintly interested in shrinking the US global mission. No one in Washington, where a kind of communal voting does go on, is about to vote "no" to that mission, or cast a ballot for democracy rather than empire.
... Unfortunately, few ever discuss ... the 700-plus military and intelligence bases the US retains around the world or ask why exactly we're garrisoning the planet. [And no one], in these past years, has seriously challenged the ever-expanding Pentagon budget...
100-0: Senate approves $600? billion war budget
Yeah, not "seriously challenged" as in the most recent $448 Billion Defense budget, which was approved 100-0 by the Senate!
September 30, 2006 [AP] -- WASHINGTON - The Senate unanimously approved $70 billion more for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday as part of a record Pentagon budget.
The bill, now on its way to the White House for President Bush's signature, totals $448 billion. It was passed by a 100-0 vote.
That continues to boggle my mind long after I diaried on it: E' tu Russ, Teddy? And a complete non-news event, a "Dog Bites Man" story (on dailykos too). By the way, the real Pentagon budget is $600 Billion (for more on that, read that earlier diary).
Ways to deal with it
So, anyone who wants the U.S. to have a much less imperialist-militarist relationship with the world needs to face up to the bipartisan nightmare on the imperial mission, and then figure out a practical way of dealing with it. One way to do so is urged by Robert Naiman and Mark Weisbrot: "The Four Questions": Get Members of Congress and Presidential Candidates on the Record. The "Surge." The Timetable. The Funding. Talks with Iran.
And, a step in the right direction is to Bring the Mandate for Peace to Washington DC on Jan. 27.
Finally, think about getting involved in counter-recruitment. It provides potential military recruits with the truth about military life to counter misleading advertising and recruiters, and asks potential recruits to question the morality of the 'work' they may be signing up for. A goal for many involved in counter-recruitment is to force the military machine go on a diet, or at minimum help make it more costly for it to consume young men and women. The American Friends Service Committee has an informative counter-recruitment page with links to similar organizations involved in that effort. Tomdispatch notes that the President recently decided to permanently expand the military by 70,000 soldiers in order "to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists" -- to increase the size of the military by 70,000. And the unexamined imperial mission will make such military recruitment very difficult and expensive:
Of course, to get those new "volunteer" officers and men, who have generally been none too eager to volunteer for the army and the marines in the midst of a disastrous, faraway, increasingly incomprehensible set of double wars, you'll have to pay even more kids more money to go to no-commitment [pre-recruitment] summer camp; and, while you're at it, you'll have to lower standards for the US military radically.
You'll have to let in even more volunteers without high-school diplomas but with "moral" and medical "waivers" for criminal records and mental problems. You'll have to fast-track even more new immigrants willing to join for the benefits of quick citizenship; you'll have to ramp up already high cash bonuses of all sorts; you'll have to push the top-notch ad agency recently hired on a five-year contract for a cool billion US dollars to rev up its new "Army Strong" recruitment drive even higher; you'll certainly have to jack up the numbers of military recruiters radically, to the tune of perhaps a couple of hundred million more dollars; and maybe just for the heck of it, you better start planning for the possibility of recruiting significant numbers of potential immigrants before they even think to leave their own countries. After all, it's darn romantic to imagine a future US all-volunteer force that will look more like the old French Foreign Legion - or an army of mercenaries anyway.
All in all, you'll have to commit to the fact that your future soldier in your basic future war will cost staggering sums of money to hire and even more staggering sums to retain after he or she has had a taste of what "leadership potential" really entails.
Nary a whisper about an empire denuded of money and troops
Yet despite the increasingly dire finances of empire, there was not even a whisper among the Democratic Party leadership, after Bush announced the permanent 70,000 troop increase, that it might be prudent to consider pulling in our imperial horns:
Instead, in the spirit of imperial-mission logic (and with the urge to bash the Bush administration for being late to such an obvious support-our-troops position), Democrats simply leaped on to the expand-the-military bandwagon even faster than Republicans. In fact, leading Democrats had long been calling for just this sort of expansion. ("I am glad [the president] has realized the need for increasing the size of the armed forces ... but this is where the Democrats have been for two years," commented Congressman Rahm Emanuel, the new House of Representatives Democratic caucus chairman.) The Democratic leadership promptly pledged to make such an expansion one of its top reform priorities in the new year.
Tomdispatch's conclusion includes more on what we all should know, that the neocons in charge don't get it even worse than the Democrats...
Rest assured, as the year 2007 begins, America's imperialists and militarists are deep into preparations for [deputy director of the Pentagon's Strategic Plans Office's "war on terrorism," General Mark O.] Schissler's 100 Year War ["We're in a generational war. ... [Islamist extremists are] absolutely committed to the 50, 100-year plan."]. They are already producing the next set of ... military responses, for America's next set of crises. At this point, it would be shocking (not to say awesome) if these weren't sooner or later applied.
... and that 'resistance' is effectively pushing back now, already diminishing the imperialistic capacity of the U.S., and this will only get stronger:
Expand the military or shrink the mission?
We Americans may never vote on this question, symbolic as it is of the critical choices being made in our name; but make no mistake, the rest of the world is already "voting" - some literally on ballots, as in Latin America; some by arms (and polls), as in the Middle East; some via old-style great-power politics, as in Central Asia. Americans may not know it, but the mission is shrinking, even as the weaponry grows ever more dangerous and the imperial path gets ever bumpier, more potholed, better mined. Expanding the US military will only increase the costs in every sense of the word.