Treatise on Militarism

Treatise on Militarism

Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, 422)

The 2004 U.S. election must have caused hearts to sink everywhere in the Third World. The bloody insurgency in Iraq only strengthened the position of the "War President," giving him greater license to continue his campaign of terror. At the time of the election the death toll of U.S. soldiers was nearing a thousand with the number injured seven times that. To which toll one must add the haunting fact that of the 500,000 plus U.S. servicemen and women who served in the First Gulf War some 325,000 are now on disability pensions suffering a variety of acute maladies generally attributed to the toxic cocktail of radiation and other chemicals they were exposed to during their tour of duty. Those who fight in Iraq today can scarcely look forward to a healthier future given that it is effectively twice as irradiated now as it was in 1991.¹ Yet still the minority who vote voted in the main for the man who put these soldiers in harm's way; but then it isn't as though John Kerry was promising to bring the troops home. As important as Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) is as explanation of conservatism in the heartland of the USA, it doesn't answer this question—why did the war on terror fail to ignite anti-Bush sentiment?² More to the point, why was it impossible to vote against the war? This is militarism at its peak—you cannot decide between going to war or not, only which is the most desired (least worst?) way of handling the conduct of the war.

Problem I: Is Today's Militarism Really New?

Militarism has always been with us, like a dark shadow, but its history is not continuous. The idea that war should be considered a logical and necessary extension of politics was given expression by Clausewitz, but he was merely putting into philosophical form what was already accepted thinking in government: arms are a legitimate means of achieving political goals. Militarism is not always as unabashed about its existence, not to say its intentions, as it is now when—as Debord so presciently put it—it has "its own inconceivable foe, terrorism" to bedazzle a frightened, confused, and misinformed public (24). But out of the limelight does not mean out of the picture; militarism has not been officially questioned since the end of the First World War when disarmament had its last genuine hurrah. World War Two, which caught the U.S. and the U.K., in particular, underarmed and underprepared for conflict, eliminated in a stroke the very concept of disarmament—strategic arms limitation and force reduction are essentially fiscal notions, decisions made in the interest of preserving a militarist posture in the face of rising costs, not disarmament. Neither should we delude ourselves, however, now that political sentiments in the U.S. and elsewhere seem finally to have turned against the "War President," that anti-war is anti-militarism.³ As we shall see, the very opposite is true.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it is generally thought that a paradigm shift in the nature of militarism has occurred, and as the violence in the Middle East continues with no sign of abatement in sight (the running-sore that is the Israel/Palestine conflict, the smouldering fires of Iraq and Afghanistan and the gathering storm in Iran all forebode ill for a peaceful future), any doubt that a new era of "hot" war has been ushered in tends to vanish. What is less certain, however, at least from a philosophical perspective, is the conceptual nature of the change. Those who demur that the present era is substantially different enough to warrant the label "new" do so on the grounds that what we are seeing today is merely the continuation of an...