military takeover

via juan cole's informed comment (from a couple of weeks ago - i'm a bit behind in my reading), a very informative and disturbing (though long) article by tom engelhardt. in it, engelhardt demonstrates how the military has come to dominate the u.s. government's response and approach to just about everything outside it's borders:

"The military has become not just our war-fighting and occupying force, but our main "nation-building" force, our major diplomatic force (now that military-to-military relations have become the essence of foreign policy), our preponderant intelligence force, a major propaganda outfit (or call it public diplomacy, if you will), our central ministry for advanced R&D research and basic science, the only part of the government seriously preparing for a global-warming world, and our planetary rescue outfit as well -- to name just a few of its roles. With more clearly to come.
...
That sums up our present Bush moment. In fact, little that this country does from diplomacy to torture to foreign aid is any longer imaginable absent the military. We are a nation whose public face -- however we may still think of ourselves -- is no longer a civilian one, not just in Iraq but in the world at large. This is essentially because, if the Bush people could be said to have a religion, it would not perhaps be fundamentalist Christianity so much as a deep and abiding belief in the ability of a militarized superpower to impose its views and desires on the world through military strength alone."

as part of his analysis, engelhardt highlights something that i have found quite puzzling myself - the u.s. contribution to the tsunami relief:

"[Three days after the event,] George emerged from hibernation to praise American generosity ("we're a very generous, kindhearted nation") and to announce that we would indeed mount a mighty relief effort to be led by… don't be surprised now… the Pentagon. ("We're dispatching a Marine expeditionary unit, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and the Maritime pre-position squadron from Guam to the area to help with relief efforts."). The very concept of a civilian relief effort naturally never came to mind, except -- for an administration intent on stripping civil government of its role in society -- in terms of private charity for which two former presidents would later be mobilized. We then largely ignored the various global relief outfits (including the UN), civilian in nature, with extensive experience in such things, sent Hurricane Jeb and our increasingly pugnacious exiting secretary of state off to do an American assessment of Asian needs; declared our own coalition of the willing (Australia, Japan, India) willy-nilly, and generally rushed unilaterally into the breach."

of course, this all hasn't been a sudden development that can only be laid at feet of the bush administration, but neither have they been backwards in taking it forwards:

"As with extraordinary rendition in the Clinton era, or neocon plans laid out in the 1990s to take down Saddam Hussein, or the establishment of a national security state in the early years of the Cold War, or (as former Latin American prisoners from the 1960s to the 1980s can attest) torture methods employed or taught by CIA or U.S. military interrogators, much of what's happened since September 11, 2001 has a good deal of history behind it. The Bush administration hardly created our American world from scratch. But it certainly accelerated the trend toward militarism, brought torture out of the closet -- making it something close to official state policy -- began to build a small-scale global gulag to go with it, melded extremes of American political and religious expression in new ways, and established what might be called a National Insecurity Homeland in the process."

it's hard not to be deeply disturbed by this. when the guiding principle is 'might is right', neither peace nor justice (nor real freedom, contrary to bush's apparent belief) can prevail. violence of any kind only begets more violence. those who claim to be acting in the name of god are treading on very dangerous ground, as the psalmist says:

"The LORD examines both the righteous and the wicked. He hates everyone who loves violence." (Psalm 11:5, New Living Translation).