America taught us to be modern, then postmodern. New York, said the English novelist Martin Amis, who settled there, is where they “road-test the future”. Hollywood provided the pictures, and rock’n’roll the soundtracks, for the popular imagination of successive generations.

At the same time, the insistent backbeat of conflict has been supplied by Americans too, in a percussive hail of bombs, bullets and shells. The US entry into World War II culminated in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a technological triumph which simultaneously called into question the philosophical underpinnings of modernity. History might be moving, not in forward progress to enlightenment but backwards towards apocalypse, a sense captured in the enigmatic opening of Gravity’s rainbow, the 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon. Some of the action is set in wartime London, cowering under the threat of the German V-2 rocket, forerunner of today’s ballistic missiles. Seeming to refer, simultaneously, to nuclear annihilation, the book begins: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late” (Pynchon 1973, p. 3).

This fear – that we might all suddenly be reduced to nothingness on little more than the whim of a middle-ranking military officer – was explored a decade earlier in the Stanley Kubrick movie, Doctor Strangelove. At the time, the same dread brought thousands out on to the streets in anti-nuclear 92protests, perhaps most notably around Britain’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in southern England.

For all that, majorities in the US, UK and allied countries spent the Cold War decades learning, as the subtitle of Kubrick’s film has it, “to stop worrying and love the bomb”. When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was revived in the 1980s, Michael Heseltine, then Britain’s Defence Secretary – a charismatic speaker, whose persuasive powers were in no way diminished by a slight speech impediment – famously labelled us an “unwepwesentative minowity”.

The ‘Atlanticist’ argument was sustained by several important myths. Nuclear weapons kept the peace, one argument proposed, because the balance of missiles on either side of the Iron Curtain imposed restraint through the certainty of MAD, ‘mutually assured destruction’, if ever one was actually fired off. Actually, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation had a policy called ‘flexible response’, a euphemism concealing plans for a first nuclear strike, if that was required to repel Moscow’s tank battalions rolling into Western Europe.

But the most persuasive line, which I remember ruefully from unsuccessful attempts to convince my peers in school debates, pub conversations and political meetings, was simple: “if they’ve got them, we must have them”. It was, in other words, the formation of the conflict as a gigantic tug-of-war, which exerted the strongest disciplinary effect on political discourses about military affairs in general, and nuclear weapons in particular. Around this was built a vast ‘security’ apparatus comprising both these elements – political and military – and also, of course, commercial interests.

America’s participation in the struggle against Hitler (and in the Pacific theatre, the Japanese) had shifted the course of events decisively in favour of the eventual victors – not, as commonly supposed in the West, ‘the allies’, depicted in countless war movies as uniformly Anglophone, but the United Nations. President Truman greeted news of the end of the war in Europe with the words: “General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations” (Truman 1945). The document that formalised the Nazi defeat includes these words: “This Act of Military Surrender is without prejudice to, and 93will be superseded by, any general instrument of surrender imposed by, or on behalf of, the United Nations on Germany” (Act of Military Surrender, 1945).

This came several years after twenty-six countries, including China and the Soviet Union, signed up to the Atlantic Charter, forerunner of the UN Charter. The signing of that document, in 1945, was the culmination of a complex military and political effort that began after Pearl Harbour four years earlier. “Understanding the UN’s wartime origins provides a powerful and much-needed reminder that the world body is not some liberal accessory but was created out of hard, political necessity as a strategic engine of victory” (Plesch 2005).

The military-industrial complex

General Eisenhower succeeded Truman in the White House and led America into battle in Korea, but perhaps his most significant political gesture came as he left the Oval Office. Eisenhower used his farewell speech to warn Americans and the world that the historic achievement of defeating fascism was in danger of being subverted by the “military-industrial complex” (Eisenhower 1961).

The UN Charter effectively made aggressive war illegal. It was the centrepiece of a decisive shift in global governance, based on a normative assumption that from then on countries would only resort to military force if they themselves were attacked. This was the fruit of victory, planted by political necessity and cultivated by negotiation and compromise. And Eisenhower’s point? That doesn’t suit everyone. The UN was intended to put to bed the principle of ‘might is right’. But the mighty – in this case, the vested interests in the war industry – now threatened to attain what he called a “disastrous rise of misplaced power” over the way we decide to respond to conflicts and crises, and they did so by framing them in terms of right and wrong.

The bipolar formation of the Cold War lent itself to this project. In October 1945, Truman had produced twelve points to govern American policy, including the importance of opening up free markets (Alexander 2002). The program would be based on “righteousness”, he said: there would be “no compromise with evil”. As after previous wars, the 94president had commissioned a review of US forces, but, uniquely in American history, this resulted in a decision not to winnow them back down to previous levels (Hossein-Zadeh 2006), but rather to maintain them at something like the degree of readiness required to engage in two major theatres of war – such as Europe and the Far East – at the same time. It’s no accident that this has been the core Pentagon doctrine ever since. The political will was generated through the most extraordinary official campaign of demonisation and propaganda, the ‘red scare’ of McCarthyism, which led to the paradigm of identity and alterity – self and other, or ‘us’ and ‘them’ – becoming institutionalised at all levels of US society.

The next imposture came with war in Vietnam, presented as a necessary measure to prevent the countries of south-east Asia falling like ‘dominoes’ into the clutches of communism. America’s defeat, a decade later, came during the era of détente, when arms control agreements with the Soviet Union were easing tensions between the superpowers – tensions that had kept the upward pressure on military preparations and budgets. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, limiting access to the bomb and committing nuclear-armed states to enter into substantive negotiations to reduce and eliminate their arsenals, came into force in 1970, quickly followed by the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of 1972.

Between them, these developments posed a threat to the interests of the military-industrial complex and triggered a notable new exertion of what Eisenhower had called its “unwarranted influence … in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government” (Eisenhower 1961). In Washington, CIA appraisals of the receding threat from Moscow were brushed aside by a team convened on the orders of President Gerald Ford – keen to prove, perhaps, that he really could walk and chew gum at the same time – to pore over the same field reports and raw data, and second-guess the assessments drawn up by the agency’s top analysts.

Team B, as it was known, reached some startling conclusions. No evidence could be found to support the long-held fear that the Soviets had developed an acoustic system for detecting US nuclear submarines … so they must have developed an undetectable, non-acoustic one instead. Moscow’s air defences were in tip-top condition, the team decided, 95based on the unimpeachable evidence of boasts in an official Russian training manual. A book on Soviet military strategy titled The art of winning was translated as The art of conquest (Curtis 2004).

This period can be viewed in retrospect as a crisis of military legitimacy, the first of three notable examples in recent times. A prime mover in the agitation for Team B was Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s Secretary of Defense, later to resume, of course, under George W. Bush. And the study’s conclusions were taken up by a well-resourced ginger group calling itself the Committee on the Present Danger, which then projected its warnings via media messages to the general public and lobbying approaches to politicians, including presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s election victory of 1980 ensured that, as in the late 1940s, the end of a war would not bring a reduction in military budgets but instead signal their relentless expansion. This project now met with well-organised opposition, however, both at home and abroad. My own CND activism came against the backdrop provided by the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, supposedly a base of Britain’s Royal Air Force but significant as a launchpad for cruise missiles, part of the US nuclear arsenal. The appointment of Michael Heseltine, the most effective debater in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, to take us on, was a backhanded compliment.

And across the Atlantic, the ‘Great Communicator’ himself performed an abrupt about-turn, well before the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev as a negotiating partner in Moscow, in response to the powerful Nuclear Freeze Movement. In a few short months, it fielded the biggest ever demonstration in New York’s Central Park, and won 36 out of 39 referendums in eight states. Media and politicians alike were unable to ignore it, and Reagan was forced to disavow his administration’s and NATO’s own policy and declare a nuclear war “unwinnable”. A ban on space weapons, proposals for a ‘zero option’ on nukes in Europe, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, all followed, including a rare cut in the Pentagon’s budget.

It’s important to emphasise that at the time the Soviet Union collapsed, US war preparations were actually being drawn down rather than stepped up, because it sets the scene, at the end of the Cold War, for 96another crisis of military legitimacy. Communism was seen to have imploded under the weight of its own contradictions, as conventional CIA analysis in the 1970s said it would. The diplomacy of Reagan and Gorbachev had helped to ensure its end was less painful than it could have been. Now, amid heady talk of Europe being healed of its wounds, millions looked forward to rebuilding better, more prosperous societies with the help of a so-called peace dividend – resources diverted from the military, which, of course, no longer needed them.

Elsewhere, the period after Vietnam saw the fall of governments friendly to Washington as far apart as Laos and Mozambique (both 1975), Nicaragua and Iran (both 1979) and even the Philippines (1986). Cambodia not only fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, it then took the Vietnamese themselves, in an invasion four years later, to remove the genocidal Pol Pot regime from power. The Reagan Doctrine saw efforts to stem the ‘red tide’ entrusted to proxy armies, such as the Contras in Nicaragua, and RENAMO and UNITA in southern Africa, since the deployment of America’s own troops across other countries’ borders had become a political lemon.

Towards Desert Storm

However, low-intensity warfare, in what were – to the American public and those of most allied countries – obscure, faraway places, did not meet the needs of the military-industrial complex. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh puts it well:

Through this same period, US involvement in shooting wars crept back on to the agenda, with the invasion of Grenada (1983), an aerial attack on Libya (1986) and the invasion of Panama (1989) representing 97limited, small-scale demonstrations of military capability. Then came the strategic switch to a new enemy, action against whom would bring arresting images of ‘smart bomb’ technology into millions of living rooms around the world.

The engagements of the 1980s had already presaged a transition from pursuing Cold War enmities to the prosecution of ‘rogue’ individuals and states. Colonel Gadaffi, whom Reagan dubbed ‘Mad Dog’, was targeted over his support for ‘terrorism’. Manuel Noriega (‘Pineapple Face’) was wanted on drugs charges when his security forces shot and killed a US Marine, providing a pretext for eliminating him. The pretext was altogether stronger in the case of the next enemy to find himself in the cross-hairs: Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

The escapade that put the Pentagon back in business, as the ‘enforcement arm’ of the ‘international community’, was Operation Desert Storm in 1991, in which an American-led multi-national force ejected Saddam’s occupying troops from Kuwait. Suspicions over the role the US played behind the scenes centred on a meeting, the previous year, between Saddam himself and Washington’s Ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie.

One version of the transcript has Glaspie saying:

It led to allegations that Glaspie had effectively given a green light to Iraq’s invasion of its neighbour, a turn of events that took most of the world by surprise.

Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, the US army general who was to become a familiar figure in the months that followed, recalls a visit to Camp David to attend a cabinet meeting shortly after Saddam’s démarche. The episode appears in his autobiography, It doesn’t take a hero (1992). On 98the sidelines, he expressed scepticism to his boss, Colin Powell – then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – over the merits of US military action by way of response. Powell told Schwarzkopf: “I think we could go to war if they invaded Saudi Arabia. I doubt if we would go to war over Kuwait.”

As if by magic, news then surfaced at the Pentagon that thousands of Iraqi troops were “massing” again, this time on the Saudi border, ready to pounce. President Bush began talking about Saddam Hussein as “the Hitler of the Middle East”, bent on conquest and regional domination. The story was refuted by a reporter from a small Florida newspaper, the St Petersburg Times, who commissioned her own satellite pictures of the area from Soyuz Karta, a newly privatised arm of the former Soviet state, now touting for business from all comers. These pictures showed acres of empty desert – nothing more.

Was Desert Storm, then, a giant conspiracy? Did the US military-industrial complex somehow ‘lure’ Saddam Hussein, as a spider lures a fly, into a web from which there was no way out? Was there a plot, involving the diplomatic service, the White House and the military, to create a pretext for another major war, in order to show off the latest ‘smart’ weaponry being produced by the big Pentagon contractors and generate more orders?

To ask the question in those terms is to supply the answer, of course. To imagine active collusion taking place on the far-ranging scale required to bring about this sequence of events, and remaining hidden, would be far-fetched. However, there are indications of an in-built systemic momentum towards war – indications we can infer both from evidence of the organisational memory applied to media strategies, and an appreciation of the changing characteristics of the wider business environment in the US and elsewhere.

The phenomenology of America’s wars

First, though, a diversion into phenomenology. Hossein-Zadeh presents “shooting wars” as “occasional”, remember, a deviation from the norm; and that is, indeed, a prevalent view. For the US, however, it is now arguably the other way round. Consider: the American entry into World 99War II came after the attack on Pearl Harbour, in December 1941, and lasted three and a half years. Then the Korean War lasted three years, and US military involvement in Vietnam, another nine years.

A series of brief encounters were followed by the anti-climactic rendezvous with Saddam Hussein’s conscript army in the sands of Kuwait. That was in 1991, but it is worth asking, when did that war cease, and the next one begin? UN Security Council Resolution 687, which marked the end of Operation Desert Storm, also called on member states to do whatever they could to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shi’as in the south from Saddam’s vengeance. The US, Britain and (initially) France interpreted this as a mandate to establish “no-fly zones” over the north and south of the country and began flying regular patrols.

Over the years, this developed into a game of cat and mouse, with claims that Iraq was coming closer to shooting down one of the planes involved, risking the attendant propaganda boost that would bring to the regime. So, military installations began to be targeted in the rest of the country as well. In December 1998, the Clinton administration ordered “Operation Desert Fox”, a four-day series of strikes on alleged weapons research and development installations, air defence systems, weapon and supply depots, and the barracks and command headquarters of the Republican Guard.

At the same time, the US and its allies were pressing for ever more stringent sanctions, originally imposed by the UN as a way of preventing Iraq from developing so-called weapons of mass destruction, but intended by the US to continue, as President Bill Clinton once said, “until the end of time, or as long as he [Saddam Hussein] is still there” (Crossette 1997). Moreover, the list of banned goods included spare parts needed to repair sanitation systems damaged in 1991, without which Iraq’s previous supply of clean drinking water became contaminated, leading to outbreaks of infectious diseases such as typhoid and cholera (as pointed out by Sue Wareham earlier in this book). The so-called oil-for-food program was supposed to provide for the basic humanitarian needs of Iraqi people, but, as the UN’s former in-country coordinator, Hans von Sponeck, pointed out, the allotted sum of money amounted to just US$110 per person per year (2001). 100

In August 1999, the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights requested the international law expert, Marc Bossuyt, prepare a working paper on ‘The adverse consequences of economic sanctions on the enjoyment of human rights’, which he then presented to the Sub-Commission’s meeting in Geneva in August 2000. Bossuyt highlighted the serious violations of international human rights instruments applicable to the children of Iraq, declaring the sanctions regime to be tantamount to genocide. It was, he declared:

Back in 1996, CBS 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl had tackled then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on air, on the unfolding horrors of the sanctions regime: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright’s reply, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it” seemed to indicate an awareness of the cost the policy was exacting in terms of human lives – an implication notably ignored by most US media, both at the time and afterwards when Iraq kept resurfacing on the news agenda.

The point is, hostilities never actually stopped after Desert Storm. Iraq continued to be regarded as a legitimate theatre of US military operations, so that the invasion of 2003 represented the next, decisive intensification of an ongoing campaign, which had been waged meanwhile through military, diplomatic and economic means. In the process, the United Nations, indispensable to previous American triumphs in the world wars and the Gulf war, was eventually brushed aside. Given that President Barack Obama, upon taking office, set a timeline for “the end of our combat mission in Iraq” by August 2010, that puts the duration of the 101war on Iraq at 19 years, to add to the cumulative 16 and half years of the earlier engagements.

That means the time the US will have spent at war comes to 35 and a half out of the 69 years between 1941 and 2010 – more than half. It begs the question of how to count the coterminous war in Afghanistan. Perhaps the years since the country was invaded and occupied, in 2001, should count as double. Even without such a device, the phenomenology implied in Hossein-Zadeh’s formula is now reversed, and likely to continue in the same direction.

The fact that, some time in the present decade, the US switched to a country whose normal state is to be at war is significant because it should lead us to view these wars, not as a series of one-off responses to individual ‘threats’ and ‘crises’, but as the product of a system. In phenomenological terms, it directs our attention to continuities, rather than particularities; and continuities, moreover, that show evidence of intensification over the period in question.

Media management

One continuity that has been traced and mapped is the evolution of message projection and management around the US use of force. Ottosen and Luostarinen interpret the rhetoric of Desert Storm, typified by the extravagant comparisons of Saddam Hussein with Hitler, as part of a deliberate marketing strategy to overcome the political problems of the Vietnam war, which

Moreover, they identify a series of techniques, also honed and refined in a continuous arc of endeavour since the days of Vietnam, for micromanaging the media. The invasion of Grenada, in 1983, drew complaints 102that reporters and camera crews had been kept away from all the significant action, and were therefore unable to bring their readers and audiences vivid field reports of the decisive battles. This neutralised the media threat, from the Pentagon perspective, but nullified any opportunity they might present. By 1991, therefore, a more positive approach had been developed: not only “punish journalists who engage in critical reporting; withhold information that can place own soldiers in a bad light” but also “use the media to misinform about the warfare” (Ottosen & Luostarinen 2000, pp. 45–46).

The application of these measures helped to ensure that definitional and representational power remained largely in the hands of military planners and their political masters, at least in this episode. In the next, however, the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Pentagon approach was outflanked, with the authorities in Belgrade organising quick-response “rubble tours” highlighting NATO bombing “errors” and the civilian casualties they left in their wake.

Philip Knightley, the veteran investigative reporter who wrote the classic history of war reporting, The first casualty, interprets the innovation of ‘embedding’ journalists and crews with forward units, in ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ in 2003, as the next response – a way to supply pictures of sufficiently dramatic intensity to win the competition for the top slot in global news bulletins, eclipsing reports illustrating the human cost (in Lynch 2008, p. 216). And, Knightley adds, the harassment and punishment of journalists operating outside the “pool” were stepped up.

As if to emphasise this last point, the critical Arab-owned TV station, Al-Jazeera, which brought its audiences many images of death and destruction caused by the “shock and awe” of the invasion, came under US fire at its offices in Kabul, Basra and Baghdad. The International Federation of Journalists stated: “it is impossible not to detect a sinister pattern of targeting” (White 2003).

The political economy of US militarism

As well as the observable, motivated process of intensification in the waging of warfare in the symbolic realm, the other key continuity-providing evidence that the US is now systematically predisposed to 103continuing engagement in significant-scale social violence is located in the economic sphere. During World War II, Charles E Wilson – later to become Eisenhower’s Defense Secretary – told a hearing of the Army Ordnance Board that, to prevent another Great Depression, the United States needed “a permanent war economy”.

The nature and structure of US capitalism have been transformed since the days of Wilson and Eisenhower, notably by the so-called “shareholder value revolution”. Will Hutton, the UK economics writer who is now Chief Executive of the Work Foundation, chronicles the fortunes of General Electric, which delivered 80 consecutive quarters of profit growth under its legendary Chairman and CEO, Jack Welch. Welch presided over a tenfold increase in GE’s market value, but transformed it, in the process, “into a half manufacturing, half financial services company” (2002, p. 26). Workers were incentivised by the prospect of dismissal, as the Reagan administration and its successors stripped away workplace protections. At the same time, spending on research and development, once the symbol of the firm’s vitality and innovative capacity, fell below the US corporate average and continued to decline.

A famous speech by Welch himself, ‘Growing fast in a slow-growth economy’, delivered in New York in 1981, proved a landmark contribution to the debate over ‘shareholder value’. The heavy gearing of Welch’s own ‘compensation’ towards stock options typified the new ‘alignment’, Hutton records, between the interests of managements and shareholders. Moreover, such interventions transformed not merely the business climate, but also the political climate. Neo-liberalism, the set of economic policies adopted by governments with the avowed aim of freeing business to ‘create wealth’, successfully ‘rolled back’ social democracy, in the rich world, during the 1980s, and was then ‘rolled out’, via the International Financial Institutions, to the rest of the world, in the 1990s and beyond.

In many countries, governments were convinced or coerced to privatise state enterprises, monetise public goods and deregulate markets, in what amounted to a gigantic piggybank raid on the assets built up by previous generations. This one-off, ‘ratcheting’ effect matches the intensification manifest in the latter part of America’s warfighting record 104since Pearl Harbour. Private contractors were the second biggest contingent of coalition forces in Iraq, after the US but ahead of the UK.

This historic switch having been accomplished, what Hutton describes as ‘footloose capital’ was left to seek ever more green fields from which to generate the stratospheric returns that stock markets had been led, by the likes of Jack Welch, to expect. Naomi Klein (2007) posits another phenomenological shift, parallel with the first, as a direct result of these conditions. It is generally assumed that business craves, above all else, ‘stability’ – a predictable context, subject only to gradual, incremental change – in which to operate. Now, however, it was only a ‘clean sheet’ or ‘fresh start’ that would open up sufficiently lucrative opportunities to enable market expectations to be met.

Klein (2007) examines the rapid economic transformations triggered by recent natural disasters. Hurricane Katrina permitted the wholesale privatisation of the New Orleans school system, where previously political opposition had ruled this out. The Asian tsunami devastated fishing communities along the Sri Lankan coast and thereby enabled long stretches of it to be parcelled up and apportioned to business interests in the name of ‘reconstruction’.

It’s a short step from the observation that business seeks out crises from which to profit – ‘disaster capitalism’, Klein calls it – to the next, namely that it thereby gains an interest in seeking to precipitate or even foment ever more extreme situations and events. Detailed plans for the economic transformation of Iraq were drawn up long before the invasion itself, she recounts, with policy prescriptions including “mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized government” (Klein 2007, p. 8). The privatisation of warfighting functions, development aid and postwar reconstruction immerse government policy responses in the logic of what Frank Stilwell calls “profit-fuelled conflicts and interventions”, where business adds to the “confluence of capital and opportunity” that creates conditions for social violence (2008, p. 263). The opening salvoes of Operation Iraqi Freedom represented payback on all the investment business had already made in preparing for both war and its aftermath.

So large and multifarious was the house that Jack built that General Electric came to encompass and illustrate – within its own range of 105activities – many of these connections. One of Welch’s acquisitions was the television network, NBC, thereby putting GE in a position directly to influence public opinion in favour of war. It was, of course, already a major ‘defense’ contractor, poised to profit from military spending. Among the significant factors joining these dots are the growth of corporate PR and the proliferation of on-air pundits from corporatefunded think-tanks, espousing both business-friendly policies and – as in the case of the American Enterprise Institute, prime advocate of the “troop surge” – escalations of military activities.

In his award-winning film, WMD: weapons of mass deception, Danny Schechter makes the intriguing observation that the media industry was, at the time, looking to the Federal Communications Commission to further deregulate the industry in “rule changes that would benefit their bottom lines. There was a question raised: Did the FCC agree to waive the rules if the media companies agreed to wave the flag?”

Jeff Chester, Director of the Center for Digital Democracy, tells Schechter: “You don’t go in and report critically on an administration that you hope will give you billions and billions of dollars in new policies”; especially as the FCC was chaired at the time by Michael Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Ottosen and Luostarinen, moreover, point out that the transition at the Pentagon – from the Vietnam legacy of seeing media as part of the problem, to Desert Storm and the plan to exploit their potential as part of the solution in managing the public presentation of military operations – coincided with the tightening grip of ever larger corporate interests: “Structural changes in the media industry since the early 1980s have been characterized by increased control in the hands of some 50 transnational corporations” (2000, p. 14). This represents another significant intensification over the period under discussion.

A change?

Fallout from the Global Financial Crisis, together with the election of Barack Obama to the White House, piqued many appetites for change, both in the US and around the world. After all, even Jack Welch had by now recanted his earlier doctrine, telling an interviewer from the Financial Times: “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in 106the world … Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy … Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products” (Guerrera 2009).

As Obama confirmed the extension of America’s war on Afghanistan to neighbouring Pakistan, however, and promised to match military commitment with lucrative reconstruction contracts, the auguries appeared mixed. By now, the doom-laden narratives of previous conflicts – the ‘red menace’, the ‘rogue leader’, and the ‘terrorist threat’ – lay in pieces, eroded by the tides of history or shattered by exposure to the light, as when propaganda over Iraq’s so-called weapons of mass destruction rapidly and conspicuously unravelled. Hossein-Zadeh deduces the a priori existence of the military-industrial complex from the mismatch between security imperatives and the level of spending on preparations for combat, and the biggest bills were now coming in just as the case for war was at its least compelling.

George W. Bush explicitly likened his so-called war on terrorism to the generational challenge posed by the Cold War, but it never convinced to anything like the same extent. In December 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, three respected institutions – the Pew Research Centre, Princeton Survey Research Associates and the International Herald Tribune newspaper – joined forces to conduct an interesting poll. They identified 275 people of influence in politics, media, business and culture, in a total of 24 countries, and asked them whether they believed their compatriots saw the attacks as something America had brought upon itself – a response, in other words, to its foreign, military and economic policies and their perceived effect on people’s lives. This view – what the writer and Sydney Peace Prize Laureate, Arundhati Roy, calls the “context side” in the “fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism” – was shared by large majorities in the Middle East, narrower majorities elsewhere, and fifty-eight percent overall.

If we accept that acts of political violence are indissociable from context, that they can be explained, if not excused, by people’s experience of identifiable factors in everyday life, then it makes sense to talk about responses other than war. Indeed, months later, in March 2002, leaders 107of 50 poor countries gathered in Monterrey, Mexico, to press for greater collective action to meet the Millennium Development Goals set by the UN to halve global poverty by 2015, and speakers lined up to link this project directly to the threat of ‘terrorism’.

“In the wake of September 11, we will forcefully demand that development, peace and security are inseparable”, declared UN General Assembly president Han Seung-soo. “To speak of development is to speak also of a strong and determined fight against terrorism”, the conference heard, from then Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo. The quotes are taken from a report of the event by the Associated Press news agency, which opened with a line of context: “Leaders of poor nations warned their rich counterparts that if they want a world free of terrorism, they will need to pay for it” (Watson 2002).

Hard on the heels of the Monterrey meeting, figures released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development showed how poorer countries were being left behind as they opened their markets at the behest of International Financial Institutions. “We have seen a de-coupling of the trade engine from the growth engine in developing countries over the past two decades” was the verdict from UNCTAD Senior Economic Affairs Officer, Richard Kozul-Wright (Stewart 2002). The liberalisation of global trade, a central plank of neo-liberalism, was exacerbating inequality and injustice, the very issues most salient in the context Roy and others constructed for the 9/11 attacks and later incidents.

The poverty of Atlanticism

America is a classic example of a “polysemic” concept; any account of its history, politics or values must be a plural narrative. The sheer plenitude of US cultural production means we can each construct our ‘own’ distinctive version from a limitless supply of ideas and images, foreshadowed in Paul Simon’s evocative lyric, ‘We’ve all come to look for America’. Anatol Lieven (2004) divides the multiplicity of the US polity into two broad historical tributaries: on one hand, its “civic creed”, beginning with the opening words of the Constitution, “We the People”, and, on the other, a “Jacksonian” militarism. 108

Useful as Lieven’s formulations are for conceptualising rival forms of nationalism, the present conjuncture has seen US responses to conflict, in effect, lifted out of either of these streams and launched, instead, into the unpredictable currents of corporate-driven globalisation. The author, William Pfaff, whose books appear on countless International Relations syllabi, used a syndicated column to recall the Great Transformation wrought upon capitalism by the industrial age, which “tore from their local roots the economic markets that since medieval times and before had been tied to communities, and had evolved through the needs and adaptations of those communities and their immediate neighbours” (Pfaff 2009).

This was, Pfaff (2009) pointed out, “the epoch that provoked socialism” and various efforts to “restore human values to economic life”. Over the years this new version of capitalism had been “civilized, or half-tamed, until the arrival of globalization”, whereupon “technology once again was eagerly used to destroy existing capitalism by repeating the two crimes of assassination that had destroyed the pre-capitalist economy: the use of technology to expand markets so widely as to destroy existing national and international regulations, and second, once again to commodify labor”.

The gleaming artefacts of our postmodern, networked lifestyles – email, GPS, satellite TV – came out of America and stemmed, at least in part, from innovations by the military-industrial complex. That selfsame technology has extended the reach of markets, and amplified movements within them, to such an extent as to create conditions of intensifying toil, matched by corrosive uncertainty, even for the relatively well-off. What is so admired about the US is the flipside of what is mistrusted, resented and dreaded in much of the rest of the world. Even the appeal of the movies can no longer be entrusted purely to ‘pull’ factors. Naomi Klein (2007) observes that the destruction of the Iraqi state through “shock and awe” opened the country’s borders, so that irreplaceable artefacts of its indigenous culture were looted from museums, packed up and shipped out, just as trucks thundered in with consignments of DVD players for sale in Baghdad’s markets. A Pentagon planner, Major Ralph Peters, thus characterised the function of US armed forces in a post-Cold War world: 109

Events have rendered this logic visible to the extent that relationships with the US now bear the imprint of a third crisis of military legitimacy, following the earlier ones after Vietnam and the Cold War. Another survey, this time commissioned by the new United States Studies Centre, at the University of Sydney, revealed that in 2007, fully 48 percent of people in Australia – generally regarded as the most sedulous of all Washington’s camp-followers – now favoured the adoption of an independent foreign policy at the expense of the US alliance.

Given the intensifying impetus to further wars, evidenced by the evolution of media strategies and underpinned by the corporate and political logic of neo-liberalism, the tensions uncovered by these polls, and manifest in global public discourses, are likely to carry on growing.

Any struggle for human values in economic and social life is in the opposite corner from the US military-industrial complex, and any effort to support or restore those values must now include, as a primary concern, opposition to America’s wars. Contestation over news agendas – by Danny Schechter and many others – and attempts to roll back the hegemony of business lobbies over public policy-making, are part of the same fabric of resistance woven in earlier generations by the women of Greenham Common and the Nuclear Freeze Movement. It is now increasingly clear that calls for public intervention in global markets, to uphold workers’ rights and protections, and support for continued military alliance with the United States – the time-honoured ‘Atlanticist’ position of mainstream opinion in trade union and labour movements in the rich world – are not compatible, but contradictory. The struggles can no longer be dissociated from one another. 110