The Ethics of making the Empire Pay

by Addison Wiggin

As we forecast on election eve a week ago, the only outcome you could bet on from a Republican overthrow of the Senate and retention of the House is an increase in military spending.  Et voila.

"The insidious increase in power," we recall citing retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson as saying, "and the influence over foreign policy that the military has, is very dangerous. And maybe in the long run, it's even more dangerous than a coup."

Wilkerson was Colin Powell's right-hand man under the first President Bush... and again in the State Department under the second. It was Wilkerson who vetted the intelligence that went into Powell's now-infamous speech at the United Nations 11 years ago during the run-up to the Iraq War.

He admits he fell down on the job.

The "mobile bioweapons labs" were the fantasy of an Iraqi defector, egged on by the Pentagon. In retirement, Wilkerson has turned into a trenchant critic of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about 53 years ago. As such, he is also the harbinger of the military's slow-motion coup

"What happens," Wilkerson explained to radio host Rob Kall a year ago, "is the power shifts gradually... and incrementally over to the war-making side, to where you wake up one morning and all you're doing is making war. And you have so many people, from Lockheed Martin to the Congress of the United States to the armed forces to you name it, who are making so much money off that war-making that you can't stop it. That's not a coup, but it is something worse, in my view. It is, ultimately, the destruction of our republic."
 

Back to Col. Wilkerson's interview. It reinforces our own thoughts about the empire having a logic of its own. The military's silent coup "is something that just happens, and it directs American policy toward war in an increased and ever-dangerous manner, and we wind up one day with no money left, no economy, and the only thing we're good at (and that's going away fast, because you need money in an economy to support a military) is the military."

With Wilkerson's words as a backdrop, we notice that the commander in chief is having a tete-a-tete with the Chinese today. No doubt their territorial claims over the Diaoyu Islands are on the table for polite discussion.

Friday, the president also doubled down on troops on the ground in Iraq to counter the U.S.' newest and most convenient enemy, the Islamic State.

And we note that since the election, it appears America's great Vietnam War hero John McCain is in line to become the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman. The vaunted "sequester" cuts from last year's budget debates were already being rolled back… [details avoided to protect the bored]... and now McCain will be at the head of the committee who decides whether to roll them back some more.

Alas, the empire really does have a logic all its own.

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