More on Obama and McCain

It really doesn’t matter what I think about the outcome of the US presidential election but something I stumbled across as I was scanning my video collection gave me further pause for thought. I wonder how many people have seen Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight? a 2005 documentary that traces the rise of the US military-industrial complex. According to Wikipedia:

The documentary asserts that in every decade since World War II, the American public was told a lie, so that the Government (incumbent Administration) could take them to war and fuel the military-industrial economy maintaining American political dominance in the world.

The film starts with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 parting speech where we warns about the threat posed by the rise of the military-industrial complex. I don’t plan to argue the veracity of this statement except to say that the film interviews plenty of respected thinkers and politicians including one John McCain.

I only spotted him because I was fast forwarding and making occasional stops to scan rthe narrative. At around 34 minutes 30 seconds he says: “President Eisenhower’s concern about the military-industrial complex, his words have unfortunately come true. He was worried that priorities are set by what benefits corporations as opposed to what benefits the country.”

In the last days, I also saw this send up of Sarah Palin via Zoli Erdos, contrasting her call for increased spending on the military compared with McCain’s past questioning of over-spends.

We are told that Obama plans to lead the US out of Iraq. That could, in theory, return a huge amount of money back to the US and help in its social programs, reduce the burden of tax and assist the unstable economy. Civil society will applaud that goal with gusto.

But how would Obama effectively disembowel the military-industrial complex when – according to the film – certain of the corporations employ thousands of people in virtually every US state? How do you balance the needs of people threatened with rising unemployment and lower disposable incomes against the persuasive power of guaranteed jobs under the wing of the military? What alternatives does Obama plan to put in place?

I hope that whomever wins the race to the White House has read Jarecki’s piece in the Huffington Post from October 24th. Harking back to the beginning of the film, he says of the Eisenhower quotation and subsequent discussion on an MSNBC broadcast:

This quotation provoked a thoughtful discussion led by Mike Barnicle of the counterintuitive fact that certain military commanders can prove more anti-war than their more trigger happy civilian counterparts. I spoke of my own experience in recent years showing my 2006 film Why We Fight several times at West Point Military Academy and how impressed I’ve been at the uncompromising analysis undertaken by its cadets and command staff at a time of war in comparison with the more superficial dialogue too-often taking place among civilians.

Although Karecki’s piece is aimed at critiquing McCain’s record, he should also know that many of those same civilians occupy positions of power on Capitol Hill from every political persuasion. As Jerecki’s fim clearly shows, the US military-industrial complex is as much a construct of political complicity as it is that of the military and the corporations that benefit. Rooting out that locus of corruption will be a mammoth task in its own right.

On this election day, I am reminded of what I witnessed when George W. Bush was brought into power by a Floridian judge at the time of his first term in power. I was in the US at the time, riveted by the court proceedings not for their political tension but for their absurdity.

As this election draws to a close, I wonder with what impressions David Terrar will return to the UK? He’s currently at the Defrag conference along with other colleagues like Jeff Nolan who believes Defrag will be ’seminal’ and Zoli. Even so, I bet most eyes will be on the TV screeens this evening.

As I said yesterday, the hopes and dreams of many of my US colleagues and friends rest on the outcome of this election. Those hopes ripple a lot more widely than perhaps my friends imagine because in the fight to eradicate corruption in all its forms, the US can send the world the strongest of signals. In both directions.

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Tagged as: Dwight D Eisenhower, Huffington Post, John McCain, Military-industrial complex