Addicted to war

And now the Bush administration is suggesting -- or at least not taking off the table -- the idea of using nuclear weapons against Iran.

It's one of the most astounding things in recent months. As Seymour Hersh reported a few weeks ago, American tactical bombers are practicing the kind of maneuvers that are only used to drop a nuclear weapon. Well, even to pretend is wrong, because it violates the most important things put in place by Harry Truman, which is the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable, and we'll never threaten a non-nuclear state with nuclear use. Well, we're threatening nuclear use, and we're apparently engaging in war games.

What do we expect the Iranians to do? Obviously they're going to dig in and accelerate their strategy. This is profoundly destructive. It's a profound betrayal of the government's obligation to protect us. It makes us more vulnerable to nuclear weapons than we were five or 10 years ago.

You really think we are more vulnerable now?

We are, because the non-proliferation regime is in collapse. We aren't in danger of Russia attacking us or China, but obviously the threat from terrorism -- the threat of a nihilist attack on New York City with a dirty bomb -- is real. But where's he going to get that nuclear material? He's going to get it when the non-proliferation regime breaks down. That's what's at risk here. The Bush administration has already given Iran and North Korea every reason to get a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration is sponsoring proliferation, and that's what's making this so risky.

The other thing I wanted to ask you about is the recent criticism of Donald Rumsfeld from former generals. What do you make of this? And how much stock should we put in their criticisms -- what does it say about civilian control of the military if we start listening to generals about whom to fire in the Pentagon?

Well, there's always been some tension between civilians and the brass, and sometimes the generals are less warlike than the civilians. General Marshall did not want to go to war in Korea, Dean Acheson did. The civilian hawks in the early Vietnam years drove the initiative to war. The military are not necessarily hawkish people. The most hawkish person inside the Pentagon in recent years was Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was looking for a reason to fight a war against Iraq.

In this case, with the military increasingly criticizing the administration and the secretary of defense, it doesn't strike me that the criticism breaks down into groups that are less warlike and more warlike. The generals' complaints are mostly about the tactical decisions concerning how to conduct this war. The generals aren't raising a much more basic question, which is why are we fighting an unnecessary war? The generals have a stake in that question. Why did this administration embark on this war when we were not attacked or in danger of being attacked? Where are the generals criticizing the basic decision to abuse the American military to launch an unnecessary war, to launch it carelessly, and to launch it with such disastrous consequences? The United States Army is destroying itself in Iraq. Where is the military outrage?

Do you think that's another consequence of this military bureaucracy -- the generals get a lot out of this war?

It's true. The war rewards, it makes people important, it keeps the national security establishment at the center of government. Of course it generates the budget -- this war is rescuing the military budget, billons and billions of dollars. We're spending more money on our defense than all of the rest of the world combined. The first Gulf War rescued the military at the end of the Cold War. This war is rescuing the military when there were reasons it should have been significantly downsized.

And there's also the bureaucratic momentum of going with the flow in a large, impersonal bureaucracy. Notice the phenomenon that has shown itself again and again. When these men are retired, they find their conscience. Robert Jay Lifton calls it "retirement syndrome." It began with Henry Stimson -- Henry Stimson upon retiring as secretary of war issued his challenge to Truman to share the atomic bomb. Dwight D. Eisenhower did it -- it was when he was leaving the presidency that he challenged the military-industrial complex. Hello? Mr. President, why didn't you challenge it in 1956, why wait until 1960 to do it? Retirement syndrome -- people going out the door, saying finally in full conscience what's horrible about what they've been doing. It's a function of the bureaucracy. People within the bureaucracy feel this kind of loyalty to it. You also saw this with Robert McNamara, who turned against the war in Vietnam but continued to preside over it.

And McNamara told you that his involvement in the firebombing of Tokyo was a war crime.

He did. He observed that if we had lost the war, he and Curtis LeMay would surely have been tried as war criminals.

Finally I want to ask how the Pentagon changed the American people. You say we've become a militarized, "vengeful people." Do you really believe that?

I do. I love my country, and the American people are good people. But we are allowing the government to do things in our name that are wrong, they are criminal. If I could say something really outrageous, I think that the American people today have turned against the war in Iraq for the wrong reasons. They've turned against it because we're losing. We should be against this war because it's wrong and unnecessary. If this war had gone the way Rumsfeld and company thought it would go, Americans would have been fine with it. And that's appalling. And of course if it had gone the way they thought it was going to go, we'd be in Iran today. That's the tragic good news here. This war has gone so badly that the American imperial enterprise has been stalled. Thank God for that.

But, again, we the American people have not reckoned with what we did at the end of World War II. And one of the things that happened on 9/11 is that we looked at ourselves and presumed to think of ourselves as world-historic victims. What we suffered was tragic, and indeed a catastrophe, but on the scale of suffering it was very minor compared to the kind of suffering we've inflicted on other nations, and we're still doing today.

Well, is it possible to change this?

To me the greatest symbol of hope is what happened at the end of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, beginning with Chernobyl. It's a miracle of my lifetime that a nonviolent popular movement led to the demise of the Soviet system. And if that can happen, the equivalent can happen on our side. We have to break the myth of military power. We have to understand that there are many more grievous threats to our nation than those that the Pentagon can protect us from.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)