By Barry Sheppard
Taking a break from the daily bombing of Iraq, US-led NATO forces are escalating the bombing of Yugoslavia, threatening a wider war. This underscores the determination of the US ruling class to build up its already massive military machine for use in policing the world.
As the bombs rained down, a telling article appeared in the March 28 New York Times Magazine, titled "From supercharged financial markets to Osama bin Laden, the emerging global order demands an enforcer. That's America's new burden".
The writer, Times correspondent Thomas L. Friedman, discusses the "globalisation" of the world economy, and polemicises with right-wing Republicans and others who put their faith in a totally unregulated "free market" to solve capitalism's economic crises, and who tend towards "isolationism" in foreign affairs. Friedman's main point is that, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
It used to be that Washington justified its huge war spending by the supposed Soviet "threat". That excuse was always phony.
The US and the other western imperialist nations started the Cold War to "keep the world safe" for big business. That included attempting to overthrow the nationalised economies in the Soviet bloc which, together with their monopolies on foreign trade, excluded them from capitalist plunder. It also meant policing the colonial peoples to keep them from breaking away from imperialist domination.
But the same imperialist interests that drove US policy before the collapse of the Soviet Union still exist, and the result has been an expansion of the US military and its weapons of mass destruction, not the much ballyhooed "peace dividend".
Under the rubric of "fighting terrorism" and the "war on drugs", Clinton announced at the beginning of the year that he was boosting war spending by $110 billion over the next six years. The US spends more in its war budget than the next 10 largest militaries in the world combined.
At the same time, Clinton — with bipartisan support — is beefing up the Pentagon's arming of the Colombian military, supposedly to stop the production of illegal drugs, but in reality to fight leftist guerrillas in that country.
Directors of three nuclear weapons laboratories and several atom bomb manufacturing plants are demanding more money from Congress to build more sophisticated weapons.
Clinton has also revived Ronald Reagan's anti-missile defence system project, known as "Star Wars" because it would be designed to use missiles to shoot down, above the atmosphere, incoming warheads containing nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.
Star Wars was and is justified as a defensive measure against missiles that supposedly could be launched by Iran, Iraq, Libya or North Korea against the US. Just listing these countries as supposed nuclear threats against the massive US nuclear arsenal shows how shallow this rationalization is.
If Star Wars ever becomes technologically feasible, it would be part of an offensive nuclear strategy, not a defensive one. The US would have a big advantage in making a first-strike nuclear attack if it could defend against a retaliatory strike.
The US has always asserted its right to make a first strike with nuclear weapons, as it did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When a German Green Party MP recently timidly suggested that NATO make a no-first-strike pledge, Washington quickly shot the idea down.
But despite its massive military spending and huge stockpiles of nuclear and other weapons, the US military and ruling class have a big problem. The US people are still very leery of using US troops in situations where they would be killed or maimed. This reluctance — the "Vietnam syndrome" — is rooted in the popular revulsion to the Vietnam War that ended 25 years ago.
President Bush hailed the "end of the Vietnam syndrome" following the US victory over Iraq in the 1990-91 Gulf War. He was wrong. The US people expressed relief that US casualties were minimal and it was the Vietnam syndrome itself that deterred Bush from sending US troops into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
The Vietnam syndrome was also evident when the US military made forays into Panama, Somalia and Haiti.
Attempting to counter this sentiment, the government has been playing up the dangers of "terrorism" and the drug menace, and recently, the "humanitarian" card as in Kosova.
In an attempt to soften up public opinion, the US Marines staged "war games" in March in Monterey and Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area. These mock assaults were supposedly to help them practice "a tactical response to a threat from terrorists possessing simulated biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction", according to a Marines spokesperson.
In another attempt to inoculate the public against the Vietnam syndrome, the armed forces are inoculating soldiers against anthrax, supposedly a danger from "terrorist" attacks. Hundreds of soldiers have refused these shots, remembering GIs being used as guinea pigs in nuclear testing in the 1940 and 1950s, the illnesses caused by the military's use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and the Gulf War illnesses being suffered by thousands of soldiers. "They've developed a distrust for the government", said one military official, who asked to remain unidentified.
The White House and Pentagon have also announced plans to set up a military command structure for the continental United States, to combat "a growing threat of major terrorist strikes on American soil", a Pentagon official said.
The growing Balkan war may, however, require either a NATO capitulation or the introduction of ground troops. US officials are saying that such troops would have to be Europeans, not from the US, but wars have a way of getting out of hand.
Daily depictions of the "ethnic cleansing" in Kosova are being used to try to convince the US people to support the US war in the Balkans. This "cleansing" is truly horrible and must be opposed. We should also support the Kosovars' right to self-determination, including separation, something both the Serbian leadership and NATO oppose.
At the same time, we should recognise that the US and other imperialist powers have their own reasons to dominate the Balkans, to make the world "safe" for big business, as Friedman so bluntly explained.