Americans are increasingly uneasy about their “national” security, and increasingly concerned that war is lapping at our shores. Instead of reducing the risk of harm to America and our interests, the federal government in Washington seems to be seeking it, investing in it, fueling it and lying about it.
Congress openly talks about fighting wars and reliably funds them, and we can easily verify that it’s piled billions of dollars into this particular spending basket. What we cannot see is why Washington acts as it does. The why is often suppressed, and the underlying rationale for the ongoing investment in war is obscured. Instead, state media and our politicians bleat continually that Washington is defending freedom and helping small states stand up to their oppressors.
These canards of American war propaganda will not fly in the case of the brutal meat grinders of attrition in Ukraine and Israel. Freedom — whether in individual or state form — rests not on words but on private ownership of self and property, and on state protection of those individual property rights. If it’s not defending freedom, is the U.S. helping a small independent state stand up against its larger and more wealthy oppressors? Neither of these alleged motivations for American foreign intervention apply to what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine or Israel. So why is the U.S. government so committed to funding, fighting, and expanding these wars? The answer is that war helps the state seize our property and our freedom. The answer is that war truly is the health of the state.
The War in Israel
In Israel over 90% of all land is owned by the state. People and corporations are given long-term leases to use it. Land, property, and people in the disputed occupied territories are considered to be owned by the Israeli military. Recent debate in Israel over a plan to transfer administrative control of the occupied West Bank from the Israel Defense Force to the civilian State Settlements Administration illustrates the significance of both military-owned land and civilian state-owned land. It also underscores the state of Israel’s fundamental attitude that all property is state property. The Israeli state’s concept of property resembles that of the Soviet Union rather than anything Americans would accept or defend. Defense of Israel is literally a defense of state property.
The state of Israel has nurtured a very peculiar political relationship with the United States, which not only guarantees political top cover at the U.N. and in Congress for all of Israel’s actions, but also provides Israel 24/7 access to Congress and the U.S. executive agencies. Since 1948, this peculiar relationship has produced over $300 billion in unconditional annual military aid and economic payments to Israel. In times of active conflict, this aid is rapidly doubled and tripled with overwhelming bipartisan support from Congress and the president. As supporters of this aid like to remind us, some of these tax dollars are spent at home by our own state to shore up our own defense industries.
U.S. state aid and military assistance for Israel are no doubt real, but neither are really necessary.
Israel — the size of Vermont and with the population of New Jersey, but ranked the fourth best performing economy in the world by the Organisation for Co-operation and Development in 2022 — is a militarized society with top-notch defense and technology sectors. It is nuclear capable, and its defensive capabilities are mighty, unmatched by any oppressor’s power. Israel doesn’t need the U.S. to “defend” it. The Zionist state is no doubt evolving and remains a place of domestic and international conflict. But it can only be described as an “independent underdog” with a wink and a nod.
The War in Ukraine
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine began transitioning away from state ownership of land and property. But Ukraine moved toward the language of private ownership with very little of the reality. Ukrainian land today is primarily in the hands of politically connected national and international corporations, and large commercial farms hold most of its agricultural land through leases, according to the Oakland Institute. For decades, Ukraine was considered the most corrupt nation in Europe. Mind-blowing levels of state and state-connected graft persisted through the transition from Soviet republic to EU member — and NATO hopeful. As centralization and state control of the means of production continued in Ukraine — now with encouragement from the West — a private economy and civil society failed to flourish.
Russia-obsessed neoconservatives like State Department careerist Victoria Nuland — recycled seamlessly from the Bush administration into the Obama and Biden administrations — passed out cookies and smiles, knowing the snipers they had hired did a fine job helping foment the 2014 Maidan color revolution to consolidate U.S. influence over Ukraine. This was not done to promote Ukraine as a free country, but to secure it as a resource and weapon.
In part due at urging of eager Ukrainian and Western officials and their hangers-on, Ukraine now embraces the particularities of Banderite national socialism while still struggling with the after-effects of the old Sovietism, complete with corruption, crime and public dishonesty. The case of Burisma Holdings and the benefits of state corruption at home and abroad may be debated and demurred. But we must acknowledge the hard truth of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s recent statements on Ukraine’s $10 trillion to $12 trillion in mineral and natural resources, which the U.S. state wants to control: “It’s a gold mine” — not for the people of Ukraine but for a U.S. government fighting for ever-expanding control beyond its borders. As with all U.S.-supported wars, the U.S. government is seeking its own advantage, one that is wholly incompatible with recognizing and protecting individual property rights, and with liberty in general.
Can we consider Ukraine an independent underdog, as U.S. politicians insist it is? Ukraine is a massive European powerhouse of natural resources, geography, cheap labor and cheaper politicians. This is precisely why its natural transition from Soviet rule to a classical liberal republic can never be permitted. Too many interested parties with too many different reasons want to shape Ukraine’s evolution, the U.S. state chief among them. Ukraine is not only not independent, but its dependency was carefully crafted by Western interests before the 2014 coup and is designed to persist long after new lines are drawn between Ukraine and Belarus, Poland, Lithuania and of course Russia. Ukraine, like modern Israel, emerged as an artificial and political state. Not only did Israel and Ukraine not arise organically, but neither was allowed that opportunity in the rushed “end of history” years of the 20th century, the most murderous, and most statist, of centuries.
The Tragedy Behind Washington’s Narrative
In comparing the current “independent underdog” statuses of Israel and Ukraine, it is difficult to know which should appall us more and which should break our hearts. Many in Israel seem to understand the real cost of acquiring stolen goods, as U.S. state aid to Israel — and the Israeli state’s solicitation of it. In Ukraine, the people have a great and growing sense that it is they who have been robbed — not only by Russia with its acquisition of the Russian-speaking Donbas, but by a handful of European and American elites who have already outdone Joseph Stalin in engineering and profiting from Ukrainian misery.
The U.S. and the West are not fueling war in Ukraine and Israel to promote liberty and freedom. The U.S. state has little to say to these countries about how they might better protect private property and individualism — in fact, it generally advises the opposite. Likewise, the U.S. government is not investing in conflict in Ukraine and Israel to help a small independent underdog stand up to its larger oppressors. The U.S., by actively aiding liberty-abhorring state institutions, fundamentally oppresses both the Ukrainian and Israeli populations. Remember, the U.S. government, regardless of politics or party, counts dead Ukrainians and dead Russians as a win-win, publicly justifying its use of bombs, missiles, and cluster munitions — used to kill the innocent and to target homes and hospitals.
Why the Regime Loves War
It is imperative that we understand why the regime loves war and requires it. Israel and Ukraine provide serious food for thought, not only for American taxpayers but specifically for Americans who imagine they live under a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The U.S. state does not fight for the independent underdog, and it does not fight for liberty. A country or even a political party that attempts to be independent of the U.S. militarism, or to truly promote private property rights in a way that costs the U.S. state some measure of power or profit quickly finds itself a target of its wrath.
Ukraine and Israel are current boutique wars of choice, connected to and very much like those the U.S. government pursued for profit and show in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere. Boutique wars are both pleasant and profitable to the regime. They feed and temporarily satisfy the military-industrial-congressional enablers. These wars facilitate control over domestic resources and liberty. They promote endless state borrowing. They allow the state to scratch an itch, just as a snake sheds its skin to grow.
Is it possible that when Randolph Bourne observed that “war is the health of the state” he understated the reality, seeing wars as periodic rather than as the very lifeblood of the state? In his well-known 1918 essay, Bourne notes that “wartime brings the ideal of the state out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden.” What has been hidden and what is now revealed in the two major wars Washington has been funding and fighting in Israel and Ukraine?
More and more people are asking this question, and more need to. Toward the end of my military career, I was one of them. Despite years of advanced military education, including completing the Naval War College program, I had never heard of Marine Lt. Gen. Smedley Butler, much less his “War Is a Racket” pamphlet. But what I was seeing, incompletely from inside, confirmed that Butler was not only correct but prescient. The interconnected cycle of national ideological and defense industrial arms races, and the incessant, wasteful and ultimately useless growth of military spending is aimed not at defense but at offense, and not just U.S. offense but the U.S.-controlled offensive capabilities of its various allies. The beneficiaries of this, as Butler noted, were always and only the racketeers. In 1933, he described his previous decades of service: “We were the state gangsters, ... high class muscle [men] for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.”
As a small-time state gangster myself in the 1980s and ‘90s, I observed the post-Cold War rise of the neoconservatives — with their passion for Israel and their raw lust for eastern Europe — as the U.S. government after 1989 seamlessly replaced popular anti-communism with rabid anti-Russianism. Yet that ideology was merely supportive of the ongoing growth of the state: Had the state been unable to adopt neoconservatism, some other “urgent guiding force” for the evolution of military institutions — both the heartbeat of the American economy and facilitators of state power — would have been found.
I served under the Bush-Cheney administration. That was a time when Dick Cheney personified the state’s desire for war and profit, and when the decision was made to politically mislead the people and their legislators into supporting the Iraq war. Wars were easy to start, and to paraphrase Butler, profits would be measured in dollars and losses only in lives. The Bush-Cheney Pentagon could not intercept a trio of hijacked airplanes the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and itself became a literal ground zero, defenseless against “enemy” attack. This failure worked brilliantly to shore up the boom in defense, intelligence and data surveillance — over 20 years of profit taking, resource grabs, and domestic manipulation. This happened as much of the Middle East and parts of eastern Europe were destroyed at the unacknowledged cost of millions of dead, damaged and displaced people, destroyed economies, and ruptured societies.
The War Racket
I came to understand that what I was doing was merely about the spending, not the defending. Nothing we were doing was aimed at protecting life and liberty. For a few years I carpooled with a ballistic missile engineer who reported on major test failures but increasing budgets month after month and year after year. This showed me a tiny sliver of the real damage done to American liberty and security by the military-industrial complex gorging at the taxpayer trough decade after fat decade. As defense and data firms consolidate behind the mission of continual contracts and guaranteed tax-funded profits, the defense sector is producing billion-dollar weapons systems that are mission capable less than 30% of the time — easily countered and destroyed for pennies on the dollar. We wonder where a trillion dollars a year has gone — because it is very clear that the massive militarized state cannot defend and that it is not interested in defending our people, our liberty, our economy, or our country.
This ever-expanding protection racket is not for the people or by the people — but it does enrich and secure the lives of a small number of people, mostly those connected directly to Washington. Most are unelected, and those who are elected face intense personal compromise and political destruction, by design, if they fail to parrot the message and fund the plans of those enriched by war and threats of war.
The U.S. government — attempting to maintain its presumptuous position as top dog and global rule maker — has permanently destroyed a beautiful place that 35 million Ukrainians and Russians once called home. It is destroying the Holy Land by backing a planned genocide and more war in the name of Zionist expansion. If the U.S. government can increase its power by destroying other countries in the name of power and state survival, history tells us it will not hesitate to do so. Many populations around the world already know this from personal experience. Americans are finally recognizing it.
While is it coming at a great price to Ukrainians and to Palestinians — whom Washington makes a weak claim to support — we are seeing the true face of unabashed state power. It is a multiheaded monster with a voracious hunger for our life and liberty, and the life and liberty of others. Instead of fighting for the good, all the evidence shows us the state fights only for the goods and more power. Bourne observes that the net effect of a war mentality — led and driven by the state, not the people — strengthens the state by seizing and controlling the collective intellect. It literally drains the productivity from our economy, the humanity from our souls and the blood from our bodies.
There is one caveat for Americans to bear in mind as we the people seek real peace, liberty, and prosperity: When we gaze directly at the true face of the state — as we increasingly must — a sullen beast stares back at us, inhuman and amoral, seeing only its enemy, and its property.
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