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Posted by beau
on 10/27/2009, 12:12 pm
It's pretty clear by now that Obama has been unable in any way to alter the power of the military and the US "security" bureaucracy, but the whys and hows of it are not easy to pinpoint.
It may well be that he had no intention of changing things in the first place, but simply to assume so, apart from being an easy out from serious discussion, sidesteps the realities of who really holds the reins of power in the US government.
I think it's most important to understand why the US continues to spend most of its budget on the military and military-related departments (CIA, NSA, etc), and regularly to expand the size and scope of the military, even during peacetime. The best discussion I've seen of this was Gary Wills' Entangled Giant in the Oct 8 issue of the New York Review of Books.
Here's the full article http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23110
I disagree with Wills on one thing. He says "Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task." Hard, yes, impossible, no. Public opinion is historically more powerful than governments, and when marshalled is unstoppable. The almost bloodless Russian Revolution of 1992 is only the most recent large-scale example. If Obama wanted to make a crusade of it, both US and world opinion would give him gargantuan support which might well win the day.
But I always worry . . . Americans seem to be in love with war . . . .
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