Keeping The Enemy in our sights

Tom Engelhardt has posted a two-part interview with Chalmers Johnson, who has been a major critic of the United States' post-Cold War foreign policy. In Part 1, he talks about how after the fall of the Soviet Union, the foreign policy and military apparatus, or complex of institutions, or military-industrial complex, however we characterize it, still looked for an enemy. Going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as James Madison famously described it. Johnson:

The Soviet Union imploded. I thought: What an incredible vindication for the United States. Now it's over, and the time has come for a real victory dividend, a genuine peace dividend. The question was: Would the U.S. behave as it had in the past when big wars came to an end? We disarmed so rapidly after World War II. Granted, in 1947 we started to rearm very rapidly, but by then our military was farcical. In 1989, what startled me almost more than the Wall coming down was this: As the entire justification for the Military-Industrial Complex, for the Pentagon apparatus, for the fleets around the world, for all our bases came to an end, the United States instantly - pure knee-jerk reaction - began to seek an alternative enemy. Our leaders simply could not contemplate dismantling the apparatus of the Cold War.

That was, I thought, shocking. I was no less shocked that the American public seemed indifferent. And what things they did do were disastrous. George Bush, the father, was President. He instantaneously declared that he was no longer interested in Afghanistan. It's over. What a huge cost we've paid for that, for creating the largest clandestine operation we ever had and then just walking away, so that any Afghan we recruited in the 1980s in the fight against the Soviet Union instantaneously came to see us as the enemy - and started paying us back. The biggest blowback of the lot was, of course, 9/11, but there were plenty of them before then. (my emphasis)

I think he's right about this process occurring. But it wasn't a simple process, nor do I think Chalmers Johnson tries to make it sound simple. It was a combination of a lot of vested interests, established mindsets and ways of understanding the world, along with lust for power and plain old war profiteering, among other things.

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