Since Scott is fond of quoting reams of often unrelated articles, here is some stuff just for him.
The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. national defense spending has increased by almost 60 percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion.
...Based on official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are U.S. military expenditures that the above grossly understates their true magnitude, which, as we shall see below, reached $1 trillion in 2007.1
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"Frankly, I can’t make sense of what has happened in the United States since 9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy....Today a radical right-wing regime seeks to mobilize “true Americans” against some evil outside force and against a world that does not recognize the uniqueness, the superiority, the manifest destiny of America....
In effect, the most obvious danger of war today arises from the global ambitions of an uncontrollable and apparently irrational government in Washington....To give America the best chance of learning to return from megalomania to rational foreign policy is the most immediate and urgent task of international politics."3
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Government-pump priming operations therefore occurred largely through spending on wars and war preparations in the service of empire. The Pentagon naturally made sure that bases and armaments industries were spread around the United States and that numerous corporations profited from military spending, thus maximizing congressional support due to the effects on states and districts.11
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This entire built-in military system could not be relinquished without relinquishing empire. Indeed, the chief importance of U.S. military power from the early Cold War years to today has been that it is used—either directly, resulting in millions of deaths (counting those who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, as well as dozens of lesser conflicts), or indirectly, as a means to intimidate.17
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The decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union has confirmed the accuracy of this assessment. The euphoria of the “peace dividend” following the end of the Cold War evaporated almost immediately in the face of new imperial requirements. This was a moment of truth for U.S. capitalism, demonstrating how deeply entrenched were its military-imperial interests. By the end of the 1990s U.S. military spending, which had been falling, was on its way up again.
Today, in what has been called a “unipolar world,” U.S. military spending for purposes of empire is rapidly expanding—to the point that it rivals that of the entire rest of the world put together. When it is recognized that most of the other top ten military-spending nations are U.S. allies or junior partners, it makes the U.S. military ascendancy even more imposing.
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The Bush administration from the first was distinguished by the particularly bellicose group of neoconservatives at its helm. But in pursuing their belligerent ends they hardly lacked solid backing within the circles of power. Strong support was extended by both political parties, Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the corporations generally.
Disagreements were largely about troop levels, the amount of force to be applied, relations to allies, dates of withdrawal (partial or whole), distribution of forces between the major “theaters,” etc. More fundamental questions, even the use of torture, were avoided. Major dissent has mainly come from the bottom of the society.
All of this suggests that expanded militarism and imperialism is deeply entrenched at present, at least within the top echelons of U.S. society. It reflects a general concern to expand U.S. hegemony as part of an imperial grand strategy, including rolling back insurgent forces and “rogue states” around the world, and keeping junior partners in line.
The war in Iraq is best viewed as an attempt to assert U.S. geopolitical control over the entire Persian Gulf and its oil—an objective that both political wings of the establishment support, and which is part of the larger aim of the restoration of a grand U.S. hegemony.27
The vast scale of U.S. military spending—encompassing more than 50 percent of the federal budget (excluding social security, medicare, and other transfer payments) and constituting 7 percent of the entire GDP—is thus externally rooted in the needs of the U.S. imperial grand strategy, which continually strains the U.S. system to its limits (as measured by the budget and trade deficits).
U.S. imperialism has been transformed in recent decades by the absence of the Soviet Union, giving the United States more immediate power (particularly in the military realm), coupled, paradoxically, with signs of a secular decline in U.S. economic hegemony. It is this dual reality of a temporary increase in U.S. power along with indications of its long-term decline that has led to urgent calls throughout the power elite for a “New American Century,” and to attempts by Washington to leverage its enormous military power to regain economic and geopolitical strength, for example, in the Persian Gulf oil region.
In recent years, the United States has enormously expanded its military bases and operations around the world with bases now in around seventy countries and U.S. troops present in various capacities (including joint exercises) in perhaps twice that number. Washington is thus not just spending money on the military and producing destructive weapons, or engaging in wars and interventions. It is also building a lasting physical presence around the world that allows for control/subversion/rapid deployment.28
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It was the monopoly media, far more concentrated than in Luce’s day and now virtually indistinguishable from monopoly-finance capital (becoming simply its public voice), that came to the rescue of U.S. war capitalism in its moment of need, giving credence to its obvious lies. “The press,” as one of us has written, “was [soon] eating out of the Bush administration’s bowl.”30
In a period of economic stagnation, financial crisis, declining hegemony, impending environmental collapse, and new populist insurgencies, Washington, representing the U.S. oligarchy as a whole, was once again able to enlist the media monopoly in the marshaling of public opinion in support of the imperial project through the promotion of war hysteria.
What made this possible was the prior existence of a well-oiled, privatized propaganda system designed to limit the range of legitimate debate in the mainstream media. In this system even the outer reaches of the quite timid liberal punditocracy were strictly walled-in to fit within the proscribed boundaries of elite debate. Today fundamental dissent toward the existence of the military-imperial system, no matter how thoughtful or well-informed, is decidedly off-limits, except for periodic ridicule. Ours is decidedly a “military-industrial-media complex.”31
Nevertheless, the imperial triangle is now increasingly confronted with its own contradictions. As Baran and Sweezy foresaw more than four decades ago in Monopoly Capital, the U.S. military system faced two major internal obstacles. First, military spending tended to be technologically intensive and hence its employment stimulating effect was decreasing.
“Ironically,” they observed, “the huge military outlays of today may even be contributing substantially to an increase of unemployment: many of the new technologies which are byproducts of military research and development are also applicable to civilian production, where they are quite likely to have the effect of raising productivity and reducing the demand for labor.” Second, expansion of “weapons of total destruction” and the devastating effects of the use of more powerful weapons, could be expected to generate a growing rebellion against the permanent war economy at all levels of society, as people perceived the dangers of global barbarism (or worse, annihilation).32
Today the enormous weight of Washington’s war machine has not prevented it from being stretched to its limits while becoming bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although still capable of great destruction, the United States is significantly limited in its ability to deploy massive force to achieve its ends whenever and wherever it wishes.
The dream of Pax Americana, first presented by John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War, has turned into the nightmare of Pox Americana in the years of waning U.S. dominance. The role the media monopoly has assumed in recent years in the promotion of war propaganda has contributed to the rapid growth of a media reform movement, which is now challenging the concentration of communications in the United States.33
There is no doubt that a society that supports its global position and social order through $1 trillion a year in military spending, most likely far exceeding that of all the other countries in the world put together, unleashing untold destruction on the world, while faced with intractable problems of inequality, economic stagnation, financial crisis, poverty, waste, and environmental decline at home, is a society that is ripe for change. It is our task to change it.
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