Monday, August 12, 2002

The Privatization of War   This weekend my wife and I were hiking in New Hampshire near our house in Alexandria.  Deep in the woods, we came on a perfectly preserved cellar hole with an old apple tree still near by.  The house that stood there once commanded a sweeping view of mountains, now gone completely obscured by the forest.    We are familiar with the history of this village.  Population peeked between 1840 and 1850 and then declined as farmers moved west to Indiana and Iowa.  I used to think these abandoned cellar holes were sad evidence of a hardscrabble life gone bust.  But today I thought here was a family that built a beautiful sturdy house and then decided they could pick up stakes and move to create a new life again.  In the higher elevations many of the homesteads were occupied for a single generation or even just a few years.   The decision to leave, to move on, exemplified the independent Yankee spirit of individual choice and individual responsibility.  This was the spirit of individual freedom and self-sufficiency that immigrants loved about America.   But today our history of individualism has been hijacked.  An explosion of atomized self-interest is destroying the public good by making every decision, no matter what the public consequences, a private one—not subject to review of the public cost.  This gives complete freedom to those who support their private interests over public ones.  It underpins the corporate CEO who’s personal whims destroy the economic life of thousands, or the politician who stays in office indefinitely, so long as he can spend public money on his private benefactors. It is also allowing a group of ideologues to stampede the country into war.   I was reminded of the absurd lengths of privatization by two stories about the war in the Wall St. Journal today.  (The Journal does not charge readers for its opinions, so the links work).  The first story by Simon Henderson argued that the real target for war and regime change should be Saudi Arabia.  The views aren’t new—they were reported by Joshua Micah Marshall in Salon.  But the signature got me.  “Mr. Henderson runs saudistrategies.com”  Excuse me?  The Wall St. Journal is giving op-ed space to the guy who runs saudistrategies.com.  Well then, lets have a little war to support the consultancy of Mr. Henderson.   The second article, by Robert Bartley, editor of the Journal,  repeated the grand strategy reported by Joshua Marshall—Set up democracy in Iraq, promote democratic revolution in Iran, then force regime change (or at least attitude change) in Saudi Arabia.  The arrogance of these plans is so absurd as to be laughable, except that the sons and daughters of your friends and neighbors may die because of them.   The Republican right wing ideologues and their allies have come to the Pentagon—not to create a new army, but to use the military power of the United States for private ends. 10:25:31 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/26/2002; 9:29:42 PM.