The Perpetual War State
Why is Israel, fresh off the destruction of Gaza, apparently prodding neighboring countries into war? Even my family members who support Israel are deeply disturbed by Israel’s continual outpouring of massive violence in the name of defense. Although my friends on the left see Israel as a special case of racist state terrorism, Israel’s violence is not special at all. It is acting in accordance with the Perpetual War theory of governmental survival. The never-ending violence of many nations, including Russia and the United States, can be explained by the same theory.
The United States has been involved in armed conflict for 93% of its existence. That’s over 100 military conflicts in 248 years. A crisis arose at the end of the Cold War, when there was no obvious next enemy to justify wartime military spending and to rally the population against. Of course, the US found its next enemy in “terrorism,” which had the benefit of not relying on the existence of any particular group or state or ideology. It is just a concept that we can wage war against indefinitely and can be assured that we will never vanquish. “Winning” is not the goal of the perpetual war. As former CIA Angolan Task Force Chief John Stockwell makes clear in his book, In Search of Enemies, wars that are known to be unwinnable can serve the purpose of a state seeking to project power.
Russia also has a long history of perpetual war. Since 1991, in its post-Soviet form, Russia has been involved in at least 14 wars and is currently waging five distinct armed conflicts, from Ukraine to Mali. Even as domestic Russian liberties have vanished, Putin has maintained his popularity among the Russian people through his fiction of protecting Russia from outside forces.
Political leaders who follow the Perpetual War theory will point to or even create external threats to distract their own population from internal instability and failings. Thus, Israel has gone so far as to subjugate an entire population for generations in a long-term project to guarantee a continual violent resistance. When a domestic social revolt threatened Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reign, Hamas, predictably, gave the government the pretext to intensify an ever-expanding war against all enemies.
But don’t we have the right to defend ourselves?
War is always packaged as self-defense. The US preemptive invasion of Iraq was described as “defensive” by American political leaders: “There should be not doubt in anybody’s mind this man (Iraqi president Hussein) is thumbing his nose at the world.… I will use all the latest intelligence to make informed decisions about how best to keep the world at peace, how best to defend freedom for the long run.” — George W. Bush.
The more plausibly a war can be depicted as defensive, the more easily it will be accepted by the public. But this does not mean that the threat has to take the form of an imminent invasion. The threat could be moral, from within the internal culture. Thus, Donald Trump warns: “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
Perpetual war need not be against outside forces, but can be just as useful to the governing powers if the “outsiders” are actually already inside. Trump: “Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.”
With an endless supply of outsiders who want to hurt us because of our freedoms (“They (al-Qaeda) hate our freedoms” — George W. Bush) and internal enemies who walk among us (“We will root out the communists, Marxist, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” — Donald Trump), who needs a real army to fight against?
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war…. War had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war…. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.
- 1984, by George Orwell
