Forty-eight years ago, in another transition to a new and hopeful presidency, a prophetic and dire warning was given by a man who knew. His warning has not been heeded and America, and the world is the worse for it.
The question is whether Barack Obama can understand the threat — perhaps the greatest American faces — and resist it.
The warning was perhaps swamped by the inaugural address by young Democrat John Kennedy. It was made a few days earlier by the out-going Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower. It was a warning not heeded to by subsequent presidents, especially George W. Bush.
Eisenhower said, “Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among peoples and among nations. . . . Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened . . . .
“Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them . . . there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution . . . .
“But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs, balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages . . . balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future.
“Until the latest of our world conflicts [Korea], the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defence. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Alas, all subsequent presidents allowed the military-industrial complex too much influence. Eisenhower had obviously experienced its power and perhaps felt powerless to do much about it. Its excessive influence was obvious on his watch.
The CIA’s toppling of the democratically elected Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 was the prime example. Arbenz wanted to nationalise land owned by the Boston-based United Fruit Company.
It was just one of more than 300 US foreign interventions since World War II. Whenever the US’s commercial interests abroad were threatened, in would come first the bribers, then the blackmailers and then the hit men to try to undermine or if necessary kill national leaders from Latin America to the Middle East, to Asia and to Africa and to replace them with US friendly despots: the Congo, Panama, Bolivia, the Seychelles, Iran (remember the Shah?), Nicaragua, Pakistan, Nigeria, Cuba, Angola, Ecuador, Afgahnistan, Iraq, Palestine. The list goes on and on.
All in the name of freedom and democracy. At first it was to save these nations from communism. Now it is to deal with terrorism. But it really has been about resources: plantation land, minerals and, most important, oil. And all at the behest of the heads of large US corporations. The interventions have thrived in the secrecy that Eisenhower warned against.
Much foreign aid has been in the form of paying western corporations and the elite in the Third World at the expense of the poverty stricken who need the aid. And US Government aid is the second lowest per head among the 22 OECD nations.
“Free trade” is a mantra of hypocrisy when it comes to Third World access to western markets for agricultural produce. Military aid is a scandal.
Will Obama be able to stand up to the military-industrial complex – the corporatocracy? They will fight for their own interests over the US public interest and over the interests of ordinary people in foreign lands. Pharmaceutical and health companies will fight – dirty if necessary – against public medicine. Arms manufacturers will press for military aid, irrespective of the death and destruction they cause. Corporations that supply foreign aid will want it to remain with conditions attached.
Yes, the Chinese and Soviet empires behaved as badly abroad and worse at home. But the world expects more of the country that began the “adventure in free government”, as Eisenhower called it.
Surely the first African-American President can see the litany of havoc and death caused by so many US foreign interventions. Surely he can see that they have not helped liberty and freedom, to the contrary. And they have not done the American people (other than corporate chiefs) any good either.
The undue influence of the military-industrial complex has led to a less secure America, a less-loved America, a less-respected America and an America saddled with the debt of war.
It has caused America to retreat from international agreements on human rights and to engage in breaches of human rights like torture, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grahib.
Surely, the first African-American President will be able to see this in a way his predecessors have not seen it and say – Enough! No more.