History of the War Machine: PNAC's Predecessor- NSC Document 68

[buzzsaw_23]

We are all by now,to varying degrees, familiar with PNAC and its blueprint for neo-American hegemony "Rebuilding America's Defenses". To understand the doctrine and its implications it is necessary to understand its origins and the fluidity of the militaristic strain in the American body-politic. So in that spirit this thread hopes to promote an ongoing discussion of the various ideologies involved, the various individuals involved and the various ways in which we may attempt to de-construct the all pervasive warfare state that dominates our culture and plagues our society.

History of the War Machine:

From NSC 68 to 2005

by Brian Bogart

<snip>

Paul Nitze was raised in moderately wealthy surroundings, in a family that embraced its German heritage.  In his frequent trips to Germany, as a youth and later as a Wall Street investment banker before, during, and after the Depression, Nitze had seen the transformation from a country in ruins to one with a strong economy and a meticulous populace.  He took pride in that transformation, and, up until Pearl Harbor, is said to have to defended Hitler in conversations at upper-class social functions.  He admired the way facts and figures and harsh discipline had remade Germany, and thought little of the moral issues surrounding its reemergence.  Nitze's view until Pearl Harbor was that the US should not enter into the war in Europe.
<snip>

 "The implications of Speer's statements were disturbingly clear: If Adolf Hitler had been more rational and methodical, if he had purged his inner circle of reprobates like Goering and Bormann and relied solely on men like Speer, and if he had fully mobilized the country in 1941 instead of 1944, Germany might have won World War II." What a fine lesson for students of foreign policy.  Keep this in mind when we turn to Nitze's disciple, Paul Wolfowitz, and his disciples, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle.

<snip>

NSC68 was fear-mongering at its highest peak, and some students of foreign policy learned this all too well for America and the world.  In NSC68 Nitze advised that superiority was the key to security, that the US pursue unbridled military research and development to stay ahead of any potential aggressor.  The lesson of World War II, he said, was that western weakness leads to aggression.  (Today, our strength and freedom are cited as causes of aggression.)  "The US must have the will and strength to be a force for peace," he wrote.  His strategy, in NSC68, was to make the most out of anti-Soviet sentiments of the postwar period.

<snip>

NSC68 was not a document specifically written to take or keep power from America's common people; the people have been isolated from power throughout our history.  But NSC68 was the blueprint for shifting from social concerns to military-industrial profit, further elevating corporations to -- and further distancing the people from -- power.  It is the abuse of NSC68 after the Cold War -- in the hands of those in power today -- that has made this distance insurmountable without revolutionary change.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1...

[barbaraann]

1. Harry S. Truman.

It must be mentioned that there was an acute fear in Washington of a second Depression during this period from 1947 to 1950, largely due to reduced demand for military production and the reduction of non-military industries that had occurred during the war as a result of men going overseas to fight. In the secluded chambers of Truman's Cabinet members, as Noam Chomsky has said, there was no real discussion about how to address this: "It wasn't really a debate because it was settled before it started, but the issue was at least raised -- should the government pursue military spending or social spending?" And that was it -- a private question of public importance, asked and answered, over and done. No public knowledge, no public debate, no public consent.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=8842

[buzzsaw_23]

3. Truman

,a Democrat, being in office as NSC was put into place and practice is certainly worth noting. This is telling as it displays how the Mil-Ind. Comlpex lives on both sides of the aisle and controls the purse strings. To do so there must be an enemy, as we know. It was/is, even by many on the left, believed that Communism was a real threat during The Cold War. The evidence does not back up that thesis. Nationalism was the real threat to the MNCorp. and to paint the nationalist leader of a nation as a communist was a sure bet to whip the US public into a frenzy and therefore convince them to get behind for an invasion,a coup, an assassination or all of the above.

The Cold War like The War on Terror was a fraud.


The U.S. government's own Bureau of the Budget refuted the alarmist thesis put forward in the NSC68 report cited above, noting in May 1950 that "NSC68 is based on the assumption that the military power of the USSR and its satellites is increasing in relation to that of the U.S. and its allies...it is hard to accept a conclusion that the USSR is approaching a straight-out military superiority over us when, for example, (1) our Air Force is vastly superior qualitatively, is greatly superior numerically in bombers, trained crews and other facilities necessary for offensive warfare; (2) our supply of fission bombs is much greater than that of the USSR, as is our thermonuclear potential; (3) our Navy is so much stronger than that of the USSR that they should not be mentioned in the same breath; (4) the economic health and military potential of our allies is, with our help, growing daily; and (5) while we have treaties of alliance with and are furnishing arms to countries bordering the USSR, the USSR has none with countries within thousands of miles from us."

The threat of a Soviet Union bent on military confrontation with the West was a giant hoax with several advantages. One benefit was that it enabled governments to secure vast public subsidy of high-tech industry through massive defense spending programs. Big business had everything to gain from responding to a terrible threat, just as big business now stands to lose massively from responding to the threat of global warming: "To a remarkable degree, containment has been the product, not so much of what the Russians have done, or of what has happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States....What is surprising is the primacy that has been accorded economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the exclusion of other considerations."

http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/feb97hotair.html

[texpatriot2004]

2. Interesting history of PNAC n/t