too late?

The question we need to be asking now -- and nobody is asking it, so I guess I'll go first -- is "Who is giving the orders in Washington D.C.?" We've been at war almost continuously since Reagan took office. During Clinton's interlude people tended not to notice because the Iraq War was on the back burner then.

Does the civilian government instruct the generals in the Pentagon to undertake hostilities, or are the generals in the Pentagon giving orders to the civilian government?

Is this a military dictatorship, or isn't it? If it is, what are we going to do about it? If it's not, why are we continuously at war, sometimes against imaginary or totally insignificant enemies?

I don't think anybody can answer this question, except maybe a few people at the very top. And possibly even they can't answer it.

What would happen if a president said to someone like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, "No, I'm not sending any more troops, and in fact, you need to prepare to leave Afghanistan because we're withdrawing and ending the war."?

If the civilian government said "No" to the Pentagon, what would happen? Nobody, since Truman said "No" to MacArthur, has ever put it to the test. Why is that?

We were supposed to get a "peace dividend" after the Soviet Union collapsed. But we all know how the civilian government, in the wake of 9/11, managed to create an enemy as big and scary as the Russians were, out of nothing more than a few rag-tag terrorists who possess no regular army, navy, or factory-produced weapons of their own. (Terrorism is the only weapon available to otherwise powerless people.)

This is the two-ton elephant in the living room nobody wants to see. It appears fairly obvious to me that the U.S. government, no matter which party is in charge, is now set on a course under which it is obligated to have an enemy whose ferocity, real or imagined, justifies a nearly trillion-dollar annual expenditure for weapons and ongoing warfare, and if no such enemy appears in the natural course of events, then we are obliged to create one.

If this country has indeed degenerated into a military dictatorship, if the civilian government exists only for the sake of funding the war and weapons sector of the economy, then we have become the ultimate destroyer of world peace. If that's what's happened, it's unacceptable, and we need to take the country back. However, it very well may be too late to do so.


Illustration, "Card Number One" by Bill Sienkiewicz, from the series "Friendly Dictators Trading Cards," 1990.