Perpetual War

Maybe if wars were studied like English departments study literature, we could have a theory of postmodern war. Traditional wars had beginnings and ends, like the world wars of the last century. Then the Cold War came, a postmodern conflict. It was war about war.

While its main combatants did not fight directly, a long string of proxy conflicts brought the level of war’s absurdity to new heights. Many regional conflicts, at that time, were more about the US and the USSR than the aims of the warring parties.

That postmodern conflict was not a joke. Both sides had atomic weapons enough to end human life on this planet. Those of us who lived through that time believed the world’s collective weapons could destroy everything at any time. We had air raid drills and bomb shelters. Metaphoric clocks read only minutes to the midnight doom of nuclear apocalypse.

Then the USSR collapsed and the warning clocks were reset to give us a little more time between life and the end of the world. War planners did not sit idle; they did not waste time. When 9/11 came, they were ready with a new kind of war, a most wretched kind of conflict.



I call it Neopostmodern War. There is no set battleground or territory where this new kind of war can take place; it can happen anywhere and nowhere. No real enemies exist. There are just vague notions of western values versus whatever anti-western values can be concocted. Neopostmodern combatants owe no particular allegiance to any country or place. Any religious basis for fighting is self-defining on all sides. The most exploited part of Neopostmodern War is that it has no end. The narrative of this new kind of war only reveals new enemies for as far into the future as we can reasonably hope to see.

The war on terrorism is perpetual war. With existing technologies and arms markets, there will always be enough people willing to attack American interests with enough force to make an endless manifestation of danger credible. So, there is no longer a need to reduce military budgets to “peacetime levels” as there no longer exists times of peace. This war has no end because the supply of hate and violence are the only things in greater supply than our collection of armaments. We are not entertaining ourselves to death, as some people say; we are defending ourselves into oblivion.

You will waste your time arguing that the basis for perpetual war is wrong because the ones who argue that there are enemies out there ready to attack us at anytime are right. Military and political leaders must conduct perpetual war. They have taken oaths to defend America and defend us they must.

At the same time it is also true that defense spending at current levels is unsustainable. We are on the verge of seeing how it will destroy us economically. Putting the world under America’s armed guards is also unsustainable. We are fast approaching a time when the other national powers will not accept America’s military dominance. Neopostmodern Warfare is about enemies without borders. There are no neopostmodern nations, however. Nations are very much about borders.

America is trapped in an endless loop. We cannot let our guard down on terrorism. A lowered level of preparedness will lead to disaster. So we employ the maximum, politically viable defense. That greater show of force by Empire America means more people around the world willing to join the struggle against us. America, then, expands its defenses. So it goes.

Capture a territory thought to aid and abet a terrorist group and the terrorist group just moves elsewhere. Iraq was not a center of military resistance to America, until we invaded. Fighters from all over then joined native forces fighting to make America’s stay in Iraq costly. They mostly succeeded.

Our enemy can be anywhere. Enough hate exists everywhere to make that true.

I doubt if anyone knows how wars without geography, wars that are not about winning territory, can end. Even wars that are mostly about territory, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, can go on for decades. Yet conventional wars do end when the territorial dispute is settled, or if a massacre makes the geographical question moot. Perpetual war changes this.

Defense at any cost will also lead to a suicidal end of our American values. Domestic spying finally has the technological means to reach truly Orwellian ends. That may not mean much to our current politicians, who are mainly political atheists, after all. Most believe in nothing but reelection. I am not going to waste my time trying to convince anyone how un-American our current rulers are.

The most wretched “enemy” are anti-Empire American citizens, and the government is preparing for that eventuality, too.