If you've ever tried fighting insomnia by watching those one of those interminably dull, think-tank-sponsored, national-security panel discussions that show up on C-SPAN late at night and wondered, "Who the hell are the people in the audience who sit through this stuff?", here's your answer:
[T]he audience is filled with dark suits and military uniforms — Beltway Bandits (consultants, contractors, and anyone else grabbing for their private piece of the defense pie) and full-time soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors. In other words, people whose livelihoods depend on the war machine constantly turning in a forward direction. They aren’t there to determine whether drones are bad or COIN is dead or why veterans are committing suicide.They just want to know where the political winds are blowing, what the talking points are, and how to navigate the budget gauntlet; then they exchange a few business cards in hopes of gaining the access they all crave, all while feeling they are part of “the hive.”That’s why the biggest stirring of excitement in the crowd didn’t come when World Bank President Robert Zoellick took the stage for a 45 minutes excursion that resembled nothing of the stated topic, “economics and security,” but when CNAS co-founder (and former senior Pentagon official) Michele Flournoy and other insiders were wheeled in to talk defense budget. Now the Beltway Bandits in the crowd suddenly awoke: to cut or not to cut, this was the question, and it affected them greatly [...]
There are only two schools of thought tolerated for debate in the CNAS vacuum---liberal interventionism and neoconservativism. It is not a matter of whether force will be used, but where to use it and under what guise. Even that debate seems largely taken for granted at these events. With the exception of tiny skirmishes between the centrists and neocons on Wednesday, all agreed that despite all the military and diplomatic blunders over the last decade, we should move full speed ahead on “readiness” and confronting China as the next great threat.
But only dirty stinking hippies would denigrate our military by shouting "War is good business!" and other vile obscenities.
Snark aside, one wonders what's more troubling here: The fact that our defense and foreign-policy establishments now seem to be fixed in permanent orbit around a global outreach strategy based on warmongering, or the fact that the people in charge of planning and deploying the warmongering outreach strategy are the same people who have been wrong about every fucking thing since the end of the Cold War. And to think some people worry that another 9/11 might happen.
---Vitelius
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