http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&contentId=us/2011/11/03/nats-occupy-oakland-violence.ktvuThe 2012 presidential election is going to be remembered for a lot of things. It is the first election in our history that did not feature a white Protestant on the ballot. It is likely to be one of the closest in history. And it is occuring at a precipitous moment in our economic history.
And yet, with all of the attention and expectations surrounding tomorrow’s vote, a key issue remains off our radar: The militarization of American society.
A piece in today’s New York Times raises this — reminding readers of President Eisenhower’s warning as he left office that the military-industrial complex was perhaps the greatest threat to the American way of life, though it seems to me it understates just how pervasive the influence has become.
Aaron B. O’Connell, assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, says the damage is primarily spiritual, saying the impact that the military has on the economy has not been as great as expected:
The military-industrial complex has not emerged in quite the way Eisenhower envisioned. The United States spends an enormous sum on defense — over $700 billion last year, about half of all military spending in the world — but in terms of our total economy, it has steadily declined to less than 5 percent of gross domestic product from 14 percent in 1953. Defense-related research has not produced an ossified garrison state; in fact, it has yielded a host of beneficial technologies, from the Internet to civilian nuclear power to GPS navigation. The United States has an enormous armaments industry, but it has not hampered employment and economic growth. In fact, Congress’s favorite argument against reducing defense spending is the job loss such cuts would entail.
Nor has the private sector infected foreign policy in the way that Eisenhower warned. Foreign policy has become increasingly reliant on military solutions since World War II, but we are a long way from the Marines’ repeated occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century, when commercial interests influenced military action. Of all the criticisms of the 2003 Iraq war, the idea that it was done to somehow magically decrease the cost of oil is the least credible. Though it’s true that mercenaries and contractors have exploited the wars of the past decade, hard decisions about the use of military force are made today much as they were in Eisenhower’s day: by the president, advised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council, and then more or less rubber-stamped by Congress. Corporations do not get a vote, at least not yet.
That’s not exactly true. Corporations do not get a vote, but they do have a lot of money and have been influencing elections for decades with a commensurate influence on policy. Oil and other natural resources drive our policy in the Middle East and parts of Africa — including which leaders we back and where we send our troops.
But this seems obvious. Less obvious are the “spiritual ways” in which the military has infected the culture:
From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas.
Again, this may understate things. The militarization of our culture goes beyond even teh most subtle impacts that the military has and includes the shift in policing. Every police department in the country, it seems, has a massive tactical unit — a SWAT team on steroids, if you will — that has turned out streets into war zones. We can argue what the trigger is — whether the drug trade or the police started this ugly cycle — but the language, equipment and focus has moved from police to police state, to a sense that law enforcement is just a local version of the military.
Radley Balko, writing in The Huffington Post last year, described the genesis of the new domestic military:
The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs.” Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America’s drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.
A bill passed in 1988 authorized the National Guard to aid local police in drug interdiction, a law that resulted in National Guard troops conducting drug raids on city streets and using helicopters to survey rural areas for pot farms. In 1989, President George Bush enacted a new policy creating regional task forces within the Pentagon to work with local police agencies on anti-drug efforts. Since then, a number of other bills and policies have carved out more ways for the military and domestic police to cooperate in the government’s ongoing campaign to prevent Americans from getting high. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney declared in 1989, “The detection and countering of the production, trafficking and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense.”
The result is a dangerous shift in the way police do their jobs and in how they deal with the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting.
The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It’s dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.
This shift can be seen in the way police describe their mission and use of these new military toys. As The Daily Beast reported last year,
Law enforcement officials say the armored vehicles, assault weapons, and combat uniforms used by their officers provide a public safety benefit beyond their advertised capabilities, creating a sort of “shock and awe” experience they hope will encourage suspects to surrender more quickly.
“The only time I hear the complaint of ‘God, you guys look scary’ is if the incident turns out to be nothing,” says West Hartford, Conn., Police Lt. Jeremy Clark, who organizes an annual SWAT competition.
This argument, of course, mirrors the one always used when civil liberties are being breached –“If you haven’t done anything wrong….”
The impact, of course, was most obvious in the response to the Occupy protests, as Ruben Navarrette pointed out in November 2011.
There is an online petition calling on California Gov. Jerry Brown to send the National Guard to protect Occupy Oakland protesters from the city’s police department.
In recent weeks, hundreds of protesters in Oakland have clashed with police officers in riot gear. In one tragic incident, a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran named Scott Olsen was critically injured when he was hit in the head by a teargas canister at close range.
Even compared to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and other protests around the country, what’s happening in Oakland shocks the senses. Judging from video and firsthand accounts, the police in that city have been especially brutal in dealing with the protesters.
It was the kind of scenes we had witnessed coming from Tunisia, Egypt and other crumbling dictatorships, places where there is no distinction between the police and the military and where guns are used to protect those in power.
As Navarrette says,
The siege in Oakland, where police have repeatedly clashed with protesters, reminds us that there’s one other thing that police officers shouldn’t do: impersonate soldiers.
The point is, police should not be engaged in shock and awe. They should not be waging war on our city streets. We should not be spending millions to equip them with drones and tanks and other military vehicles. We should use these tools only when necessary and would probably be better off if we were to replace this hardware spending with money for more police officers, increased patrols and community policing initiatives that make officers a part of the communities they are supposed to protect.
“Police officers,” Navarrette said,
have the power to either make their job simpler or more difficult. If they treat people well and build relations, people will cooperate. They’ll have leads, witnesses and informants. But if they see the people they’re supposed to “protect and serve” the way an occupying army sees the native population, they’re going to encounter resistance, suspicion, defiance and other things that make their job harder. That’s a recipe for chaos.
But this is not something we have been hearing from either of the major party candidates, both of whom lend their tacit support to this militarization. It is too late for this election season, but it is not too late overall. We need to make it clear that we want our police to be police, to protect and serve and not to be domestic soldiers doing battle with our fellow citizens.
Hank Kalet 