"I am extremely concerned about the shameful, almost total passivity of Congress during the period of preparations for our military attack on Iraq. . . . Congress’s inaction is a dangerous precedent in executive-legislative relations.  In light of this precedent, future presidents will be tempted to seize virtually dictatorial powers under the title of commander in chief, and nothing in our history rules out the possibility of their yielding to that temptation.  This seems to be the meaning of the recent crisis."

 In my first essay on this topic, I presented an overview of the entitled subject and considered the contemporary aspect of the topic in some depth.  In the second essay, I elaborated upon that overview with pertinent historical details from the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Now, in this final essay, I will continue my analysis by covering the main developments, events, documents, and state proclamations or assertions in the 20th and 21st centuries that — in practice— have essentially obliterated the original U.S. Constitutional distinction between making and declaring war.  Clearly, since the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. policy makers have ordered their military forces to engage in scores of military interventions, conflicts, and wars without bothering to obtain a formal declaration of war.  This series of three essays has attempted to explain why such actions have taken place and why waging war has become very practical while formally declaring war has become quite impractical for many key policy makers of America.  As indicated in the first two parts of "On Making vs. Declaring War," this is a situation fundamentally impelled by the needs of a growing and consolidating economy which entered its embryonic stage of monopoly capitalism around the period of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898.
 After the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the need for foreign markets by that consolidated and expanding economic system continued to grow.  As Andrew Carnegie had pointed out, the solution to truncating depressions and to the problem of "generalized overproduction" in a system that had a far greater capacity to produce goods than to absorb those goods in a low wage, domestic market place (average daily manufacturing wage ranged between the low of $1.32 and the high of $1.53 in the period 1872-1891)  was to keep production lines running "‘full’" while disposing, "‘even at low foreign prices,’" the surplus product in foreign markets.   Quite obviously, such a situation required state policy makers who were not only cognizant of the needs of such a system of production but who would operate to insure the continued health of that particular economy.  For one, J. D. Rockefeller appreciated such people’s service so much that he praised their assistance to his overseas interests with these words in his autobiography:  "One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department in Washington.  Our ambassadors and ministers and consuls have aided to push our way into new markets to the utmost corners of the world."
It is evident that early 20th century U.S. leaders, both inside and outside of government, had come to realized, as Woodrow Wilson once observed, that "‘The masters of the Government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufactures of the United States.’"   And wise policy makers had to be guided, as he bluntly said before becoming president, by the fact that "‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of the nation which are closed against him must be battered down.  Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.  Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.’"   No wonder that Wilson’s Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan praised Wilson as the president who had "‘opened the door of all the weaker countries to an invasion of American capital and American enterprise.’"   Bryan could have added that this accomplishment, at times, included an invasion of U.S. military forces, for Wilson not only sent them into the European war but also into Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Russia.
 Wilson’s interventionism, of course, was fostered by many factors but looming large among them was the fact that the U.S. Gross National Product had burgeoned by a percent of increase of slightly over 216% between the period 1887-1891, and the period 1912-1916.   Likewise, the percent of increase for U.S. exports between 1900-1919 was slightly over 85.5%.   Even more compelling was the fact that U.S. foreign investment soared five fold between 1900-1914.   Summarizing these pressures, Wilson put it succinctly in his 1912 campaign for the White House:  "‘Our domestic markets no longer suffice, we need foreign markets.’"
 So, as historian Norman G. Levin Jr. has pointed out, President Wilson went far beyond his predecessors in envisioning a global market place that would ultimately be free of traditional imperialism and open to U.S. manufacturers, investors, and exporters.  Convinced that America’s commercial abundance would not only profit U.S. business, but would raise the world’s standard of living and enhance personal freedoms, Wilson called for the world-wide creation of capitalist societies, open markets, free trade, peaceful competition, constitutional governments with personal liberties, and limited social mobility.  His vision of establishing such "liberal capitalism" largely anticipated the more sophisticated, integrated world economy desired by the architects of America’s global dominance in the post World War II era.  Like many of those later U.S. policy makers, Wilson tended to see the interest of all humankind as synonymous with the interest of the U.S.  And, like them, he did not acknowledge — at least, not openly — that the U.S. "open door" policy and the superior productive capacity of the U.S. could be a threat to the less productive, less industrial, and less economically sophisticated nations of the world.
 But, of course, the greater productivity of the U.S. economy and the "open door" political demands of U.S. policy makers promoted more than just a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship between high production and low production societies.  Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, those factors have produced a state of economic subordination/dependency and more than a little deindustrialization among the societies saddled with both low production capacity and vastly unequal income and wealth distribution patterns.  Indeed, the greater productionism of the U.S. and just five other industrial powers hit the peoples and cultures of Asia (except Japan), Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East with a veritable landslide of manufactured goods and dislocating technology.  It virtually steamrollered much of the handicraft production systems of India, French Indochina, China, Africa, and Latin America into virtual oblivion.  Consider, for instance, that with its 13% share in 1913, and its 20.4% share in 1929, the U.S. alone had a greater portion of the world’s total exports of manufactured goods than did all the combined countries apart from the U.S. and only five other industrialized nations.   Displaying an even deeper economic involvement in the world’s economy in the period leading to the Great Depression, U.S. foreign investments jumped from a 6.3% share of the world’s total in 1914, to a 35.3% share in 1930.  Parenthetically, by 1960, the U.S. had a 59.1% share of the world’s total foreign investments.
And, today, that process and its impact on the poor is continuing under the guise of globalization and neoliberal economic policies pursued by transnational corporations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO).  However, as discovered by Nobel Prize-winning economist and former director of research at the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz, the three pillars of the "Washington Consensus" (i.e., neoliberal policies of austerity, privatization, and market liberalization) and globalization have not worked out well for "millions" of the world’s poor.  "Many," he writes, "have actually been made worse off, as they have seen their jobs destroyed and their lives become more insecure.  They have felt increasingly powerless against forces beyond their control.  They have seen their democracies undermined, their cultures eroded."   To this sad commentary about the failure of "trickle down" economics and its lack of economic development, Stiglitz adds this stinging indictment of the results flowing from the coercive policies and practices of the elite dominated institutions in which he had served:  "Globalization, as it has been advocated, often seems to replace the old dictatorships of national elites with new dictatorships of international finance.  Countries are effectively told that if they don’t follow certain conditions, the capital markets or the IMF will refuse to lend them money.  They are basically forced to give up part of their sovereignty, to let capricious capital markets, including the speculators whose only concerns are short-term rather than the long-term growth of the country and the improvement of living standards, ‘discipline’ them, telling them what they should and should not do."
 Summing up this globalized process of  benefiting the few at the expense of the many, historian Chalmers Johnson describes the systemization of the process that keeps so many societies in a state of dependency and subordination to a few others:  "Having deprived the Third World countries of access to agricultural subsidies and crippled their ability to build competitive industries, the WTO proceeded to prevent them from using the foreign technology employed by the industrialized nations and to lock in the monopoly profits of companies that owned patents on indispensable products such as medicines.  The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS), which instituted these barriers, proved to be a gold mine for transnational corporations.  Its purpose was to prevent developing countries from copying or stealing proprietary technology in the same manner the currently advanced countries had done in their processes of economic growth. . . .  It is a clear example of the rich nations kicking away the ladder to keep poor nations from catching up."   Writing about the outcome of all this for many of the nation states of the world, Johnson cites the findings of economist Oswaldo de Rivero to declare:  "What globalization has produced . . . is not NICs (newly industrialized countries) but about 130 NNEs (nonviable national economies) or, even worse, UCEs (ungovernable chaotic entities)."
Naturally, such a state of affairs requires a military presence, so, as Wilson had observed, the flag follows the manufacturer.  Thus, in the 1920s, major detachments of U.S. armed forces were "stationed in only three countries abroad," but during World War II, they were in 39 countries, and they were in 64 by 1966.   It should be noted, in passing, that as of the September 30, 2001 figures that he took from the Pentagon’s "Base Structure Report," Johnson reports that the U.S. has "some 725 foreign bases in thirty-eight countries."   And, as of today, these bases have been augmented by additional bases in the Middle East and nearby countries.  Currently the indications are that U.S. overseas forces are being disbursed around the globe from larger concentrations in various countries to smaller, more numerous, and more scattered bases.  These more numerous bases will contain several hundreds or thousands of troopers instead of the tens of thousands of troops that, in the past, were typically stationed in bases like those in Ramstein, Germany or on bases in Okinawa, Japan.  This new basing strategy is better designed for "global intervention," and it has been termed "lily padding."  It is designed to create hundreds of smaller, "low-profile bases" that can "act as temporary access-points for forward [based] operations" and more rapid deployments of larger U.S. forces anywhere in the world.
 Of course, like economic developments, this stage of ubiquitous U.S. military bases has been part of a historical process.   Prior to the current U.S military presence around the world, the biggest deployment of U.S. troops under Wilson’s administration came with his war to make the world "safe for democracy," World War I.  Unfortunately, the results of the Great War — one of only two declared U.S. wars in a century filled with undeclared U.S. wars and military interventions — did not turn out to be as grandiose as Wilson’s rhetoric.  With 30 million dead, including 114,000 American soldiers,  with the collapse of four long-lived empires, and with the forces of traditional imperialism, neo-imperialism, communism, and fascism extant, the stage was set for an even bloodier Second World War (60 million killed).  In 1920, the U.S. Senate, of course, rejected Wilson’s call for U.S. membership in the League of Nations, and the U.S. voters, having had enough of what writer Gore Vidal termed "great men," elected a succession of "normalcy" inspired, hands-off, laissez-faire type Republican presidents, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.  Presumably turning inward — "isolationism" — after the debacle of World War I, the real leaders of the U.S. did nothing of the sort.  The economy that they owned and controlled would not permit it.  With U.S. productivity rising by 72% in manufacturing and 41% in mining in the period 1919-1929,  and with U.S. foreign investment climbing by slightly more than 4.3 fold, from $3.5 billion in 1914 to $15.2 billion in 1930,  powerful U.S. decision makers were well submerged in foreign markets prior to the crash of 1929.
 And, then, with the clobbering imposed by the Great Depression and the virulent advent of fascist/militarist aggression in China, Africa, and Europe, those U.S. economic forces of production were given an incredible boost by the marshalling efforts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.  As the Japanese invaded central China, conquered chunks of Southeast Asia and seemed bent on either striking at the Soviet Union or driving the Western imperialists out of Asia to build their so-called "co-prosperity sphere," some U.S. policy makers must have regretted the green light that earlier had been given to Japanese imperialism by the Taft-Katsura agreement (July 29, 1905 — U.S. supported Japanese "suzerainty over Korea" in exchange for the Japanese leaving the Philippines alone)  and the Root-Takahira agreement (November 30, 1908 — an open door in China for the "equal opportunity for commerce and industry of all nations in that Empire").   Those quid pro quo agreements with the modernized Meiji regime were only one part of a sort of "gentleman’s imperialism" that U.S. policy makers practiced in the 20th century’s decades leading to World Wars I and II.  And that practice in Asia, along with U.S. business and policy makers’ actions in Latin America, in China, in the Middle East, and a total lack of opposition to Italian and German fascism in the 1920s and 1930s contributed to fascist aggression and their early triumphs.  It emboldened the future Axis powers.  So Poland and Pearl Harbor came.
 But while the Great Depression had brought Hitler and Japanese fascist/ultra-militarists to power, it also had set off a chain of thinking among U.S. policy makers, and those men carried Wilson’s earlier "open door" imaginings to new heights.  So, after declaring war on Japan, Germany, and Italy, they conducted the war not simply to avenge Pearl Harbor but also to establish an "open door" world, par excellence.  Now, in the very large, that goal has been explained best by historian Thomas J. McCormick when he wrote that U.S. policy makers of the 1940s had the catastrophe of the Great Depression very much in mind as they witnessed huge chunks of Europe and Asia fall into the aggressive German and Japanese spheres of control.  And those conquests — with more on the horizon — threaten to exclude or truncate British and American trade, investment, and raw material access in such fundamental ways that "'the nightmare of a closed world'"  appeared to be at hand.  U.S. policy makers, including President Roosevelt, knew that, if England and the U.S. were excluded from European and Asian markets, it would not only cripple much of their profit making potential, but it might even threaten their respective nation's future economic and socio-political stability.  Quite simply, the health of those capitalist systems, which the policy makers of England and the U.S. were charged with maintaining, required an "open door" world for trade, investment, extraction of raw materials, and markets.  As Roosevelt accurately summarized it, ‘"Freedom to trade is essential to our economic life.  We do not eat all the food we produce; we do not burn all the oil we can pump; we do not use all the goods we can manufacture.  It would not be an American wall to keep Nazi goods out; it would be a Nazi wall to keep us in’"
And given that pressing necessity, U.S. leaders "fought the war," wrote McCormick, "not simply to vanquish their enemies, but to . . . insure that the periphery in the Pacific rim, the Mediterranean basin, and Latin America would be integrated, under American aegis, into a global market economy, its resources equally open to all [industrial] core powers."   In other words, the 1940s and 1950s architects of U.S. global dominance — such men as Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan, Averell W. Harriman, James V. Forrestal, Robert Murphy, Paul H. Nitze, and Harry Truman — aimed at constructing a U.S.-led free market world based on economic internationalism and maintained by a U.S.-led collective security apparatus.  After all, these policy makers had a clear mission to perform.  It, as University of Wisconsin professor Harvey Goldberg once lectured, was the conquest of foreign markets for the most powerful U.S. economic interests and that meant either putting or maintaining a group of U.S.-acceptable political rulers over the people in those targeted areas.  Naturally, those political rulers were the ones who, it was expected, could maintain socio-political control over their populations and, so, serve the more powerful U.S. economic interests as clients.  Of course, the world order that post World War II U.S. policy makers undertook to build was meant to eschew the older traditional forms of colonialism, autarchy, and economic nationalism.  Instead, those U.S. policy makers advocated an "open door" world in which the economic principles of free trade and productionism would reign supreme.  As these policy makers saw it, if all societies operated according to the economic dictates of comparative advantage and economies of scale, everyone would be a winner.  It was understood, however, that some — those with advanced industrial economies and sophisticated, high profit producing technologies like the U.S. — would be the bigger winners.
Known, now, by some historians as America's "hegemonic project," this "project" turns the whole Cold War into a mere "subplot" of "a larger story."   And it means, as McCormick noted, that U.S. policy makers had to "manage" virtually the whole world — Russia (previously the Soviet Union), England, German, Japan, the Third World, and the American citizenry  — if the "project" were to be successful.  Naturally, part of that "management" required frequent and undeclared U.S. wars and military conflicts.  These, in fact, became so frequent that it was considered operationally impractical to declare war, but not to wage it.  At any rate, before it became as fashionable as it is today, and as far back as 1959, the ground-breaking American historian William Appleman Williams described what those U.S. policy makers were doing in words that characterized a U.S., informal, open door empire.  Incidentally, such a free market, global order still requires supportive policy makers who, today, may use a perpetual war against terrorism to insure access to what they see as vital global markets.
 After all, today, as in the past, that free market, capitalist world, as McCormick has written, "could only be achieved if political and military power was organized globally. . . .  Only then could there be a . . . free flow of capital, goods, currencies, people, values and ideas necessary to make international capitalism viable."   Unfortunately, for those mid-20th century U.S. policy makers’ post-war plans, the large communist states of the Soviet Union and China as well as the many Third World peoples fighting for their self-determination and social liberation threw a monkey wrench into the U.S. design.  But that was not the only problem that the U.S. policy makers faced because leaders in Britain and France desperately wanted to resurrect or to continue holding their spheres of influence and closed empires.  And that aim constituted a huge obstacle to the American design.  It had to be dealt with.
So, during and in the aftermath of World War II, U.S. policy makers conducted a largely unreported and almost subterranean battle with their Western allies over control of the colonial resources and markets in the colonial empires and the spheres of influence of Britain and France.  This battle — guided, on the U.S. part, by its longstanding strategy of creating an "open door" access for U.S. business interests in all parts of the globe  — was manifest in such actions and events as the American 1941 to 1944 effort, spearheaded by State Department diplomat Robert Murphy, to strike deals with the Vichy French over French held North Africa and inside France behind the back of the Free French forces led by General Charles de Gaulle.    It was discernable in the successful U.S. policy makers’ 1944-1946 effort in the newly liberated Italy to displace British influence by supporting the Ivanoe Banomi government against the British attempt to install a pro-British government led by King Victor Emmanuel and Prime Minister Pietro Badaglio while simultaneously containing and crushing the communist and socialist led Italian partisan movement, and, later, in deposing the Ferruccio Parri left-coalition government.   It was much more visible in the U.S. policy makers’ successful strategy to crack into the oyster of the enclosed British empire known as the sterling bloc.
That strategy was on dramatic display after President Harry S. Truman had put the economic screws to the newly elected British Labor government by unilaterally cutting off all U.S. lend lease supplies to England on August 21, 1945.  Following that action, British negotiators were forced to go to Washington with their hats in their hands to bargain for a $3.8 billion loan  which they got at a 2% interest rate.   But, more importantly, the American policy makers also got all that they wanted and that, effectively, was virtually the whole British empire.  After all, in order for the British to get the 1946 U.S. loan, they had to give up all import restrictions in all parts of the British empire, and they had to end the principle of non-convertibility which meant that they could no longer stipulate that all of the huge amounts of foreign currencies that had been built up in various parts of the British Commonwealth during the Second World War had to be exchanged only for pound sterling.    Explaining what this Washington loan agreement really meant for the British empire and U.S. post war objectives, Lord L. S. Amery, an old British Tory and one who had been in on empire building for most of his life, put it bluntly.  Note well, that this guy was intimately involved with the Washington loan agreement, and, given his personal history, he, as professor Goldberg once said, could "smell imperialism" when it walked into the room.  Here, from Amery’s revealing 1946 book, The Washington Loan Agreement, is his summary of the meaning of those crucial loan agreements:  "The object of American policy is . . . to set up . . . money and money power outside national control as the dominate factor in [the] world economy. . . . We have been forced to pledge ourselves to a commercial scheme which is to deprive us . . . of any effective control of our own home market."  Then, with amazing prescience, he spelled out the American strategy and goal:  "I rather like the robust buccaneering spirit of modern American economic imperialism.  Only . . . it is against the British Empire . . . The British Empire is the oyster which the loan is to prise open.  Each part of it . . . is to be swallowed separately, to become a field for American industrial exploitation, a tributary of American finance, and, in the end, an American dependency."   In Amery’s description of what had occurred in Washington, there was almost a half admiration for what the Americans had pulled off, but, still, one can almost hear him weeping as he observes that they were doing it to the British empire.
At approximately the same time that these events were transpiring, the "number two person in the U.S. embassy in Moscow from 1944 to 1946,"  professional diplomat George F. Kennan, fired off his analysis of the emerging U.S.-Soviet antagonism in early 1946.  It became famously known as the "Long Telegram."  Yet, while it diagnosed the nature of the antagonism between "West" and "East," it did not offer any prescription for dealing with it.  The main point of the Long Telegram was to describe the Soviet Union’s leaders and communist system as being "‘committed fanatically to the belief that with the US there can be no modus vivendi’" and that those leaders believe "‘that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.’"   In his Long Telegram, Kennan stressed the importance of educating (or, more accurately, orienting) the U.S. public to this point of view, and, once he returned to Washington in 1947, he contributed mightily to that effort.  His starting point was based on the assumption that the communist ideology and institutional structures of the Soviet Union rendered it inherently expansionistic.  Consequently, the U.S. must counter — on a global scale — that intrinsic, aggressive impulse with "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."   As for the global dimension of this containment policy, Kennan argued that "the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy."   So, from 1945-1991, the Cold War — with some bloody hot ones thrown in — came.
Even before Kennan’s pronouncement appeared in print, leading U.S. policy makers were attempting to prevent the communist-led Vietminh movement in Vietnam from moving into the vacuum of collapsed Japanese and French power at the end of World War II.   The U.S. position on French Indochina had evolved from President Roosevelt’s French anti-colonialism in 1943-1944 — the U.S. had also lent some OSS military assistance to the Vietminh’s struggle against the Japanese occupiers in mid-summer 1945  — to one of accepting a restoration of French rule over Vietnam as the best of the options in keeping with larger U.S. global objectives.   Already, near the end of July 1945, U.S. policy makers had opted for a reinstallation of French rule over Vietnam in their Potsdam agreement.   And, just to cover all the bases, that action was followed by President Truman’s August 14, 1945, General Order #1 which granted to General Douglas MacArthur, the Allied Supreme commander in the Pacific, the power to designate which of the groups to whom the Japanese were to surrender their occupied territories everywhere in Asia.   In short, by attempting to determine the political complexion of Asia in such a way, the American policy makers were fully inserting themselves into the politics of Asia and casting a gigantic American umbrella over the entire region.  So, armed with the Potsdam agreement and Truman’s sweeping General Order #1, the U.S. policy makers made sure that the Japanese turnover of Vietnam went to the French — inserting British/French and Nationalist Chinese troops into the newly liberated Vietnam in September 1945  — and they fruitlessly tried to exclude the battle toughened Vietminh from the scene.
And, yet, the other side of that U.S. policy maker support for an anti-communist French return to Vietnam was their opposition to a French neo-colonialism that might close the door on U.S. access to Vietnam’s resources and markets.   A U.S. State Department memorandum, "American Interests in Southeast Asia," of March 26, 1945, neatly stated the overarching U.S. goal, "‘The economic interests of the United States . . . demand not only free access and trade in Southeast Asia, but also a rising standard of living there.  This would increase the market for our products in the area, and markets are one of our primary interests in the postwar world.’"   Thus, while the U.S. policy makers went nearly all-out in supporting the French against their Vietminh foes in the French Indochina War from 1946 to 1954,  they were persistently uncomfortable with any sign that the French intended a recolonization of Vietnam that might threaten to truncate U.S. economic interests.  So, when, in 1950, U.S. policy makers extended U.S. recognition to the French puppet Bao Dai regime in Vietnam, they were not only supplying the French war effort against the Vietminh, but they were putting ever more pressure on the French to grant the Bao Dai regime more sovereign powers.  In such a way, U.S. policy makers hoped to simultaneously exclude the Vietminh and pry wider open that French semi-closed door in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, off in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean region, there came an opportunity to open more important doors.  So, on March 12, 1947, came the Truman Doctrine.  And it, as the Americans prepared to supplant the exhausted British in the Greek civil war, clearly announced that, while other nations might think in terms of spheres of influence, U.S. policy makers thought in terms of the whole world as their sphere.   Thus, Truman’s "emotional" announcement to go to the rescue of the British and Greece took the form of contending that there was such a huge communist menace in Greece (and beyond) that the U.S. must expand its Monroe Doctrine so that it covered the whole globe.   In its most significant rhetoric, the Truman Doctrine asserted that the U.S. would "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure."   And it is very important to note that these words meant that there did not have to be any evidence of "outside pressure" to justify U.S. intervention into the societies of foreign nations.
Truman’s pronouncement was soon followed by Kennan’s tremendous hit with the work that won him lasting fame and the establishment’s accolade of being the "father of containment."  The work was entitled "Sources of Soviet Conduct," and it was signed by Kennan’s pseudonym of "X."    Following its publication, the containment strategy and the Truman Doctrine’s Manichean view of the world were incorporated into what became the cornerstone of all subsequent U.S., Cold War strategic thinking, National Security Council memorandum 68 (NSC 68) in 1950.   Describing the need and method — military, economic, and political — for the "containment" of communism, especially Soviet communism, NSC 68 laid out the arguments and strategy for doing the job.   And the job — protecting the global perimeter of the "open door," free-market world needed by the U.S. economy — required huge expenditures.  Thus, one vital "purpose of NSC 68," as Secretary of State Acheson bluntly explained, "was to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ . . . that the decision [for containment] could be carried out."  More importantly, he famously continued with a statement that epitomizes the elite art of prevarication, "If we made our points clearer than truth, we . . . could hardly do otherwise."   And, so, China, Korea, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Cambodia, Lebanon, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and many others came.
Today, Acheson’s outlook, objective, and technique for gaining policy approval by preying on people’s fears through the means of exaggeration — as well as displaying certain policy makers’ extraordinary hubris — is marvelously reflected in the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.  That statement reads, in part:  "[W]e will not hesitate to act alone . . . to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively . . . and . . . compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities . . . [O]ur best defense is a good offense. . . .
 To contend with . . . the many security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia . . . This broad portfolio of military capabilities must also . . . ensure U.S. access to distant theaters, and . . . assets in outer space . . .  Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."
Simply stated, these goals are nothing less than the current U.S. policy makers’ intention to militarily dominate the entire globe.  But that is neither new nor news anymore.  What is new is the candor of the rhetoric and the extremity of the means to obtain long-standing objectives. By, within the context of a Manichaean view of the world,  openly preaching and implementing the doctrines of a "forward leaning" military strategy (i.e., "‘anticipatory self-defense’"),  unilateralism, and preemptive war (more accurately termed preventative war),  the George W. Bush administration has made a quantum leap in the direction of making perpetually undeclared war.  In fact, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy, was so outraged at the idea of making preventative war almost entirely on the basis of Executive assertions about a presumed threat that he minced no words to write:  "‘The president has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarming similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.  Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.’"   More detached in his verbiage but no less outraged by the implications of the Bush II administration’s doctrines and practices, scholar Richard Falk nails most of the wider meaning behind the current administration’s military approach to the rest of the world when he writes about the fundamental recklessness, even lawlessness, of the Bush II "doctrine of pre-emption." He explains:   "Pre-emption . . . validates striking first . . . on the basis of a shadowy intentions, alleged potential links to terrorist groups, supposed plans and projects to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and anticipations of possible future dangers.  It is a doctrine without limits, without accountability to the U.N. or international law, without any dependence on a collective judgment of responsible governments and, what is worse, without any convincing demonstration of practical necessity."   And the undeclared Iraq War of 2003 came.
And the coming of that war — hyped by distortions and exaggerated claims about the Iraqi regime’s military capabilities and the immediacy of its menacing intentions toward the U.S. people and their allies  — reveals the extent to which Congress has capitulated to militarism and to Executive power after decades of huge military spending and similar Congressional responses throughout the Cold War.  In describing Congress’s "‘week of shame’" (October 3-10, 2002), historian Chalmers Johnson notes that "both houses voted to give [via resolution] the president open-ended authority to wage war against Iraq (296 to 33 in the House and 77 to 23 in the Senate).  The president was given the unrestricted power to use any means, including military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq whenever he — and he alone — deemed ‘appropriate.’  There was no [real] debate.  Congressional representatives were too politically cowed even to address the issue."   More poignantly and with a greater sense of the historic danger that such a capitulation to Executive power represented, Kennan wrote: "I am extremely concerned about the shameful, almost total passivity of Congress during the period of preparations for our military attack on Iraq. . . .  Congress’s inaction is a dangerous precedent in executive-legislative relations.  In light of this precedent, future presidents will be tempted to seize virtually dictatorial powers under the title of commander in chief, and nothing in our history rules out the possibility of their yielding to that temptation.  This seems to be the meaning of the recent crisis."   After years of study, Johnson has come to share Kennan’s grave concern for the future of the American Republic, but he goes beyond him in his pessimism about the American future if we continue on the present path.  He writes more in despair than outrage:  "Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years.  Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx.  If present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States.  Their cumulative impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our Constitution.  First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans. . . . Second, there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an ‘executive branch’ of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency.  Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification of war, power, and the military legions.  Lastly, there will be bankruptcy."
But don’t worry, our leaders tell us.  They are in control, and we may safely surrender our democracy and sovereignty to them.  Indeed, one need only read Schlesinger’s 1973 book The Imperial Presidency to know that the U.S. Congress has a long tradition of granting imperial war making power to the Executive branch.  And today’s U.S. policy makers are part of a concomitant tradition of "open door" strategists who stretch back more than a hundred years.  Clearly, they are continuing that "concerted effort to adopt the nineteenth century ["open door"] policy to the expansive needs of a [twenty-first] century [post-]industrial America."  A vivid contemporary example of this devotion to the "open door" strategy is found in the actions undertaken by the U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer in Iraq.  Operating through his authority and that of the U.S.-created Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), he has "‘ordered’ reforms that will allow full foreign ownership of parts of the Iraqi economy" as well as "permit investors to take their profits out of the country, with ‘no requirements to reinvest the money in Iraq.’"   In addition, the CPA imposed a regressive flat tax on Iraqis. But, beyond that (it always goes a step further), on September 19, 2003, according to analyst Naomi Klein, Bremer issued "Order 39" to open the Iraqi economy to profit making private firms.  "It announced," she writes, "that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatized; decreed that foreign firms can retain 100 percent ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100 percent of their profits out of Iraq.  The Economist [naturally] declared the new rules a ‘capitalist dream.’"    In other words, Iraq has begun to resemble a strip mine to be raked over by insider and outsider investors.
Of course, the idea that this must be accomplished primarily through the means of the military violence that has been and is now being perpetuated is under challenge by some elements in U.S. leadership circles, but virtually no one in those circles disputes the strategic need for an "open door" to other people’s resources and markets.  The means are debated, but the goal remains the same.  And, unless there are profound changes, that will likely mean ongoing tension, conflict, and, sometimes, war whenever any group or regime threatens to close the door or undertakes such substantial socio-economic and political changes that the bulk of its domestic labor and riches might be redistributed to the primary benefit of its own people (or a smaller indigenous group) rather than to outside investors.  So, keeping a check on that potentiality — or the threatening example of that potentiality — and putting a lid on possible social upheavals from below requires U.S. military forces and recurrent U.S. interventionism.  No one has explained why this is so better or more bluntly than Thomas L. Friedman.  As a leading foreign affairs analyst and establishment thinker for the New York Times, he put it this way when he urged the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley to pay their taxes for a gigantic, post Cold War military machine to protect U.S. foreign markets.  In March of 1999, he wrote:  "Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. . . .  [And] we are the biggest beneficiaries and drivers of globalization. . . . That is why sustainable globalization . . . requires . . . the active involvement of the United States. . . .  The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.  And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. . . .  The global system cannot hold together without an activist . . . American foreign and defense policy.  Without America on duty, there will be no America Online."
And, so, the U.S. military-industrial complex  and world-wide military apparatus have the over-arching purpose of insuring the smooth functioning of the kind of world economy that allows the wealthy few to produce, trade, invest, extract raw materials, and make profits with as few restrictions and constraints on their activities as possible.  These privileged people are those who disproportionately dominate and benefit from transnational corporations, global financial and trade organizations, and their influence over vital domestic and international institutions.  Now, while the people in this international elite only make up between three and ten percent of humanity, — just 475 of the world's billionaires have more wealth than half of humanity, or three billion people  — they come from the upper class of the entire global community.  Indeed, as of 1999, there were 44,000 transnational corporations — with 280,000 affiliates — that had major investors from that international class of rich people.   Given such international financing and investing, as early as 1991 only 157 of the world's top 500 transnational corporations were U.S. based, and some of their stock was undoubtedly owned by wealthy stockholders from all over the world.
Such people, Americans included, follow mammon virtually wherever it leads them.  Economic analyst William Greider aptly summarized their leading axiom when he wrote that the "principles of finance capital [and multinational corporations] are maximizing return on capital without regard to national identity or political or social consequences."   Thus, it is not surprising that Vance D. Coffman, the CEO of America’s top defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, can be found explaining the virtues of "offsets" (i.e., helping the leaders of other countries offset the expense of buying expensive U.S. weapons systems by compensating them though the device of granting them and their societies other lucrative business contracts, jobs or technologies) to his stockholders.  After stating that offsets "will be a way of life for us in the long term," Coffman says, "I do think that we can do business internationally and make ourselves and our technologies available to other countries and thereby enlarge our business base as well."   Statistically, this type of compensation means that "offsets on major [overseas U.S.] arms deals now routinely average between 50% and 100% of the value of the original [weapons] sale."   In the late 1990s, it also meant that, after a time, the Lockheed Martin offsetting "coproduction arrangements," which it established in connection with its major weapons sales to Turkey and South Korea, churned out more F-16 fighter aircraft in those countries than in U.S.-based Lockheed Martin factories.   More importantly, as military spending analyst William D. Hartung noted, when just the "50% cost of average offsets" is added together with the annualized average of $7.8 billion of government subsidies already going to U.S. arms exporters, it means that the U.S. weapons contractors’ $12 billion in weapons sales in 1996 brought them a profit, but those sales cost the overall U.S. domestic economy a net loss of $1 to $2 billion.
Beyond those startling figures, corporate globalization, led by the U.S., continues apace.  With the corporate mergers and acquisition boom breaking "all records for both numbers and types of companies after the 1960s,"  and with mergers jumping 78% in just the period of 1997-1998, large scale national and transnational corporations are positioning themselves to engage more extensively in global markets.   Meanwhile, the facts show that the foreign direct investment by developed core industrial countries, like the U.S., in certain developing countries, like China, have risen from $20 billion in 1990 to $120 billion in 1997.   In such a context of international capital flows and investment, General Motors — one of the largest corporations in the world — owns 33% of Isuzu  and Ford owns 33% of Mazda while one of the premier American aircraft producers, Boeing Company, now has 20%-23% of its values produced abroad.   In this era of corporate globalization and accelerating outsourcing, this cross-border investing may suggest a future trend or pattern for all major corporations and investors in the world.  And, yet, the figures by economist Timothy Taylor demonstrate that, in the late 1990s, "U.S. investors [still] held 90 percent of their equity portfolios in U.S. stocks."   In fact, Taylor stated that "investors all over the world tend to stick to their home market."   And since national savings patterns are "generally quite close to national investment" patterns, it appears that the global financial market is not yet completely borderless.   These findings indicate that there is likely to be strong nationalist business pressures that continue to dominate U.S. policy makers.  And those powerful U.S. investors, along with important people in the export trade, mighty U.S.-based transnational corporations, and significant investors in foreign raw materials and mineral markets, will demand U.S. military support and protection on behalf of their special interests.  Besides, with daily global financial transactions — 98% "sheer speculation" and only 2% in long-term trade or investment — moving between $1.5 and $2 trillion,  international capitalism, as a whole, requires military protection.
So, to buttress this post-modern, "open door" global order, Americans beneath those in that upper tier of the top 1%-10% are incessantly propagandized and taxed to acquire ever newer and ever more weaponry  as well as to pay for troop deployments and military actions around the world.  Some, sadly, are taxed in blood and life.  Of course, underlying all that has been stated so far is the fact that all this is a rational response to the larger needs of an elite strata of U.S. society.   And McCormick clearly identified that underlying "national" interest and its requirements when he wrote that the U.S. has become a "rentier [dominated] nation."  That means that "[t]here is a tendency to overinvest and lend overseas and to live off dividends and interests (renting out one’s money, hence rentier)."   In such a nation, he notes, "The tendency [of the wealthy] to overinvest abroad is compounded by the tendency to overinvest in military production.  Essential to the hegemonic power’s capacity to act as a global policeman, military research and production receive favorable treatment from the government in the form of state subsidized higher profits."   Clearly, unless Americans are among the few upper class beneficiaries  of the military-industrial complex or corporate globalization, most of them are being horribly victimized by a steady stream of undeclared wars and the costs which they entail for almost everyone.
And, yet, in this day and age, Americans would be wise to recall that the U.S. Defense Department's own 1997 study has declared that "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States."    Thus, as the recent Director of the conservative Cato Institute's Defense Policy Studies sagely concluded:  "There is a way to significantly reduce the chances of an attack on the American home land by terrorists using weapons of mass terror . . . [The U.S. must cease] provocative overseas interventions . . . [and] should adopt a policy of military restraint.  That policy entails intervening only as a last resort."   So, there is another option.  But it means that we must stop giving our elite Executive branch policy makers a free hand in making wars.  In our democracy today, we need to renounce the maxim that guided John Jay and seems to guide so many other decision makers in our country.  That maxim is that "‘the people who own the country ought to govern it.’"   No.  No.  Instead, let us assert anew that ours is a government "of the people, by the people and for the people."  And if we follow that principle and if we stop, as Abraham Lincoln admonished us to do, placing "our President where kings have always stood,"  we stand a much better chance of not only avoiding the worst that may lie ahead but of saving our Republic and of helping to enable real democracy and self-determination everywhere on earth.
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 PAGE   22
 
 

Notes On Making vs. Declaring War, III

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, No. 69, New York:  Mentor Books, [1787-1788] 1961, 417-418.  Hamilton’s emphasis.
  George Kennan, Letter to the Editor.  Washington Post, March 25, 2003, p. A8, Sec. B.
  Beyond the explanations and descriptions offered in this series of essays, it might be useful to clarify what is meant by the terminology of "monopoly capitalism."  Harry Magdoff did just that when he wrote:  "It is customary to think of competition and monopoly as direct opposites.  This is quite proper according to dictionary definitions.  However . . . the terms competition and monopoly are used [by some analysts] to designate different phases of capitalist society.  In neither of these phases is there either pure competition or pure monopoly.  Indeed . . . competition exists within the monopoly phase.  Competition is between giants of the same industry (within and outside the nation) and between industries" as well as between smaller firms.  See Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism:  The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy, New York:  Monthly Review, 1969, 64.  In other words, the nature of capitalism in its monopoly phase is that of an economic and political system that is dominated by needs and imperatives of highly concentrated and highly centralized, large-scale firms.  Consider these statistics from the turn of the 20th century as a mark of that rapidly centralizing and consolidating capitalist system:  Between 1897-1904, 5,300 U.S. industrial firms were consolidated into just 318 firms who held 40% of the manufacturing capacity of the country; see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, New York:  Harper, 1995, 343.   In 1900, just 1% of the U.S. population owned more than wealth than the remaining 99%; see Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, New York:  Random, 1952, 57.  By 1914, John D. Rockefeller and John P. Morgan sat on a combined total of 85 separate corporate boards of directors in what is known as systemic interlocking directorates; see Zinn, 252.  During this period, International Harvester Corporation (on whose board of directors sat J.P. Morgan) was protected by tariffs against foreign competition and it produced 85% of all farm machinery in the U.S.; see Zinn, 251.  In 1900, J.P. Morgan controlled 50% of U.S. railroad mileage; see Zinn, 250.  Even earlier, in the 1880s, "small" manufacturing firms had a net worth of under $2 million each and "large" to "very large" companies were valued at $5 million to $10 million, but "‘each of the country’s ten largest railroads had more than $100 million of net worth and the largest of them [i.e., the Pennsylvania Railroad] had over $200 million.’"  See Morton J. Horwitz, Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960, New York:  Oxford UP, 1992, 95.  In 1890, over 50% of the nation’s wealth was held by 1% of US families (up from 29% in 1860); see Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy:  A Political History of the American Rich, New York:  Broadway Books, 2002, 43.  According to Phillips, "by the 1890s the goliaths of U.S. business, railroading, and finance had gained de facto control over many state legislatures, the federal judiciary, and the U.S. Senate."  See Phillips, xvi.
  David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor:  The Workplace, the State, and American labor activism, 1865-1925, United Kingdom:  Cambridge UP, 1987, 69.
  Thomas J. McCormick, China Market:  America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901, Chicago:  Ivan R. Dee, 1990, 28.  Cited as McCormick, China Market.
  John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, New York:  Arno Press, [1908] 1973, 63.
  Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, Sixth Edition, New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1995, 210.
  Michael Parenti, Against Empire, San Francisco:  City Lights Books, 1995, 40.
  Zinn, 353.
  US Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, Washington, D.C.:  U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975, 231. The GNP figures were listed on table "Series F 71-97" as $12.3 billion for the period 1887-1891, and $38.9 billion for the period 1912-1916 ("Current Prices:  1869-1931").
  Magdoff, 47.
  William Woodruff, Impact of Western Man:  A Study of Europe’s role in the World Economy, 1750-1960,  New York:  St. Martin’s Press, [1966] 1967, 150, 151, n. 21, 150, n. 1, 155, n.1.  Woodruff’s tables and notes list U.S. foreign investments as $700 million in 1900, and $3.5 billion in 1914.  Latin American historian Juan Gonzales, noted that, as of 1914, nearly 50% of these U.S. foreign investments went into Latin American countries.  See Juan Gonzales, "Fifty Years of Empty Promises," Columbia College Today, Vol. 27, No. 2, (December 2000), 27.
  Zinn, 353.
  Norman Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics:  America’s Response to War and Revolution, New York, Oxford UP, 1968, 13-19.  This citation covers all information in this paragraph.
  Magdoff, 55.  Those countries were identified as "Others," and their combined share of the world’s manufactured exports were 12.5% in 1913, and 18.2% in 1929.
  Ibid., 56.
  Joesph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, 53, 248.
  Ibid., 247.
  Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:  Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York:  Henry Holt, 2004, 270-271.
  Ibid., 262.
  Magdoff, 42.
  Johnson, 153, 154.
  Eli Jellenc, "New Bases for a New Global Intervention Strategy," Defense Monitor, Vol. XXXII, No. 3 (July/August, 2003), 5, 7.
  George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America:  A Narrative History, Vol. II, Sixth Brief Edition, New York:  W.W. Norton, 2004, 835.
  Irvin Bernstein, Lean Years:  A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933, New York:  Da Capo, 1988, 54.
  Woodruff, 150, 151, n.21 and n. 23.
  Source Documents at www.usd.edu/~sbucklin/primary/taftkatsura.htm.
  Source Documents at www.usd.edu/~sbucklin/primary/roottakahira.htm.
 Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century:  United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After, Second Edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., [1989] 1995, 32.  Cited as America’s.
 Ibid., 32.
 Ibid., 33.
 Ibid., xiii.
 Ibid.
  Ibid., xiii-xiv.  The U.S. policy makers who labored to produce this particular global economic order, as McCormick states, were economic internationalists who "viewed nationalism as the bane of the 20th century — the underlying cause of both world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the epic revolutions in Russia, China and Mexico."  See McCormick, America’s, xiii.
  Following in the intellectual/scholarly footsteps of American historian William Appleman Williams (The Contours of American History, 1951, 363-370;  The Roots of the Modern American Empire, 1969, 377-379), McCormick explains this point in the following concise manner:  "[T]he Open Door Policy . . . represented America’s  basic response to the . . . question of how to expand.  Instead of closed doors, [it’s] open markets; instead of political domination, [it’s] economic hegemony; instead of large-scale colonialism, [it’s] informal empire.  In short, a most interesting hybrid of anti-colonialism and economic imperialism."  See McCormick, China Market, 128.  With regard to Great Britain, McCormick adds these pertinent remarks:  "[T]he promulgation of the Hay [Open Door] Doctrine did pass the scepter of open door champion from Great Britain to the United States. . . . Now, as Britain’s power wavered . . . the United States made a concerted effort to adopt the nineteenth-century policy to the expansive needs of a twentieth-century industrial America."  See McCormick, China Market, 127.
  Harvey Goldberg, Class lecture on "U.S. and Vichy France" in Contemporary Societies.  History. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974.
  James E. Miller, United States and Italy, 1940-1950:  The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization.  Chapel Hill, NC:  North Carolina UP, 1986, 96, 98-101, 104-105, 113, 132, 135-137, 158-160.  After bringing the Parri government down, the U.S.-supported Alcide DeGasperi government was established with massive amounts of U.S. aid flowing to it.  See Ibid., 208-210.
  McCormick America’s, 55.
  Ibid., 155.
  Ibid.,  55-56.  My emphasis.  Note well, that the American negotiators with the British played some real hard ball in getting the British to open up their markets throughout the British empire as the main price for obtaining that loan.  The Americans wanted into that closed, British market area of the sterling block, and, early in 1946, the British seemed to be using the principle of "non-convertibility" to keep them out and to acquire the money that they could use to rebuild their bankrupted economy after World War II.  By employing the principle of "non-convertibility" in all parts of the British empire, the British were requiring that all the foreign currencies that had accumulated in India, Australia, Egypt, and throughout the Commonwealth could only be converted into a special form of pound sterling.  This converted pound sterling, of course, would be used to buy British goods and services, and, so, help to put England back on her financial feet.  But the Americans cut off lend lease to the vulnerable, newly formed Labor government.  Then, in the 1946 loan negotiations, the American negotiators demanded, as a condition of the loan, that the British end their efforts to retain their closed empire and end the principle of non-convertibility.
  L.S. Amery, The Washington Loan Agreement.  London:  McDonald, 1946, vi-viii, xi.
  Ernest R. May, ed. American Cold War Strategy:  Interpreting NSC 68.  New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1993, 5.
  Ibid.  Kennan maintained that the Soviet leaders and communist parties throughout the world would strive to:  "‘a.  To undermine general political and strategic potential of major western powers. . . . b.  On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts . . . to weaken power and influence of Western Powers on colonial backward, or dependent peoples. . . .  c.  Where individual governments stand in path of Soviet purposes pressure will be brought for their removal from office. . . .  d.  In foreign countries Communists will, as a rule, work toward destruction of all forms of personal independence, economic, political, or moral. . . .  e.  Everything possible will be done to set major Western Powers against each other. . . .  f.  In general, all Soviet efforts on unofficial international plane will be negative and destructive in character, designed to tear down sources of strength beyond reach of Soviet control.’" See Ibid.
  George F. Kennan, ("X").  "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs.  25 (July 1947): 575.
  Ibid., 576.
  Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam:  From World War II through Dienbienphu.  New York:  W.W. Norton, 1988, 69-70.
  Ibid., 64-65.  See also James S. Olson, and Randy Roberts.  Where the Domino Fell:  America and Vietnam, 1945 to 1995.  Third Edition.  St. James, NY:  Brandywine P., 1999, 24.
  Olson 24-26.
  Gardner, 60, 61-62, 69-70.  See also, Olson 25.
  Harvey Goldberg, Class lecture on "French Imperialism in Vietnam" in Contemporary Societies.  History.  University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974.
  Olson 26.
  Gardner 66-72.
  Ibid., 69, n. 51, 366.  My emphasis.
  Olson 38.  By the end of 1953, the U.S. was supplying the French Indochina war effort with $500 million annually, and, rising to $1.1 billion in 1954, that military aid represented nearly 78 percent of France’s war expenditures in 1954.            .
  Gardner  77-78, 86-87, 115-116, 118, 139, 152, 153.
  McCormick, America’s, 21, 75.
  Ibid., 75.
  Harry S. Truman, "Address before a joint session of Congress," March 12, 1947, American History Sources, 1946-Present, Brandywine Press supplement, 3, online at   HYPERLINK http://www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1947DOCTrumandoctrine.htm;   www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1947DOCTrumandoctrine.htm;  Internet.
  Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," 566-582.
  NSC 68:  United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950), A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950 (Marked "Top Secret" and dated, above the table of contents, April 7, 1950).  This document is located in May, ed., American Cold War Strategy:  Interpreting NSC 68.
  The almost 60 page NSC 68 was primarily authored, in 1950, by 43 year old Paul H. Nitze, under the supervision of Secretary of State Dean Acheson.  It was declassified from its "Top Secret" status only in 1975.  There is no analyst who has so acerbically highlighted some of the essential meanings and features of NSC 68 better than author Noam Chomsky.  So, his extracts from it and his analysis of it are worth quoting at length.  He writes:  "The `compulsion' of the  `slave state' [i.e., USSR] is to achieve `the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society' in every corner of the world that is not yet `subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin.'  Its `implacable purpose' is to `eliminate the challenge of freedom' everywhere, gaining `total power over all men' in the slave state itself and  `absolute authority over the rest of the world.'  By its very nature, the slave state is `inescapably militant.'  Hence no accommodation or peaceful settlement is even thinkable.  We must therefore act to `foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system' and ‘hasten [its] decay' by all means short of war (which is too dangerous for us).  We must avoid diplomacy and negotiations [unless the Soviet Union is substantially weakened] except as a device to placate public opinion because any agreements ‘would reflect present realities and would therefore be unacceptable, if not disastrous, to the United States and the rest of the free world,’ though after the success of a ‘roll back’ strategy we may ‘negotiate a settlement with the Soviet Union (or a successor state or states).’
The authors concede that the fiendish enemy is far weaker than its adversaries in every relevant respect.  This disparity confers further advantages on the enemy:  being so backward, it ‘can do more with less,’ at once midget and superman.  Our situation is thus truly desperate. . . .
The innate evil of the slave state is highlighted by comparison with the United States, a nation of almost unimaginable perfection.  Its ‘fundamental purpose’ is ‘to `to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual,' and to safeguard these values throughout the world.  Our free society is marked by `marvelous diversity,' `deep tolerance,' `lawfulness' . . . [and] a commitment `to create and maintain an environment in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers.'  The perfect society ‘does not fear, it welcomes, diversity’ and ‘derives its strength from its hospitality even to antipathetic ideas,' as illustrated by the McCarthyite hysteria of the day, perhaps. . . . ‘The essential tolerance of our world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations are assets of potentially enormous influence,' particularly among those who have been lucky enough to experience these qualities at first hand, as in Latin America, which has so benefited from ‘our long continuing endeavors to create and now develop the Inter-American system. . . .’" (26, 27)
NSC 68 [then ironically] warns that we must overcome such weaknesses in our society as the `excess of a permanently open mind,' `the excess of tolerance,' and `dissent among us.'  We must ‘distinguish between the necessity for tolerance and the necessity for just suppression' [of presumably subversive ideas]. . . .  It is particularly important to insulate our `labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media for influencing opinion' from the `evil work' of the Kremlin." (57-58).  Such is how NSC 68 goes from praising the open society to censoring its openness.  See Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New.  New York:  Columbia UP, 1994, 26, 27, 57-58.
  Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation:  My Years in the State Department.  New York:  W.W. Norton, 1969, 222, 374, 375.
  "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," September 2002, 6, 14, 29, 30.  It must be stated that the George W. Bush’s administration’s National Security Strategy does not stand alone in its general goals, only in its greater candor.  Among its many antecedents there is the 1998-1999, bi-partisan Commission on National Security/21st Century whose aim was to outline "a strategy for the United States to ‘remain the principal military power in the world’ in the coming century."  Moreover, to insure a continued U.S. dominance on earth and in space, this 1999 report concluded that "‘U.S. military spending will have to rise dramatically.’"  See James M. Cypher, "Return of the Iron Triangle:  The New Military Buildup," Dollars and Sense, 2002, 1,   HYPERLINK http://www.dollarandsense.org/2002/cypher0102.htm   www.dollarandsense.org/2002/cypher0102.htm .  Meanwhile, among professional military people and strategists, the idea of obtaining global military dominance is simply the natural extension of the basic military objective of planning and striving for dominance on the battlefield and in war as a whole.  As for current U.S. military strategy, the antecedents for the global military objective stated in the 2002 National Security Strategy are found in the 1960s military doctrine of "flexible response," and, more recently, in the military doctrine of "full spectrum dominance" embodied in the Department of Defense's strategy documents entitled "Joint Vision 2010" and updated in "Joint Vision 2020." As detailed by these excerpts from "Joint Vision 2020," "full spectrum dominance" is nothing short of the military strategy for maintaining and enlarging U.S. interests in the "open door" global, free market, capitalist system.  In its words:  "The ultimate goal of our military force is to accomplish the objectives directed by the National Command Authorities.  For the joint force of the future [i.e., Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps], this goal will be achieved through full spectrum dominance — the ability of US forces, operating unilaterally or in combination with multinational and interagency partners, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations. . . . Additionally, given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas present forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance" because "the global interests and responsibilities of the United States will endure, and there is no indication that threats to those interests . . . will disappear."  See U.S. Department of Defense, General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Office of Primary Responsibility:  Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, J5; Strategy Division  "Joint Vision 2020," Washington, D.C.:  US Government Printing Office, June 2000, 6, 1.
  Jeffery Record, "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism," Strategic Studies Institute,"  Carlisie, PA:  Publications Office U.S. Army War College, December 2003, 3,   HYPERLINK http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.htm   www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.htm  or http://www.carlisle. army.mil/ssi/ .
  Ibid., 32.
  Record described the difference between preventive and preemptive war by explaining that "according to the Defense Department’s official definition of the term, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was a preventive war, which traditionally has been indistinguishable from aggression, not a preemptive attack, which in contrast to preventive war has international legal sanction under strict conditions.  Preemption is ‘an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.’  Preventive war is ‘a war initiated in the belied that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater risk.’"  See Record, 49, n. 51 citing Joint Publication 1-02, "DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms," Washington, DC:  Department of Defense, April 12, 2002, 333, 336.
  Johnson, 286.
  Richard Falk, The New Bush Doctrine," The Nation, July 15, 2002, 1,   HYPERLINK http://www.thenation.com/   www.thenation. com/ docPrint.mhtml?i=20020715&s=falk.
  Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Mathews, and George Perkovich, "WMD in Iraq:  Evidence and Implications," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004, 13-14, 47-61.
  Johnson, 292.
  George Kennan, Letter to the Editor.  Washington Post, March 25, 2003, p. A8, Sec. B.
  Johnson, 285.
  McCormick, China Market, 127.
  "President Bush’s Remarks on Democracy in the Middle East:  What About Iraq?"  Center for American Progress, November 2003,   HYPERLINK http://www.centerfor   www.centerforamerican progess.org .
  See Naomi Klein, "Bring Halliburton Home," The Nation (November 24, 2003), 1,    HYPERLINK http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?I=20031124&s=klein   www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?I=20031124&s=klein  .  Klein, however, notes that these so-called "reforms" "clearly violate" the "Hague Regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, both ratified by the United States), as well as the U.S. Army’s own code of war" because those documents state that an occupying power is only an "‘administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates . . . [and] must safeguard the capital of these properties’" not sell them.  Likewise, she finds that "the U.S. Army’s Law of Land Warfare states that ‘the occupant does not have the right of sale or unqualified use of [nonmilitary] property’"  See Ibid., 1, 2.
 Thomas L. Friedman, "Manifesto for a Fast World:  The American Burden,"  New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1999, 42, 43, 84, 96, 97.
  President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term military-industrial complex when he warned Americans to be on guard against its unwarranted influence over the U.S. society in his 1961 "Farewell Address to the Nation."  He said, "The conjunction of immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.  The total influence – economic, political, and even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. . . .  In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. "  See Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Farewell Address to the Nation," 17 January 1961, American History Sources, 1946-Present, Brandywine Press supplement, 2, online at   HYPERLINK http://www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1951DOCEisenhower   www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1951DOC Eisenhower MIcomplex.htm; Internet.
  Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh with Thea Lee and the Institute for Policy Studies, Field Guide to the Global Economy, New York, New Press, 2000, 53.
  Ibid., 66.
  William Greider, One World Ready or Not:  The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1997, 66.
  Ibid., 25.
  Vance D. Coffman, Interview in Lockheed Martin Today, March 1997, 2, www.lockheedmartin.com/files3/lmtoday/9703/coffman.html.
  William D. Hartung, "Welfare for Weapons Dealers 1998:  The Hidden Cost of NATO Expansion," A Special Report by the Arms Trade Center, World Policy Institute at the New School on Global Beat (March 1998), 30, www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/nato/ hartung030498.html.  Cited as Hartung, "Welfare:  NATO Expansion."
  William D. Hartung, "Welfare for Weapons Dealers:  The Hidden Costs of the Arms Trade," World Policy Papers (1995), 33, 34, www.cdi.org/ArmsTradeData base/Arm…s_The_hidden_Costs_of_the_Arms_Trade.txt.
  Hartung, "Welfare:  NATO Expansion," 31-32.
  Douglas Dowd, "Bankers and Globalization, Past and Present:  From Pinstriped Conservatism to 7/24 Speculation," Research Paper delivered at conference entitled Reflections on the Social Impact of American Multinational Corporations at University of Stendhal, Grenoble, France, January 11, 2002, 2,   HYPERLINK http://www.vaivecchio.com/New   www.vaivecchio.com/NewFiles/articles/ pastpreslo.html.
  Anderson, 67.
  Ibid., 17, 19. According to Field Guide to the Global Economy, foreign direct investment is defined as "purchasing a lasting interest in, and a degree of influence over the management of a business in another country."
  Greider, 182.
  Ibid., 131.
  Timothy Taylor, "The Truth about Globalization," The Public Interest, 2,   HYPERLINK http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article2.html   www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article2.html .
  Ibid.  Taylor listed the percent of home market equity portfolios held by national investors in those portfolios as:  Canadian 88%, Japanese as 94%, German and United Kingdom investors as about 80%.  See Taylor, 2.
  Ibid.
  Dowd, 2.
  Relating this specifically to the military-industrial complex and the national security state, defense analyst Robert Higgs, writes in the conservative Cato Institute’s journal Policy Analysis:  "Manipulation of information is [not only] central to what modern governing elites do, [but] on defense-related and foreign policy matters, the scope for information management and opinion leadership by the national security elite is much wider." Given that advantage, the military bass and their corporate counterparts in the arms manufacturing business have used the best Madison Avenue advertising/propaganda techniques "to get the customer [i.e., taxpayer] to buy something he or she doesn’t need for a price he or she probably can’t afford."  See Robert Higgs, "U.S. Military Spending in the Cold War Era:  Opportunity Costs, Foreign Crises, and Domestic Constraints,"  Policy Analysis no. 114 (November 30, 1998), 14, www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa114.html.
  Theories and arguments about the U.S. capitalist state — who controls it, for what purpose, and whose interest it serves — are voluminous and endless.  Still, they cluster around two basic and contrasting theories about the way the U.S. political system functions.  These contrasting theories have been termed "elitist" and "pluralist."  And, while the argument over which one — or which variant of either — is likely to rage forever, political scientist G. David Garson's conclusion is the closest in reflecting the functioning reality of the current U.S. political economy.  Garson wrote:  "If America is elitist, it is elitist in a pluralistic way, or, if pluralist, then pluralist in a way that benefits an elite. . . . [P]luralist theorists," he continues, "obscure the manner in which government policies systematically favor a business-based elite.  America is," he flatly states, "an elitist political economy."  See G. David Garson, Group Theory of Politics, Beverly Hills, A:  Sage, 1978, 207.
  McCormick, America’s, 6.
  Ibid., 7.
  Generally speaking, they are within the top 1%-10% of US households.
 Department of Defense, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Technology, "The Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task force on DoD Responses to Transnational Threats, Vol. I, Final Report, Washington, D.C., October 1997, 15.
 Ivan Eland, "Tilting at Windmills:  Post-Cold War Military Threats to U.S. Security," Policy Analysis, No. 332, February 8, 1999, 34,   HYPERLINK http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-332es.html)   www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-332es.html .
  Frank Monaghan, John Jay, New York:  Bobbs-Merrill, 1935, 323.
  Abraham Lincoln to William H. Herndon, February 15, 1848.  Letter in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, editor Roy P. Basler, et al, Vol. I, 451-452.