[Reader-list] Fwd: Should the US Be Bombed? -Tom Engelhardt

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Date: 26 August 2010
Subject: Should the US Be Bombed? -Tom Engelhardt



Should the US Be Bombed? | CommonDreams.org




Should the US Be Bombed?

The Nonexistent Debate Over American Weapons Proliferation Policies

by Tom Engelhardt

For Star Trek fans, the news is grim.  Some set of maniacs on planet
Earth is ready to take all the pleasure out of that low-budget TV show
and its ensuing set of big-budget movies.  They are actually planning
someday to manufacture phasers, ones large enough to vaporize incoming
missiles and others small enough to be hand-held and, if not vaporize,
then inflict terrible pain.  Sooner or later, they expect to beam them
down to this planet and set them to work.

Oh, sorry, those aren't maniacs; they're the weaponizers at defense
giant Raytheon (in conjunction with the U.S. military).  As the
National, the English-language newspaper of the United Arab Emirates,
reported recently, Raytheon is in an arms race with Boeing to produce
such weaponry perhaps for the coming decade.

One of the strangest aspects of these last years when two
administrations, the U.S. intelligence community, and the American
media have focused on, obsessed about, speculated wildly about, and
generally chewed over a single potential proliferation story -- Iran's
nuclear program -- is how little other weapons proliferation stories
even qualify as news. I'm excepting, of course, the usual alarms over
possible nuclear weapons developments in North Korea, Syria, and the
like.  And I'm certainly not referring here to the estimated 200 to
400 nuclear weapons in Israel's undeclared arsenal that hardly rate a
peep in our media.

I'm thinking about us.  We are, after all, the numero uno weapons
proliferator on the planet.  I'm thinking about -- to pick a few
weapons systems almost at random -- the U.S. Air Force's next
generation bomber, an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or the
truly futuristic bomber, "a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at
hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere," on the drawing
boards for 2035.  I'm talking about the coming generations of ever
more powerful, ever more independent pilot-less drones which the Air
Force is now planning out until 2047.

As with the drones today, the story of those Raytheon "phasers," large
and small, if they ever come on line, will be reasonably predictable.
Ever since the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, the world has been
experiencing an arms race of one.  A single great power, the United
States, continues to develop new weapons technology, often for the
distant future, that is staggeringly advanced and strikingly
destructive (potentially reaching, in some cases, an almost nuclear
level of local devastation).  It continues to act, that is, as if it
were still in an arms race with another threatening superpower.

Once our latest wonder weapon is developed, whatever it may be, it is
sooner or later sold to allies -- after all, we now control almost 70%
of what's still dubbed the "global arms trade" -- while other states
rush to develop their own versions of the same.  (Just last week, for
instance, Iran proudly unveiled its first "drone bomber.")  Sooner or
later, such weaponry will predictably drop down to the level of
non-state groups.  Just wait for the first "suicide" drone to hit
something American, or the first terrorist to unsheathe a "phaser" on
some airplane.  Then, of course, a drone- or phaser-proliferation
panic will set in, "rogue states" will be threatened for having the
nerve to develop such weapons, and we will redouble our anti-drone or
anti-phaser research, while our media discusses appropriately
aggressive actions that need to be taken ASAP.

Hence, Iran's present nuclear adventure (which, by the way, began in
1957, thanks to the Eisenhower administration's Atoms for Peace
program).  Check out Tony Karon's deconstruction at TomDispatch.com of
the present "debate" over whether to bomb Iran back to the pre-nuclear
age, and while you're doing so, take a second to wonder why there is
no media debate over whether to bomb the U.S.  After all, we are the
planet's foremost weapons proliferator; we have a reputation for using
what we produce and parceling it out as well; and, as it happens,
we're still investing money in improvements to our vast nuclear
arsenal.

© 2010 TomDispatch.com

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of
Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a
novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His most recent book is The
American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).