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Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11

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Sweet Land of Militarism


by Karen Kwiatkowski

Resurgence of the Warfare State delivers a ferocious punch to those who prefer their states massive and their wars, as Mr. Bush might say, catastrophically successful.

The rest of us, preferring our state small, our leviathan caged, and our wars as a last resort rather than feel-good fixes, will savor Dr. Robert Higgs' latest contribution to modern history and politics. Resurgence is a carefully selected set of powerful essays, organized into eight parts, each focusing on a unique aspect of the modern, post 9-11 American warfare state.

The book begins with an important post-9/11 interview conducted by Michael Lynch of Reason. Dr. Higgs, an economic historian who is Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and editor of their superb journal, The Independent Review, briefly explains the themes of his earlier books, Crisis and Leviathan (1987) and Against Leviathan (2004). What we know, thanks to Higgs' lucid presentation and analysis, is that national crises in American lead to bigger, more invasive, and more hubristic government, the kind that doesn't go away after the crisis fades.

In Resurgence, it becomes clear that some national crises are more equal than others in delivering the government goods of more centralization, more spending, more interference in and control over the private life of American citizens. 9/11 was invaluable and has shown itself to be an unsurpassed opportunity for government growth. Just as after the Japanese attack on the sleepy naval base at Pearl Harbor, America is again a super-animated warfare state.

Shortly after 9-11, Dr. Higgs predicted "an overwhelming public demand for government to act." He saw clearly that new agencies would form and old agencies would find creative new missions. He forecasted that government would graciously bail out major domestic industries of airlines and insurance, call up reservists, make war abroad, and clamp down on civil liberties at home. "Bombs and missiles" would be dropped, he warned.

Of course, he was right in every case. The first set of chapters in Resurgence draws on the wisdom of James Madison, who said, "...of all the enemies of liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded....No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." Of course, preserving universal "freedom" is repeatedly voiced by the White House.

Yet Vice President Cheney is also quoted by Higgs, with this terrifying gem, "[The present war] may never end....It's a new normalcy." This new normalcy is the warfare state, and Madison's grave insight becomes Cheney's glee. Where Madison's Congress may have been contentious and worried about excess executive power, Cheney's Congress after 9-11 was generous and genuflecting toward the White House, filled with admiration for the architects of war on liberty at home and on various sets of unfortunate villains abroad.

Is Washington entirely to blame? Higgs also explains, sometimes humorously, how business and the corporate world in American has adapted to Washington and enjoined the leviathan over the past 100 years. Woodrow Wilson, a war promoter abroad and freedom fighter at home, helped create the modern American economic landscape, a vista that brings the eye inexorably to Halliburton's 9-11 boosted billion dollar no-bid contracts to help out the "war" effort. American defense, and to a lesser extent, energy and banking industries are fourth-generation heirs of what General Smedley Butler called "the racket." 9-11 may have been a surprise to many, but in many ways it represents just one more on-ramp to the government till, and one more hull-crushing iceberg for the ship of state's financial and constitutional accountability.

Higgs shows how our corporate and political culture confuses free market competition with lobbying a greedy Congress and wooing an obese federal bureaucracy for programs, legal favors and contracts. But beyond economics, he presents an alarmingly clear picture of the very real costs to American values and the so-called American way of life. Included in the collection is "The Pretense of Airport Security," where he writes,

The TSA's program serves one political purpose above all others. It routinely abases and humiliates the entire population, rendering us docile and compliant...[T]he entire population without exception is treated as suspected criminals and made to feel like inmates in a concentration camp.

Certainly, the recent deadly shooting of an unarmed man trying desperately to depart an airplane just before takeoff reminds us of our correct role as sheepizens. The robust and repeated federal defense of the TSA was that the marshals were "just doing what they were trained to do" to keep the rest of us safe. Safe and docile, like inmates in a national concentration camp.

Dr. Higgs provides some helpful information for taxpayers, not just on the nature of government accretion after 9-11, but the degree. Did you actually believe that the defense budget was around $430 billion last year? Actually, Higgs provides the real numbers, and it was nearly twice that. Just like every year after 9-11.

Higgs has not written a book suitable for bedtime reading with the children. This stuff is downright frightening, and as the book progresses from the programmatic and systemic realities that serve as pylons for the warfare state, he explores the philosophy and attitudes that inform the current warfare state administration, and the tragic and deadly spawn of these philosophies and attitudes. He explores President Bush's "Faith-Based Foreign Policy" and "Crackpot Realism." In another era, this might be just good fun at the expense of a hapless president. But Higgs carefully builds a bridge to the dark side of our present and past foreign policies, to the lie-based invasion of Iraq. Incidentally, the crackpot realist himself, Mr. Bush, recently admitted publicly that it was indeed a lie-based invasion. True to Higgs' characterization, Bush claimed he would do it all just the same, lies or no lies. Well, of course he would! America is a warfare state, and as Resurgence of the Warfare State shows in a myriad of ways, that's exactly how the current administration and its political and industrial enablers like it.

Perhaps the most painful part of the book is the last two sections that focus on the invasion of Iraq, and the aftermath. The attacks of 9-11 transformed the long held neoconservative dream of a US-controlled Iraq into reality. Although the justifications for the conquering of Iraq were lies, the American media, the Congress, and the people at home were at their most intellectually and emotionally vulnerable after 9-11. Those who had long planned the invasion and the power shift in the Middle East had their "new Pearl Harbor" and they used it. Higgs writes poignantly here about the crimes in Iraq that go unreported in the American media, and in a few invaluable pages the reader is left with a striking sense of the magnitude of pain and agony we have inflicted on average Iraqis.

The book concludes with an assessment on the success of the Iraq war for America, an evaluation of this particular post 9-11 foreign policy. The message throughout Resurgence is that post 9-11 trends and anti-Constitutional tendencies aren't giving us more safety, security, prosperity or freedom. However, Higgs explains that in logical and practical terms, the war in Iraq has been extremely successful and profitable in every way, for the warfare state.

How does Robert Higgs add to the growing cacophony of critiques of government growth in general and the Bush administration specifically? There are three key reasons to read this book, send a few to your dearest friends, and buy one for your favorite teenager. First, it is easy to read, in whole or in parts. His explanations make sense, his historical research is relevant, and his style is to frequently punctuate with a memorable phrase or blazingly insightful observation. Second, while Resurgence is fuel for the libertarian activist, it also works for the conservative aiming to rein in the neoconservative hijack of the Republican Party, or the liberal who is frustrated with the lack of a moral spine in the Democratic Party. For the humanitarian, there is emotional outrage tempered by logic, and for the statistician and economist, there are facts and numbers, presented in a thematically connected and eye-opening way. Third, this book has staying power. Robert Higgs has been infuriatingly accurate in his predictions of just about everything that happened in this country after 9-11. Resurgence, more than anything else I've read, also helps provide the conceptual framework of the current and coming phase of the American experiment - a full-fledged warfare state. While Higgs, as in previous books, offers little in the way of solutions to the problems, or a roadmap for reversal of the warfare state, he has built a house on a rock, and there is a sense that understanding how the warfare state works will be the key to breaking it down, or at least surviving its future collapse.

In an extraordinary way, by gripping the reader in the drama and new governmental directions of the post 9-11 period, Resurgence of the Warfare State is almost a novella. There is a Goliath-like villain with an unavoidable, inevitable, seemingly unstoppable agenda. There is a heroic but lonely protagonist, David-like in his honesty and clear-eyed courage. As with a worthy novella, afterwards we enjoy a bittersweet moment of time-suspended reflection on what we have read, what we have discovered, and the unanswered questions that remain. In Resurgence of the Warfare State, Robert Higgs has provided something very special that is well worth buying, reading, sharing, and re-reading, and talking about with your friends, your neighbors, and your children.

December 20, 2005

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

Reading the collection of short essays in Higg's slender volume is a reminder that not all the opposition to America's growing war machine comes from the left. There remains a solid core of opposition from the right, anchored in Libertarian principles and voiced in Congress by representative Ron Paul of Texas. Though the material here is neither extensive nor deep, and is too often repetitive, it does serve as a useful reminder of the pre-Cold War Republican party. That was the party of Robert Taft, Main Street America, and small business. They opposed big government, big taxes, international meddling, large standing armies and unionized workers. Their historic defeat came in 1952 with the triumph of the Eisenhower wing and its Wall Street backers. Now, it appears, what's left of that point of view has migrated from the Republicans to the Libertarians, at least as an ideological force.

The articles here are uniformly brief, pungent, and incisive, occasionally rising to an eloquence, as in Chapter 20, on America's War Party. There's also an informative chapter on the hidden true size of the Defense budget, showing how deeply our economy is mired in imperial expenditures. The biggest drawback lies with the format which works against the kind of analytic depth some readers may prefer. The book really works best as a collection of op-ed pieces. So, if you're looking for an anti-empire perspective in short, sweet doses that doesn't mirror the Chomskyite left, then this may be your ticket.

"Resurgence of the Warfare State" is a compilation of 47 of Higgs's essays written in reaction to the outpouring of newspeak, disinformation, and propaganda in support of information warfare (IW) since 9/11. With wit and a sense of tragic despair born out of a nostalgic love for an America long gone, Higgs takes us through the last four years of the British fifth column inside Washington, District of Criminals - the Bush Crime Family and its anti-capitalist but very corporatist administration.

Higgs's chronicles of American-powered British empire range from political commentary to unorthodox kinds of prose such as poetry. He says in his Introduction that "At every step, of course, the perpetrators have boldy proclaimed that black is white; that the road to peace must be paved with gravestones; that the 'reconstruction' of a city or even an entire country begins by obliterating it with bombs, rockets, shells, and bullets; that 'liberation' takes the form of heavily armed soldiers bursting into homes and mosques and dragging people off to torture them in hideous prisons, then blaming everything on "terrorists" who include, it turns out, little children now with their eyes blinded, their skin burned, or their limbs blown off by U.S. bombs and bullets."

The first essay is titled "Glory Days for Government: an economic historian talks about national security crises and the growth of government", which was originally an interview with the author by Reason magazine writer Michael Lynch in which Higgs warned that "historically a large proportion of all government expansion has taken place as an emergency or crisis action".

Essay Three is titled "Wake Up to the Law of the Ratchet" coauthored with Professor Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University where the authors explain that every time government increases in response to perceived crises, it never contracts back to its original size - it is left bigger than it was before the crisis. According to this law, America is lost and has been replaced by Amerika, a corporatist state operated Italian-style.

Essay Seventeen is titled "Free Enterprise and War, a Dangerous Liaison", which goes far to explain how the British Tories infiltrated America's conservative movement and replaced their pro-capitalism with anti-capitalist corporatism, veiled by Orwellian doublespeak so that most conservatives do not cotton on to the usurpation. ( for further reading see Richard Cockett's "Thinking the Unthinkable".)

Essay Twenty-Nine is titled "To Make War, Presidents Lie", which begins with former President McKinley of Canton, Ohio who did the Philippines wrong, and later rode on up to Buffalo but didn't stay too long. Higgs covers Wilson, FDR, LBJ, skips Clinton and concludes with Bush, Jr: "Now President George W. Bush is telling the American people that we stand in mortal peril of imminent attack by Iraqis . . . Bush may be telling the truth. In the light of history, however, we would be making a long-odds bet to believe him". Higgs was prophetic on this one, as www.ImpeachBlair.org uncovered the false information that Bush's British bosses fed him to give credence to his unjust invasion plans.

The remaining essays grow more disturbing. We have lost our country to the British fifth column. America's foreign policy is now Britain's foreign policy. American-powered British Empire is not freedom. Many of Uncle Sam's best allies in the Anglo-American waged world war remain dictators and kings. The U.S. government has been supporting Blair's British foreign policy in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and even Uzbekistan, where U.S. soldiers operate a military base and airfield.

The U.S. military should be upholding liberty and freedom, rather than give military assistance and sell arms to dictators and human rights-abusing governments just because its suits the oil billionaires club's short-term military and geo-political interests. In fact, the U.S. leads the world in arms sales and military training to countries that abuse human rights - as determined by its own State Department!

When will we stop sacrificing our young men to state terrorism in the quest for oil? When will we tell the British to do their empire without American brawn? What would George Washington say? And, lastly, who is Marvin Bush?

Higgs's book should be on your shelf alongside Nicholas John Cull's "Selling War" and James Gibb Stuart's "Hidden Menace to World Peace" by Ossian Publishers, 268 Bath Street, Glasgow, Scotland, G2 4Jr, United Kingdom.

I'm sure this one will get snagged on a certain "Guideline" - paint-by-numbers and all that - but I'm going to submit it anyway - if for no other reason than fyi.

I've just ordered Resurgence of the Warfare State on the strength of one of the customer reviews.

No, not the five star one by Karen Kwiatkowski.

Au contraire. It was the one star one by Jill Malter. Didn't much like the sulphurous stench of special pleading coming off it. In fact, I didn't like it so much that I reached straightaway for my 1-click ordering button. Which is by way of saying, sometimes you can judge a book by the covering fire its negative reviewers are laying down.

The tripline - the real giveaway - was that stark little sentence: "My litmus test on books of this sort is what they say about Israel."

As the old saying goes, I guess that's what makes a horse race. Because funnily enough as an American my litmus test on books of this sort is what they say about America.

And as for: "truth is a value. And I thought that whether we actually ought to invade Iraq, making a big military commitment, did indeed depend on the truth of Saddam Hussein's implicit boasts of being on the verge of having a serious threat involving weapons of mass destruction (while explicitly denying it)".

Let's see, there's a "depend on the truth" followed by an "implicit" followed by a "boast" followed by an "on the verge" followed by a "serious" followed by a "threat" followed by an "involving". What is that, seven! removes. That's world class weasly.

It's just so lame. There's much banging on about America's enemies and threats And then having had its cake the review proceeds to eat it by telling us that "Israel was not immediately threatened by Iraq".

You can't have it both ways. If Iraq's tiny but armed to the teeth neighbour Israel isn't threatened how is it that half a world away the world's only superpower is threatened?

Two words and a question mark sough in the wind here: "delivery systems?"

Bottom line: a wee little case of literary "blowback".

In short, I bought the book dear reader. My five star recommendation is based on a reaction, a strong hunch - and, yes, jumping through the hoops of cyberspace "forms". I'll make any required "adjustments" when I've read it.

This work is garbage. Please see my published review in a recent issue of the academic journal Democracy and Security, Vol. 3, No. 2.
Dr. Robert Hager
Political Science Instructor
Glendale Community College
Glendale, CA

This book is a collection of articles and interviews dating from September, 2001 to December, 2004. And the articles address some interesting and serious topics.

One major issue Higgs addresses is whether the war on terrorism is merely resulting in more government restrictions on us Americans, to no good purpose. But he's not too convincing in his arguments here. After all, America does face real enemies. I think that if threats to America are not taken seriously, we'll have even more attacks, and finally our responses to them will be even less pleasant for us as well as for our attackers.

I'm a liberal. I share Higgs' concerns about potential losses of our liberties. But I think the greatest danger to our liberties might be a refusal to respond sanely to threats against us on the grounds that terror can't be combated!

Higgs challenges the idea that wartime economies bring prosperity. After all, much of what such economies produce is of limited overall value for peacetime consumers. I think he has a good point here. If the idea of a war is to make money, I think we Americans are way off track. In my opinion, we ought to fight wars rarely. We ought to fight against direct threats to us, when there is little choice. When going to war is optional, I feel that we need to do everything we can to maintain flexibility rather than commit troops.

That said, I think that Iraq certainly asked for a fight. We may well have been wrong to go along with the idea. But that does not say anything positive about Saddam Hussein's Iraq! Higgs has a different stance. He regards the war against Iraq as a plot by our administration for power. He wonders if Bush is some sort of religious nut (sometimes, I wonder about this as well, but I do feel that our war policy is based on secular ideas). And he complains about lies told by our administration.

I feel very strongly that truth is a value. And I thought that whether we actually ought to invade Iraq, making a big military commitment, did indeed depend on the truth of Saddam Hussein's implicit boasts of being on the verge of having a serious threat involving weapons of mass destruction (while explicitly denying it).

What does one do? I do not want to be put in the position of letting Iraq blackmail us into letting it run wild in the region, with America afraid to respond on the grounds that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. I prefer to be told that we know better, and we'll call Iraq's bluff.

We didn't do that. Instead, our administration said that it had evidence that Iraq was not bluffing. If our administration was simply mistaken, then we clearly were not prepared to call Saddam's bluff, and the war was not all that unreasonable an idea. If our administration was lying (and my guess is that it was lying), maybe we were prepared to call Saddam's bluff. At that point, I suspect Higgs would have been telling us all that Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction, so we ought to leave Iraq alone! You see, I don't trust Higgs either.

Higgs says he opposes the war in Iraq on moral grounds. But I'm not convinced. Nations that threaten us have every reason to expect us to respond. If we are going to call all our actions immoral, that's an open invitation to attacks by tyrants.

The author asks if we have committed war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he compares us with the Germans (I wonder, why not with the Russians) in World War Two. Here, I think he is way off base. It is a sort of special pleading to say that everyone else can do what they please, but when we fight, it is a crime.

My litmus test on books of this sort is what they say about Israel. I know plenty about the Arab war on Israel, and if an author feeds us garbage on this issue, I become very reluctant to trust him on other topics. And that's what Higgs does. He argues that "only Israel wishes the United States Godspeed in its attack on Iraq." And he asks if "the present U.S. war policy constitutes still another case of the American dog being wagged by the tail of its Israeli protectorate."

That's absurd.

If our invasion of Iraq prevented the carnage of Israel's obliteration by Iraq, then Israel surely would have favored it. But in that case, our action would have made sense. If we were prepared to fight Saddam to save Kuwait, the nation least in agreement with us internationally, surely there was a reason to fight to save an ally from destruction.

More likely, Israel was not immediately threatened by Iraq. In that case, Israel would do just what it did: it would cheer for us there. But it would have hoped that we'd stay more flexible, for two reasons. First, there might be a real threat to both Israel and the United States that the American military would find it hard to respond to when it was bogged down in Iraq. Second, Israel would probably rather see non-military support for itself than military action against others. When we invade Iraq, the next thing we do is demand that Israel make "concessions" to Arab rejectionists! That's not a good trade for Israel. Israel would be far better off were America to strongly encourage European and other nations to quit supporting Arab thugs against Israel. That could be done without any war at all. Meanwhile, America could come up with some very reasonable and inexpensive gestures that would help Israel a great deal, such as moving our Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem. America is in no way being "wagged" by Israel.

I do not recommend this flaky and unconvincing book.