Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler?
A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to (Someone Like)
You...
By Danny Sjursen
February 22, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - There
once lived an odd little man -- five feet nine
inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet -- who
rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself.
For all but a few activist insiders and scholars,
U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington
Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a
century ago, this strange
contradiction of a man would become a national
war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and
then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most
prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.
Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and
educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an
influential congressman, he would end up serving in
nearly all of America’s “Banana
Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a
rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor,
he would retire as the youngest, most decorated
major general in the Marines.
A teenage officer and a certified hero during an
international intervention in the Chinese
Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a
constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the
police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved
absence from the military), and a proponent of
Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he
would serve in battle as well as in what might today
be labeled
peacekeeping,
counterinsurgency, and
advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the
Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti,
France, and China (again). While he showed early
signs of skepticism about some of those imperial
campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by
critics at the time, “Dollar
Diplomacy” operations -- that is, military
campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business
interests -- until he retired he remained the
prototypical loyal Marine.
But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his
tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign
policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d
only recently played such a prominent part.
Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in
what became a classic passage in his memoir, which
he
titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent
thirty-three years and four months in active
military service... And during that period, I spent
most of my time being a high class muscle-man for
Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero
transformed himself into an equally acclaimed
antiwar speaker and activist in a politically
turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly
anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and
politicians alike promoted what (for America, at
least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all,
the height of what later pro-war interventionists
would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”
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Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for
that moment and certainly for our own)
in his unapologetic amenability to
left-wing domestic politics and
materialist critiques of American
militarism. In the last years of his
life, he would face increasing criticism
from his former admirer, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military
establishment, and the interventionist
press. This was particularly true after
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded
Poland and later France. Given the
severity of the Nazi threat to mankind,
hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s
virulent opposition to U.S. intervention
in World War II wrong.
Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade
of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the
assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant
has proven historically deeply misguided. In the
wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the
First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a
significant part of an entire generation of
veterans) about intervention in a new European
bloodbath should have been understandable. Above
all, however, his critique of American militarism of
an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin
America remains prescient and all too timely today,
especially coming as it did from one of the most
decorated and high-ranking general officers of his
time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror,
such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)
Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of
his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of
organization than today’s highly professionalized
armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in
a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some
disturbing similarities between the careers of
Butler and today’s generation of
forever-war fighters. All of them served
repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars
around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have
stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to
China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions
from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets
of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were
motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial
interests.
Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial
campaigns of the first third of the twentieth
century generated a Smedley Butler, the
hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this
century hasn't produced a single even faintly
comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is
matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military
establishment and contemporary national culture,
none of it particularly encouraging.
Why No Antiwar Generals
When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one
of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank
just below that of only the Marine commandant and
the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900
generals and admirals currently
serving on active duty, including 24 major
generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores
of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one
has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19
years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful
American wars. As for the most senior officers, the
40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal
antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there
are
more of them today than there were even at the
height of the Vietnam War, although the active
military is now about half the size it was then.
Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one
qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing
wars.
Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against
those terror wars has come from retired colonels,
lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior
officers (like me), as well as enlisted service
members. Not that there are many of us to speak of
either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you)
that I personally know just about every one of the
retired military figures who has spoken out against
America’s forever wars.
The big three are Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel
Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime
West Point history instructor, retired Colonel
Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War
whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel
Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine
public servants, poignant voices, and -- on some
level -- cherished personal mentors. For better or
worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a
retired senior theater commander or prominent
four-star general offering the same critiques.
Something must account for veteran dissenters
topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously,
there are personal reasons why individual officers
chose early retirement or didn’t make general or
admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag
officers should raise at least a few questions when
it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired
commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top
generals and admirals is appointed each year to
choose the next colonels to earn their first star.
And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that,
according to numerous
reports, “the members of this board are
inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek
candidates in their own image -- officers whose
careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such
a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no
less breed potential dissidents.
Consider it an irony of sorts that this system
first received
criticism in our era of forever wars when
General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly
publicized “surge”
in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to
serve as the chair of that selection committee. The
reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over
colonel, a protégé of his -- future Trump National
Security Advisor H.R. McMaster -- earned his star.
Mainstream national security analysts reported on
this affair at the time as if it were a major
scandal, since most of them were convinced that
Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista"
protégés and their "new"
war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would
turn around the failing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those
very tactics twice -- once in each country -- as did
acolytes of his later, and you know the
results of that.
But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour
intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of
that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent
colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by
Cold War-bred flag officers because they were
promoting different (but also strangely familiar)
tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how
likely it would be for such a leadership system to
produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious
sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.
At the roots of this system lay the obsession of
the American officer corps with “professionalization"
after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested
itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier
tradition,
end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer
force.” The elimination of conscription, as
predicted by critics at the time,
created an ever-growing civil-military divide,
even as it increased public apathy regarding
America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin
in the game" most citizens had.
More than just helping to squelch civilian
antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of
the military, and of the officer corps in
particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers
would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the
level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system
geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of
such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak
gruffly and look like a man with a head of his
own, but typically he’s turned out to be just
another
yes-man for another
war-power-hungry president.
One group of generals, however,
reportedly now does have it out for President
Trump -- but not because they’re opposed to endless
war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald
doesn't “listen enough to military advice” on, you
know, how to wage war forever and a day.
What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?
In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler
regularly focused on the economic component of
America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that
the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had
helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the
constabularies he had formed and empowered in
faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S.
corporate investors. Though less overtly the case
today, this still remains a reality in America’s
post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly
so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was
essentially the
only public building protected by American
troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital,
Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003).
Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more
subtly than that, both
abroad and here at home where those wars help
maintain the record profits of the top weapons
makers of the military-industrial complex.
That beast, first identified by President Dwight
D. Eisenhower, is now on
steroids as American commanders in retirement
regularly
move directly from the military onto the boards
of the giant defense contractors, a reality which
only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the
military retiree community. For all the corruption
of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the
path from the military to, say, United Fruit
Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate
giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for
retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler
would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of
the “revolving
door” in Washington.
Of course, he served in a very different moment,
one in which military funding and troop levels were
still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of
capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist
publications and
supported the Socialist Party candidate in the
1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found
today’s
nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets
beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long
ago
identified as a treacherous nexus between
warfare and capital “in which the profits are
reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems
to have reached its natural end point in the
twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and
still rising) “defense” spending of the present
moment, including -- to please a president -- the
creation of a whole new military service aimed at
the full-scale militarization of
space.
Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous
polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only
public institution Americans still truly trust.
Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to
have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic
retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an
apathetic public around those forever wars of ours.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically
nil, given the military system of our moment.
Of course, Butler didn't exactly end his life
triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25
pounds due to illness and exhaustion -- and
demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still
maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule -- he
checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard
Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of
some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working
himself to death in his 10-year retirement and
second career as a born-again antiwar activist,
however, might just have constituted the very best
service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner
could have given the nation he loved to the very
end.
Someone of his credibility, character, and candor
is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this
military generation is unlikely to produce such a
figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly
confessed that, “like all the members of the
military profession, I never had a thought of my own
until I left the service. My mental faculties
remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the
orders of higher-ups. This is typical...”
Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of
their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity...
Danny Sjursen, a
TomDispatch regular, is a retired
U.S. Army major and former history instructor at
West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan
and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a
memoir of the Iraq War,
Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and
the Myth of the Surge and his forthcoming
book,
Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War,
is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at
@SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress
on a Hill."
Follow TomDispatch on
Twitter and join us on
Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the
Splinterlands series)
Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel
Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's
A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred
McCoy's
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and
Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's
The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II.
Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen
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