Posted on 31-7-2003
Stan
Goff On US Militarism
Interviewed by Jennifer Van Bergen, Truthout, 16 July
2003
Stan Goff is a former Sergeant with Special Forces and military
instructor at West Point, among other posts. He is the author
of Hideous Dreams, about his experience in the 1994 American
incursion into Haiti. Goff's upcoming book, "Full Spectrum
Disorder," from Soft Skull Press, will be available in
December.
[JVB] Thank you, Stan, for taking the time
to do this interview. Your extensive military background, which
we'll get into in a moment, certainly qualifies you to speak
on military matters. I want to remark, though, that it seems
unusual for former military, especially those who were in Special
Forces, to come out as strongly as you have against military
measures. From your book, I sense that you are as much a social
commentator and analyst as you are a former military man. Without
going into your background yet, can you give truthout readers
a short reason for this? How did you come to speak out as you're
doing and, briefly, what is your main message?
[SG] I've always been intellectually restless,
as I think anyone is who is truly interested in what is going
on around them. Not interested in appearances, but interested
in understanding how things work and damn the consequences.
The military actually exposed me to some of the most educational
experiences around, not the least of which was travel and the
occasional obligation to live among and at the level of poor
people in peripheral countries. Measuring my own experience
against a lot of reading and studying led me to the left in
a pretty gradual but inevitable way. I don't hold my views because
of some religious devotion to an idea, but because leftist analysis
conforms most consistently with my own experience. That doesn't
mean it conforms with my comfort level. But when we stay comfortable,
we quit growing. So I try to stay a little uncomfortable intellectually,
an important thing for an auto-didact.
And a friend of mine who died recently said that soldiers
are natural political scientists, because politics can be a
matter of life or death to them. If I have a main message, it's
that I'm from inside the military system, and now I am from
inside the political left, and I want to build a bridge between
the left and the military. Not militarism, but the people in
the military.
[JVB] Tell us about your background.
[SG] My parents' families were from Arkansas and
Michigan, but I moved a great deal when I was a kid. My dad
followed work. I was actually born in San Diego. My family lived
outside St. Louis when I joined the Army at 18. Both my parents
worked at McDonnell-Douglas as riveters on center fuselage assembly
of the F-4 Phantom close air support aircraft.
[JVB] How did you start out your career in the
military?
[SG] I just hung around doing spot work and learning
how to get into trouble right after I graduated high school
in 1969. After a few months, I started to see myself stuck in
St. Charles, taking a job on the assembly line at McDonnell.
I believed the whole official narrative about the world communist
conspiracy and in its evil, so I enlisted in the Army in January
1970.
[JVB] What conflicts did you fight in?
[SG] My first duty assignment was Vietnam. It
was the 80s before I worked in any more conflict areas. I didn't
fight in them all. They included Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador,
Peru, Colombia, Somalia, and Haiti.
[JVB] I realize youve written about Haiti in your
fascinating book, Hideous Dreams,but could you tell us anything
briefly about any of the other conflicts?
[SG] Well, there was a common denominator that
it took me a couple of decades to figure out. We were engaged
in conflicts against poor people. I didn't realize it at the
time Haiti was the watershed actually but this is the military
role in an imperial state. While the national chambers of commerce
in these places, with their eager compradors, assisted US corporations
to drain the value out of these countries, the militarys job,
often through the surrogate militaries of the host nation as
we called it, is to stand guard against all those masses of
people in the host nation from whom the value was being drained
in labor and resources. If you steal enough from people, they
hit a point where they become rebellious, and to continue stealing,
you have to use people with guns.
Aside from that sort of macro-analysis, one thing that
stands out in my mind is how badly many of the operations went,
and how important it is for the US military to spend huge sums
of money on arms and high technology. Grenada and Somalia are
examples. Real emblems of stupidity in planning and execution.
Thats why I tell people not to buy into the hype about US military
invincibility. Person for person, and dollar for dollar, the
US military is the most inefficient in the world. And the most
fragile. They are fragile because of their overwhelming dependence
on high technology, and fragile because the troops come out
of a pampered consumer culture where real physical hardship
is anecdotal. Sustained hardship, as we are seeing in Iraq now,
devastates morale.
[JVB] What kind of a commander were you? What
did your colleagues think of you?
[SG] I was never a commander.That title is reserved
for commissioned officers. I was a non-commissioned officer,
a sergeant. I did, however, act as the senior enlisted member
of infantry and special operations units. I had a very good
reputation overall. I had an aptitude for planning and operations.
And while I'm pretty small, I was pretty wiry and I had very
good physical endurance. I was well-respected by my subordinates,
my peers, and by officers.
[JVB] When did you get into the Special Forces?
[SG] Actually, Special Forces was a late interest
for me in the military. I started out an infantryman. I gravitated
into the Rangers, which is a highly disciplined force of specially
trained shock infantry that is part of the Special Operations
community. I worked for a year as a tactics instructor at the
Jungle School in Panama, then went to try-outs for Delta Force.
Delta is designated as a "special forces detachment,"
but it is not Special Forces, that is not part of the 18 Branch,
the Green Berets everyone hears about. Delta is a very small,
very specialized and highly secretive unit that does almost
exclusively direct action missions that are politically sensitive.
It's known as a counter-terrorist unit, a military SWAT outfit
if you will. It's a unit that puts a very high premium on skills
for entering man-made structures like buildings and vehicles,
and a very strong emphasis on precision marksmanship. After
Delta, I taught Military Science for a while at West Point.
Then I had a break in service, where I went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee
and trained SWAT teams at the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility.
I re-entered active duty, with a loss of rank, in 1988,
working for just over a year as a platoon sergeant at 1st Ranger
Battalion in Savannah. Then, at the advanced age of 38, I went
through Special Forces Assessment and Selection, another torture
try-out. I was the oldest guy to finish with my group, probably
one of the oldest guys to ever go all the way through it. Like
I said, I had a high threshold for pain. Then I went through
the Special Forces Qualification Course as a Special Operations
Medic. I spoke Spanish, so I was assigned to 7th Special Forces
Group, who are responsible for Latin American work. I left 7th
Group to be attached to 75th Ranger Regiment in 1993, and accompanied
them to Somalia that year. Then I was promoted to Master Sergeant,
and you can't be a medic in SF as a Master Sergeant. Your job
then is to be a team sergeant in charge of an A Detachment.
So I went to 3rd Special Forces, a Sub-Saharan Africa and Caribbean
Group, and went with them to Haiti in 1994. In December, 1995,
I went on terminal leave, and was officially retired February
1, 1996.
There, now you have my whole career before you.
I should say that I retired under a cloud, and that whole
tedious story is in my first book, "Hideous Dream."
[JVB] What do you do now?
[SG] I have been working in the non-profit sector,
mostly on liberal political and social justice issues. Right
now, I am the field organizer for an environmental group concerned
about nuclear energy risks. I should say that I am not a liberal.
I find most liberals to be conservatives who want to be forgiven.
[JVB] How do you feel about those years in the
military? How do you feel about the military now?
[SG] I've written quite a bit about how I felt
about various aspects of my military life. There's no one monolithic
impression. Parts of it I liked very much. The travel. The economic
security. The exposure to other cultures. The highly physical
nature of the life. Other aspects of it I hated. Bureaucratism.
Institutionalized stupidity. The hegemonic sexism and homophobia.
I don't regard military people as any more or less culpable
for what they are sent to do, however, than anyone else. Lots
of people like to stereotype the military, like to sit up on
whatever privileged hilltop they can perch on and cast little
stones of sanctimony at the military. These are people who say
we live in a system, but they don't really believe it. In their
most secret hearts, they've bought the whole bourgeois narrative
about personal responsibility, individualism, the history of
kings and generals, all of it. Now once someone understands
the nature of that system, and they are in the military, well,
then you've got a genuine role conflict. And that's my issue
with the U.S. military. It is an instrument not of defense,
but of control and plunder of peripheral peoples.
[JVB] What do you think about Bush's build-up
of the military?
[SG] Bush is making more politically fatal mistakes
than I can count these days. His so-called build-up of the military
is one of them. He is not in fact building up the military,
depending on how you define that. He is building up the weapons
industry, at the behest of his mad military advisor, Donald
Rumsfeld - a weird man who has convinced himself without a shred
of evidence to support it, that he is a military genius.
Rumsfeld has convinced himself that technology can replace
human leadership and ingenuity on the battlefield, so he is
prevailing on his intellectually challenged boss to buy lots
of expensive toys. I write at length about this Rumsfeld Doctrine
in "Full Spectrum Disorder," the book that's coming
out in December from Soft Skull Press. This whole trend is being
reinforced within the administration by his coterie of neo-con
economists who think they can replicate the Reagan era recovery
through military Keynesianism. Like I said, the sum of these
errors will be far greater than their parts. Unfortunately,
other people will pay with treasure and blood, and the whole
clique will retire in comfort to write their bullshit memoirs
and give lectures. The military itself, if you look at the humans
who populate it, is undergoing the same kind of attacks on its
living standards as the whole rest of the American working class,
in order to pay for Rumsfeld's killer drones and super-subs.
[JVB] What do you think about him reducing veteran
benefits? What do you think about his giving tax cuts to the
rich while reducing vet benefits?
[SG] I think it will bite him in the ass at the
end of the day. The problem is, they have to cut. They are trapped
on the runaway train of their own economic nostrums, their own
overwhelming rich-white-boy hubris, and a very real, very deep
crisis of capitalism itself. In response to a column I wrote
recently taking Dubya to task for his inane 'bring 'em on' comment,
I was flooded with supportive emails from pissed off vets and
military families. They were all talking not only about the
hypocrisy of this faux-cowboy preppy daring people to attack
soldiers while he sat in the air conditioned White House, they
expressed a profound sense of betrayal at benefits cuts, for
active duty people and veterans. Bush's entire neo-con hallucination
about world domination is based on the projection of military
power, yet he manages to alienate the very people who will lay
it all on the line.
[JVB] What did you think about the invasion of
Iraq?
[SG] I think it has turned into a tremendous tar
baby. And the more he fights this tar baby, the deeper he will
become stuck in it prior to 2004. People know it had something
to do with oil, but they don't understand the complexities of
oil.
Americans are not critical thinkers by and large. We
suffer from a collective sociogenic learning disability based
on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism
and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and
alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to denial.
So understanding what invading Iraq had to do with oil
takes a little study. They didn't just go there to steal. There
was a confluence of factors that were economic, strategic, and
political. People like Andrew McKillop and Michael Hudson have
written at length on these points. The main point is that the
US economy has been converted into a credit and debt scam aimed
against the rest of the world, and backed up by military force.
But the scheme is falling apart as the rest of the world is
losing the ability and willingness to pay. The US economy is
dreadfully weak, with the real material economy now gutted by
parasitic speculation, and the only source of strength left
is the military, which they are now trying to use to gain control
over the world's energy supply.
[JVB] About the fact that we now know that Bush
lied about WMD's?
[SG] Every thing this administration has told
the public has been a lie from the very beginning. The way you
determine whether on not the Bush cabinet is lying is by whether
or not their lips are moving. They started with a fraudulent
election, consolidated by a right-wing judicial fiat. They had
planned the invasion of Afghanistan as a first step for developing
a standing military presence in the region the summer prior
to 9/11. They'd even informed the Pakistanis of their intention
to invade in October. Then the 9/11 hijackers fly in like a
scourge against the nation, but like Santa Claus for the Bush's
neo-con clique. All the plans were put on fast forward, and
the pretext was now available for advancing a very aggressive
domestic agenda for the development of a police state infrastructure.
September 11th was a neo-con wet dream.
[JVB] What about Afghanistan?
[SG] Afghanistan and now Iraq have fore-grounded
the just deserts of overweening pride and plain imperial racism.
They underestimated their putative enemies, failed utterly to
understand the cultures they were invading, and maintained an
unshakable faith in the ability of high technology to deliver
stable apolitical military victories. Now they have a dual quagmire.
[JVB] Bin Laden? About the fact that we didn't
find him and now no one is even focused on him at all?
[SG] That's because he was never the issue. Controlling
the region as a way to position for economic war against Europe
and China was... and is.
[JVB] What about the Patriot Act? What about the
Military Tribunals? The Guantanamo detainees? The "unlawful
enemy combatants"? Do you think the Bush Administration
is violating the Constitution? The Geneva Conventions? (Other
international laws?)
[SG] This is the most lawless administration in
living memory, and that's a real accomplishment given the parade
of arch criminals who have occupied the Executive Branch for
the last 100 years. There is a wealth of material available
on the net and elsewhere warning us about the Patriot Act. The
Patriot Act has one major flaw. Once the decision is made to
apply it generally, instead of against scapegoat populations,
the U.S. government will be faced with the most heavily armed
population in the world. There's a certain grim poetic justice
there. The tribunals and detentions are just plain exercises
of impunity against every internationally recognized standard
of legal practice in the world. This is also well known. The
Geneva Conventions forbid unilateral invasions in the absence
of a real and immediate threat. Period. It's unequivocal. People
say we should be cautious with the term fascism. I agree. We
are now faced with a wannabe fascist administration. They would
do well to recount how Mussolini ended up.
[JVB] How do you feel about Bush's war on terror?
[SG] Bill Blum once said that the difference between
a terrorist and a superpower is that the latter has an Air Force.
This whole slogan, 'war on terror', is used to tar any government
that fails to comply with the U.S. diktat. They actually allege
that Cuba sponsors terrorism. That's preposterous, and everyone
damn well knows it.
[JVB] You're aware of the allegations that Bush
went AWOL while he was enlisted?
[SG] I've read them.
[JVB] What do you think of that?
[SG] I don't really care. I sort of avoid that
whole chicken-hawk thing, even though it has wide appeal. It's
pretty gendered, for one, and it tacitly endorses an ideology
of militarism. What Bush is doing would be wrong and stupid
even if he had a chest full of combat ribbons to rival Smedley
Butler. That doesn't mean I won't out him when he sits in D.C.
and says shit like "Bring 'em on."
[JVB] Do you think this war is race-based?
[SG] Politics is economics by other means, and
war is politics by other means. Let's get this straight right
now. Our entire system was constructed from day one on the subjugation,
exploitation, or extermination of whole peoples. There has to
be a cover story about that kind of practice, a justification.
Racism provides that justification. Frontal racism, like slavery
and Jim Crow, and implicit racism like 'white man's burden'
and 'exporting democracy.' In that sense, not only this war,
but this entire society is race-based.
[JVB] Is there is anything you would like to add?
[SG] Just that we need to bring all the US troops
home immediately, and allow the Afghans and Iraqis to determine
their own futures. And that we need to try in every way possible
to politically destroy the Bush government. They are both stupid
and reckless, and that is a dangerous combination
|