we make reality – a pathological disconnection from reality

Faced by real dangers, the U.S. defense establishment loses itself in fantasy By William Pfaff

[T]he Defense Department, which has been unable to supply troops with simple body and vehicle armor in adequate quantities, is preoccupied with new nuclear weapons and space wars.

It wants vast new expenditures on projects with no relevance to present realities. The Pentagon and the Energy Department ask for new and “more usable” nuclear weapons, including earth-penetrating “bunker-busters.” The need is highly debatable and the political costs of developing new nuclear weapons enormous.

The Air Force makes it known that it wants a national security directive to “establish and maintain space superiority,” a project on which it seems already to have spent billions, and on which it wants to spend more, up to an estimated trillion dollars (and beyond, as experience of such estimates overwhelmingly suggest).

Quite beyond the project’s feasibility, cost, foreign policy implications, and likelihood to inspire countermeasures by other nations, it is another demand for a military capability irrelevant to the present and realistically foreseeable future security needs of the country.

On May 9, a lost civilian light plane entering Washington airspace produced a disgracefully panicked evacuation of Congress, the White House, and most of the rest of official Washington. We are urged to control outer space, but an errant light plane terrorizes Washington. The one is costly fantasy. The other is reality.

This occurs at the same time American military forces still are unable to pacify Iraq or Afghanistan, agricultural societies of less than 25 million people each, both largely in ruins. The billions Washington already has spent on reconstruction have yet to produce reliable electric power, clean water or a functioning sewer system in Baghdad itself.

The creation of an official capability for reconstructing 25 countries, at a time when anonymous senior army officers are quoted as saying that the United States could be defeated in Iraq, is the most egregious Washington example of a pathological disconnection from reality.

However, it is a logical bureaucratic response to the announced administration intention to overturn tyrants and spread liberty throughout the world. It serves also as its reductio ad absurdum. …

One is inclined to dismiss all this as product of institutional delusion or bureaucratic make-work. However, it responds to the expressed interests of the president, and as one of his associates said after his re-election, “we make reality.” This was in response to a question about “realism.”

The remark unknowingly echoed one of Hannah Arendt’s acute observations about totalitarianism. One of the most significant aspects of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century was that they “made reality” out of fictions.