Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Although the U.S. military claims that it has accounted for all the mines it has laid in Korea and that they cause no civilian casualties, this is simply untrue. There are, for example, still some twenty thousand to thirty thousand M14 antipersonnel mines in the ground in the Chungri mountain area of Yong-do, just off the seaport of Pusan in the extreme south of Korea. The U.S. forces laid the mines in 1956 to protect a missile unit it based there, and they were never removed when the unit was relocated. They have been blamed for many civilian injuries and deaths since the 1960s.⁴

The Australian government, which strongly backed the Ottawa treaty, estimates that it would take 1,100 years to clear the world’s mines using current techniques, which depend on metal detection. Modern land mines actually contain little metal, and Australia is sponsoring research to locate buried mines through their “thermal footprints”—that is, by identifying irregularities in ground-surface temperatures created by the different properties of mines and the earth around them. It plans to incorporate this technology into unmanned aerial vehicles whose task will be to detect mines from the air and so lessen current risks to ground personnel in mine-clearing operations.⁵ One might well ask why the Pentagon, with its $267.2 billion budget for the year 2000, has not provided serious funding for similar research.

Former marine Bobby Muller, who in 1969 was blown off a road in Vietnam by a mine and later crippled by gunfire, says that President Clinton told him he simply could not “risk a breach with the Pentagon establishment by daring to sign the treaty.” Jody Williams put it more bluntly, saying that Clinton “did not have the courage to be the commander-in-chief of his military.”⁶, But these comments may miss the point. It is not just a matter of personal courage. The relationship between the civilian elite that runs this country and its powerful military has undergone a sea change since the 1950s. It is now increasingly likely that a congressman, a senator, a state department official, even a president will not have served in the military. The draft-deferment system during the Vietnam War signaled the early stages of this process, in which promising students and professionals—mainly middle- or upperclass young men—were kept out of Vietnam in the name of national security and the nation’s welfare, while the poor and working-class largely fought the war. Both President Clinton and his secretary of defense William Cohen enjoyed student deferments during Vietnam (Cohen had a marital one as well), and neither served in the armed forces. In the wake of Vietnam, with the military transformed into a purely volunteer career choice, the gap between the experiences of the civilian and the military hierarchies has only widened—and with the threat of the former USSR ended, the fact is that the military has for the first time begun to slip beyond civilian control.

When it comes to an issue like land mines, a civilian president, even one with better command credentials than Clinton, can no longer afford to cross his military leaders. Similarly, it is hardly imaginable today that a president could support something like an international criminal court that offers the threat, no matter how distant, of putting American men in uniform (or their civilian surrogates around the world) at risk of indictment. George Washington’s Farewell Address now reads more like a diagnosis than a warning: he counseled Americans to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”

When, in Rome, the U.S. representative expressed fears of “politically motivated charges” against Americans, he was actually worrying about, among other matters, situations in which Americans might use a brutal local military to undermine what it deemed an “unacceptable” regime, as has happened numerous times in the past—in Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s Congo in 1961, in President Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnam in 1963, and in President Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1973. Such activities have often been foreshadowed by the military “training” programs the United States has long conducted with the militaries of other nations around the world.