The Iron Triangle Runs the Pentagon, not the Other Way Around

After a heads up from chicago dyke at Correntewire I've started reading Empire Burlesque.

The quality of work out here in progressive cyberspace pleasantly, consistently, surprises me.

Chris says exactly what I feel about the DINOcrats going belly up over Darth Rumsfeld's takeover of the CIA:

...Sure, old Peeper-Creeper Hayden would have been confirmed in any case, given the Republicans' bootlicking obedience to the White House, but couldn't the Democrats at have made a pretense of opposition? Couldn't they have at least registered the slightest demurral against Hayden's nomination?

No, they could not. They are a fetid sack of quivering jellyfish: spineless, boneless, brainless, useless. Now watch them come begging for your money between now and November: "Oh please, give generously to our noble cause! We're the only ones who can save you from the big bad Bushists!"

No, you're not. You won't stand up now, why should you stand up later? You won't do anything except the same damn thing you've been doing for the past five years: acting as eager, willing enablers of evil. You've done it again today with this vote. You'll do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next...

John Nichols at The Nation is right there on it too:

...Hayden's involvement as head of the National Security Agency with the illegal warrantless wiretapping program initiated by the Bush administration, his role in the secret accumulation of the phone records of tens of millions of Americans for surveillance purposes, his unapologetic rejection of the rule of law and his limited acquaintance with the Constitution would surely have stalled his nomination. And the fact that a member of the military should not head the civilian intelligence agency that is charged with provided unbiased information to elected officials – as opposed to the Pentagon line – would have finished Hayden off.

In the face of a united Democratic opposition, a sufficient number of Senate Republicans, ill at ease with the administration's reckless approach and increasingly concerned about the damage President Bush and his aides are doing to their party's credibility and political prospects, would have abandoned Hayden.

Unfortunately, there is no opposition party in Washington.


There is, instead, a Democratic Party that, when push comes to shove regularly allows itself to be shoved.

So it come as little surprise that Hayden's nomination has sailed through the Senate, winning approval Friday by a 78-15 vote. Most Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, joined the vast majority of Republicans in rubberstamping George W. Bush's poke-in-the-eye pick to head the CIA...

Chris also takes the long view about the PentaclePentagon takeover of the entire governmental structure, although it may be a bit more complex than the review of James Carroll's House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power indicates:

The first civilian to see the plans, during the Kennedy administration, was, ironically enough, Daniel Ellsberg – the Pentagon consultant who later leaked the "Pentagon Papers," revealing the disastrous lies behind America's war in Vietnam. What Ellsberg found was moral insanity almost beyond imagining. The only plan proposed by the "guardians" was an all-out nuclear strike on every city in the Soviet Union, on the Warsaw Pact nations and China as well, with a deliberately low-balled estimate of 400 million people killed immediately. There were "no intermediate steps, no flexibility, and no warnings" incorporated in the plan, which could be triggered by a range of non-nuclear provocations, some posing no direct threat to the United States at all. What's more, the high priest of the nuclear cult, Gen. Curtis LeMay, reserved the right to launch this genocidal fury on his own, as a first strike, if he suspected the Soviets were preparing to attack.

Civilian control of the military was thus exposed as an empty myth; the center of power in the American government had shifted from the decisions of democratically elected leaders to the imperatives of procurement and militarist paranoia emanating from the five-sided fortress raised up in a Virginia wasteland known as Hell's Bottom...

Sort of. Particularly nowadays I think there's good evidence the real locus of power uses the Pentagon as a front.

Hence the long list of professionals who've quit the government- and the military.

The Pentagon isn't just the military anymore; in fact, the military is becoming much less military and far more outsourced corporate security.

When you outsource your nation's security, it's possible for someone else to view national interest as part of their profit margin.