War! What is it good for?

Welcome to our second bonus guest post of the week (Sam is on holiday and back next week). We are delighted to host Phil Tinline, an author and journalist who was a BBC documentary maker for 20 years including a stint as executive producer of Radio 4's award-winning investigative history series, Document.

Phil’s first book - The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares - was one of my favourite books about British politics published in recent years. So much so that I’ve quoted it on this site several times and in the introduction to my own book.

His new book - Ghosts of Iron Mountain - tells the bizarre story of a 1960s hoax and its long, unexpected afterlife, and uses it to explore America's nightmares about political power. In his post for us today Phil looks at how the hoax helps explain MAGA-world’s unusual and often contradictory attitudes towards war.

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What are we to make of MAGA’s curious attitude to war? The inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent Signal chat about the imminent bombing of the Houthis has shed intriguing light on this in several ways, and not just the participants’ eye-poppingly relaxed attitude to operational security.

There was the priapic, emoji-splattered belligerence, which didn’t include an eggplant but might as well have done. Then there was Secretary Hegseth’s denunciation of “PATHETIC” European “freeloading”, and his cry “Godspeed to our Warriors” – a term this vet turned champion-of-the-soldier has made his own.

A British journalist, Sky’s Martha Kelner, challenged the ferociously pro-MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene about the leak. And, once she had finished telling Kelner to go back to Britain, Greene said something which sat oddly with all the gung-ho tub-thumping:

“I am thankful to President Trump that he is leading us out of wars, that he’s ending the war in Ukraine where American lives could have been killed if Joe Biden was still President today”.

Hegseth himself, echoing Trump, has made clear that America is no longer willing to fight in Europe, and has demanded an eight percent cut in annual US defence spending. MAGA’s apparent zest for peace jars against all the bellicosity. But it has wide appeal. So what is going on here?

There are perfectly decent reasons to oppose sending US soldiers to fight abroad. The war in Iraq was not exactly an unvarnished triumph. Repeated deployment has inflicted severe injury on the sections of American society from which the military recruits its ranks. There are genuine risks of nuclear escalation in Ukraine. The defence industry has often had far too cosy a relationship with Washington. And that charge that NATO allies have been freeloading on the generosity of the US taxpayer is not an empty one, as Europeans are finally accepting.

But listen to the specifics of MAGA anti-war rhetoric and something else is audible. In March 2023, Trump declared in a speech near Waco, Texas that America was “heading into World War Three”. He blamed this on the Biden administration “courting nuclear holocaust”; the accusation has been much repeated since. During the election, it was a theme of Trump TV ads, and of expostulations on Fox. (Though it was striking to watch Laura Ingraham’s warnings of looming world war being undercut by an ad declaring that “Freedom and democracy are under attack and Ukraine is the front line”. Viewers could be forgiven for being confused.)

As a rule, the blame is aimed at President Biden for having been weak or careless. But on Twitter recently, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard sought to pin an even graver charge on President Zelensky, accusing him of “trying to drag the United States into a nuclear war with Russia/WW3 for years now”.

Alongside that fear of near-future Armageddon there runs the denunciation of real and present “forever wars”. This phrase emerged as a criticism of the US-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan; one of its proponents, Vice-President JD Vance, returned from (non-combat) service in Iraq “skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it”. But now, like many others, he applies the notion of forever wars to the very different conflict in Ukraine.

In February, when Niall Ferguson attacked Trump for shrugging off “the invasion of a sovereign state by a dictator”, Vance branded Ferguson a “globalist” who was promoting war without a plan to end it. Likewise, last September, Robert Kennedy Jr. made a solemn promise to two of his fellow scholars of geopolitics, Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand. The Trump administration, he tweeted, would “end the forever wars”. And tellingly, in 2023, he revealed who was behind them: the US “foreign policy establishment manipulated” Ukraine into a war “to fulfil vain + futile geopolitical fantasy”.

Kennedy’s baseless claim gives us a glimpse of the animus driving at least some of this MAGA pseudo-pacifism. In both the spectre of World War Three and the spectacle of forever wars, they detect the manicured hand of east coast elites: the kind of people who care too much about the rest of the world and not enough about ordinary Americans.

It is no accident that both these attack-lines have been aimed against Ukraine and its leader, who is so beloved of those “PATHETIC” Europeans. Trump’s own rhetoric, meanwhile, points to a related suspicion: that elite warmongering is driven by greed. In 2020, he accused America’s military leaders of “wanting to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy”.

As history shows, the appeal of these themes is by no means specific to the right. This is particularly visible in the later 1960s, when a generation of Americans had grown up under the shadow of World War Three, and the war in Vietnam really did seem to be lasting forever. So this period has something to tell us about the long roots of MAGA’s antipathy to war. And one way to explore this is through the story of an extraordinary document, which appeared at precisely this moment.

Iron Mountain

In August 1963, Pete Hegseth’s predecessor as Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, commissioned a fifteen-strong special study group, comprising an industrialist, a systems analyst, a war planner and various scientists, social and otherwise. The group was tasked “to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive”, and then to draft “a program for dealing with this contingency”. The group met initially in a nuclear bunker at Iron Mountain, a hundred miles north of Manhattan. When it delivered its report in 1966, it was deemed so incendiary that it had to be suppressed.

But that winter, as the war intensified, one of the study group experts leaked it to a writer called Leonard Lewin, who had it published in November 1967 under the title Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.

This revealed that military spending was seen as vital to stabilize the economy. Worse, the experts had advised that war was “the basic social system”– the foundation of national sovereignty, and of the administration’s right to rule and enforce its authority. Without the threat of attack, the Report argued, social collapse beckoned. And replacing the beneficial effects of conflict would require horrifying alternatives. Releasing men from the army would mean replacing military discipline with a “sophisticated form of slavery” and the introduction of “blood games”. And so on.

The Report triggered a furore. Inquiries to determine whether it was authentic were launched in the Pentagon, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the White House. The memos went right up to the president. Officials whispered to journalists that the Report reflected accurately the way that some people in Washington thought.

It eventually became clear that Report from Iron Mountain was, of course, a hoax. But that triggered a fresh round of speculation about who had concocted it. The smorgasbord of plausible authors was revealingly extensive – from Noam Chomsky to Henry Kissinger.

Particular suspicion fell on two similarly vivid figures. The first was Herman Kahn, a chubby, ebullient defence intellectual who had horrified the nation by thinking the unthinkable about what America might have to sacrifice to endure and win a nuclear war. At the RAND Corporation and latterly his Hudson Institute, Kahn had a thriving career churning out reports that followed a ruthlessly clinical Iron Mountain-style logic. No wonder that he was also one of the figures who inspired the title character in the movie Doctor Strangelove.

The second suspect was the celebrity economist and former Kennedy ambassador, JK Galbraith. Earlier that year he had published The New Industrial State, which contended that the defence industry played a significant part in stabilizing the economy. And his newest publication was a pamphlet called How to Get Out of Vietnam. While Kahn denied all involvement and dismissed the Report “nutty”, Galbraith wrote a review under a transparent pseudonym, hinting that he had been asked to serve on the study group, but that he’d been too busy.

Forever Wars

Galbraith really had been involved, but only as an advisor. It would not emerge for several years, but the Report had actually been cooked up by a bunch of left-wing anti-war satirists.

In early 1966, it briefly appeared as though peace might break out in Vietnam. This triggered a ‘peace scare’ on Wall Street, sending stocks tumbling. At a satire magazine called Monocle, editor Victor Navasky and his team were so shocked by a report of the ‘peace scare’ that they had an idea. Why not concoct a story about a suppressed government report, warning that peace would usher in calamity? The fellow satirist they hired to write it was Lewin (who then passed the book off as a leak he had been handed). And he expanded the target area to encompass the icy logic of the Cold War, and in particular the slaughter rationales of Herman Kahn.

But crucially, for all its mad prescriptions, many were convinced the Report was real. It seems to have landed particularly hard with young men, vulnerable as they were to being drafted to serve in Vietnam. The idea that secret cabals of Washington-affiliated defence intellectuals were happy to consign them to the meat-grinder, the better to feed the power of the American state and its allied industries, apparently did not seem so far-fetched.

One thing that drives the kind of fear and suspicion the Report captured is the distinction between the warrior and the war machine. As Leonard Lewin (still posing as merely the Report’s editor) told a radio interviewer in March 1968:

“The most appalling kinds of murder are committed by perfectly decent people who just push buttons. In the old-fashioned days of war there was this much to be said for the cruel professional killer who killed at the end of a bayonet – he had to have the courage required by the full knowledge of what he was doing because he could see it.”

This echoed the arguments of the left-wing sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose bestselling 1958 polemic The Causes of World War Three had mocked the stock market for its peace scares, and called for the replacement of the “permanent war economy by a permanent peace economy”.

Mills was no pacifist – he lauded the Revolutionary proto-libertarian Patrick Henry, and prided himself on having once kicked a racist in the face. Like Lewin, his fundamental objection was to the vast, implacable military super-state that had arisen from the Second World War and America’s development of the atom bomb.

He once wrote that in the US Civil War, a general “did not earn the respect of his men by logistical planning in the Pentagon; he earned it by better shooting, harder riding, faster improvisation when in trouble”, and that historically, American democracy had been “under-pinned by the militia system of armed citizens” when “one man meant one rifle as well as one vote.” The Constitution, he argued, was “constructed in fear of a powerful military establishment”.

Report from Iron Mountain and the reaction to it also points to the long history of Trump’s complaint about the cold implacable war machine and elite money-making. At Yale, a few weeks after the Report’s publication, TV cameras caught a revealing exchange between a student and the visiting Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. In the course of an argument about the war in Vietnam, one student suggested American industry did better out of war than peace; a second demanded to know if Governor Reagan had read Report from Iron Mountain; Reagan said he hadn’t, but that their arguments reminded him of old myths “of the munition makers who are out pulling strings to create a war”.

Reagan was old enough to remember how, in the 1930s, the suspicion had spread, on both left and right, that the arms manufacturers had not only profited from the Great War, but had fomented it in order to do so; books had appeared with titles like Merchants of Death and War is a Racket. In 1934, a committee under Senator Gerald Nye had been established to investigate, and even after it petered out, its animating idea powered opposition to American involvement in a second world war.

This was sometimes expressed in anti-Semitic terms, as by the aviator Charles Lindbergh, a leading member of the America First Committee, in his infamous 1941 speech ‘Who are the war agitators?’ (Alongside the Jews, Lindbergh also blamed the British, a view in which he was far from alone). As the US entered the war, this strain of anti-militarism descended further into conspiracy theory. A journalist named John T. Flynn, who’d worked with Nye’s committee, argued that President Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor, but let them go ahead to provide a pretext for war. The anti-war historian Harry Elmer Barnes would later write a book with a title that anticipates today’s talk of “forever wars”: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. He also became a pioneer of Holocaust denial.

Especially after America’s victory in 1945, this extremism left these ideas discredited. But in the 1960s, a more reasoned suspicion of arms-makers and war bureaucrats began to return. In 1960, when President Eisenhower’s speechwriters were composing their chief’s farewell address, they decided to challenge the conjunction of two crucial new elements in American public life: the “immense military establishment” and the “large arms industry”. They rejected reviving the phrase “merchants of death”, but the term they coined instead, “military-industrial complex”, became similarly resonant. Eisenhower worried that this was fuelling the arms race – and warned that “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” which the complex threatened to acquire must not be allowed to “endanger our liberties or democratic processes”.

The phrase soon began to take on a life of its own: Martin Luther King branded the military-industrial complex “an instrument of quasi-authoritarian fear and coercion”. And this idea captivated the emergent New Left, some of whom were warming to that old inter-war anti-militarist thinking. Influenced by Mills and The Causes of World War Three, they were given to attacking “megadeath intellectuals”, the coerciveness of the militaristic mind set, and the case for spending less on warfare and more on welfare.

There were two separate critiques at work here. First, the thinking and interests that were driving the arms race – and with it the threat of a Third World War. And second, the economic demands supposedly motivating perpetual war in Vietnam. Together, these help explain why many found that the Iron Mountain hoax, for all its outrageous satirical absurdism, seemed plausible. Lewin finally fessed up in 1972, in the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers: the torrential leak of government documents which confirmed that, as many had long suspected, the Johnson administration had lied about what it was up to in Vietnam. The “satirical conceit of Iron Mountain”, Lewin wrote, “has been overtaken by the political phenomena it attacked”.

The fact that so many fell for the hoax reveals the deep, broad roots of the fear that the defence industry, military bureaucrats and warmongering globally-focused leaders are promoting endless war today and courting apocalyptic war tomorrow, with zero care for ordinary citizens. And why it is that, in the decades since, this thicket of suspicions has sprung up again, on the right.

Neo-Nazi Revival

In the traumatic aftermath of Vietnam, the US was in no rush to go back to large-scale warfare, even as President Reagan ran up vast deficits on defence spending. And months after he left office in 1989, the Cold War itself came to a sudden end, raising the prospect of a ‘peace dividend’. By this time, Report from Iron Mountain had long since fallen out of print. And yet it was at exactly this point, as the Soviet Union wheezed its last, that Leonard Lewin discovered that his old hoax had been given a surprise new lease of life. It was being republished by the extreme right, who thought it was real.

The specific conflicts that inspired it may have passed, but in this supposed government document, the far right found the ‘proof’ they needed of the evil machinations of the elite. The Report was republished, distributed and sold by a nexus of organisations set up by a reclusive neo-Nazi called Willis Carto; this network was among America’s primary promoters of Holocaust denial. Carto’s frontmen insisted, sincerely, that the Report was a genuine government document, and therefore not subject to copyright.

His ‘Liberty Library’ advertised the Report in his extremist weekly, the Spotlight, sometimes pairing it with that old 1930s screed, War is a Racket. The paper reviewed Lewin’s old hoax under the headline “Perpetual War Engineered” – these people were big fans of Harry Elmer Barnes and his hatred of supposedly Jewish-initiated forever wars. As the reviewer sarcastically averred, “War is a good business – invest your son”. He attacked such “Establishment, interventionist, “megadeath intellectuals” as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn” for having once called the Report satire.

Horrified by all this, Lewin successfully sued to stop the misappropriation of his book, pointing out that he had come clean almost twenty years before. But it proved too alluring a ‘proof’ of the malign intent of the federal government and its militarised power. With the vanishing of the great Soviet arch-foe, alongside recession, globalisation and the arrival of Bill Clinton, many right-wing Americans found a new enemy: Washington.

In response, a militia movement emerged across America – and Report from Iron Mountain became one of its bibles. Its supposed revelations of the elite’s militaristic malignity helped to justify the militias’ self-image: that they were preparing to resist a tyrannical police state and its foreign allies, who were about to start oppressing Americans in their black United Nations helicopters. The heroic American warrior confronted the insidious globalist war machine once again.

Both these cases illustrate how the right was embracing what had once been left-wing imagery. That line “War is a good business – invest your son” echoed an old anti-Vietnam war slogan – and it was not the only one the Spotlight appropriated. In 1996, in the wake of the Report’s illicit far-right revival, it was republished officially, and Victor Navasky, the man who had had the idea in the first place, wrote a new Introduction.

In it, he observed that:

“These days anti-interventionist alumni of the peace movement have found themselves on the same ‘side’ as isolationists like Pat Buchanan in opposing US intervention in Bosnia.”

As if to prove the point, in 2002, the leftist Gore Vidal published a book deploring America’s endless military interventions, and the federal intrusions on liberty that emerged in the “wars” on drugs and terror. But Vidal’s title, echoing the far right Harry Elmer Barnes, was Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. And inside its covers, Vidal championed a book about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that argued that it may have been perpetrated by the Clinton regime – using the hoax document Report from Iron Mountain as evidence.

MAGA confusion

After 9/11, the hard right found itself divided over the militaristic state. Many embraced the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and the War on Terror, leaving those who saw only false flags and police states on the fringe. The militia movement lost much of its momentum. But with the rise of Barack Obama, the right found a common enemy once more.

And in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, the America First side of right-wing politics, once championed by the militia movement, now had a stronger case. As the journalist David Neiwert has charted, the movement doubled in size between 2007 and 2008. March 2009 saw the launch of the Oath Keepers, which soon revived the nightmares of the 1990s in some detail. On its website, Report from Iron Mountain – still taken as genuine – was invoked to attack the militarization of law enforcement.

With the invasion of Ukraine, the Report was also pressed into service by at least one prominent opponent of the Biden administration’s provision of military support to Kyiv, who is no fan of Trump’s foreign policy either. Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a Vietnam vet, and served as chief of staff to Colin Powell, in which role he researched Powell’s deeply flawed presentation to the United Nations making the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Wilkerson now says he inadvertently took part in a hoax; he has become a sworn enemy of the neoconservative “cabal”. But if that was a hoax, there was another he failed to spot – in 2022, in the Quincy Institute’s periodical Responsible Statecraft, he insisted that it was “still undetermined” whether Report from Iron Mountain was really a satire or “or a genuine report”. Its claim that war is “the principal basis of organization on which all modern societies are constructed”, he wrote, was shown to be true by the war in Ukraine. Lewin’s exaggerated imagery of evil militarism has long outlasted the wars it was meant to satirise.

With Trump’s return, antipathy towards “forever wars” and hostility towards those who start them and who benefit have now found their way into the heart of power –however intermingled it is with the administration’s more warlike declarations. The end of America’s post-war military internationalism has been a long time coming and has significant support – partly based on the notions whose history we’ve been tracing. The idea that military spending is good, even vital, to the economy, which Report from Iron Mountain was contrived in part to mock, has now migrated across the Atlantic. And Washington’s new hostility to its erstwhile allies may undermine the United States’ military-industrial complex and its international sales pitch far more effectively than any satire.

But the administration should also beware the difference between that American suspicion of the war machine and its veneration of the warrior. This is one reason Signalgate may prove so dangerous. Hegseth may have tattoos of the AR-15 rifle he carried in Iraq and of his old infantry regiment’s insignia, but his text banter revealed him not as a warrior, but as a callous, slapdash Pentagon bureaucrat. Precisely the figure left and right have been united in reviling for so long. But then, perhaps the problem isn’t really that military power is concentrated in the hands of a small, secretive group of men – provided you get to be one of them.