21st century religion

Tom Englehardt starts the year off with a disquisition on our national security state. He looks at this state as a religion. Some of his more interesting comments:

At a cost of nearly a trillion dollars a year, its main global enemy consists of thousands of lightly armed jihadis and wannabe scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet.  They are capable of causing genuine damage -- though far less to the United States than numerous countries -- but not of shaking our way of life.  And yet for the leaders, bureaucrats, corporate cronies, rank and file, and of the NSS, it’s a focus that can never be intense enough on behalf of a system that can never grow large enough or be well funded enough.
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While they have a powerful urge to maintain the faith the American public has in them, they also believe deeply that they know best, that their knowledge is the Washington equivalent of God-given, and that the deepest mysteries and secrets of their faith should be held close indeed. Until you enter their orders and rise into their secret world, there is such a thing as too-much knowledge.  As a result, they have developed a faith-based system of secrecy in which the deepest mysteries have, until recently, been held by the smallest numbers of believers, in which problems are adjudicated in a “court” system so secret that only favored arguments by the national security state can be presented to its judges, in which just about any document produced, no matter how anodyne, will be classified as too dangerous to be read by “the people.”  This has meant that, until recently, most assessments of the activities of the national security state have to be taken on faith.

In addition, in the service of that faith, NSS officials may -- and their religion permits this -- lie to the public, Congress, allies, or anyone else, and do so without compunction.  They may publicly deny realities they know to exist, or offer, as Conor Friedersdorf has written, statements “exquisitely crafted to mislead.” They do this based on the belief that the deepest secrets of their world and how it operates can only truly be understood by those already inducted into their orders.  And yet, they are not simply manipulating us in service to their One True Faith.  Nothing is ever that simple.  Before they manipulate us, they must spend years manipulating themselves.  Only because they have already convinced themselves of the deeper truth of their mission do they accept the necessity of manipulating others in what still passes for a democracy.  To serve the people, in other words, they have no choice but to lie to them.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let’s start with its gargantuan side.  No matter how you cut it, the NSS is a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of staggering numbers that, once you step outside its thought system, don’t add up.  The U.S. national defense budget is estimated to be larger than those of the next 13 countries combined simply off-the-charts more expensive.  The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier strike groups when no other country has more than two.  No other national security outfit can claim to sweep up “nearly five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world”; nor, like the National Security Agency’s Special Source Operations group in 2006, boast about being capable of ingesting the equivalent of “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds”; nor does it have any competitors when it comes to around the U.S. and globally are never-ending.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ After all, if the twenty-first century has taught us anything, it’s that the most expensive and over-equipped military on the planet can’t win a war.  Its two multi-trillion-dollar attempts since 9/11, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both against lightly armed minority insurgencies, proved disasters. (In Iraq, however, despite an ignominious U.S. pullout and the chaos that has followed in the region, the NSS and its supporters have continued to promote the idea that General David Petraeus’s “surge” was indeed some kind of historic last-minute “victory.”)-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other words, in bang-for-the-buck practical terms, Washington’s national security state should be viewed as a remarkable failure.  And yet, in faith-based terms, it couldn’t be a greater success.  Its false gods are largely accepted by acclamation and regularly worshiped in Washington and beyond.  As the funding continues to pour in, the NSS has transformed itself into something like a shadow government in that city, while precluding from all serious discussion the possibility of its own future dismantlement or of what could replace it.  It has made other options ephemeral and more immediate dangers than terrorism to the health and wellbeing of Americans seem, at best, secondary.  It has pumped fear into the American soul.  It is a religion of state power.