The war machine is not the State; the State appropriates a war machine, and adapts it to its aims. The war machine is also not the military. There is a “capitalist tendency to develop total war” and that requires motivation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 421). Two axioms apply:

AXIOM 1: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 351);
AXIOM II: The war machine is not the military forces (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987 380); the U.S. soldiers are just private contractors, the mercenary force of reservists paid to keep the wealthy sons and daughters of Congress from being conscripted.

The U.S. State has undertaken to totally destroy another State (to be precise, several States); the U.S. State has appropriated its military institutions (Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, & National Guard) for that end. $5,500 is spent recruiting each military volunteer, and higher sums spent to recruit Hispanics, who die in far greater percentages than other races, unable to cash in on promises of education after service. The recruiters begin their influence in the Middle schools, with free rides on Hummers, and a chance to feel the munitions. In High school, students are seduced into the ROTC; and this continues with College ROTC programs.

Motivation is part of the war machine; the best and the brightest must be recruited, families of recruited must believe their sons and daughters are sacrificed to save the State; the families of the military must not publicly display the bodies of GI’s in the media. It is the motivation of fear-ridden anxiety; the media-inspired terror by CNN, Fox, USA Today, and Clear Channel radio; the war machine appropriates the Press to make annihilation of another nation the rallying cry; the enemy is specified the “Other.”

The war machine also stirs deep passion by turning its sights on the “unspecified enemy” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 422); in the case of the War on Iraq, the “unspecified enemy” is the peace movement, which to the fascist is quite terrifying. Fear is used as a device to entice people to surrender their freedom, to spy on their neighbor. Annihilate the new enemy; turn the guns on those who would protest war.

This is a media-driven ‘postmodern’ war machine (Best & Kellner, 2001) has its sights on the new enemy, all those peace people with their signs (welcome to the end of habeas corpus; the U.S.A. Patriot Act; the war on peace by the war machine). A postmodern war is a spectacle production, a craft of spin doctors and embedded journalists, and a press owned by the war machine.

The new objective is the destruction of democracy, the actualization of worldwide domination; the new “military democracy” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 394).

Total war on Iraq is a war of total annihilation, the “destruction of the entire population and its economy” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 421); except of course for the oil economy which was the prize of so-called total war.

Total war has been eclipsed by a limited war; this occurred with President Bush spectacle of the May 19th 2003 landing in a fighter jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier. 138 U.S. troops died in Iraq in the six weeks of aggression from March 19th to May 1st 2003 (when President Bush did his Top Gun landing), and the banner read: “Mission Accomplished." As of Aug 19 2004 953 U.S. GIs are dead & 13,603 estimated Iraqi dead. By the time this book goes to press that number will exceed 1,000 U.S. dead and 15,000 Iraqi.

The U.S. is a war economy, where the investment in depleted uranium and other munitions, the arms sales to other nations, the subcontracts of non-combat personnel to Haliburton, and so forth makes up the war machine.

U.S. Empire is a worldwide war machine, a succession of continuous warfare in a long list of countries since WWWII. This is fascism, a “war machine takes peace as its object directly” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 421). The war is called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” It is most definitely what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 421) call “the peace of Terror or Survival.”

Motivation is essential to the war machine. An economy addicted to war, to the sales of weapons of mass destruction to other war machines ? the State appropriates not only war machine but the media (more accurately, the embedded media). Ironically, the most disenfranchised people, the homeless, those without healthcare, those without tax breaks, and those families of the Hispanic soldier dying on the front line ? these are the people most passionately supporting the war machine. As education takes its hit, as all the institutions of State assessment legislate the outcome assessments of the university ? the war machine becomes isomorphic with the nomadic motivation machine. The nomadic motivation machine (State+Press+Capital) articulates the encasement of motives and influences to perpetuate the war machine and our “concentration camp society” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 390).

The good news is the U.S. Empire’s perpetual war machine is running up against humanity and ecological limits; the fascist State can not continue to bully the world; CNN shown in the U.S. is not the CNN shown internationally; the U.S. State does not control all the Press, there are conscript-slaves resisting military service, returning home with Depleted Uranium poisoning, to a military medical establishment that is still in denial about Gulf War Syndrome. There are cracks in Bush’s evangelical capitalism, in the holy war fought to obtain the grail, oil. Religious motives are the motor of this latest war machine; “crusade” was Bush’s most Freudian slip of the tongue. The war machine is intertwined with aristocratic family, a genealogical legacy of Bush presidents (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 366). There is a new sovereignty and few seem to mind, as long as the entertainment value is there.

As the military institution ceases to be a puppet of the State apparatus, there may be a death of motivation to deterritorialize other nations, to reterritorialize the oily earth. One can only hope that the U.S. Empire war machine is already being overtaken by the worldwide peace movement, that there is some genuine alternative to the State appropriation of the military into the war machine along with the embedded Press.

References
Best, Steve & Kellner, Douglas. 2001. The Postmodern Spectacle.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. (Translation: B. Massumi). 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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