Sylvester Stallone, desperate to revive his flagging career, is planning to make Rambo 4. The market for gung-ho patriotic epics is reckoned to be pretty good right now and the Rambo franchise is an established brand. In Rambo 4, apparently, the muscle-bound hero will invade Afghanistan, massacre the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden.
There is a slight problem, though. Fans of the Rambo movies may not be the brightest stars in the firmament, but they do tend to follow their hero's exploits with obsessive attention. It's a fair bet that most of them will remember Rambo 3 - which is slightly embarrassing, since Stallone was also splattering the sands of Afghanistan with blood in that film. Back then, however, Rambo's enemies were sadistic child-killing Russians and his friends were the hardy, heroic mujahidin, whose unshakeable devotion to the truths of fundamentalist Islam was the source of their courage and nobility.
It is notable that the last American war in Iraq, Operation Desert Storm in 1991, didn't produce any heroic Hollywood epics. The one big commercial movie set in that particular Gulf War was the downbeat, deeply sceptical George Clooney vehicle Three Kings. It focused on the cynical rapacity of the American troops and the betrayal of the Shia uprising against Saddam which the US had encouraged and then abandoned.
Three Kings, indeed, seemed to mark a certain turning-point in American popular culture. The film industry obviously reckoned that the public had lost its appetite for the crude simplicities of good Americans against evil foreigners. Even those who didn't pay too much attention to the subtleties of geopolitics didn't really believe in this stuff any more.
That changed on September 11th, of course. The rhetoric of good versus evil didn't just return, it was resurrected in a cruder, more cartoonish form than ever before. All that axis-of-evil sloganising is so childish that it is easy to miss the reality that something very profound has happened to the American ideology of war.
For most of the 20th century, the US, in common with most world powers, understood war, in the famous formulation of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, as "the continuation of politics by other means". At least in the way the mandarins imagined it, war was part of a package which included diplomacy, statecraft and a set of long-term strategic aims.
This old conception of the soldier as an armed politician has now been replaced by a new idea of the soldier as an armed corporate c.e.o. The current US administration is utterly saturated with the market ideology of 1970s neo-conservatism. It is also dominated by former corporate c.e.os. They see war, quite literally, as a business.
In a recent issue of the bible of geopolitical wonks, Foreign Affairs, the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explicitly envisages war as an extension of free-market ideology.
His aim, he writes, is to transform the Defence Department and the US armed forces into an aggressive multinational corporation. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be pro-active, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be 'validated' but rather anticipates them before they appear and develops new capabilities to dissuade and deter them."
THIS shift in thinking is as profound as it is alarming and it is one reason why the coming war on Iraq cannot be dismissed as simply a land-grab aimed at controlling the oil supply. Such old-fashioned considerations do, of course, impinge on the thinking of the Bush administration, but there is also something quite new going on and it can't be understood simply through the old rules of imperialism.
When you begin to imagine military strategists as venture capitalists and generals as entrepreneurs, you are planning for permanent war. As the c.e.o. of Coca Cola or Intel, it is not your job to keep things ticking over and hold on to your market share. You must be continually expanding, constantly beating the competition, always developing new products, forever on the lookout for new markets and products, eternally anticipating new threats.
In his application of market ideology to war, Rumsfeld follows the logic of corporate strategy. He is quite explicit about his belief that threats don't need to be validated. A good corporation doesn't wait until the public begins to demand a new product. It invents the product and then creates the demand and Rumsfeld is telling us quite openly that this is the way wars will be fought. We invent the war and then create the demand for it.
The logic of this is that victory in Iraq (and I have no doubt that the US will win a complete victory) is not an end to anything. It is one episode in a permanent campaign. Since threats must be anticipated and need not be validated, there will always be a menace to fight. If this ideology is risky, well entrepreneurial ideology values risk-taking above all else. Risk is good.
Consistent principles are unnecessary. The good corporation is constantly changing, its brands are continually re-invented. So what if Rambo 4 contradicts Rambo 3? If there's a market opportunity to re-establish a clapped-out franchise, what's the problem?