Introduction to Iron Mountain and Welcome

There are probably "Iron Mountains" in most mountainous places. The Iron Mountain we are thinking of is in New York state. It is purported to be the launching pad and final meeting place of a top secret panel the charge to which was to challenge all assumptions and consider what the implications of the military-industrial complex might be. In a nut shell the Report From Iron Mountain, "leaked" by Richard Lewin, decided that for an industrialized country like the United States it was absolutely essential that a significant percentage of the economy be dedicated to "waste," meaning that physical and human resources needed to be irrecoverable and essentially programmed to not feed forward into the rest of the economy. War is seen as the fundamental and quintessential form of waste, and so the "Report" argues that a continuous or nearly continuous state of warfare become the flywheel of the American economy. So far only NASA has anything else like it, and at that NASA is a mere dimple in the pit that Iron Mountain demands, Tang ® notwithstanding.

Our use of the Iron Mountain legend is ironical, of course. The book was written at a time when American confidence in its military and industrial prowess was high, when the Soviet Union was showing only the first signs of stress and wear. The U.S. was not yet "post-industrial"—whatever that means beyond shipping our factories to countries with cheap, exploitable labor costs. The U.S. was not yet "post-modern" in the intellectual sense that significant sectors of the literati and cognocenti had not yet decided that "Progress" (with a capital P) was illusory and probably chimerical.

Since then, though, the Soviet Union has given way to a new form of authoritarian Russia, the illusion that we are safe behind our oceans has been crushed by the events of 9/11/01, and the country is wallowing more or less helplessly in the wasteland of a huge financial collapse the full extent of which has not yet been understood. The ironies of Iron Mountain will often infuse essays presented here directly or by allusion. Let it be understood that we are not in favor of the military-industrial-Congressional complex and, quite the reverse, would like to see its demise as soon as possible. Finally, though, we will be going beyond Iron Mountain in our analyses, concentrating on the very things that Iron Mountain submerged: rule of law, individual freedom, progress, ethics, and a rational compassion for humanity.

JB