To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a general, everything resembles war. In my lifetime, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have seriously proposed pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union; repeatedly urged the invasion of Cuba; selected contractors who supplied weapons so shoddy they led to troop mutinies during the Korean war; warned of the domination of world communism if we did not invade Vietnam; lied about body-counts and strategic blunders there to disguise our growing loss of control, and stayed the course with ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in Iraq.
The disastrous arguments and practices are currently being recycled for the war in Afghanistan. Forgive my skepticism, but I have yet to understand why our troops are deployed there and how we intend to either pacify or defend a Nation larger than California and Texas where the population hates us, and a majority has sworn blood oaths to revenge murders of tribal members.
Our endless wars and military adventures are costing us the way of life they are supposed to defend. After we pay our tab for Social Security, Medicare, Veteran’s benefits, interest on debt, pensions and other entitlements, (50% of tax revenues), of all the money left in the national treasury, the Military consumes over 40%. They actually consume more, because their budget is so complex, cached in other departments of State, tacked on to future year requisitions, or declared classified, that no one can say with certainty exactly what they cost us. Knowledgeable sources estimate the amount at over $750 billion dollars per year.
No-bid contracts, black-budgets, Cold-war weapons-systems; civilian-killing drones turning local populations against us, contribute nothing to national prosperity. They flow down the sink-hole of the military-industrial-congressional vector, stealing the funds from average citizens starved for the decent education our kids need for future competitiveness; denied upgraded highways, bridges, airports and ports without which no economy can flourish.
While the lack of decent, affordable health care every other major economy has managed eludes and bankrupts us, our Research and Development funds which might make our products competitive with the other developed economies, are diverted to stock dividends and expenditures in the war economy instead of consumer industries. We rack up short-term gains from selling evanescent computer games, and nifty "smart" toys, while the Japanese, Chinese, and Europeans with far more modest military commitments, manufacture cars, heavy equipment, and consumer goods and, more importantly, repatriate their profits.
In my own life-time, I’ve witnessed our native electronics industry, shoe industry, textile industry, rose industry, electronics industry, and now automobile industry transformed from world exemplars into also-rans if not outright losers. The men and women we sent to Washington to protect them and the fates of their millions of workers, have abandoned them wholesale and signed on as concierges of the corporate sector. Their skill-sets of charm, alarm, and the manipulation of language are dedicated to amassing personal wealth before retiring through the revolving door to secure corporate sinecures,
Forgive my simple heresies, but if the United States was really under threat wouldn’t we know it? Chilling and horrific as 9/11 was, it was accomplished by a bunch of losers with dime-store technology who recognized that we had dropped our security chain low enough so that they could step over it. Why? Because we don’t want to spend the money that real security would cost.
We lose a 9/11 number of people a week to heart-attacks from crappy food and other preventable afflictions. We sacrifice 18 times that many souls every year to gun-violence. 100,000 lives every year in automobile accidents and we don’t feel it necessary to declare war on cars.
The Taliban has no navy, regular army or air force. They’re not going to invade the United States or our allies. If they were, wouldn’t we all would be lining up to volunteer; offerring to pay more taxes for our mutual defense; sacrificing something to save ourselves and support our men and women in uniform? However the men and women who declared this war have made our sacrifice for us----they dedicated our entire economy as an offerring to Mammon.
In World War II, we instituted a draft, rationed fuel, butter, meat, and fat, supported the troops by buying War Bonds. If we, the people, really perceived a common threat, would we do less again? Congress is afraid to ask the American people to make any sacrifice for these wars, the real purpose of which is to keep the corporate pumps primed and assert America’s projection of force on a global basis. Consequently, they ply us with insubstantial, changing, rationales and tweak our anxieties, for fear that we might stop Twittering long enough to realize that military adventurism and greed magnify threat rather than diminish it.
We’ve allowed a small band of criminal thugs to scare our wits away. Our fear has been manipulated to camouflage the fleecing we’re getting from those who profit by it. Instead of building alliances, cooperating with world police and intelligence agencies to track and jail murderous scum, we’re behaving like locker-room jocks, pumping our fists in the air and declaring war on terror. It’s an embarrassment--- like declaring war on anger while criminals gut your house.
Exactly how many terrorists does it require to justify a war? How many disaffected Afghan peasants represent a threat to our national security? I’m sure we could find a couple of thousand people in any country on earth who hate the United States for some reason. Would this justify global war? The arrests of domestic terrorists here in September demonstrate that a number exist within our borders. Bombing Baghdad or Afghanistan to “get terrorists” is like bombing Brooklyn to get John Gotti. The rationale is wearing thin, and the policy makers, realizing the American people are growing dubious and restive, are beating the drums about cutting the debt they’ve incurred by these adventures. Rather than pay a single extra dollar in taxes they are using a future fiscal calamity to gut Education, benefits to the old, unemployed, and repairs and upgrades to our infrastructure. The wars continue to siphon public money into their stock-options and dividends, while six thousand families a week are being thrown out on the streets at home.
Ideologically driven military adventurism is precisely what foundered Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society and enmeshed us in Vietnam, and endless murderous adventures in Latin America. The domino theory that once predicted the sweep of communism across Asia, justifying the horrors we inflicted on the Vietnamese and ourselves, turned out to be horse-crap. The TV pundits keep the dumb-show-for-sucker discussions running while the real game is maneuvering to get one’s mouth under the spigot of money, waving ones hands in the air to show how clean they are.
Under current arrangements, we don’t need to win any of these wars. All we have to do to keep the stock market afloat and the investors happy, is continue to make weapons, uniforms, and machinery,fly them someplace in the world, under one pretext or another, blow them up, and make more. Perpetual war is the goal of current policy, consequently the hemorrhaging of resources from the body politic into corporate coffers is virtually invisible.
Barefoot peasants in some of the poorest countries on earth have thrown multi-national corporate vandals out, reclaiming their countries, assets and national pride. Our leaders point fingers at them and call them “communists”. The barefoot campesinos and peasants observe the way we are being swindled and laugh. They don’t care what we call them. They know we’re fools.