Thursday, February 2, 2012

More War??

One of the most frustrating things about American government today is that it really does not matter which party is in office when it comes to our compulsive war mongering. We are just out of the mess in Iraq and we are only just beginning to talk about maybe being willing to leave Afganistan, and now we are waving our rifles and bombs in the air in threatening motions toward Iran. Meanwhile, we blame the whole national economic crisis on Big Government and totally ignore the bizarre reality that America spends more on its military than all other countries of the world combined! Why? Is this what Eisenhower meant when he told us to "beware the military-industrial complex?"

Well, today, we are told that Israel may well attack Iran this spring. Oh, great. Where will we stand on that? We will, of course, get totally sucked into that war so there we will be, fighting yet another war in the Middle East. We will not, of course, reflect upon the expense of lives (either ours or theirs) nor will we bother to reflect upon the expense of yet billions more dollars. When it comes to our war machine, we really don't care how much we spend or where the money comes from. (Debt, what is that?)

Is there any rationality connected with this militarism at all? Actually, I think not. What is the track record for actually "winning" wars? Well, in some sense we "won" the Second World War in both Europe and the Pacific. We did, of course, manage to withdraw from both regions and we wound up realizing that we had to re-build both enemies in order to secure any meaningful peace. In Korea, the war is actually still on. We just agreed to stop shooting at each other. In Vietnam, we foolishly decided to take over a failed French colonial policy and look what happened. We lost that war because it was an un-win-able war. Exercising some intelligence could have saved us, but we are short on intelligence when it comes to our military engagements.

In 1991 we pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait. As we all said back then, we probably would never have bothered if the chief product of Kuwait had been broccoli. The elder Bush stopped the military from going all the way to Bagdad so, later on, his wild son Bush II had to spend billions of American dollars and destroy thousands of lives to show off to his daddy that he could face down Saddam Hussein. Who ever thought that we could wage a war on Iraq and do what? We're going to change Iraq? Ridiculous. So now we have finally left (more or less) and nothing has really changed. It's the same society and it will go its own way.

Afganistan! Did we ever bother to study what happened to the Russians in Afganistan? Why did we believe that the results would be any different? For that matter, why do we seem to believe that we can storm into any country, bomb the shit out of their population, land our forces in their towns and farmlands, and utter things about forming democratic governments, and expect that change will occur? If some country did that to us, we would be in the streets and alleys fighting tooth-and-nail. We would be planting IUDs, car bombs, etc. We don't seem to understand that what we face is just plain human nature.

So now we are waiving our weapons in front of Iran. Why? Well, largely to protect Israel. Yes, this time (and for the last many decades) we are picking up on a failed British colonial problem. Why do we seem compelled to solve European failures?