{"id":81095,"date":"2016-10-17T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=81095"},"modified":"2016-10-11T14:43:54","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T13:43:54","slug":"delusions-of-worthy-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/10\/delusions-of-worthy-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Delusions of Worthy Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"daviesnicolas\"<\/a>Fifteen years ago, on October 19th 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri, as they prepared to fly halfway across the world to wreak misdirected vengeance on the people of Afghanistan and begin the longest war in U.S. history.\u00a0 Rumsfeld told the bomber crews<\/a>, \u201cWe have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live.\u00a0 We choose the latter.\u00a0 And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

15 years later, our wars have changed the way millions of people live\u00a0and\u00a0killed about 2 million people<\/a> who had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11th.\u00a0 The most\u00a0basic principle of justice, that only the guilty<\/a> should be punished for a crime, was quickly lost and buried in America\u2019s rush to war.\u00a0 September 11th became the pretext, some would say a cynical pretext, for a massive expansion of U.S. militarism.<\/p>\n

President Bush\u2019s military spending set a post-WWII record, an average of $635 billion per year<\/a> in 2016 dollars, compared with an average of $470 billion per year throughout the Cold War.\u00a0 Now President Obama has done what would have seemed impossible in 2008, outspending Bush by an average of\u00a0$20 billion per year.\u00a0 Bush\u2019s unilateral military build-up and its continuation by Obama are unprecedented, and have paradoxically shattered the pattern of U.S. military spending established during 50 years of the Cold War, when it was justified, rightly or wrongly, by a serious military competition with the U.S.S.R.<\/p>\n

When we compare our military spending<\/a> to that of other countries, we are outspending\u00a0the\u00a0sum of the\u00a0next 9 military powers in the world\u00a0(most of which are U.S. allies in any case), and we are single-handedly spending more than\u00a0180 less militarized countries combined.<\/p>\n

So we have to ask: what purpose or interests does this serve, and what dangers does it represent?\u00a0 Clearly it has not enabled the U.S. to win any wars.\u00a0 The only wars we have won\u00a0since WWII were over the tiny neocolonial outposts of Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo.\u00a0 Hillary Clinton derided those operations<\/a> as \u201csplendid little wars\u201d in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000, as she urged its members to support more ambitious uses of\u00a0U.S. military force.\u00a0 Clinton got what she asked for, but she seems to have learned nothing from the catastrophic results.<\/p>\n

Justifying Mass Murder<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The danger of investing so much of our country\u2019s wealth in military forces and weapons of war is that it gives our leaders the illusion that they can use\u00a0war to advance our national interests or solve international problems.\u00a0 As an American general once observed, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.”<\/p>\n

Instead of making good on the \u201cpeace dividend\u201d Americans hoped for\u00a0at the end of the Cold War, U.S. leaders\u00a0were seduced by the mirage of a “unipolar” world in which\u00a0the threat and use of U.S. military force would be the final arbiter of international affairs.\u00a0\u00a0The late Senator Edward\u00a0Kennedy was ignored when he\u00a0condemned these ambitions<\/a> as \u201ca call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.\u201d<\/p>\n

In pursuit of this mirage, we\u00a0have used force\u00a0in violation of the UN Charter<\/a>\u00a0against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and now Syria.\u00a0\u00a0Our\u00a0military and civilian leaders have systematically violated the laws of war, ordering U.S. troops to kill civilians<\/a>, torture prisoners<\/a>, \u201cdead-check\u201d<\/a> or kill wounded enemy combatants, and to misidentify murdered civilians<\/a> as combatants killed in action, deliberately undermining the distinction between combatants and civilians that is the basis of the Fourth Geneva Convention<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Obama\u2019s doctrine of covert and proxy war has expanded U.S. Special Forces operations from 60 countries when he took office to 150 countries today<\/a>:\u00a0training allied forces to torture and kill their own people in countries like Saudi Arabia and Colombia; conducting joint operations with local forces from Iraq\u00a0to\u00a0the Philippines;\u00a0and operating in secret under CIA command\u00a0across Africa, and\u00a0supporting\u00a0forces\u00a0linked to Al-Qaeda<\/a>\u00a0in Libya and Syria.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy<\/a> and other U.S. agencies have\u00a0supported\u00a0shadowy forces working to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments in Honduras, Ukraine, Venezuela and now even nuclear-armed Russia, where the results of an attempt at U.S.-backed regime change would be supremely uncontrollable and dangerous.<\/p>\n

Under President\u00a0Obama, U.S.\u00a0special forces night raids in Afghanistan exploded from 20 raids per month when he took office to over 1,000 a month two years later<\/a>, a Phoenix Program on steroids with an ever-expanding target list based only on drone surveillance and\u00a0phone numbers harvested from captured cell-phones.\u00a0 Real human intelligence on the identities of victims is explicitly excluded from\u00a0U.S.\u00a0special forces’\u00a0vaunted\u00a0\u201cnetwork analysis.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Senior officers have admitted to the Washington Post<\/em> that at least half these raids target the wrong person or house<\/a>, killing thousands of innocent people.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile,\u00a0President\u00a0Obama\u2019s expansion of special forces operations has not led to any reduction in U.S. air strikes. \u00a0He is responsible for over 80,000 bomb and missile strikes<\/a> on 7 countries, compared with about 70,000 against 5 countries<\/a>\u00a0by President Bush.<\/p>\n

The Future – War or Peace<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>The world faces huge problems that must be addressed and resolved in the next few decades.\u00a0 We have depleted many of the natural resources that our present way of life has been built on, and now climate change is turning our use of fossil fuels into a slow form of mass suicide.\u00a0 The question facing us is this:\u00a0 will the allocation of increasingly scarce resources and the necessary transformations of the 21st century be directed by international cooperation for the benefit of all and the survival of human civilization?\u00a0\u00a0Or will\u00a0our world\u00a0be torn apart\u00a0by a desperate scramble\u00a0for\u00a0dwindling supplies of precious resources as\u00a0the most powerful countries use military force to try and grab what they can at the expense of everybody else?<\/p>\n

Our country\u2019s current war policy offers only one answer to that question.\u00a0 We must find a\u00a0different one – and an effective political strategy to impose it on our deluded leaders while there is still time.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of<\/em>\u00a0Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq\u00a0and of the chapter on “Obama At War” in<\/em>\u00a0Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we compare our military spending to that of other countries, we are outspending the next 9 military powers in the world, and we are single-handedly spending more than 180 less militarized countries combined. Clearly it has not enabled the U.S. to win any wars. The only wars we have won since WWII were over tiny Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo. Hillary Clinton derided those operations as \u201csplendid little wars\u201d in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, as she urged more ambitious uses of U.S. military force.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}