America, I thought I knew you. In all the bluster of the Republican primaries going on in the US, the talk of gaffes, polls, religion, attack ads and true conservatism, it would be easy to overlook a fascinating development. In a country that has long identified patriotism with fighting the right wars, people are tired of war. More importantly, soldiers are tired of war….
A long overdue reevaluation of our quasi-imperial foreign policy seems finally to be finally an acceptable topic of conversation. The Cold War is over and we won. Why in heaven’s name do we have a standing army in Europe? Why are we shipping arms to Israel, a nation with, by some estimates, the world’s sixth largest stockpile of nuclear weapons? Why did we attack Libya (without a declaration of war)? Did they attack us? Were they about to? Why did we invade Iraq? Did they attack us? Were they about to?
Our military has been stretched to the breaking point. We have beggared the national treasury with all of these idiotic wars. God knows how many of our sons and daughters have been needlessly killed and maimed as a result of all this military adventurism. All we are doing is making enemies in every corner of the world out of people who understandably are ticked off by American troops being in their country or neighborhood. And if all but one of the men running for president don’t get it, our soldiers certainly do. They are overwhelming supporting Ron Paul. (Disclaimer: I am also supporting Dr. Paul).
At least when Woodrow Wilson (may he roast in the hot stinky bad place) plunged us into a war we had no business being in he came up with a great sounding lie to justify it. We were “making the world safe for democracy.” What was our justification for invading Iraq? Were we making the world safe for Halliburton?
It is time and indeed past time for us to learn to mind our own damned business.
From Vicksburg on the United States war goal has been “unconditional surrender.” We have never been good at negotiated settlements, but that has been our practice since 1945. We settled in Korea for essentially restoring the status quo ante. In Vietnam we refused to take the war to the north and lost. In Lebanon we agreed to Syrian and Hezbollah (Iran) control. We pulled out of Somalia. Gulf War One ended with an unstable “no fly zone” that Saddam was increasingly testing. We went in to put him out of power and we did so. We might have gotten out earlier and let the Iraqis have their civil war without us. And we can leave the Afghanis to work out their own problems with Pakistan and Iran, etc. That still leaves a number of bases all over the world from which we can act to project power and protect our interests. We need some national discussion about whether we are willing to continuue in our post-Korea policy of negotiated settlements or whether we want to return to the policy of unconditional surrender even if this means that we will recognize no limits of national boundaries etc.
Another national discussion needs to take place about whether we want to continue with an all-volunteer military – in which case we need to do better by our veterans – or whether some form of compulsory military training (cf. Israel or Switzerland) would better serve our national interest. I’m inclined to the second option but am willing to listen to others comments.
What has been the real percentage cost of our defense budget as compared to our total national budget and to our GNP (corrected to 2010 dollars and not counting dollars spent in actual combat) been each year since 1940?
What has been the real percentage cost of our national social entitlement programs computed in the same manner over the same time period?
The bottom line is that we are a nation that has vastly expanded its social entitlements at the expense of its national security interests.
We are also nation in which about only half of its citizens pay federal income taxes.
Go figure.
I’m a veteran, as many of you know. [b]I HATE WAR.[/b] I’m also of the opinion that there were wars that we never should’ve gotten involved in, and one of them was Vietnam.
The French were responsible for starting that war in support of their colonial policies……they didn’t want to let go of what was then known as French Indo China. They got their heads handed to them by the Viet Minh nationalists and Ho Chi Minh…..a nationalist who was forced to turn to the Communists for help in ridding his country of French influence.
President Eisenhower was duped into sending U.S. military advisors to aid the French……a stupid move, as it turned out. Ditto for John Kennedy. Criminal for Lyndon Johnson, who was itching for any excuse to butt in on a civil war. We lost 57,000 people in that war……one of whom was an Air Force nurse who tended me while I was in the hospital at Travis AFB.
War has always been a part of life, and it always will be. There’s no getting around that. But if wars must be fought, then let them be fought for the right reasons. Right now, we’re fighting a religious war against Muslim terrorists…..like it or not. If Christianity and Judaism are going to survive, we can’t back down. It’s costly, and we can’t deny that. But more important, we can’t afford to lose.
Cennydd (#4.) said,
“…Ho Chi Minh…..a nationalist who was forced to turn to the Communists for help in ridding his country of French influence.”
Ho Chi Minh may have started out as a nationalist, but he sold his soul to International Communism. And by doing so, he knowingly made himself an enemy of all who were not communist. Any accomodations that he made with non-communists were made to advance the communist cause. I believe he was a founding member of the communist party in France. He later served communism in the Soviet Union and then in China.
Yes, he chose his homeland as an arena for communist aggression, but if he had been a true nationalist, he would not have suppressed non-communists in Vietnam and there would not have been further war in South Vietnam. Over a period of years the South Vietnamese political situation would have sorted itself out in a nationally Vietnamese manner.
His absolute intolerance toward non-communists caused non-communist Vietnamese to fear him and to fight his mislead minions.
And by the way Cennydd, as a person who led sailors in the River Patrol Force and who fought in the Mekong Delta, I call tell you that I too do not relish war, but I also realize that stands must be taken and consequently wars end up being fought.
And, there are truly bad people leading nations and/or movements who have accumulated so much power and who are exercising that power in such a manner that to ignore them, deny their motives, to abjectly permit them to dominate ther scene, etc. is to invite an even larger war with even more serious consequences.
Do you remember Kruchev’s famous United Nations speech where he stated that he was going to “bury” the West through communist-led insurrections and warfare in third-world countries? And then, warfare in third-world countries began popping up all over the place.
At that point in time, at the time of the onset of the U.S. involvement in South Vietnam, there was no idea of how far this was going to go. And yes, Johnson and his appointed policy making cohorts were behaved in a manner that ignored the best advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that was unimaginative, to say the least. The Joint Chiefs also really didn’t know how to exerccise military power in low intensity warfare/counter-insurgency environment. The only two services that had leadership that displayed any real sense of how to fight the Vietnam war were the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy.
Agreed!
I’m pretty sure that God is tired of war, at the very least.
So the post WW2 order is finally falling apart, where the US bankrolls free trade, and ensures that nations compete on the basis of commerce rather than dreadnoughts. What an ignorant and stupid woman. She concludes that friendliness is the new currency. How far will friendliness take New Zealand? How many divisions does the friendliest country in the world have?
Very good poiont, paradoxymoron. The USA, Britain and other countries do not maintain armies and fleets just for the sake of it. They maintain them because they are inevitably bound up with trade dominance.
Some would call it [b]Trade Protection,[/b] and Britain did just that as recently as World War 2.