Why Serve?
Kissinger: In my life, I have almost always been on the side of active
foreign policy. But you need to know with whom you are cooperating. You need
reliable partners -- and I don't see any in this conflict (Syria).
Kissinger: I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be
discovered, not declared. It's an admission that one grows in life. It's not
necessarily a self-criticism. What I was trying to say is you should not think
that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the
concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications.
Kissinger:
I'll tell you what I thought at the time. I thought that after the attack on
the United States, it was important that the US vindicate its position. The UN
had certified major violations. So I thought that overthrowing Saddam was a
legitimate objective. I thought it was unrealistic to attempt to bring about
democracy by military occupation.
SPIEGEL: Why
are you so sure that it is unrealistic?
Kissinger:
Unless you are willing to do it for decades and you are certain your people
will follow you. But it is probably beyond the resources of any one country.
Spiegel Online - International 11-13-14
By J.M. Hamilton (12-12-14)
In 1988, Governor Michael
Dukakis (MA – D) lost his presidential election to George H.W. Bush, largely,
due to the perception that he was soft on crime. This ushered in a period where a fear mongering
GOP attempted to label every Democrat as “soft on crime.” The Democratic Party, rather than sticking to
its principles on appropriate and impartial sentencing (many Dems objected to
the death penalty), rushed – in a game of political
one-upmanship – alongside the GOP - to build the criminal justice
industrial complex.
Today, nearly forty years later, most Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, recognize President
Reagan’s federal mandatory sentencing guidelines, the criminal justice
industrial complex, the steady privatization of our prison system, and the
militarization of our local and state police agencies for what they are: a
complete and unmitigated disaster.
A national disaster that is a
threat to the rule of law; that has led to the highest incarceration rate in
the developed world (totalitarian China has a lower incarceration rate than the
U.S.); has had the pernicious effect of disenfranchising minority voters;
incarcerated and ruined the lives of many young citizens and persons of color for
victimless crimes, like drug possession; and has led to the complete melt down of race relations and police and societal relations in our country. Forty years – two generations - is a long
time for both political parties to figure out that their “get tough” moves on
crime were intolerant, a waste of taxpayer resources and human lives, and worse
still, completely racist.
Today, the Democratic Party
(or GOP-Lite), led by President Obama, appears ready to repeat a similar
mistake. The Democratic Party appears
all too ready to begin following a fear mongering GOP, once again, down the rabbit hole of foreign policy and by ignoring President Washington’s
admonishment: to beware of foreign
entanglements.
The result of the GOP’s blind
over-reach, globally, has been failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Vietnam before it, Afghanistan and Iraq
nation building has wasted hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars, led the
Federal Reserve to print trillions of dollars to pick up the tab, and caused
record amounts of suicide among our fighting men and women; and above all, Iraq
and Afghanistan have proven once again, that indigenous people (governed by corrupt puppet regimes), who are unwilling to fight for their own freedom, will
not fill the vacuum – when American forces depart. Hence, leaving a disaster in the making, nearly
every time America reaches for the DOD for nation building purposes.
Now our President, who many
of us support, and who campaigned on a pledge to pull the U.S. out of two
failed GOP led wars, Iraq and Afghanistan – quite
possibly in a duel of political one- upmanship, yet again – is doubling
down and leading this nation to war.
Sound familiar?
POTUS has started up fresh
wars in Iraq and Syria, and appears to be backtracking on winding down the Afghanistan nation building exercise. (The
President has also steadily back peddled on his pledge not to place boots on
the ground in Iraq and Syria.) Per departing
Defense Secretary, Mr. Hagel, local Afghanistan forces – after more than a
decade of U.S. occupation – need more time to get their act together. Good luck with that.
Question: Thirty to forty years from now, will a future
generation of Americans and both political parties wake up from our national
nightmare of foreign adventures to recognize – like the building of the criminal justice industrial complex – that
it was all an epic waste of lives and resources?
Foreign adventures that were, and are, a monumental waste of taxpayer
money, little more than a boondoggle for the military industrial complex, war profiteering
defense contractors and multinationals, and a complete waste and ruin of the
lives of the men and women who proudly serve this nation (and a disaster for
the indigenous peoples we allegedly, went in to protect, and bring hope and
democracy to)?
And the U.S. can place the forty-year
old war on drugs right up there in the pantheon of ineptitude as well. It’s a war that should have never been waged.
To that end, the point of today’s piece: Why serve?
Or more specifically, why serve in our nation’s armed forces?
Culturally, it’s no accident
that Hollywood continues to glorify WWII with new movies, but films portraying
Afghanistan and various Iraqi conflicts often take on a more ominous tone, or are
morally ambiguous (more akin to Vietnam movies), and with good reason. When one compares the costs of the lightning
raid by Special Forces on OBL’s compound, versus the trillions spent, and the
hundreds of thousands of lives wasted on the two nation building exercises
(designed to eliminate a similar or the same threat)… well the cost/benefit
analysis doesn’t add up. There is no
comparison. The abuse of the men and
women who serve doesn’t stop there, however.
How about the circumstances
that placed these men and women into harms way to begin with? It’s well documented that America has been led
into war, time and time again, through misinformation, falsehood, and contrived
and slanted data. The true motive for
Iraq was the ocean of oil it contains – a resource that is now in abundant
supply within the United States.
As for the politicians, who
are all too eager to send our troops into battle? Unlike previous generations, the majority of the
members of today’s U.S. Congress have never seen a battlefield, let alone served. And as there is no draft, it is highly unlikely
that their sons or daughters would ever be placed in harms way. As taxes are no longer raised to pay for wars
(wars are now financed), and there is no draft, the general public rarely offers
focused, or sustained, disapproval of U.S. war efforts, no matter how badly
mismanaged. And that is by design. The corporate run news media flashes a couple
of beheadings on the nightly news, and our martial response is often
exponentially disproportionate, poorly calibrated, and with little thought
given to the repercussions or unintended consequences.
It gets worse still, because
thanks to SCOTUS’ Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions, arguably, the
Congress and the Executive branch – in no small way – are compromised into doing the plutocracy’s bidding on foreign policy matters. This means the true power brokers in America,
the plutocracy (the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street,
and Private Equity barons) call the shots, and the Congress is all too happy execute their requests. The fact that the
nation, as some have argued, went into Iraq, so that Mr. Cheney’s Halliburton
could start up operations in the region, is a terrible reason to fight a
war.
How many of the nation’s
youth were led into joining the war effort, post 9-11, with the best of
patriotic intentions, when the reality was they were not fighting for democracy
and America, but rather were fighting so that Exxon Mobil could begin sucking up
Iraqi oil? Do we really want our
nation’s fighting force dying and killing for the Royal House of Saud, Qatar,
or so that Exxon can make an extra billion on its next quarterly
statement?
What have our rulers, the
plutocracy, done to demand such blind allegiance from our armed forces and our
citizens? The U.S. economic power elite
have shipped jobs offshore in record numbers, through free trade agreements, outsourcing,
and globalization. As noted in Barron’s: through M&A,
bankruptcies, and private equity, the plutocracy has cut down the number of
publicly traded companies from 8,823 in 1997 to 5,008 at the end of 2013. This industrial and service sector
consolidation - killed jobs and
opportunity - has made the rich wealthier, caused gross wealth and wage inequality,
led to stagnating wages, harmed the economy and the tax base, and led to monopolies
and cartels (that produce a predatory tax on society, and a drag on the economy
through monopolistic profits). Worse
still, the power elite are now fleeing the country, that has long protected
them and their assets, in the latest tax dodge called inversions. How’s that for instilling loyalty and trust?
Perhaps contributing most to
foreign policy chaos, is the military industrial complex or MIC. The revolving door between private defense
contractors and the armed forces’ generals and officer staff is ceaselessly
spinning. This means we have an
organization (the DOD) that is a dedicated advocate for war to resolve all the nation’s problems, both foreign and domestic.
Don’t understand something, don’t like some foreign head of state or
some regime, is a dictator nationalizing domestic resources, is the U.S. economy
stagnating, need a distraction from political stalemate and the ineffectiveness
of our government to solve problems…. forget about an exit strategy, and unintended
consequences be damned: WAVE THE FLAG AND BOMB IT, ALREADY!
It’s the GOP way. And rapidly becoming the Democratic way,
where the end always justifies the means.
That’s precisely the problem with these wars: the means and the process,
unlimited war, has become the end unto itself.
Make no mistake about it, we should all cherish and
honor the men and women who serve this country. We can
strongly disagree with the military missions our economic and political leaders
send our armed forces on, but the men and women in uniform have no choice but
to execute upon their orders. My
grandfather served in WWII, within the European theatre, and my father served
in the U.S.A.F. for thirty-five years, during the height of the cold war. I have a strong appreciation and a sense of
gratitude for what these men and women do everyday, and the sacrifices their
families make for our nation. While our
nation’s history is rich with battles and wars fought for righteous and moral
causes, recent conflicts and nation building exercises do not reflect well
upon our economic and political leadership, nor our nation. In fact, they make us look morally bankrupt,
and are financially, bankrupting the nation.
In nearly all instances where
our military was deployed from Vietnam to Syria, the U.S. had made the
situation worse, while facing no existential threat to our national
security. In fact, it is the wars
themselves and the resulting blowback, that have created a threat to our national
security: by creating deficit spending, by over-extending our military on
missions it is ill suited for, and by abusing the men and women who serve. Dr. Kissinger is 100% correct, and as J.M.H.
has previously argued: nation building
should be conducted by an international body, not solely the U.S. military.
Record poppy production in
Afghanistan under U.S. watch, notwithstanding.
Torture conducted by the CIA as a matter of routine, like brushing your
teeth in the morning. An intelligence
community (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., etc., etc) that has run completely off the
rails, violated the nation’s civil liberties and due process, created a police/surveillance
state, and that is beyond the reach of any reasonable controls or guidance. These are just a few examples of where the
DOD and the intelligence community are entirely out of control, and conducting their affairs in a morally and logically unconscionable manner.
Some fifty odd years
ago, in his farewell address to the nation, the greatest General who ever lived,
President Eisenhower, called it:
“We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren
without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want
democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent
phantom of tomorrow.”
As such, and in this current
environment, I would be very hard pressed to recommend to my son that he serve
in the armed forces. Instead, if he
wanted to serve his country, I would recommend that he join the peace corps.
President Obama, in 2008, campaigned on a desire to
end two failed nation building exercises. And the American people,
wisely, supported the President in that regard.
What should have come as a surprise to no one was that these two wars,
like Vietnam before them, would come to a very bad end (just as I predicted in
2010 in my piece, No More Afghanistans).
No less surprising is that the GOP, who
brought these circumstances upon the nation, would attempt to hang their
foreseen failure upon the current White House occupant. But shame on the great communicator,
President Obama, for forgetting to mention to the American people, the highly
probable collapse of a corrupt and unstable Iraqi regime.
More recently President Obama
characterized his foreign policy as not doing “stupid stuff” (which this blog
has applauded), but how smart was it to go into Syria to fight a force, ISIL,
that has no nukes, no air force, and no weapons of mass destruction? (Or was it just politically expedient for the
President, and necessary to create the greatest opportunity for Hillary’s
coronation?) Moreover, the beneficiaries
of our martial efforts in the region appear to be Big Oil companies
(Halliburton, Exxon, et al.), Iran, various oil rich Arab monarchies, and Assad,
the Syrian dictator. Secretary of State
John Kerry, who once asked how can we ask our soldiers to “die for a mistake” called Vietnam,
now is the biggest cheerleader for the latest Iraqi/Syrian war.
As for the rogue states who played no small part in the formation of
ISIL, The Royal House of Saud and Qatar…. As usual, the U.S. is addressing the
symptom (ISIL) and not the problem, our so-called allies (Saudi Arabia and
Qatar).
Until there is campaign
finance reform in this country – coupled with term limits, extravagant sums of
money are divorced from the political process, and until the DOD and
Intelligence agencies are brought under control, there should be a moratorium
on any and all wars, unless the U.S. and its territories are invaded. Our nation’s warriors are fighting and dying in foreign lands for a lie, for major corporations, and to enrich DOD
contractors. And so that politicians,
beating the fear drum, can be reelected.
Time for some fresh blood and
some new thinking is this regard; time for Senators Warren and Paul to run for
higher office.
P.S.
J.M.H. has been writing about
monopolies and cartels for a few years now, calling them an unholy alliance
between government and the private sector.
Crony capitalism at its worst, monopolies feed upon the consumer, kill
jobs and opportunity, stifle innovation, and are a tax upon society, through
monopolistic profits. And at long last
much of what I have written has played out before our eyes in real time, with the
collapse of Big Oil and OPEC. You want
to stimulate the economy and create jobs (forget about the FED), expand the tax
base, and eliminate the Federal debt… politicians take note…. Kill monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and cartels.
There’s no greater stimulus
under the sun, and no greater preserver of capitalism's best attributes.
Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2014
