Thoughts on the upcoming war (or, "Won't Get Fooled Again") (8-28-2013)
Eleven years ago, I and several
hundred thousand of my fellow Americans (along with many in other nations)
found ourselves on the right side of history, while the rest of the country
ignored us. Worse, they despised us.
The Iraq invasion was going to happen. Every news anchor, every pundit,
left or right, had already been sold on the merits of the case, all of
which had of course come through official channels. No, this was not Vietnam,
they said. The war was going to pay for itself with oil revenues, they
said. The smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud, they said.
They said, and they said, and they said, and these talking points became
indisputable facts. Dissenting viewpoints were not allowed on major airwaves,
and were instead relegated to small-time regional talk shows and brief
mentions on C-Span. It was going to happen, and if you said it shouldn’t,
you were a monster, a traitor.
Yesterday, on NPR, I heard General Wesley Clark explaining to me how a
military action in Syria would not be like Iraq. Spinning the dial, both
digitally and terrestrially, I find this chorus growing. This is going
to happen. And if you don’t want it to, you’re a monster.
Well, guess what. I’m a monster.
And so are many Iraq vets I know, who are also aware that this is another
installment in the defense contractors’ manufactured-amnesia cycle.
The last war? No, there’s no way it’ll be like that. Hell,
that was a decade ago. We can do surgical strikes now. No, no, not like
those OLD surgical strikes that killed all those children and made the
population hate us and anything we attempted to do in their country. This
is different, man.
No. It isn’t. It never is.
Kurt Vonnegut wisely noted that the war he fought in, World War II, was
one of the only just wars in human history. It erased the lessons learned
from World War I, which scarred a whole generation and set off a wave
of revolutions, from Bolshevism to fascism to, yes, Nazism. After World
War I, the world’s people had problems trusting their leaders when
they told them a war was just.
It took the rise of Adolf Hitler to make people believe again that war
was a necessary thing. So a new precedent was set: War DOES solve things.
It eliminates evil.
Except that in the long arc of history, it doesn’t. And don’t
take it from me. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the most highly
decorated veteran of World War I, had it figured out in the 1930s:
“War is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most
vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one
in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it
seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’
group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very
few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge
fortunes.”
How has that changed since Butler last said it? Who profited from the
war I marched against in 2002? Who will profit from a war in Syria?
Yes, in 1945 we put down Hitler, an evil man. But among those who profited
from that enterprise were men like Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and—get
ready for this—the Ba’ath Party in Syria, whose current leader
is the man we are presently rallying to destroy.
Take a moment to read that sentence again. Bashar al-Assad (who, like
Saddam Hussein, is not Hitler) is the leader of a regime that was for
decades a client state of one of WWII’s winners, the Soviet Union.
One war turned into another one, misleadingly called the Cold War, despite
the fact that at its peak in 1962, the entire planet came within 40 minutes
of nuclear annihilation.
In the decades following WWII, evil dictators around the world were given
boatloads of money by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., to be on one side or
another, or both at times convenient to the regime.
Why am I taking us back to the 20th century here? Because if there is
one thing that Americans are terrible at, it is memory. In our cities,
we bulldoze history to make way for the new shiny thing, and we discard
our war lessons likewise. But just as Butler saw through the fog of war
to its root causes, so too did Eisenhower at the end of his presidency,
when he warned us of the military-industrial complex. And we forgot.
The next war springs from the last one. It is the same war. The same shareholders
profit, and the same toll is taken from the society who is talked into
it. It is a racket. It always has been.
We are only just now disentangling ourselves from the Iraq debacle. Or
we think we are. What powers have the past ten years unleashed that will
one day come to roost once again in the belfries of thinktanks and the
paid punditocracy, driving a new president towards a newer, better war?
Just like our assistance to the Mujahedeen in the 1980s helped bring about
9/11?
Already the perpetrators of the last conflict expect that we have forgotten
their names. In a letter to President Obama dated just yesterday, Bush
II era hawks such as Paul Bremer, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Joe Lieberman,
and—yes, really—KARL ROVE are explaining how very, very necessary
it is to go to war now, now, now!! (I’m not making this up, read
it for yourself here)
I know already what is coming. People are going to assail me with factoids,
with reports from official sources. They’re going to assure me that
this time, THIS time, it’s necessary. And they will honestly believe
it. They believed it last time.
Trotting out endless lines of minutiae for partisan debate is the business
of the pundit class, because it serves a purpose. Mired in arguments over
this little detail or that, we do not see the big picture. This is a criminal
tactic. Focus your attention on the crazy guy in front of you, and you
do not notice that your pocket is being picked from behind.
While writing this letter today, I went back through the materials that
ultimately convinced me to march against the last war. It is shocking
how little difference there is between the two eras. In fact, I
want you to read the words of Ben Cohen (co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s)
at that very first march. I want you to tell me what is different between
then and now:
“Now these are tough economic times for the U.S. America is
on the brink of recession. Median household income is down. Poverty and
unemployment are up. The huge surpluses of the last years have been frittered
away on tax breaks. City, state and school budgets across the country
are in shock. Retirement and college savings have been decimated.
And now the administration wants to add another 200 billion dollars to
that last line on the chart. 200 billion -- that's a lot of money. What
could we buy with that if we didn't have this war?
For 55 billion dollars we could provide all of our public schools with
state of the art computer systems for all of our students.
For 11 billion dollars a year, we could reduce class size, kindergarten
through 3rd grade, to 15 kids per class.
For 6 billion dollars a year, we could provide health insurance for all
those kids who don't have any today.
For 2 billion dollars a year we could provide Head Start for the hundreds
of thousands of eligible kids who can't get into the program.
For another 2 billion dollars a year, we could double funding for clean
and renewable energy.
There are 30,000 children a day, around the world, who are dying from
hunger. For 13 billion dollars a year, we could feed all of 'em!
There are 6,000 people a day dying from AIDS in Africa. For 10 billion
dollars a year, we can curb the disease.
And for 1 billion dollars a year, we could provide complete public financing
of all federal elections, allowing us to really, totally and absolutely
get money out of politics -- for one billion dollars a year.
All of those things I just reeled off add up to 100 billion dollars. This
war is going to cost 200 billion. We have another 100 billion left over!
The continued belligerence of our leaders saps our souls, saps our spirit,
and saps our strength as a nation.”
Only the names and numbers have changed. It is still a racket. It will
still sap our strength as a nation. It already has, for it is the same
war. The endless war, the one that keeps the contractors employed. Names
and locations aren’t important. All that matters is the flow of
capital from the taxpayers to the defense industry. That must continue.
Why? Because it must. Why? Because they do not have any other plans, and
they own us. Our fate will be decided by their bottom line. This is not
new.
General Butler would recognize the war that is presently being sold to
us. He knew that his was not the war to end all wars:
“Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier
means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to
be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still
will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions
makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must
wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of
our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical
and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the
constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting
them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than
we can out of war -- even the munitions makers.”
Not a word of this has changed. We point at the Assad regime and cry foul
over reports of chemical weapons. How many of us watched Colin Powell
lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in front of the United Nations
a decade ago? The same beneficiaries of that lie believe that we have
forgotten. It is up to you and I to prove them wrong. To let them know
that we, too, can study humanity and see patterns. And to weed out those
poisons without which our country and our species would stand some chance
of survival.
Thus I ask that you join with General Butler and I to say once again,
to the President and the Congress and to their faceless financiers, who
would sell our children’s future for a few more bars of gold:
TO HELL WITH WAR.
Do I believe that doing so will change the course of history? That is
hard to say. But we know what happens if we don’t try.
