Our nation was founded on wonderful ideals, beginning with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These ideals, and the practice of democracy, have inspired people the world over and have changed the larger human community for the better.
Before World War II, the United States was no angel. We intervened throughout Latin America as we saw fit, largely to protect the interests of American corporations, but we were not a militarized country. We only raised an army when we needed one.
During the Great Depression it was extremely difficult to get the economy moving again. It wasn’t until the Second World War, when the entire country was mobilized to prepare for and fight the war that the depression ended. Taxes were extremely high because the whole nation was committed to winning the war.
After the war, rather than risk another depression, our leaders chose to continue to fund the military rather than to demobilize. The Cold War, which they promoted relentlessly, provided the excuse for continued militarization, including the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Hot wars, like Korea and Vietnam, also flared up.
In the last sixty years the economy of the country has become increasingly intertwined with military industry. In his final address to the nation as he was leaving the presidency in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned us against the increasing power of the military-industrial complex:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Ike’s warning came true. The Pentagon and the military industries have spread the military business into every congressional district. To get re-elected, politicians need jobs and the military industry provides high paying work. Members of Congress make deals such as, “I will fund your project if you fund mine.”
When weaponry advanced from a rifle to a machine gun, the casualties increased dramatically, but nuclear weapons created the possibility that we could destroy life on earth. This changed the nature of the danger we faced from other countries to the weapons themselves.
Ronald Reagan is often given credit for changing the Soviet Union, but Mikhail Gorbachev was the prime mover. He gave up on a lost cause. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we hoped for a peace dividend, but it never came.
The neo-cons who took power after the dubious 2000 election are extremists who believe that unilateral American power can and should enforce our will on the rest of the world. Their ideas of global domination led us to invade Iraq, which is an unmitigated disaster for the people of that sad country.
The neo-cons currently running our country are destroying our economy as well as destroying Iraq. These people live in a fantasy world, so we need not only to remove them from power, but to remove their idea of a militaristic America ruling the world through unlimited power. This will not be easy, for as Eisenhower said, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
In international negotiations these neo-cons act like heavy-handed bullies. For example, they demand that Iran agree to stop producing nuclear materials before we will talk to them.
At the same time, we are violating the SALT treaties by developing a new generation of nuclear weapons and threatening to use them. This will touch off a new nuclear arms race. When I learned English, the word for this was hypocrisy.
The Air Force has many generals who would be happy to bomb Iran. Bombing is their business and they believe in air power. The problem is the military industrial complex, not just neo-cons.
Terrorism is a major problem, but international cooperation is essential to stop it. The world is coming to hate us because of the arrogant and murderous way we are acting. Terrorists are being created in greater and greater numbers the longer we continue our invasion, and when we leave, we will leave a nation in shambles.
Osama Bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein because Iraq was the most secularized Arab country. Invading Iraq was exactly what Bin Laden wanted the U.S. to do. Tens of thousands of their professionals, who made their country work, have already left. Iraq, one of the most developed countries in the Middle East, prior to the U.S. invasion, is now in chaos. We have created a lose-lose situation, for us and especially for the Iraqis.
There is a solution, which is to have an international intervention, but that would require the United States and Britain to admit the invasion was a mistake and to stand down. The neo-cons will not allow this to happen, because they cannot admit their policies have failed. But they have failed.
People hate having bombs dropped on them. Many people around the world know much more about the destructiveness of war than Americans, because they have experienced it.
Bombing Iran could be even more disastrous than the invasion of Iraq. If Iran is attacked, the disaster that is Iraq could spread throughout the Middle East.
War is both extremely destructive and extremely expensive. We are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and we have military bases all over the world, but instead of paying for it, we are “running up a tab” that our children and grandchildren will have to pay.
Our bill is growing at three billion dollars every day — about one billion to the invasions and two billion because of our trade deficit. We are importing more than we export and the governments of Japan, China, and South Korea are financing this by buying U. S. Treasury bonds. This gives them enormous power over us.
At the same time, the wealthy, who benefit most from the way our economy is structured, are being excused from paying, not only now but also in the future. This is fundamentally unjust.
Our nation is at a crossroad. We cannot continue to arm our country with increasingly complicated and expensive weapons, both in the frontier of outer space and on earth, and solve the life-and-death problems that we face, which are enormous.
The prospect of changing the militarized economic system that has been in place since WWII is daunting. The deeply held belief systems that keep it in place are pervasive, and they are difficult to see because we are immersed in them. But not being able to see it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Our current path, continually expanding the military and buying on credit, is destroying our economy.
We can no longer have guns and butter. Militarism is increasingly expensive, yet it does not make us safer. We must begin to stand down from the belief that we can dominate the world militarily. We are bankrupting ourselves, economically and morally.
Rather than looking for new ways to evolve, our leaders sound like Louis XIV, “Après moi, le deluge.” We could change our direction, which is where the thinking of Joanna Macy and David Korten, who both talk about “the Great Turning,” can help us begin to imagine a different way of being.
The Neo-cons assert that we must fight a War on Terrorism. That is a war that will never end, but they are ignoring the very real problems of hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, global warming, and injustice.
Grover Norquist, a leading neo-con power broker, said he wanted to weaken the government until he could “get it down to the size where we could drown it in the bathtub.” But when the government has less power, the corporations have more. Power does not go away.
The choices we make will determine whether or not humanity has a future on our beloved planet. So far, it looks bad, but the future remains full of possibilities.
Change can come rapidly, as was demonstrated in the USSR and in South Africa. If we were to commit ourselves to an all-out effort to find the solutions to the problems we face, we could create whole new industries and unleash the famous American ingenuity into the marketplace. This kind of commitment could shift the direction we are headed and, simultaneously, revitalize the economy by shifting resources away from militarism toward solving human problems.
If we begin living the ideals we profess, America would once again inspire the world and change humanity for the better. We can live in a world where “liberty and justice for all” applies to all the people in the world.
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