Recipe concocted for perpetual war is a bitter one

Last October marked the 16th anniversary of US unending war in Afghanistan, the longest conflict on foreign soil in U.S. history. The cost to human lives in our current cycle of U.S.-initiated “perpetual wars” throughout West Asia and Africa is unthinkably high. It runs well into millions of deaths if one counts victims of spinoff fighting and sectarian violence that erupt after we destroy governance structures.

Also to be counted are other forms of human loss, suffering, illness and early mortality that result from national sanctions, destruction of physical, social and medical infrastructure, loss of homeland, refugee flight, ethnic cleansing, and their psychological after-effects. One has to witness these to grasp their extent in trauma, and they all arise from the Nuremberg-defined “supreme crime” of initiating war. Waging aggressive war is something America is practiced in and does well, with justifications like “fighting terrorism,” “securing our interests,” “protecting innocents,” “spreading democracy,” etc. – as has every aggressor in history that felt the need to explain its aggressions.

Yet few gathered across the country in October, much less gave a thought of lament to the harm the Americans are doing. Recalling that domestic opposition to the Vietnam War grew exponentially over the similar timespan of that aggression, one might wonder what has changed. A numbed, distracted America has reached the point where bellicose presidential threats to destroy North Korea with its nuclear arsenal.

One explanation for the US current apathy is that its Military Industrial Complex has long since developed means to effectively counter any collective war-weariness. Vietnam-era MIC apologists publicly worried that “sickly inhibitions against the use of military force” would jeopardize American “interests” around the globe. What was lost in Vietnam were millions of its own people, a countryside devastated by saturation bombing and the eco-poison Agent Orange, whose toxicity still devastates people there, and the still-present effects of that war.

Lest we forget, it was visited upon them in the American name, at American hands, by their leaders and the profit-making military-industrial backers they tolerate. Add the millions of deaths and utter destruction of Cambodia, along with Laos, you'll arrive at a massive, prolonged crime perpetrated by the US, which also suffered – although not nearly at the same rate.

Along with 58,000 official American lives lost, plus hundreds of thousands of physically and many more emotionally damaged veterans, Americans as a society lost whatever post-World War II moral standing they thought they enjoyed. However, they may try to fool themselves.

The MIC managers’ answer to the Vietnam unease was brilliantly synergistic, and has made the subsequent costs of war largely invisible to the Americans. First, they quickly eliminated the draft, fine-tuning Vietnam-era social engineering via temporary college-deferments – which had reduced but did not eliminate military service burden-sharing among the better-off – into no burden at all for that class.

In its stead they created a “professional” army whose ranks are manned by “volunteers” from the ever-growing pool of de-industrialized America’s less-advantaged – joined more recently by immigrants seeking US citizenship. The British imperialistic model of employing “surplus” populations as enforcers of global military dominance was thus reborn.

The American remarkably swift transition from “boots on the ground” to overwhelming reliance on aerial bombing, drone, mercenary, and surrogate (including US-supported Al Qaeda and Daesh proxy) warfare under Obama completed the domestic pain-relieving process of engaging globally in the “foreign entanglements” the first president warned Americans against. The lopsided asymmetry of this kind of war-making is such that our casualties have become a tiny fraction of a percent of the totals. American war deaths have dropped to levels so low that government lawyers can claim with a straight face that US-NATO’s aggressive bombing campaigns do not even constitute “war” anymore.

Nor has the US regime raised taxes to cover war costs. Rather, it has put war costs, already conservatively estimated to be $5.6 trillion since 9/11, onto the ever-expanding national debt ceiling, which “like a speed limit sign that is never enforced” now stands at over $20 trillion, with no end in sight. This level of debt would normally and eventually reduce the buying power of the dollar and raise prices for everything the US imports. It has not yet done so because the dollar’s status as the world trade currency is propped up by U.S. hard and soft power.

This is the poison icing on the cake of the MIC’s maintenance of war: The US's abundance of cheap world goods depends on it.

Unsurprisingly, Americans tend not to concern themselves with their government’s harming of distant others when they do not see it. If those harmed are effectively demonized by their compliant consent-manufacturing mass media so as to make them believe “they deserve it,” their sympathy tends to disappear altogether. But to be human is to care about other humans. Veterans who cannot keep buried their psychic wounds of combat – from Vietnam to the present wars – are committing suicide at the rate of 22 per day.

Given the Americans' somnolent acceptance of the notion that this unprecedented state of perpetual war is somehow protecting their safety, it’s ironic that military service is emerging as significantly correlated with, if not a cause of, America’s dramatic increase in mass shootings and other domestic terror-type killings. Researchers studying recent lists of mass shooters find veterans are over twice as likely to be mass shooters. 

A super-hero style militaristic culture promoted by the Pentagon and CIA-backed entertainment industry helps sustain public momentum for war but does not generate peace at home. How much worse will this problem become now that the military is relaxing its standards and accepting applicants with histories of mental illness? A Homeland Security analyst warned that the Americans were creating human time bombs – only to be personally disparaged for his politically incorrect but accurate prediction.

Americans have an engorged, non-stop war-making machine that is reliant on high tech weapons systems, normalized ubiquitous surveillance, the congressional hostage-taking presence of war manufacturing and support industries or bases in every district, the narrowing of mass media discourse to stage-managed, stereotyped liberal-conservative mudslinging and subsidized glorification of war prowess, and not least, the continual re-creation of enemies to fight.

Beyond post-traumatic killings and suicides, and massive debt, the costs of maintaining this behemoth afflicts America in other ways. Blowback is likely a factor in the record-level teen suicides, road rage incidents and shootings both of and by an increasingly militarized police force; an epidemic in opioid and other addictions; a hollowed out productive economy that underpays most workers.

We can also add the compounding of poisons into the air, water, and soil that will touch everyone’s children long into the future as the Americans focus their wars where the oil is. This is in order to control the world’s petroleum supply, which is wrecking the world’s weather – via the activities of the number one institutional polluter in the world: The U.S. military.

You have just listened to excerpts of a piece jointly authored by Robert Wing and Coleen Rowley. As a Foreign Service field officer, Robert Wing monitored the Aceh insurgency and set up safety networks for Americans and Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel who disclosed serious pre 9-11 FBI failures.

RM/ME