Excerpts from an article in the December 9, 2019 issue of The "PeaceWorker." The author is William J. Astore, retired lieutenant colonel, who has taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Pennsylvania College of Technology. The article is entitled "American Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet."
War is our new normal. America's default position on global affairs, and peace, some ancient, long-faded dream. And when your default position is war, whether against the Taliban, ISIS "terror" most generally, or possibly even Iran or Russia or China, is it any surprise that war is what you get? When you garrison the world with an unprecedented 800 or so military bases, when you configure your armed forces for what's called power projection, when you divide the globe --the total planet -- into areas of dominance (with acronyms like CENTCOM, AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM). commanded by four-star generals and admirals, when you spend more on your military than the next seven countries combined, when you insist on modernizing a nuclear arsenal ( to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion) already quite capable of ending all life on this and several other planets, (sic) what can you expect but a reality of endless war?
Think of this as the new American exceptionalism. In Washington, war is now the predictable (and even desirable) way of life, while peace is the unpredictable (and unwise) path to follow. In this context, the U.S. must continue to be the most powerful nation in the world by a country mile in all death-dealing realms, and its wars must be fought, generation after generation, even when victory is never in sight. In our politics today, it's far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right.
Never-ending war weakens democracy while strengthening authoritarian tendencies in politics and society. In an age of gaping inequality, using up the country's resources in such profligate and destructive ways offers a striking exercise in consumption that profits a few at the expense of the many.
The delusional idea is that Americans are , by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable. No American leader wants to be labeled a "loser." Meanwhile, such dubious conflicts, such as the Afghan War, now in its 18th year, continue to be treated by the military as if they were indeed winnable, even though they visibly aren't.
American society is almost completely isolated from war's deadly effects. We're not being droned (yet). Our cities are not yet lying in ruins (though they're certainly suffering from a lack of funding).
Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy prevents one from knowing and resisting what one can't essentially know about. Learning its lessons from the Vietnam War, the Pentagon now classifies (in plain speak, covers up) the worst aspects of its disastrous wars. This isn't because the enemy could exploit such details -- the enemy already knows -- but because the American people might be roused to something like anger and action by it.
Long ago an unrepresentative Congress ceded to the presidency most of it's constitutional powers when it comes to making war. These duly elected representatives are largely captives of the military-industrial complex.
Despite our size, we are a remarkably insular nation, and suffer from a serious empathy gap when it comes to understanding foreign cultures and peoples or what we're actually doing to them. When our globetrotting troops,when not fighting and killing foreigners in battle, often stay on vast bases, referred to in the military as "Little Americas."
The U.S.military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system,only wants to grow more so,but what's welfare for the military bases isn't wellness for the planet.
There is, unfortunately, only one Planet Earth, or Spaceship Earth, if you prefer, since we're all traveling through our galaxy on it. Thought about a certain way, we're its crew members, yet instead of cooperating effectively as its stewards, we seem determined to fight one another. If a house divided against itself cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out so long ago, surely a spaceship with a disputatious and self-destructive crew is not likely to survive, no less thrive.
In other words,in waging endless war, Americans are also, in effect, mutinying against the planet. In the process, we are spoiling the last, best hope of earth: a concerted and pacific effort to meet the shared challenges of a rapidly warming and changing planet.
Unfortunately, for America's leaders, the real "fixes" remain global military and resource domination, even as those sources continue to shrink on an ever-more fragile globe.
If America's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen prove anything, it's that every war scars our planet -- and hardens our hearts. Every war makes us less human as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium. Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life.
Despite all of war's uses and abuses,its allure and temptations,it's time that we Americans showed some self-mastery (as well as decency) by putting a stop to the mayhem. Few enough of us experience "our" wars first-hand and that's precisely why some idealize their purpose and idolize their practitioners. But war is a bloody,murderous mess, and those practitioners,when not killed or wounded, are marred for life because war functionally makes everyone involved into a murderer.
We need to stop idolizing its so-called warriors. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity and the viability of life, as we know it, on Spaceship Earth.
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