NEWS JUNKIE POST
Nov 11, 2010 at 12:41 pmVeterans Day: Denouncing The Insanity Of Permanent War
On the 11Th hour of the 11Th day of the 11Th month of 1918, World War I officially ended. That day marked the end of a four-year massive slaughter which killed more than 7 million French, German, British, Russian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers and killed or wounded millions more civilians. The United States stayed on the side lines of the conflict to only enter it in its last 19 months. 116,000 US soldiers were killed in action during World War I, making it a conflict twice as deadly as Vietnam for the US military.
World War I at its inception was rationalized by calling it “The war to end all wars”. Obviously, this didn’t work out as planned, and 31 years later Europe was engulfed in the psychotic killing mayhem of World War II. Since then, the world has had a very few periods of sanity where conflict resolution between nations entailed diplomacy and not warfare. 65 years after the end of World War II, we still live in a world at war, as if no lessons were ever learned.
The insane “logic” of war seems to always have the upper hand over peaceful solutions between nations. Arguments to justify warfare have been made by politicians and generals for centuries. One of the newer versions of it, still currently made by the defenders of military action in the United States, is the convoluted and disingenuous distinction between “wars of choice” and “wars of necessity”. One can argue that the last “war of necessity” fought by the United States was World War II. In effect, the US was attacked by Japan in Hawaii, and German U-boats in the Atlantic , and had the right to defend itself. Since then, all the wars fought by the two news super-powers (the US and the USSR) were arguably “wars of choice” or more accurately wars to either maintain or expend their respective empires. It was the case for the Korean war and the Vietnam war, both fought on the ideological ground of preventing the “domino effect” spread of communism.
Today, the nation waging wars across the globe is the United States of America. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq is almost unanimously identified as a war of choice while the conflict in Afghanistan is too often called a war of necessity. Some have even pushed the barbaric logic of its definition by calling it “the good war”. For the United States war is not the solution of the last resort anymore, but has instead become a pathological way to assert dominance and conduct world affairs.
65 years after the end of World War two, the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. The US military still has a strong military base in South Korea. And yesterday, the Obama administration made a move away from its commitment to start the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. Defense Secretary Gates, Secretary of States Clinton and Admiral Mullen, all cited 2014 as the target date for starting to withdraw troops. Last year the White House insisted on the July deadline, and the message shift is effectively a victory for the military, which was saying that the July 2011 deadline was “undermining its mission”. One thing however is “etched in stone”: when President Obama finishes his term in 2012, the United States will still have troops fighting both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In his books, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War”, Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army Colonel, offered one of the most drastic and insightful critic of America’s military and foreign policies since World War II.
“By the midpoint of the 20Th century, the Pentagon had become Leviathan, its actions veiled in secrecy, its reach extending around the world. Yet, while the concentration of power in Wall Street had once evoked deep fear and suspicions, Americans by and large saw the concentration of power in the Pentagon as benign. Most found it reassuring,” wrote Bacevich in his book.
I take issue with your analysis of Cold War conflicts as “wars of choice”. Vietnam, Korea et al. were fought to defeat the spread of an ideology that many (quite rightly, in my view) considered evil — viz. Soviet totalitarianism, “Stalinism”, pick your epithet. Had that ideology been allowed to spread unchecked, its avowed enmity to the United States and other Western liberal nations would have greatly raised the risk of renewed worldwide armed conflict.
Think back to the uneasy peace between the World Wars. If Churchill had successfully convinced the Allied powers to strike preemptively against Hitler once Germany had incontrovertibly broken multiple treaty obligations by the early 1930s, would that have been a “war of choice”? That is to say, what if a limited “war of choice” can prevent a total “war of necessity”? Fighting a war of choice is shooting first when a mugger points a gun at you. Fighting a war of necessity is only pulling the trigger after you’ve taken a bullet.
Hitler and Japan both practiced preemptive war. Look where it got them.
If you can’t tell the difference between Nazi and Rising Sun imperial expansion and 20th century American military operations, we are coming from perspectives too far apart to have a meaningful debate.
I would like to argue that they did not figt a preemptive war. In essence as was put by DGK, they were the mugger who pointed the gun at someone in an attemtped to take something that wasnt theirs. I would also like to state, that if we had not been attacked by japan, I can quite guarantee that we would all be speaking in a german dialect today.
I can also assure you that at some point even the attack on pearl harbor had not happened we would have been forced into an armed conflict one way or another simply because we were suppling a lot of european countries with weapons and supplies. The reason for the assault from japan was an attempted to stop that. The other note to be aware of was that while all of this was going on there were messages back and forth between germany and mexico as well for a similar assault on US soil.
Quite right on many points, AMC, but I would submit that Germany and (especially) Japan had already “fired the gun”, as it were. The shameful quiet of the West during Japan’s nearly unimaginable brutalities in China and Southeast Asia are, to me, the greatest indictment of the unthinking isolationist pacifism prevalent in Congress and Parliament at the time.
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Veterans Day: Denouncing The Insanity Of Permanent War | NEWS ……
Here at World Spinner we are debating the same thing……
It’s sad but not hopeless, in the bigger picture.
It’s true that in 2010, America is busy, hither and thither, rivaling other nations for the spoils of capitalism and environmental destruction and pretending this has something to do with peace, for somebody.
American policy and history reveal that American aggression continues to set back the anti-war movement from making the progress it could have made, and should have made, since 1918.
People are sleeping: citizens hardly bat an eye over the insane expenditure on the military; crimes are in progress.
But a hundred years ago, women were going to jail and risking their health and lives to win the vote, and their hope was that their fight for gender equality and political inclusion would advance the situation not only of Western women but all women. Their strategy was to value actions, not words, that would advance human rights. They were awake. In that spirit of people past and present, I put my faith.
cheers
And Americans wonder why they are hated all over the world. Duh.
Why exactly are we wasting our time in Afghanistan and Iraq again?
If people have to due do that I can live my american dream so be it. I enjoy being lazy and having cheap gas. You? Welcome to the history of the world. There are those that take and those who are taken from. I like to take.
Unfortunately for you, there are amazing people out there in the world living selflessly and doing good things for others, disproving your world view and in contrast revealing you and like-minded people as the bottom feeders of society. The American dream is my nightmare, and I require a little more fulfillment out of life than cheap gas and the ability to be laziness. I like to give.
lazy*
I just wrote a song that I thought readers of this article might like to hear.
The song is: “End the Insanity” and can be heard here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pUdpOOTIGo&feature=player_embedded
(cut and paste into your browser url area)
Thanks for listening.
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I found your post a really good read, so have added this trackback!!…
The author implies that most international disputes were settled diplomatically before WWI and WWII.