|
Consequences of a War State
By Charley Reese
03/18/06 -- -- War consists of killing people and destroying
property. That's all there is to war. Any honest soldier will tell
you the same thing: His job is to kill people and destroy property.
That's true of all branches of the service.
The difficult question is, When is a nation justified in making the
decision to kill other people and destroy their property? I think
the rule is the same as it is for individuals. You are justified in
killing only in defense of your own life or the lives of others for
whom you are responsible.
By that definition, the U.S. has fought only one justified war in
this and the past century. That was World War II. Putting aside the
fact that the U.S. government provoked Japan into attacking, attack
it did, and the U.S. had a right to respond. We were not attacked,
however, in Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada,
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Iraq.
In Korea and Vietnam, we intervened in a civil war as two sides of a
divided country fought for supremacy. We bombed Libya in a reprisal
raid for a terrorist attack in Germany. Reprisals, in World War II,
were considered war crimes. We weren't attacked by Lebanon. In
Panama, we attacked to change the government. I don't really know
why we attacked Grenada. The pretense was that it was building an
airport that could handle Soviet airplanes. I suspect it was really
a political ploy designed for domestic consumption.
I don't know why we decided to bomb Yugoslavia. That, again, was a
civil war that should not have concerned us. The now-late Slobodan
Milosevic was only trying to do what Abraham Lincoln did – prevent
the secession of states from Yugoslavia.
Our problem in Afghanistan was not the Taliban government. It was
al-Qaeda. We overthrew the Taliban government but failed to destroy
al-Qaeda. Only God and George Bush know why we attacked Iraq. That
was clearly a war of aggression, no different from the German
invasion of Poland in the 1930s.
It's ironic that the president likes to claim to be promoting peace,
when we are the most warlike nation on Earth and the one with the
largest war-department budget. We are also the biggest arms peddler
in the world. It seems there is no country on Earth that's immune to
U.S. officials telling it how to run its internal affairs.
The problem is that war, except in self-defense, is a total waste.
Human lives are wasted. Accumulated wealth is wasted. The results of
war are debt, taxation, human sorrow and human bitterness. The
billions of dollars we spend killing other people and destroying
their property are billions that can't be spent on improving
education, America's infrastructure, the health of our people and
preserving our land, water and air.
Wars also destroy truth and trust with their secrecy and propaganda.
Instead of patriotism, which is a love of the land and the people,
the war state substitutes jingoism, which is a love of the
government and support of war. In America today, both liberals and
neoconservatives have been corrupted by the imperialist war state.
The liberals are too cowardly to oppose unjustified wars, and the
neoconservatives instigate and applaud them.
It is a triumph of imperial war-state propaganda that people are
afraid they will be called unpatriotic if they oppose their
government's foreign wars and their domestic consequences.
Well, a continuation of the present policy will eventually destroy
America. We are already $8 trillion in debt. Most of the world views
us as a rogue nation. Our manufacturing base is being depleted, not
to mention our natural resources. Our education system is sick. Our
culture is decadent. Our government is corrupt.
It's no longer a question of supporting or not supporting any
particular administration. It's a question of survival. Those who
value liberty and the rule of law and believe that foreign policy
should be based on the Golden Rule had better assert themselves now.
Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Click below to read or post comment's on this article
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
