Tom Engelhardt on America's wars - A Record of Unparalleled Failure // William J. Astore - The Militarized Realities of Fortress America
Tom Engelhardt: Don’t Walk Away from War It’s Not the American Way
The United States has been at war - major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions - nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions. Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again.
So here are five straightforward lessons -- none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country -- that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:
1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever.
2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never.
3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.
4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.
5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.
2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never.
3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.
4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.
5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.
And here’s a bonus lesson: if as a polity we were to take these five no-brainers to heart and stop fighting endless wars, which drain us of national treasure, we would also have a long-term solution to the Veterans Administration health-care crisis. It’s not the sort of thing said in our world, but the VA is in a crisis of financing and caregiving that, in the present context, cannot be solved, no matter whom you hire or fire. The only long-term solution would be to stop fighting losing wars that the American people will pay for decades into the future, as the cost in broken bodies and broken lives is translated into medical care and dumped on the VA.
Heroes and Turncoats: One caveat. Think whatever you want about war and American war-making, but keep in mind that we are inside an enormous propaganda machine of militarism, even if we barely acknowledge the space in our lives that it fills. Inside it, only certain opinions, certain thoughts, are acceptable, or even in some sense possible...
read more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_a_record_of_unparalleled_failure/#more
William J. Astore - The Militarized Realities of Fortress America read more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_a_record_of_unparalleled_failure/#more
I spent four college years in the Reserve Officers’ Training
Corps (ROTC) and then served 20 years in the U.S. Air Force. In the
military, especially in basic training, you have no privacy. The
government owns you. You’re “government issue,” just another G.I., a
number on a dogtag that has your blood type and religion in case you need a
transfusion or last rites. You get used to it. That sacrifice of
individual privacy and personal autonomy is the price you pay for joining the
military. Heck, I got a good career and a pension out of it, so don’t cry
for me, America .
But this country has changed a lot since I joined ROTC in
1981, was fingerprinted, typed for blood, and otherwise poked and prodded. (I
needed a medical waiver for myopia.) Nowadays, in Fortress America , every
one of us is, in some sense, government issue in a surveillance
state gone mad. Unlike the recruiting
poster of old, Uncle Sam doesn’t want you anymore -- he already has
you. You’ve been drafted into the American national security state.
That much is evident from Edward Snowden’s revelations. Your email? It can
be read. Your phone calls? Metadata about them is being gathered. Your
smartphone? It’s a perfect tracking device if
the government needs to find you. Your computer? Hackable and
trackable. Your server? It’s at their service, not yours.
Many of the college students I’ve taught recently take such
a loss
of privacy for granted. They have no idea what’s gone missing
from their lives and so don’t value what they’ve lost or, if they fret about it
at all, console themselves with magical thinking -- incantations like “I’ve
done nothing wrong, so I’ve got nothing to hide.” They
have little sense of how capricious governments can be about the definition of
“wrong.” Consider us all recruits, more or less, in the new version
of Fortress America
