by Tom Blair
Columnist
I am not a pacifist, coward or one who does not believe in fighting for freedom or rights, but have you wondered why we are such a militarily aggressive country?
If you ask anyone on the street why we fought in Viet Nam, or Korea, why we want to fight in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and a hundred or more other countries, you will get many different views. Mostly you’ll hear, “For freedom, liberty, human rights or to protect our interests.” No one mentions oil.
What is really sad and hurtful is the loss of life and the reason for it. How can parents, brothers, sisters and other family members accept the loss of a loved one in a battle in foreign land, where it is really not clear why we are there and especially when we pull out later and cannot see what was accomplished?
It may be called a conflict, military action, intervention or preempted strike, but it is still a war. For the United States, only the US Congress has the power to declare war. That’s explicit in the US Constitution; however, Congress has agreed to give up that power when it feels like it and put it in the hands of a president. Think about that… giving one man power to take our country into war.
I only have a small space to write about this, so I will get to the point. President Eisenhower warned us as he closed the door on his way out of office about the “Military Industrial Complex” – that is, corporations, military defense contractors, companies who make fighter planes, ships, guns, ammo, missiles, military radar and electronics, uniforms, military land vehicles, MRE meals, fuel, gas and security. SECURITY? Yes, we even have private contractors supplying security for our military.
In an earlier article I told you about overcharging defense contractors doing things that our soldiers used to do, from peeling potatoes to doing the laundry.
Remember Halliburton? Dick Cheney, the Vice President who suddenly was making $36 MILLION dollars a year from interest ownership in his defense contracting businesses.
Just take a minute to think about how big the defense industry and military is: we spend more on military and defense than everything else in the budget combined. Think about how many jobs would be lost if we didn’t have war, how much unemployment there would be, not counting the number of military people looking for jobs.
We go along with it, after all; the press, who sucks up to politicians for good news stories, prints what the political leaders want us to hear. They show the “nice” stories, trying to avoid the hospital yard littered with bodies from our “smart” bombs.
Our military, press and leaders like to make our destruction sound clean by using words like precision bombing, laser guided, smart guns etc., to describe how we are going to do something. And on TV we only see the video that looks like a perfect hit every time. But in the first six months in Iraq, there were 50 precision strikes that never hit their target.
B-2 bomber parts were made in every state. The contractors wanted it that way, so whether the bomber was worth the money or not, no one would scrap the project and the political leaders in every state would fight to keep it going.
Our leaders cry of fighting for peace. Does this really make sense? We send tanks instead of tractors and troops instead of technology to help countries.
I am not knocking our troops; we should always support them. They fight because they are patriotic Americans doing their jobs, but let’s face reality: we wage war because of the powerful, unstoppable and often corrupt military-industrial complex.
Tom “Road” Blair
Website: www.tomroadblair.com