There seems to be some disagreement out there on just how much the United States spends on its military in comparison with the rest of the world. According to James Surowiecki, the New Yorker's business columnist, it's more than the rest of the world combined. Others are not quite so hyperbolic, but the point is, no matter how you slice it, we spend an awful lot. We waste an awful lot, too.
After all, war is money.
Then there was the recent Democratic primary in Connecticut. Iraq war supporter Joe Lieberman lost to the anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. So in a blue state not all that far from Ground Zero, support for the war has certainly ebbed.
War is politics.
And then there's Israel and Lebanon. Israel knew she had a hostile militia on her border, but apparently didn't know how well armed and financed that army was. Or did know, and decided to attack "disproportionately" before it got any better armed and financed. In any case, this latest showdown was no Six-Day War. Israeli soldiers died in significant numbers, and Hezbollah's Sheik Nasrallah was warning Arabs to get out of Haifa before he went hog-wild with his weapon of choice -- Katyushas manufactured in Iran. Those Soviet-designed rockets are sufficiently destructive, relatively inexpensive and easy to manufacture. Now much of Lebanon is in "déjà vu" ruins, Hezbollah has gained new credibility and the Israeli public is wondering what went wrong.
War is unpredictable.
To repeat, money, politics, unpredictable. Nature of the beast.
Let's start with war is money -- the truth of the statement is staggering. Without our gargantuan commitment to the military, the United States would be a mega-Kuwait, a country with enough cash to give us everything from hospital care to a college education free of charge. (And we probably wouldn't be so upset over illegal immigrants, since in a country freed from the military industrial "con"-plex, no American would ever stoop to manual labor.) Our infrastructure would be phenomenal, our ghettos models of urban living and we'd all be getting social security at birth.
Of course, such utopian musings aside, the fact is we need our military, right, to protect us from our enemies? Well, partly. We mainly need it to keep our economy going -- all those battleships and missiles supply a lot of jobs -- and where do all the wasted and unaccounted-for millions and billions go? Well, for every fighter jet and nuclear submarine, there are a slew of corporate executives living like kings and coating their parachutes with gold.
The money we spend on armaments is brain-boggling. Put it in terms of a household budget, you would be spending more than 50 cents of every dollar on your home security system. Even if a mere dog might suffice, the homeowner would opt for surveillance cameras, electric fences and a veritable battalion of personal-use WMDs. The home would have protective devices so sophisticated they wouldn't even work, plus old fashion security measures like, for instance, a moat. When guests visited, it would take them hours to get in and almost as long to get out, but only because they would be obeying the proper protocol; real enemies might still get through.
And what can you say with certainty about this U.S. military tumor that keeps growing every day? Well, for one thing, it is not benign. No matter how many times our chief "W"itch doctor insists the growth is not malignant, don't believe him. It metastasized decades ago in Viet Nam and has now spread to Iraq. An army is like a gun; if it's in the drawer, you'll use it. And in the case of Iraq, the whole concept of the American army has acquired new meaning, or an old meaning we haven't seen since our manifest destiny days. That is, never mind defending us from our enemies, no -- the army has become a tool of -- not national transformation as it was when we decided to relieve Mexico of California -- but world transformation. The solution to all our problems. The shortcut to peace in the Middle East, and therefore, perhaps, on Earth.
Not. In fact, just the opposite. The Middle East is in more turmoil now than in quite some time. When you're dealing with a beaker of nitroglycerin, it may be better to walk on tiptoes rather than clomp around in cowboy boots, n'est-ce pas?
Which brings us to war is politics. Isn't it though?
Can you imagine, the Nazis were steamrolling through Europe, the Japanese were annexing Asia, and Roosevelt still couldn't drag us into war until the Japanese made a mess of Pearl Harbor. Politics. How did we get into Viet Nam -- kind of slowly, but with a great back story -- if we didn't stop them, the commies would take over the world. The evidence was shaky, but the politics were omnipresent. And then there's Iraq. Talk about your political war -- here was a country that hadn't even remotely attacked us, not even a made-up attack a la Tonkin Gulf. And the back story had to be created out of whole cloth, the weapons of mass destruction slam dunk, down to some third-class theatrics at the United Nations. It was presented to us - the American public - by the current administration with a chorus from Congress as if overnight, a mole had turned into a melanoma requiring immediate surgery. Of course, a little something called 9-11 helped - or should I say, the politics of 9-11. For that day has become completely political, and not just in the mouths of Ann Coulter and our Strangelovian VP - no, it seems a constant wrangle between the parties, and within the parties, about just how to interpret the event, how to respond to it, what it does and doesn't justify, and ultimately, what it means. An event that when it took place, in cold reality, was a horrific moment of violence and chaos, but has now become, in political reality, a number of different events, with varying significance, and demanding a number of divergent responses. For a while, with the war on the Taliban, 9-11 seemed like another Pearl Harbor - an unprovoked attack leading to a counter-attack on, if not exactly the perpetrators, at least the government that supported and sheltered them. Nobody had a problem with that. But then 9-11 started to morph. Politically.
It was 2002. Theater of the absurd - an endlessly debated run-up to war. We decided Iraq had WMDs and demanded it cough them up. When it didn't, the war became a done deal. Think about it -- the administration induced a national psychosis, and the doctors -- the U.S. Congress -- instead of helping guide the patient back to reality, wrote the prescription the administration wanted. By March 2003, the Bush bunch had somehow managed to reconfigure 9-11 into not simply the work of Al Qaeda but a catch-all assault perpetrated by all things terrorist (define as you will). With a little help from some fictitious uranium in Africa, and a U.S. still dazed from the attacks the previous fall, Bush went on TV and delivered his final ultimatum to Saddam. The shock and awe that followed will go down in the annals of military -- and political -- history: how not to make the world safer for democracy. Three-and-a half-years later, the same shape-shifters are running our country, and what has the no-end-in-sight Iraq war given us, besides a daily dose of death? A shocking and awesome national debt, an unprecedented degree of political polarization, and a Middle East about as peaceful as a ticked-off rhinoceros.
Well, war is unpredictable. Indeed. Look at Iraq, look at Israel and Lebanon, and look for God's sake at history. To use war as an implement of foreign policy is tantamount to fighting an insect pest by introducing another insect to destroy it. There's no way to know if the second introduced insect will end up causing more harm than the first. To put it another way, war is a risky gamble.
The South gambled on its ability to win a war of secession based on the fervency of its cause and the competence of its military leaders. It lost. The Third Reich gambled on its ability to win a war so fast that resistance would be futile. You could say cold weather in Russia in December was predictable but the Germans gambled on reaching Moscow before the snow. They lost. The American colonists gambled that England wouldn't have the stomach for a "guerilla war" in the American wilderness and guess what -- they won.
The invasion of Iraq, in retrospect, was a huge gamble. The prediction was that if you topple an evil despot, the people would be so grateful that centuries of tribal conflict would give way to a state of gratitude-based harmony. That in turn would create an oasis of democracy in a desert of dictatorship. I don't know about you, but I would rather play roulette with the deed to my house than bet on the harmony between various Arab factions. The fact of the matter is, once you go to war, anything can happen -- too many random forces are put into play (just ask any soldier on the front). Once the WMDs were discovered to be a hoax, the justification for the war began to evolve from stopping the bellicose Saddam to spreading freedom to the very interesting "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." The last statement indicates that as the war spiraled out of our control, its planners began working up an explanation that it was a war of necessity as opposed to a "pre-emptive" assault thought of as more of an insurance policy. In the same way that you purchase insurance to protect yourself from the unpredictability of life, so the Bushies tried to sell us on the idea that by invading Iraq, we were taking out extra coverage on our interests in the Middle East -- peace and freedom, that is (I certainly won't mention the "o" word). Well, I would say things have not gone quite according to plan except that this statement presupposes there was a plan -- which there was not. There was a theory that many in high places apparently found compelling, but it was not based on the concrete steps necessary to realize it, but instead on wishful thinking -- wishful thinking and a humongous checkbook.
Which brings us from unpredictability to money again. A never-ending cycle of human folly.
As long as there is money to be made, political gain to be had, and a gambling urge to sate, homo sapiens will always keep war on the front burner. No matter how it turns out, somebody always profits -- financially, politically, perhaps emotionally. Maybe war is worth the price, the politics, the roll of the dice. After all, the alternative is nearly as utopian as a neo-con vision -- more money to spend on people instead of weapons, more cooperation in the halls of government, and a dull stability on the international scene. Sound dreary? Then grab your gun -- war is a lot of things, but it sure ain't dull.