Coronavirus
Is Exposing How Foreign Crusades Bled America’s
Domestic Resources Dry
By Murtaza
Hussain
April 09,
2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- The coronavirus pandemic now ravaging the United
States should lead every American to a series of
important questions: What are the real threats that
I face? What has my government been prioritizing in
terms of my — and the nation’s — security? And where
has all my tax money been going?
Considering these questions, it’s hard not to
conclude that the American government’s national
security priorities have been so askew of reality
that they left the country dramatically unprepared
for an acute threat to millions of its people.
The
government’s focus has been overwhelmingly on
the threat of extremist groups and unfriendly
regimes abroad, mostly in the Middle East. Over
a period of two decades, the United States spent
trillions of dollars waging wars and occupations
across the region. These confrontations have won
America an ever-growing list of enemies around
the world. They are still making life miserable
for millions in the Middle East. But their
impact on the United States itself is now also
being painfully revealed: a country that has
spent trillions on foreign wars but is unable to
defend its citizens from basic threats like
disease and economic collapse.
The
last few weeks have revealed a spectacle of a
federal government apparently incapable of doing
what is required to stop the spread of a
pandemic on American soil. Not only has testing
capacity lagged far behind much smaller and less
wealthy countries like Taiwan and South Korea,
but shortages of critical health infrastructure
will likely mean the excess deaths of
potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans
in the foreseeable future. Governors of large
states have been
publicly begging
the federal government for ventilators, masks,
and other basic tools to deal with the outbreak.
There is
little sign
that the capacity even exists at present to
respond to these requests.
Meanwhile, the avalanche of military spending
that was released after the September 11 attacks
continues to roll onwards. According to Brown
University’s
Costs of War Project,
the U.S. government has spent a staggering $6.4
trillion on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Pakistan since 2001. This gargantuan number does
not even account for interest payments on the
borrowing needed to pay for the wars, which
could run to as much as $8 trillion by
midcentury, let alone the opportunity costs to
American society of this massive spending on
foreign adventurism. Then there are the
attendant inflations of the Pentagon’s base
budget; domestic “war on terror” spending at the
Departments of Justice and Homeland Security;
and of course the wild expansion of our
intelligence apparatuses, all but unaccountable
to the general public in both their acts and
spending.
That American counterterrorism wars have killed
hundreds of thousands of people while failing to
achieve any clear political or strategic benefit
makes the
squandering of this generational wealth
even more bitter.
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The
parlous state
of America’s critical infrastructure has not
gone unnoticed by the rest of the world amid
this crisis. Even though the pandemic originated
in China, the Chinese Communist Party later exhibited
a reasonable ability to get the outbreak under
control domestically and is now attempting to
position itself as an exporter of global goods:
shipping masks and doctors across Europe and
Asia. While the Trump administration
visibly struggles
to muster an
appropriate response
at home, it has also been undercutting the
efforts of other countries to handle the crisis.
It has done so by
diverting critical resources
away from allies like France while attempting to
exacerbate the global pandemic through economic
sanctions against enemies like Iran, despite the
pleading of its allies
to change course.
The net
result of all this might be a United States that
has bled its institutions to the point of anemia
in pursuit of ideological crusades abroad, only
to find itself unable to compete with major
rivals on the things that matter most.
In a
recent article in the national security
publication War on The Rocks, Mira Rapp-Hooper
of the Council on Foreign Relations and author
of the forthcoming book “Shields of the
Republic: Triumph and Peril in America’s
Alliances” noted the grimly ironic implications
of this.
“It seems unlikely that the American leadership
that knowingly abetted this global catastrophe
will be capable of transforming its governance
efforts when it has embraced poor governance as
strategy,” Rapp-Hooper
wrote. “If
China exits this epochal crisis as a confident
leader it will not be the ineluctable result of
a structural shift; Beijing will have
Washington’s calamitous domestic mismanagement
and myopic foreign policy to thank for it.”
Even
after two decades of nearly unmitigated
strategic failure in the Middle East coupled
with the disastrous self-harm of unchecked
defense spending, it seems that significant
portions of the U.S. elite have still not awoken
from their intoxication with foreign wars of
choice. Amid a global pandemic that could kill
millions and cripple the American economy for
years to come, there are
strong signs
that the U.S. military might be ordered to
embark on yet another war in Iraq — this time to
fight Iranian-backed militias
in that country whose ambitions are ultimately
local to the region.
Such a
conflict would serve the purposes of
well-organized elite interest groups in the
nation’s capital. But it is almost impossible to
argue that it’d make any contribution to
improving the day-to-day security of ordinary
people living thousands of miles away in the
United States. If this war does take place, we
can place it into a larger context: a
once-powerful country depleting its strength
through costly military adventures in distant
lands, but institutionally incapable of
providing the basics of life for its people at
home.
Murtaza Hussain is a journalist whose work focuses
on national security, foreign policy, and human
rights. His work has previously been featured in the
New York Times, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera
English. - "Source"
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