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Militarism threatens to bankrupt U.S. economically and morally
By Reed M. Smith
04/21/05 "Daily
Times" - - Michael Parenti, eminent author and historian, recently told an audience of almost 300 people in Penn State's Schwab Auditorium that what empires do is much different from how they are represented in history by their leaders.
This has been true since Greece and Rome, for Persians in biblical times, Turks, Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, Belgians and others up to the present time.
We were always told that the United States does not do such things. America, "the land of the free and the home of the brave," is, as President Bush declared, bringing liberty, democracy, justice, peace, progress and stability to the poor and troubled nations.
A person can always look at the goodness and blessings of our country, or can look at its faults and abuses.
We now hear about our responsibility as the world's only superpower to liberate and democratize the Middle East and to oppose tyranny everywhere. So why aren't we intervening in Darfur, where more than 2 million innocents have been uprooted or slaughtered in a brutal, racist civil war?
In Iraq, the most prosperous country in the Middle East before our first Gulf War, we helped Saddam Hussein to gain ascendancy, and even supplied chemicals for his chemical warfare, when current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was there in the 1980s.
With an estimated 700 military bases, and American troops worldwide, the U.S. is the greatest empire in history, whether we recognize it or not. Why then are we so universally hated and resented, not just by a new breed of terrorists, but are seen abroad as an arrogant superpower, guilty of an illegal Iraq war, massive arrests, brutal raids and continuing torture?
Members of our rather phony coalition seem to be dropping like flies.
In two years, 1,547 U.S. soldiers have been killed and more than 11,664 wounded, 92 percent of them since the fall of Baghdad.
By April 9, there were 2,005 Iraqi police and guardsman deaths, and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.
Total coalition losses are 1,724 soldiers, about 90 percent from the U.S.
Congress has been largely supine. It has never officially declared any of our wars since December 1941.
As Parenti noted, the U.S. media has generally legitimized the system, as have many veterans groups, the dominant Republican Party, the right wing and many churches. A new breed of flag waving nationalists or superpatriots has been justifying if not propagandizing the war, often with lots of profitable contracts to clinch the deal.
Competent observers have said that Iraq has never been a direct threat to U.S. security, but it is now a breeding ground for terrorists as a result of the war and occupation, much of which has been shielded from American eyes.
We devastated Fallujah, a city of about 200,000, with orders, as in Vietnam, to "shoot anything that moves." The whole world, particularly the Muslim nations, was shocked.
Informed people who are not swayed by our warhawks agree that Iraq is now a mess, not a budding democracy, but another grab for oil and lucrative U.S. contracts, a la Halliburton, Boeing and others. The best thing is to get out before we kill thousands more Americans, Iraqis and others, and before we turn the Middle East into a smoking cauldron.
As in the case of Vietnam we must face facts, accept defeat -- or as Knight Ridder columnist Joseph Galloway wrote recently, just declare victory and go home.
Even Rumsfeld was almost promising that to the troops last week.
As Parenti predicted, the very next day things will start to improve.
It is up to the American people to demand that our representatives stop the warhawks' world-girdling military appetite in the Middle East and elsewhere, restore our own democracy, and devote our tax resources to urgent human needs at home and abroad.
Rampant American militarism is bankrupting our country morally and economically. The sooner we recognize that and rejoin the human race, the better.
Reed M. Smith, of State College, is a retired political science professor who taught at Penn State as a graduate assistant and later at the University of Pennsylvania, Bradley University and elsewhere.
Copyright: Knight Ridder
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