Love, American Style
Outside I hear the ground shaking
Up from underneath
It’s only when the empire’s breaking
That you see their teeth
(Al Stewart - “Rain Barrel”)
Americans love to think that we’re a peaceful people, and that we fight wars only when we must.
Unfortunately, you can count in nanoseconds how long those assertions hold up when exposed to such insidious commie dirty tricks as the application of logic or the examination of empirical history.
Sure, any war can be spun as some necessity against some Very Bad Person, preferably of brown skin, slanted eyes and/or differing deity. Not only can any war be so spun, probably every war there ever was has been, at least since the days when governments had to start offering some justification or another for their little foreign adventures.
But pick your barometer - any one will work - and you’ll quickly see who are the militant folks on the planet. For America, it turns out - gulp - to be that bloated, frightened meth-addict staring back at us in the mirror, not some overseas evil emperor du jour.
For example, suppose you wanted to measure comparative national war-like tendencies by simply counting wars. Since World War II, the US has messed around, in ways big and small, in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Lebanon, Granada, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan again, and Iraq again. No country in the world can begin to match this record in the last half-century. And I’m not even listing here the covert operations (almost everywhere), including the ones that toppled democratically elected governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile, etc.), the long-term occupations of Latin American countries by the US military, the gunboat diplomacy of the American Navy around the world, the aiding and abetting of other killers (Saddam invading Iran, for example, apartheid South Africa or the Israeli occupation of Palestine), the militarization of the oceans and of space, or the myriad other ways in which the US leads the planet in aggressive tendencies. (For a whole century’s worth of overseas fun - not even counting the big stuff - Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow is highly recommended reading.)
Who has China been invading lately? Russia? Fidel? Those perfidious (and perfumed) French? Heck, even Saddam couldn’t touch this record for aggression, especially once you account for the fact that the US government assisted his foreign soiree into Iran (complete with the chemical weapons, of course) and likely green-lighted the one into Kuwait as well. And let’s even grant that one or two of those American adventures had some measure of altruism associated with them, as perhaps the Balkan or Somalian affairs might have (I’d like to know the full story before making that judgement). Isn’t the sheer volume of them - especially relative to the number of wars other countries have fought - a bit problematic for maintaining the pretense of America’s pacific intent? My conservative (in both senses of the word) list above goes to nearly twenty. Isn’t that a bit much for a peace-loving country?
But scratch that measure if you must (perhaps it cuts too close to the bone). Maybe we can detect America’s dislike for war in another metric, say military spending. Oops. Turns out that’s going to be a bit problematic too. I guess it won’t be a huge surprise to anybody that the US spends more on ‘defense’ than any other country in the world. Maybe that’s not so completely absurd, given that we have the third largest population on the planet. (At least it’s not entirely out of line if you set aside the slightly inconvenient fact that the two larger countries are about four times bigger than we are). But here’s the truly scary part: The United States not only outspends every other country in the world on military goodies, it outspends ALL other countries of the world. Combined. That’s right. Take all 190-plus countries out there and add together their defense budgets and you still won’t equal America’s alone. What’s more, that doesn’t even include the $100 billion or so that we’re dropping each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the additional costs in veterans’ (so-called) care, munitions replacement and economic losses we have been hemorrhaging for those wars, and will continue to, for decades to come, estimated to run up toward two trillion bucks total. (Oh, and did I mention that one-sixth of our population doesn’t have healthcare coverage? Never mind. I’m sure those are completely unrelated facts.) Anyhow, does that sound like a peace-loving country to you? We love it so much that we outspend nearly 200 other countries in the world - combined! - in buying shit for war! And think about this for a second: How absolutely disastrous does your diplomacy have to get so that you need to be able to fight off every other country of the world, all at once?!
Okay, okay, so that one didn’t work out so well either. The good news is that at least we don’t make the world an uglier place by continually inventing new and more vicious weaponry. Not us peace-loving Americans! You know, like atom bombs, napalm, bunker-busters, cluster bombs, neutron bombs, space lasers, phosphorous bombs and stuff like that! Who would build such things? What kind of depraved mind would harness so much of its scientific and industrial establishment to such ends? Who would… er… um… Hey, wait a minute! What do you mean that we invented and manufactured all those things?!?! I thought we were the peace-loving people! Meanwhile, can I interest you in some depleted uranium at a very, very attractive price?
Okay, but we must be good neighbors, really, because we’re always the ones who are pushing for all sorts of international treaties to limit war, weapons and the worst practices of nasty governments. You know, for example, how we signed on to the United Nations Charter (which we more or less also wrote), and its requirement that states may only use militarized aggression in the case of self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council to do so in a collective security operation. Hey, sometimes we even comply with it! Or maybe you prefer the treaties against land mines, child soldiers or the weaponization of space, which we’re pretty much the only folks not signing? The “quaint” and “obsolete” Geneva Conventions against torture and war crimes? How about the International Criminal Court, which John Bolton led the Bush administration into single-handedly trying to destroy? Hmmm… Wonder why they would have wanted to get rid of that? Gee, I thought genocide and war crimes were a bad thing! America is the world leader in supporting human rights and seeking peace. So, remember, if you hear someone tell you that we’ve been abdicating, avoiding, ignoring and destroying all these (and myriad other) treaties that seek to end or prevent war, it’s just the liberal America-hating media elites telling lies again, because they want us to lose our wars. (And why would they want that? That’s easy! So some other country can march in, take away their enormously profitable media franchises, steal their mansions and yachts, and then hang them for treason and pillaging, of course. Who wouldn’t trade their current set-up for that? Trust me, these guys know a good thing when they see it.)
All right, all right, so it turns out that none of these measures of warlike tendencies turned out so very well. America is winning these contests about as often as is Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. And with about as much grace, too. But at least the rest of the world thinks of us as nice, peaceful neighbors, right? Well, actually, they sometimes do! Just not now. And just not when we’re, uh, engaged in most of our wars. Vietnam wasn’t exactly appreciated out there in the global community, and that opinion hasn’t changed a whole lot, even after we’ve established a lovely little trading relationship with that same communist country that we once argued would be so dangerous if it went… er, well, communist. You know, like China! That’s why we don’t trade with them now, or - perish the thought - make ourselves vulnerable by allowing them to finance our national binge borrowing. No sense aiding and abetting the enemy, eh?! (This is getting so confusing, though. Are communists our friends or our adversaries? Are we trying to help them or hurt them? Why does it seem like it depends on how much money there is to be made?)
Sorry - I digress. Despite ourselves, America is in fact sometimes admired in world opinion. But not when we play our war games. People didn’t like Vietnam, they didn’t like Central America in the 1980s, they didn’t care for Iran, Guatemala or Chile, Granada or Lebanon, and they resent the hell out of our support for Israeli colonialism in Palestine. They can’t stand America’s duplicity, hypocrisy and arrogance when it comes to so many aspects of international diplomacy, including the aforementioned treaties we’ve avoided when we’re not trying to destroy them. Yet nothing has so inflamed world opinion as the gross transgression against international law and human morality that is Iraq. America’s standing in world opinion isn’t the only measure of how comparatively warlike we are, but it certainly is a valid one. When everybody else in the neighborhood hates you, or hates something you do, it’s a moment for a little reflection and introspection, isn’t it? Unless, of course, you’re just an asshole. Then why bother?
No, America’s standing in world opinion isn’t the only barometer of our aggressive tendencies, but then again, every single one of them we’ve examined has turned out the same. We fight by far and away more wars than any other country in the world. We spend way more money on our military than every other country in the world, combined! - nearly 200 hundred of them altogether! We out-do the world in creating new and vicious ways to liberate more and more people from the ongoing hassle of being alive. We abdicate every treaty meant to keep the dogs of war at bay, from ABM to Geneva to the UN Charter. Or else we smash them. And, finally, we are admired for our peaceful tendencies in every part of the world. Except where we’re not. Which turns out to be just about everywhere nowadays.
What a record, eh? Even the East German judge has to give this puppy a high score for consistency! Even if you disqualify one of these measures for some reason or another, surely the fact that they all point in the same direction is uncomfortably telling.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Much as I’d like to be, I’m not a pacifist, because I realize that there are genuinely bad actors out there who can’t be tamed by a Dick Cheney charm offensive, or beaten into submission by a Condoleezza Rice piano sonata. I’m glad the US military was there to stomp Hitler. Maybe even Korea, Bosnia and Kosovo could be justified as a response to aggression, though here it gets murkier. But Vietnam? No way. Today’s Iraq war? Utterly shameful. The Mexican War? Spanish-American War? Cuba? Nicaragua? Guatemala? Granada? Be serious. Way too often America’s pacific intentions are harder to find than the elusive Higgs boson particle. Probably you’d need a massive supercollider and a bunch of expensive detection equipment to do it, too.
And god knows I’m not blaming the troops for this. Indeed, too often they’re the second victims (the truth being the first) of policymakers like Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, for whom war is a game and people are pawns.
But because of these monsters and the record they’ve created, Americans have to face an ugly and unfortunate fact. Despite what your sixth grade civics teacher told you, we’re not the white-hats of the world. Or at least not often enough. We just like to think we are.
But thinking and being are, alas, two different things, as we found out going into Iraq - thinking we’d be greeted with chocolates and flowers.
We may get them yet, however. Perhaps they’ll be handed to us at the exit ramp, as the next president extricates a sobered United States from the disaster of its latest example of bringing love, American-style to the world.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
Yes, Brand USA has been taking a beating lately, but many people outside the U.S. still look favorably on us. The less informed populations have no idea what we have been up to–they only see U.S. movies, TV and music videos. Other folks know about our various wars and approve. For example I met a guy in Joburg who was concerned with the high Muslim birth rate–he approved of Bush’s Muslim extermination policy. Bottom line is that the U.S. brand is strongest when fortified by plenty of fear and ignorance, of which there is no shortage.
Excellent article and presentation of sordid truths. The article’s analogy of the US as a deluded meth addict is useful. We think we are peaceful, we wage war. We think we are peacemakers, we prepare for war. We think we are admired where in many countries around the world we are viewed as the greatest threat to peace. We think we are beautiful and we have become ugly. We are addicted to war, and it is time for an intervention.
Pretty good rant. If you want to augment this important article, go here:
http://www.fas.org/index.html
Our first step in recovery is recognizing we have a problem. So a movement needs to get underway to rename our great country to “The United States of Assholes,” or possibly even “The Fascist States of Assholes.”
Excellent piece, but it fails to mention the continuous US/Eurpopean (and now Chinese) interventions in Africa, both overt and covert.
This should be viewed in light of the fact that Bush has been running around Africa (at least some of the nations that are sufficiently controlled to see that he survives) swearing up and down that the U.S. has no military or imperial designs on Africa.
So we can’t ignore our current interventions in Somalia, Ethiopia, the Congo, etc., etc., etc… And control of Nigerian oil and central and southern African minerals, ad nauseum.
We especially can’t forget Africa because our role in the slave trade, slavery and the rendering of African-American citizens as second-class in our apartheid society.
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.
If your only tool is an army, every solution begins to look like a war.
THE USA IS THE GREATEST THREAT TO WORLD PEACE ON THE PLANET
Let’s not develop illusions here: Americans are among the most violent people on earth. We shoot each other up in the street, in school, and at home. We are economically competitive with one another and, in many cases, regard our poor as being deserving of their poverty, which leads to a kind of ‘economic violence.’ Like everyone else, we’re all too willing to kill over ideology. And my oh my, since WW2, we’ve been involved in one war after another: The Korean War, Vietnam, Gulf War 1 & 2, and Afghanistan. Let’s just admit it: Americans love to fight!
Militarism and now a $4 trillion debt. What a disaster!
Thirty years after my discaharge as a disabled USAF Veteran, my Congressman sent me a letter last week asking if he could help me in any way regarding the VA or other associated departments. At the bottom of the letter it states, “This letter and printing along with postage paid for by Taxpayer dollars.”
WTF? I have met face to face withthis person, call at times 6 or more calls at his DC office, Yes he can do something for me F$$KING IMPEACH the ENTIRE EXECUTIVE BRANCH! Paid for by MY taxes.
canuckchuck, throughout this thread your purpose has been to throw simplistic hate terms at all Americans, STFU, demean this entire government, demean the ones that have allowed this American Citizens feel that 10 to infinity, you only perpetuate the ignorance of what we feel about this, what we do to end it, and behave as a petulant child. I will not lower myself to your tantrum like rhetoric, although take a good look in that there mirror insofar as Canada and the RCMP lately.
Hope your anger doesn’t interefere with many great posts in your past that represented an intelligent and concise perception of the Murderers in Charge.
Funny thing is that America, the world’s bully boy, has a big, unpleasant surprise coming its way, something that it didn’t count on, a relentless enemy that will destroy it, bring it to its knees.
Oh yes, folks, the hour of justice is nigh. The Trojan Horse Awaits Within! See:
www.dangerouscreation.com
Much better. I stand corrected.
Good stuff as always DMG. But the disturbing thing is the increasingly large gap between the reality as you have described it and the general public perception. Iraq causing 9/11, and WMD in Iraq are just two tiny examples of a much larger disconnect. The question, really I suppose, is the relationship between “what your sixth grade civics teacher told you” and what Rupert Murdoch told her. And even more generally, the role of Rupert Murdoch and friends in creating a public culture in which such disconnection between reality and perception can thrive. There is a brief discussion here (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/82956/Boxed_in.html) of the situation in Australia, which mirrors so exactly, if in a test tube, the American story.
EAT THEIR SUCKERHUNCH (A Long & Blinding Road)
O Condi, wilt thou in so promising a Kiss to the Frog, instead Lick the Imperial Toad? Vision Thing Amok, HALLUCINATION($) IN PROGRESS!
Re: The Wealthiest War Cabinet on the Most Chickenhawked Warpath in U.S. History:
“…thinking we’d be greeted with chocolates and flowers.”
“…indignant courage
finds unexpected stride, in the edifying irony
that a Sitting President was on his Game after all…”
–The Second Succumbing ~ AG Masley
Apologies to W. B. Yeats: “The Second Coming”
–posted by Sheila Samples:
http://atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3354/1/
The money is almost gone for our empire. Soon we will not find lenders and our printing money to be spent on war will lead to complete devaluation of the currency. Even the Chinese won’t need that much wallpaper.
It’s kind of ironic but not surprising that for the past few decades, America has been a warmongering country with more bloated “defense” spending budgets and yet the DIVORCE rate in America is over 50% !
This is a great article full of wonderful satirical humor, only I wish it were more funny. Violence and war has invaded our culture to such a degree that it has warped who we are as a people. I’m a counselor, and I find myself in front of a violent 10 year old trying to explain that he should not solve his problems with violence. Our whole country solves its problems with violence. Not only that we do not plan at all, but instead intend to just invade another country when we need something like oil for example. We refuse to live within our means and demand luxury even if we have to destroy others to do so. Such greed. To imagine that those of us who are American pay taxes for a war machine. It makes me want to move to Canada or some country where I know my kids or grandkids will not have to go to another mindless war.
Shankari25, You cannot run and you cannot hide…it is a global empire and it is almost done with us…used us up. It is ready to move on, the “de-coupling” is almost complete. Have you noticed how new leaders have been elected and are making nice with us in many countries…Canada, Australia, UK, even France? Canada won’t let our soldiers escape there like they did during Vietnam…and they have their own history of tagging along in wars. My husbands grandfather came to the US from Canada to avoid being drafted into WWI…Globalization is the New fuedalism…
Shankari, your words ring true. What was the old saying about ‘Those who live by the sword will die by the sword!”
Problem is that the instinct towards violence and killing is part of our nature. We’re born with it. Religion and education have not quashed it. More drastic measures are called for.
Cheers.
Private prison corporation legal counsel fingered for federal judgeship appointment
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1203602190090
It would be good to see a story on this phase of development. the link has secondary link to campaign against the nomination - with the lawyer’s record. Sunshine might be a good thing.
With a $10 trillion debt, you can’t blame modern Americans with wondering if they, also, aren’t victims of America’s military machine.
I would estimate that 80% of the war hardware America has purchased in the last 30 years wasn’t used for its real purpose: to fight a war and defend this nation from invasion. Now, of course, the ’strategists’ among us will defend the notion that such a projection of offensive force defends America just by being. But, those people remind me of the Republicans who still claim the debt is small because ‘its a small fraction of our GDP’. If America is threatened without our $500 billion a year defense budget, lets lower it by 40% and see who tries to invade us! And if the debt is small enough to be insignificant compared to our obvious national wealth: pay it! Time and again, the purveyor’s of these ideas can’t ‘put up or shut up’. Their notions are nightmare’s that they sell the rest of us to get money for their own households: its call predation.
America is defended from invasion with a $100 billion/year military. At $200 billion/year, we can project force anywhere in the world. At $400 billion/year, we can project force in multiple locations in the world. Clearly, we are no longer just ‘defending America’ at $500 billion/year, but we’re still footing the bill. Nowhere is this clearer than in Iraq.
For a perspective of how America can defend itself even with a puny military, consider that when WWII started, America’s total annual military expenditures were smaller than those of Romania! As I recall: despite that puny start, we won that war not just for America, but for the world.
If we’d had the worlds largest military before WWII started, I doubt that the outcome would have been any different. However, one things for sure: American’s themselves would have been living short, harsh, brutish lives (paying for all that unused military hardware in peacetime).
Kinda like were living today!
The American military is now the official US jobs creation department. It is the ONLY one the Republicans will allow. Because the only things the Republicans are concerned about are keeping ‘their’ money away from others and getting more of it for themselves by hook or by crook. Its candidate for president this year will be McCain, an utter warmonger.
So Republicans will let the country pay for guards for their money and for a force to reach out and grab more of it. Certainly the ‘efficient’ corporations they tout are efficient in part because they do not have armed forces to pay for. Because they have Republicans to force the country to pay for this instead.
Even Eisenhower had to sneak in the Interstate Highway System -which he conceived of as a jobs program for returning soldiers after seeing the German Autobahn system- as a military defense national emergency road system. That was how he got the Republicans to vote for it. And a lot of good things inadvertently came out of DARPA, because it had the budget to experiment with things like the internet. And DARPA had the budget because it was about ‘defense.’ Otherwise it would have gotten squat.
The Republican Party is the Party that appeals to our primitive, lizard brain. Grab, kill, eat, greed, fear. But I slander reptiles since they do in innocence what Republicans scheme, and reptiles exist benignly in local ecosystems, while Republicans pillage and abuse the whole planet.
It could be said that the Republican Party is the Party of Cain from the Hebrew Bible, answering the perennial question, “am I my brother’s keeper?”, by murder of same. And it is the Party of Judas, from the New Testament, who betrayed Christ, because it will sellout for coin even Christ himself in its warmongering and selfishness.
Socialism is the only answer for America and for the world. But Republicans can’t bear to part with any of ‘their’ money. They would rather throw away all of America’s money for mercenary forces in a vain attempt at protecting their own money.
How much good could be done if other uses could be made of that money/human energy. But that would be ‘commie socialism’ according to the Republicans. Don’t they see that they are even now being protected by a ’socialist’ government istitution, the US military? How stupid they make themselves, blinded by their lust for ‘gold.’ How criminal they have become, with their gigantic piles of loot.
Unless the Republican Party is utterly defeated, it will insist upon squandering the nation’s wealth on protection for their loot here and around the world. And nothing else. That Party and their Corporatist/Fascist freeloaders must be defeated. Sadly, the pathetic Democratic Party is not much better, but could be, as at least it does not consider socialism and liberalism curse words, unlike the Republican Party where these words have been twisted and distorted to serve as the boogie-boogie monsters that scare the base.
The partial answer to American warmongering is that America must not be ruled or abused anymore by the Republican Party, The Party of Cain, The Party of Judas.
Empire pie
Empire pie empire pie
Empire pie Empire pie empire Empire pie
America gotta get some while we wonder why
Empire pie Empire Pie
America gotta stay on top because corporate pie don’t want to die
Just give me more pie
Give me more pie
Hold them corporate logos high
Just give us more pie
Empire pie empire pie
Please don’t question why
Just give me more
Empire pie
Empire empire
Please don’t ask why
Just give me more of that empire pie
Hey just watch any of them super nest shows
That will show you why
Hey don’t you like my nest
Blest with the biggest missile in the west
Empire thought
We know what’s free
We know what’s liberty
For we have a monopoly
We hold the monopoly
Empire pie empire pie
No need to ask why just give me more of that empire pie
Hey dubya will tell yah why
We need more empire pie
While body bags get piled up high
Just give me more give me more of that empire pie
while body bags get piled up high
Hey give me more of that empire pie
While body bags get piled up high
No need to ask why
just give me more of that empire pie
Hey dubya will tell you why
Empire pie empire pie no need to ask why
No need to ask why
Great line, Canuck Chuck; the US is trapped in a cycle of having a large military built to fight a world war and therefore, to justify its existence, must use it, even when it’s not the best way to accomplish the task, such as ferreting out terrorists.
Shankari25, this is apparently a widespread problem; my high school teacher friend says the standard comeback when he tells his students not to use violence to settle their differences is “The president does it — why can’t we?”
FVHorn, if you want Republicans to vote for universal health care or anything else beneficial for the average American, just name the bill the Identifying Domestic Instigators, Objectors and Terrorists (IDIOT) act and it will sail through Congress. Make the bill thick and wordy enough and you can guarantee no Republican will never read it.
As far as Dr. Green’s excellent article, I’m reminded of what my ex-wife’s conservative father, who was a foreign service diplomat for nearly 20 years, once said. He served in 10 different countries in all parts of the globe and concluded, “They all would have been better off without our help.”
He would add, “The only thing the United States has excelled at internationally is selling arms to other countries so that they can attack each other and earning profits for American businesses. In all other respects, our gunboat diplomacy has been a complete failure.” It’s sadly as true today as it was 35 years ago.
Isn’t the miltary supposed to be in its own land, protecting its citizens, insteady of traipsing all around the globe slaughtering innocent civilians and building more bases here and there?
Why does the U.S. need such a huge military in the first place when it has thousands of nukes, missiles, drones, and every conceivable type of weapon to hit a country if it attacks the U.S.?? It’s as easy as playing video games for the U.S. to fight someone in another country; remote-controlled death.
Who was it that said the military is the white man’s welfare?
I have one word for anyone that understands or not…KARMA… it never ever stops seeking a very fair balance of “do unto others” as it will be done unto you.
So does that make KARMA a threat ? A terrorist ? An idea that needs to be tortured,killed and a new war for America to start fighting against ?
Everyone thinks karma is such a bad thing, actually it is a way to bring back balance. It is a way to define how we do things, maybe not good or bad, maybe just better than yesterday. Maybe it is just remembering where things went wrong and doing one thing that will make it better. Or, learning what real power is and knowing that everyone has it. So don’t let yourself be tricked into a definition that doesn’t allow your humanity. Don’t think your power is better, or stronger, or smarter than anyone else’s power. Everyone, every person is responsible for outcomes, lucky for us power and change can be the same thing.