The other day I found myself thinking about the military mentality of the United States. Perhaps this is the reason why professional football is our national pastime; with its complex formations and carefully diagrammed plays, the communication between coaches on the field and those in the press box -- which is not unlike that between a platoon leader and a forward observer -- football is war-like. Broadcasters often refer to football seasons as “campaigns,” certain players earn the title of “warriors,” and top-tier quarterbacks are sometimes called “field generals.”
We like to declare war on conditions, objects and tactics almost as much as we do on other nations. Back in 1964, the Johnson Administration declared War on Poverty, spawning a slew of programs that widened the social safety net and provided minorities greater opportunities to get a leg up on the American Dream. Unfortunately, LBJ was as preoccupied with the war in Vietnam as he was with poverty in America, and the costs of propping up the corrupt government of South Vietnam against the communists up north hampered his administration’s efforts to eradicate poverty. Moral of the story: choose guns or butter, but not both.
Good old Dick Nixon continued many of LBJ’s anti-poverty programs, but also decided in 1968 that illegal drugs were a grave and immediate threat to the nation and launched the War on Drugs. Nixon was a law and order type, and in his view the hippies, anti-war protestors and black power advocates were amped on speed or freaked out on LSD and had to be stopped before all hell broke loose. The drug war continues to this very day, fought in our inner cities as well as our suburbs, with harsh legal remedies such as mandatory sentences that are partly responsible for jamming nearly one million non-violent offenders into the prison-industrial complex. The United States now has the distinction of being the undisputed World Champion of Incarceration, with more than two million people locked away. Despite millions of dollars spent on enforcement, eradication and anti-drug education, demand for illicit drugs is as rampant as ever, which is one reason Mexicans are killing one another to control lucrative drug routes to the American market. Lesson here: beware of unintended consequences. Second lesson: drop the hypocrisy and legalize the drugs that Americans are going to use anyway. The Volstead Act didn’t work against alcohol, remember? We came to our senses and dropped that bad idea; by now it should be abundantly clear that the War on Drugs is a total failure.
My favorite American war has to be the War on Terror declared by George W. Bush in 2001. War on Terror is a catchy slogan that no doubt captured the nation’s fear and need for revenge after 9/11, but I never understood how war is declared on a tactic. The most successful anti-terrorism efforts involve painstaking police work, intelligence collection and international cooperation, not full-scale military operations. But we needed revenge so Bush sent American forces to Afghanistan to root out the Taliban who were said to aid and abet al Qaeda, even though most of the 9/11 plotters were Saudis operating out of Germany. The overwhelming firepower of the American troops sent the Taliban packing (temporarily) and persuaded Bush (or was it Dick Cheney?) that it was high time to take out another purported sponsor of terrorism – Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Of course, it took a concerted campaign of monumental lies from the Bush gang to convince people that invading Iraq and changing the regime there was critical to winning the War on Terror. The governments of Great Britain and Togo, to name two, swallowed the lies and joined the Coalition of the Willing, but most people knew better and millions the world over took to the streets to protest. Bush carried on anyway, and it wasn’t long before Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was crowing about Shock & Awe, and CNN and Fox were hyping the invasion as if it was a football game. Only when successful invasion became failing occupation -- and American casualties began to mount -- did cold reality set in. Lesson: think twice or three times before unleashing the dogs of war.
Well, if you can’t walk tall, at least carry a large stick. And we do. The American military is a colossus that straddles the planet, more ubiquitous than Coca-Cola. Some 280,000 U.S. military personnel (not counting private contractors) are positioned from Guam to Turkey, Greece to Greenland – 135 countries in all. Our economy may be second-tier and getting worse all the time, but for now we can still boast having the biggest stick in the world.
We love war and its trappings. Why else do F18 fighter plans streak over stadiums before major sporting events? Why are West Point cadets used as human props for presidential speeches? Why is such deference given to generals and admirals? We love military spectacle as much as the Soviets ever did. What we shy from are the human costs of war: images of dead civilians, flag-draped coffins being off-loaded from cargo planes, and photographs from VA hospitals of the wounded, the maimed, the burned and the forever shell-shocked.
Far too often we confuse brute military force with moral authority, deluding ourselves into believing that our military might is only used for just purposes.
If you believe that, then you must also believe that pigs will one day sprout wings and take flight.
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