War

There have been plenty of wars in the history of this nation, it began with a war, 29 years later there was a second war with England, remember that one? You know where the Brits invaded and burned Washington D.C., it was 1812. There was the long, drawn out systematic annihilation of the native American population, the countless invasions of Mexico, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, The Cold War, Gulf War One, Bosnia, The War on terror ... and that's not mentioning the times we have militarily "intervened" to protect our "interests" around the world. All told we have spent 66 years officially at war (Source: The New York Public Library Desk Reference, 3rd Edition) and have had 1,315,433 American soldiers killed in military action (Source: U.S. Army Military History Institute) that does not include those wounded or those missing in action. Wounded sounds too cuddly, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of men and women whose physical health will never be the same, amputees, blind, deaf, destroyed bodies. So 1.3 million dead, and we're pretty good at war, i mean we kill more than we get killed, we have the best technology, we can kill you from really far away. In WWI there were 116,00 American soldiers killed out of the total 9,721,937 battlefield deaths (source:Casualties and Medical Statistics, 1931) Almost 10 million soldier killed in 4 years. 10 million! And no army is very accurate, there were 7 million civilian deaths which excludes those who starved to death or died of disease ... so in 4 years in Europe more than 16 million people were shot and blown to pieces, for what? I really picked that one at random, you can do the same thing with any of the wars we've fought, including the one we're fighting now.

I am not for one second trying to say anything against soldiers, i always openly praise them for the sacrifice that they are willing to make. And for the work that they do.

But let us for a second think about the cost (both monetary and personal) of war. We spend billions of dollars a year to maintain and improve our armed forces, we are told that it is necessary for our defence. We pour money into the coffers of military contractors and have no adequate veteran care. When our soldiers come home sick from the battle field our government spends money on lawyers to deny them treatment rather than treat them. When amputees came home from Iraq and we housed in a veterans hospital with black mold growing on the walls we were outraged ... for a minute. The government fired someone and said it was under control and we went back to our lives. It's not the mold that needs to be fixed, it's the entire system.

Our government makes life and death decisions in budget meetings, the sons and daughters of the poor and the people of other countries are "regretable losses" ... makes it sound necessary.

Don't fool yourself, we don't fight for democracy, we don't fight to free oppressed people, your government does not send people to war for any benevolent reason, they do not rain down bombs and cruise missiles to deliver self determination. If we really believed in self determination and democracy and ending oppression do you think we would grant favored nation trading status to the Chinese regime, supply arms to the contras, supply arms to the Indonesian regime, ignored the injustice and brutality in South Africa, ignored the pleas of the UN commandant in Rwanda to help stop genocide as it was happening ... i'm getting carpal tunnel and a headache typing and thinking about this, there's a laundry list of examples, i could keep going, do some research if you want more, it won't be hard to find.

So why do we fight these wars, basically a third of the time we have been a nation we have been at war, and since 1915 we've been in 6 major wars and countless "police actions" (Bosnia and the like) ... Eisenhower told you why, remember, "beware the military industrial complex"? It's about budgets and spending. Brave men and women are sent into battle to satisfy the munitions manufactures of the west. If they aren't fired we do not need any bullets, cruise missiles, guidance systems, bombs. Your government sends people to kill and be killed when there is a gluttonous surplus of bombs. When East Timor was invaded and the people there were being killed the United Stated provided the Indonesians with the means to do it. When Iraq invaded Kuwait it was an action that required us to go to war to stop an unjust invasion. Our government talks about self determination and ignores the pleas of the Kurdish people who face genocide from two directions (Iraq and Turkey) when the Kurds rise up they are tagged as terrorists and villages are destroyed by Turkish pilots flying American attack helicopters, we used them to secure northern Iraq and then left them to fend for themselves unrepresented in the new "self determined" Iraq. Everywhere you look there are contradictions in our foreign policy until you remove the motivations given from podiums and in newspapers and realize that the motivation is money. Not money like you would think, we're not going to invade India to take all the tea, we're going to bomb a mountainous wasteland into rubble to make bomb makers rich. I mean they answer to the stock holders, we can't deny them the capitalist "right" to profit improvement. We did not invade Iraq to take the oil like you hear, we invaded Iraq so that huge multinationals would have a new market to build and sell to in perpetuity.

Do you believe that Bin Laden (or the thousands like him) needs a nation state to plan an attack in this country? An idea cannot be defeated and with every bomb we drop we are sending orphans and widows and widowers to the Taliban and al queda and hamas. "Look the Americans are killing your family, come join us and fight them" it sure must make recruiting easy. We negotiate peace between Israel and Palestine and sit idly by while Israel breaks the agreements that are reached ... and wonder why the Palestinians don't trust us.
What i'm trying to say with all of these schizophrenic examples is that there is no consistency with our foreign policy if you buy any of the reasons that are given at press conferences ... the only explanation for the state of perma-war that we find ourselves must be found outside of foreign policy ... the only thing that makes sense is the same reason that we have fought in the past. Capitalism. We go to war to open up markets, to "create" jobs and profits in the arms business. I hope that's why, because if the leaders of our country really believe that having elections in Afghanistan and Iraq is going to somehow protect us from terrorist attacks we are in a lot of trouble. Bin Laden is a figure head, there are thousands of people who hate this nation that are violent and homicidal and are only lacking means and opportunity, global democracy will not deter them, they are not controlled by governments and are not restricted by porous borders half a world away.
I vote no on war and yes on trying to repair our relationship with the world. It is your government's actions that have bred this hatred of our nation and until they understand that they will not be able to make inroads against those who wish to destroy this country.