Is America Addicted to War?

I posted a few days ago about an excellent article in America magazine, entitled World Without War, written by Bishop Robert McElroy, the auxiliary bishop of San Francisco. (Unfortunately, this might ensure that he’ll never be anything but an auxiliary…) It was an excellent article, and I wish I could have reprinted it, or at least given a link to it, but America doesn’t allow that. At the time, I also mentioned a second article, not from a religious source, that I posted on my Facebook page, entitled Is America Addicted to War? (In my mind, there’s NO DOUBT that the answer to that is a sad but resounding YES.) The article mentions five reasons that contribute to that “addiction.” Please check out the original article, HERE. Here are the reasons, plus my comments:

1. Because we can.
2. The U.S. has no serious enemies.
3. The all-volunteer force.
4. It’s the Establishment, stupid.
5. Congress has checked out.

Because We Can… An obvious reason why we keep lurching into armed conflicts is because we have an extremely well-funded military, and we’ve got to keep them busy. What would they do if we didn’t? That’s actually a scary scenario to contemplate, but rather than think about that, just consider that we do get into conflicts like Liberia because we’ve got all this hardware and manpower just waiting around, itching to actually do something. It’s like the old government budget canard about spending your budget before the end of the fiscal year, even if you don’t need to … otherwise they’ll figure you don’t need it and you’ll get cut. The American people might begin to wonder why we need this gigantic expense if we didn’t really show how useful it is…

The U.S. Has No Serious Enemies… Well, of course we can’t just go invade Russia or China. However, our “sphere of influence” has expanded considerably since the rest of the world realized they’d go bankrupt trying to maintain an arms race with us. Nobody but the U.S. has anywhere near the resources devoted to the military that we do. Nor has anybody else in history, ourselves included.

The All-Volunteer Force… Actually, “volunteer” is a bad misnomer. It makes it sound like our forces are doing this out of a sense of altruism, and getting no monetary compensation in return. Isn’t that our understanding of the word “volunteer”? Actually, we should label this one as “Our Professional Military.” These folks are paid for their services – not as well as our bankers, of course, but they are paid nonetheless. They are NOT “volunteers” in the usual way we understand the term.

By this I mean no disrespect to the men and women, and their families, who serve in our military. I have parishioners who have served recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I have a nephew and his family who are “lifers” in the military. I respect them very much for their dedication. In many cases people in military actually put their lives on the line, and most of them serve out of great love for our country.

Nonetheless, they are not “volunteers.” There is a real monetary cost for their service. Now, if that service were provided by “draftees,” there would certainly be a much greater social cost involved. It would cause us to look a lot harder at the size and cost of our military, and the uses we make of it. This would be a good thing -- our government would have to be more accountable for its actions. It would be required to develop convincing rationales for our military actions that our citizenry would accept and support. As for now… most of our populace, and especially most of our leaders, personally have very little “at stake” in the sacrifice offered by those in the military. So, when we talk about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, or our action in Libyaa, the discussion is very academic.

It’s the Establishment, Stupid… Having such a large and expensive military necessarily means that we have a lot of people with a LOT at stake in defending it and in developing ways for us to use it. There are a lot of people whose livelihood depends on it, and here I’m not talking about the soldiers, but the people in the CIA, the military contractors…jobs, in so very many political districts! And thus “bringing home the bacon” gets wrapped in a gaudy patriotism that gets politicians reelected. Actually, shouldn’t we start with the assumption that we should be trying to build a more peaceful world, rather than just juicing up our own abilities to be the biggest and strongest nation around?

Congress Has Checked Out… Has no one noticed that despite spending far more on our military more than the #2 nation (China -- four or five times as much) and almost as much as the rest of the world combined… that in the recent Budget negotiations, there was almost no discussion on reducing the amount of money we spend on our military? WHY NOT? Our representatives – Republicans and Democrats both – are afraid to appear soft. They are afraid to be the first to say, enough! And likewise, they do little to check the Executive Branch in its military adventures. When will they ask why Afghanistan is the longest war in American history, and begin to ask hard questions? (Such as: What are our aims? What is our plan? When will it be over?) Congress fails to ask these questions because the people in Congress are more afraid of being questioned about it when they have to run again. But those questions are important. These things should be discussed, debated! And they should all be held accountable for the results.

This is obviously a subject I have a lot of passion about.