Dumb Ass Wars: An American Trademark
Posted: 7/10/10
From WW2 through our current silliness in Iraq and Afghanistan the United States has pursued economic, ideological and military warfare on and in a series of countries that, quite frankly, could never do us any harm. It may seem like we’ve just somehow lurched from one crisis to another but the cold hard fact is that former President Harry S. Truman, by signing (in secret) NSC 68 placed America firmly on a long-term war footing that literally spanned generations.
It was the Truman administration that launched the Cold War, in a contrived atmosphere of fear and hatred (Think the McCarthy pogroms), eschewing anything that smacked of diplomatic reasoning and instead embraced naught but military aggression. Although NSC 68 faced opposition that opposition faded when the North Koreans invaded South Korea and the long dark dance began.
The Korean War (6/25/50)-(7/27/53), was ostensibly a civil war between the states of North Korea and South Korea that were created out of the post-World War II Soviet and American occupation zones in Korea. The North apparently attacked the South, America supported the South, China then came in on the North’s side, along with Russia. General MacArthur was ready to nuke the bunch of them before he was relieved of his command by President Truman. Nobody won, and sixty years later we’re still staring at each other over a line some idiot drew in the Korean sand.
So much for grownups ruling the world.
Following Korea the American people became embroiled in a series of clumsy, awkward and disastrous undeclared wars, skirmishes and just plain adventuring in places like Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, none of which returned any value for the blood and money expended by not only the Americans but also for their hapless allies. The locals were generally seduced by offers of whatever the locals deemed valuable, whether money, position, women or whatever, said locals generally having to deal with the inevitable American pullout and the equally inevitable wrath of their neighbors and countrymen.
What may seem like a fumbling, bumbling American foreign policy becomes more clear, although not any the less a massive stumbler, when viewed in the context of NSC 68. For the time NSC 68 was the best assessment of the world situation amidst the dangers of two mighty super-powers, diametrically opposed ideologically and armed to the teeth with weapons capable of destroying human civilization. But the policies that NSC 68 generated lead to the massively expanding powers of the military-industrial complex (Hey, Ike warned us!), micromanaged war fighting (by politicians, an instant recipe for disaster) and the rather bizarre mindset that no, we can’t stop fighting these goofball wars as that would mean loss of jobs.
What NSC 68, and it’s interpretations by succeeding generations of military and political operatives missed, was the absolute unsustainability of a permanent defensive war footing. The massive weapons outlays eventually brought down the Soviet Union in 1991, just as now it threatens to seriously damage, if not destroy, the American economy. Great big guns, missiles, bombers, submarines and the like can only become affordable in offensive postures, when the loot from captured territories can be used to feed the war machine. Long term, all we have achieved is the continued unholy profitability of the same companies that waxed so obscenely fat during World War Two.
My Point Being:
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For an indicator of how much respect the American people receive from their government, news outlets and entertainment media just watch fifteen minutes of American TV and all those dirty little suspicions will be confirmed.
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