US war on its own democracy
The phrase "thinking about the unthinkable" has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I've been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one that has been rolling out in far slower motion: that America's "war on terror" never ends because it's far more convenient for America's leaders to keep it going - until, that is, it tears apart anything we ever imagined as democracy.
I fear that it either can't or won't end because, as Martin Luther King pointed out in 1967 during the Vietnam War, the United States remains the world's greatest purveyor of violence - and nothing in this century, the one he didn't live to see, has faintly proved him wrong.
Considered another way, Washington should be classified as the planet's most committed arsonist, regularly setting or fanning the flames globally, from Libya to Iraq, Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria to - dare I say it - in some quite imaginable future Iran, even as our leaders invariably boast of having the world's greatest firefighters (also known as the US military).
Scenarios of perpetual war haunt my thoughts. For a healthy democracy, there should be few things more unthinkable than never-ending conflict, that steady drip-drip of death and destruction that drives militarism, reinforces authoritarianism, and facilitates disaster capitalism.
In 1795, James Madison warned Americans that war of that sort would presage the slow death of freedom and representative government. His prediction seems all too relevant in a world in which, year after year, the US continues to engage in needless wars that have nothing to do with national defense.
To cite one example of needless war from the last century, consider America's horrendous years of fighting in Vietnam and a critical lesson drawn first hand from that conflict by reporter Jonathan Schell. "In Vietnam," he noted, "I learned about the capacity of the human mind to build a model of experience that screens out even very dramatic and obvious realities."
As a young journalist covering the war, Schell saw that the US was losing, even as its military was destroying startlingly large areas of South Vietnam in the name of saving it from communism. Yet America's leaders, the "best and brightest" of the era, almost to a man refused to see that all of what passed for realism in their world, when it came to that war, was nothing short of a first-class lie.
Why? Because believing is seeing and they desperately wanted to believe that they were the good guys, as well as the most powerful guys on the planet. America was winning, it practically went without saying, because it had to be. They were infected by their own version of an all-American victory culture, blinded by a sense of the United States' obvious destiny to be the most exceptional and exceptionally triumphant nation on this planet.
It was far harder for grunts on the ground to deny the reality of what was happening - that they were fighting and dying in a senseless war. As a result, especially after the shock of the enemy's Tet Offensive early in 1968, escalating protests within the military (and among veterans at home) together with massive anti-war demonstrations finally helped put the brakes on that war. Not before, however, more than 58,000 American troops died, along with millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.
In the end, the war in Indochina was arguably too costly, messy and futile to continue. But never underestimate the militaryindustrial complex, especially when it comes to editing or denying reality, while being eternally over-funded for that very reality.
It's a trait the complex has shared with politicians of both main US parties. Don't forget, for instance, the way then-president Ronald Reagan re-edited that disastrous conflict into a "noble cause" in the 1980s. And give him credit. That was no small thing to sell to an American public who had already lived through such a war.
In the meantime, the militaryindustrial complex has mastered the long con of the no-win forever war in a genuinely impressive fashion.
Consider the war in Afghanistan. In 2021 it will enter its third decade without an end in sight. Even when President Donald Trump makes noises about withdrawing troops from that country, Congress approves an amendment to another massive, record-setting military budget with broad bipartisan support that effectively obstructs any efforts to do so (while the Pentagon continues to bargain Trump down on the subject).