We were warned explicitly, implicitly, and repeatedly. But as we have learned - uh, make that “found out” - the hard way and always after the fact, hubris, unbridled power, and self interest trump good judgment every time, especially when the subject is the funding and use of America’s military. The biggest losers are the families of America’s killed service personnel, disabled and displaced veterans, the American taxpayer, and the U.S. Government’s ever dwindling credit score. But because of the shameless conduct of politicians, hawkish pundits, and other stakeholders in the vast military industrial complex, any honest questioning of the military is tantamount to treason, or at the very least, an act of “cut and run” cowardice. Meanwhile the increasingly opaque game continues relentlessly and unabated, all too often to the country’s detriment.

The Good, the Bad, and the Unmitigated Disasters

What makes national defense issues so prone to demagoguery is the fact that history is replete with enough Pearl Harbors and 9-11s to illustrate the fact that America has enemies and legitimate national defense issues that require courage and collective sacrifice. Unfortunately, there have been, are, and always will be people in public life who equate every international challenge as a license to use our military as a first resort. Sometimes the provocation is even more minimal if non-existent. The most egregious example was George W. Bush, prodded by “the more experienced” Uncle Dick and Rummy not to mention an assortment of neoconservatives like William Kristol and his fellow travelers at the Project For The New American Century, to attack Iraq in 2003 on the basis of wishful thinking, faulty intelligence, and outright lies. Fear and deceit against the very real backdrop of the September 11 attacks was sufficient to trigger a rush to judgment that has been nothing less that an unmitigated disaster in terms of needless American and Iraqi deaths not to mention a trillion dollars and counting squandered on the very nation building that W. scoffed at during his 2000 campaign. Worse yet, the Iraqi debacle provided an effective and ongoing recruiting tool for our real enemies while turning much of the post 9-11 good will toward us from outside our borders into enmity.

As awful as Iraq has been for America, there have been many other unnecessary disasters. In 1961 the military advised John Kennedy that the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba was a sound and necessary use of military force. That didn’t turn out well. Eisenhower and Kennedy planted the seeds of Vietnam even after the French were expelled from Indochina in 1954, by sending U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam. But it was LBJ’s ego and Ford Motor whiz kid Robert McNamara’s arrogance and lack of understanding that guaranteed 58,000 Americans would die, not to mention hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans who would never be the same by turning an Asian civil war into an American war of necessity. Why? Because of the so called, now discredited, “Domino Theory,” which discounted the power of nationalism and ignored the fact that countries have unique cultures of their own, not to mention corrupt regimes that can trigger and sustain revolt. Oh, and by the way, it is estimated that 1.5 million or more Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War. In 1975 the Communists finally prevailed. But it’s all okay now. Vietnam is one of our leading trading partners in Asia, kind of like China, only smaller. You might remember Communist China from the Korean War. I wonder what happened to that particular “Evil Empire?” I guess they decided to open up Walmarts and export cheap consumer goods to America, so everything is okay. Never mind.

Because we are Americans, we have traditionally harbored feelings of superior values we feel compelled to export with a missionary zeal despite not being invited. When this is combined with our own economic interests we are quite adept at rationalizing intervention around the world. Just look at our early twentieth century relations with Central and South America. How many dictators did we prop up to make sure Americans had plenty of bananas to eat and that United Fruit Company prospered? To be sure, Castro’s Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela are reactions to our past intervention in that part of the world.

And I would be remiss not to mention that in 1953 the CIA along with the Brits overthrew an unreliable nationalistic government in Iran. We installed the Shah, armed the country, and turned a blind eye to internal suppression of human rights by the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK. When the Iranian Revolution deposed the Shah in 1979, we armed a new friend in Iraq named Saddam Hussein. If you haven’t seen the photo of a smiling Rummy shaking Saddam’s hand, you should and you can, thanks to the “Internets” as W. has dubbed the World Wide Web.

To be sure, America didn’t invent empire building. It is coextensive with the collective ego that comes with nationalism. Rome was really good at it as were the Persians, the Spanish, the French, the Russians and the Ottoman Turks to name a few. The Brits were at one time the world champs of colonial empire building. It is ironic that while many politicians and talk radio narcissists want to remind us of the sanctity of the Declaration of Independence and the wisdom of the founding Fathers, few realize that American colonists were fed up with the British Military Industrial Complex. They also fail to point out that it was an emerging sense of American nationalism that combined with getting ripped off by King George and Parliament that led to what is now the United States of America. Oh yeah, revolution and insurgency are okay if we do it. Like Vietnam, Great Britain long ago decided to bury the hatchet with us. Had they not, there is a good chance that German might be the official language of England and the rest of Europe for that matter, which brings us back to another legitimate use of American military power. The irony is that we were bound and determined to remain neutral isolationists. But for Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s blunder of breaching his non aggression pact with Stalin before finishing off Great Britain, German might well be the official American language east of the Mississippi River with Japanese spoken to the West. Can you only imagine what Jackson and Shreveport might look and sound like today? But I digress.

The Military Industrial Complex

On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower, himself a U.S. Army General of some note, explicitly warned us against the potential dangers posed by an out of control military industrial complex in his farewell address as President. His words turned out to be prophetic. The Pentagon has become a symbol for what can go wrong when politicians, defense contractors and their lobbyists and high ranking career military officials get together to do business with minimal oversight in the name of freedom, democracy and God’s will. Too much? Go back and read some of W’s speeches. Anybody remember “Mission Accomplished,” Blackwater atrocities, or Halliburton subsidiary KBR’s Electric Shower in Iraq? Here are two facts that should tell you that everything is not necessarily on the up and up behind the secretive, closed door world that is national defense. Each additional soldier we send to Afghanistan carries a one million dollar per year price tag in terms of logistical support. It costs $400 to import a gallon of gasoline to that region – I can’t call it a country, because it is not. This is the tip of the iceberg funded by earmarks inserted into thousand page defense bills by members of the House and Senate from every state because defense is big business for their corporate campaign contributors. In reality, the tab is paid for by taxes and money borrowed from overseas. Some of our creditors are the very same people who are denounced on the floor of Congress as our enemies or potential enemies.

The New Vietnam

And so, like Vietnam, we are escalating our involvement in Afghanistan where we have been for eight years. How many more years and why, exactly? Afghanistan is rated as the second most corrupt failed state in the world behind Somalia. The topography makes the Great Basin in Nevada look like the Kansas prairie. President Hamid Karzai just got through stealing an election. His brother is the biggest drug trafficker in the region. The entire system of government is hopelessly corrupt. An article in USA Today documented that it took 51 signatures to transfer ownership of a house. Each of those signatures required a bribe. One must even bribe doctors to gain access to medical treatment. And, I almost forgot, official estimates place only about one hundred or so members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. This is the same track that finally did in the late Soviet Union.

Yes, I know much of the problem is next door in nuclear armed Pakistan. I know it’s complicated. But the question remains, notwithstanding President Obama’s December 1 speech; what is the mission? What is the exit strategy? Does he really know? Does anybody?

The Solution

It is all quite simple, really. Reinstate the military draft and levy a war tax on every single American citizen over the age of 18 with no exemptions or deductions. Then, step back and watch how necessary this war or weapon system or you name it REALLY is. I predict it would be a lot cheaper to just open a Walmart or a McDonald’s in Kabul and be done with it.