Readers,
I admit to you I’m demoralized after seeing this news a couple
of days ago:
The
House has
passed,
329-101, its version of the fiscal 2023 National Defense
Authorization Act, which would authorize $840.2 billion in national
defense spending.
I’ve
been writing against massive and unnecessary spending on wars and
weapons since the early 1980s, when I did a college project that was
highly critical of the Reagan “Defense Buildup” under
then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Those were the days when
there was a real movement against Reagan’s pursuit of the MX
“Peacekeeper” ICBM and the deployment of nuclear-tipped
Pershing II and GLCMs (ground-launched cruise missiles, or
“glick-ems”) to Europe. The Nuclear Freeze Movement
helped to stimulate talks between Reagan and Gorbachev that led to
the elimination of weapons like the Pershing II, the GLCMs, and
Soviet SS-20s, introducing a small sliver of (temporary) sanity to
U.S.-Soviet relations.
Then
came the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and America’s
unipolar moment of triumph. Who knew that 30 years later, America
would be vigorously advancing and inflating a new Russian threat that
would then be used to “justify” renewed spending on all
sorts of esoteric, exorbitant, and wildly unnecessary weaponry to
feed the never-satiated military-industrial-congressional complex
(MICC). I didn’t predict it, that’s for sure.
For
the last 15 years, I’ve been writing about
six articles a year whose main theme has been the often colossal
failures of the MICC and the total lack of accountability for the
same. Never has failure bred so much success for an institution. And
the institution itself, I truly hesitate to write, is woefully
lacking in integrity. Whether it was the Pentagon
Papers
in Vietnam, the Afghan
War Papers,
the lies about WMD
in Iraq
that
precipitated the disastrous Iraq War in 2003, or that hoary chestnut
about babies being ripped
from incubators
in Kuwait that helped to justify Desert Shield/Storm in 1991-92, the
American people have been told so
many lies about war
by “their” MICC that it boggles the mind.
And
don’t even get me started about how the military lied about Pat
Tillman’s
death, tarnishing the legacy of a brave soldier inspired by service
and idealism.
People
with integrity who try to tell us the truth about America’s
wars, like Chelsea
Manning
and Daniel
Hale,
end up in jail. The liars and the ones who always get it wrong end up
being richly rewarded and often promoted to the highest levels.
This
has to end, or America itself will come to an end. And it’s so
frustrating because, again, I’ve been writing about this, off
and on, for forty years, and steadily over the last 15 years. But
nothing I say or write, or other critics like Andrew
Bacevich
and William
Hartung
say or write, makes any difference, so it seems, as the MICC
continues to become the giant war robot that rules America.
