Did
you know the Russia-Ukraine War is a great
“investment” for the United States? A terrific
opportunity to kill lots of Russians and to
destroy lots of their military equipment at a
relatively cheap cost to us? (Just don’t
mention the price paid by Ukraine.) It gives
new meaning to the expression “making a
killing” on the “market.”
To
Gordon Gekko’s infamous “greed
is good” speech we must now add “war
is good.” That war is “right.” That it
“works”—at least for America,
allegedly.
War
as an “investment” truly symbolizes the moral
bankruptcy of conventional discourse in the
U.S. political mainstream. Instead of war
being a calamity, a catastrophe, a realm of
death and destruction, dare I say even a
mortal sin of grievous evil, we’re told that
instead it’s an investment that’s paying
dividends, especially in that growth stock
known as Ukraine.
We can’t let MAGA Republicans
stop the
Ukraine “investment,” can we?
Not when
it’s paying such great dividends.
Even
body counts and truck counts from the Vietnam
War era are being brought back to show what a
great “investment” the Ukraine War has been
for the U.S. In her latest, Caitlin
Johnstone cites
war-lover Max Boot for his advocacy of the
Russia-Ukraine War as a continuing investment
opportunity for the U.S., including the use of
body and truck counts as a measure of
progress:
“Russia has lost an
estimated 120,000 soldiers and 170,000 to
180,000 have been injured,” [Max] Boot
writes [in a Washington
Post op-ed].
“Russia has also lost an estimated 2,329
tanks, 2,817 infantry fighting vehicles,
2,868 trucks and jeeps, 354 armored
personnel carriers, 538 self-propelled
artillery vehicles, 310 towed artillery
pieces, 92 fixed-wing aircraft and 106
helicopters.”
“The Russian armed forces
have been devastated, thereby reducing the
risk to front-line NATO states such as
Poland and the Baltic republics that the
United States is treaty-bound to protect,”
Boot continues. “And all of that has been
accomplished without having to put a
single U.S. soldier at risk on the front
lines.”
“That’s an incredible
investment,” gloats Boot.
At
no time in his masturbatory gushing about
how many Russians this war has helped kill
does Boot make any mention of the
immense toll this
deliberately provoked and completely
unnecessary war has taken on Ukrainian
lives. Their deaths and dismemberments and
displacement are the largest price being
paid into this “investment” by far, but Boot
doesn’t deem them worthy of even a footnote.
We’ve
been seeing this “investment” line being
promoted with increasing frequency by US
empire managers and their apologists. In
an article
published in the Connecticut Post last
month, Senator Richard Blumenthal assured
Americans that “we’re getting our money’s
worth on our Ukraine investment.” A few days
prior to that Senator Mitt Romney had described the
proxy war as “the best national defense
spending I think we’ve ever done,” because
“We’re diminishing and devastating the
Russian military for a very small amount of
money… a weakened Russia is a good thing.”
In December Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell said that
funding the proxy war is “a direct
investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s
future capabilities to menace America,
threaten our allies and contest our core
interests.” Last November the imperial
war machine-funded think
tank Center for European Policy
Analysis published
a report arguing
that “US spending of 5.6% of its defense
budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s
conventional military capability seems like
an absolutely incredible investment.”
Imagine
the vacuity, the bankruptcy, the venality, the
sinfulness of writing about war and killing as
“an absolutely incredible investment.” And
what is our ROI, our return on investment? A
lot of dead and wounded Russians and
Ukrainians, a devastated and poisoned
landscape, millions of war refugees, and an
increasing likelihood of a wider war that
could possibly go nuclear. ROI, indeed.
War
is many things, but it is not an
“investment.”
People who talk and write
like
this have no moral center. They are
soulless.
They are automatons of war.
