Memorial Day weekend was replete with parades, American flags, and tributes to our war dead, but little reflection on war, particularly the tragic fact that the United States has fallen into the death trap that President Eisenhower warned us about: the military-industrial complex.
Instead of defending our nation as the Constitution stipulates, since the 9/11 attacks the U.S. military, CIA, and military contractors have been waging aggressive wars or interfering by proxy in other nations’ internal affairs.
Looking at our national budget, you can see the overwhelming power of the military. The $600 billion price tag, way over $1 billion a day, eats up 54 percent of all federal discretionary funds. That’s almost as much money as the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. It’s no wonder we don’t have money to address the crisis of global warming, build a decent public transportation system, institute a medicare-for-all health system, or provide the free college education that all our youth deserve.
There have been a few great wins for diplomacy under President Obama, particularly the historic Iran nuclear deal and opening to Cuba. For the most part, however, President Obama has carried over many of the Bush policies. Fifteen years after 9/11, the U.S. military is still in Afghanistan (the longest U.S. war in history) and the Taliban remain strong. U.S. soldiers are still in Iraq, where our invasion opened up the floodgates of sectarian violence that gave birth to the Islamic State. President Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has bombed seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Syria. He never made good on his promise to close the prison in Guantanamo. But he did do something unique: Instead of capturing prisoners and locking them up in Gitmo, he decided instead to kill “suspected terrorists” through drone warfare.
The barbarism of targeting “suspects” by remote control from the comfort of an air-conditioned base in the United States,…