It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song “War,”
sung by Edwin
Starr, hit number
one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That was at the height of the
Vietnam antiwar movement and the song, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett
Strong, became something of a sensation. Even so many years later,
who could forget its famed chorus? “War, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.” Not me. And yet heartfelt as the song
was then – “War, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker. War,
it’s got one friend, that’s the undertaker…” – it has little resonance
in America today.
But here’s the strange thing: in a way its authors and singer could hardly
have imagined, in a way we still can’t quite absorb, that chorus has proven
eerily prophetic – in fact, accurate beyond measure in the most literal
possible sense. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
You could think of American war in the twenty-first century as an ongoing
experiment in proving just that point.
Looking back on almost 15 years in which the United States has been engaged
in something like permanent war in the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa,
one thing couldn’t be clearer: the planet’s sole superpower with
a military funded and armed like none other and a “defense” budget
larger than the next
seven countries combined (three
times as large as number two spender, China) has managed to accomplish –
again, quite literally – absolutely nothing, or perhaps (if a slight rewrite
of that classic song were allowed) less than nothing.
Unless, of course, you consider an expanding series of failed
states, spreading terror movements, wrecked
cities, countries hemorrhaging refugees,
and the like as accomplishments. In these years, no goal of Washington
– not a single one – has been accomplished by war. This has
proven true even when, in the first flush of death and destruction, victory
or at least success was hailed, as in Afghanistan in 2001 (“You helped
Afghanistan liberate itself – for a second time,” Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld to U.S. special operations forces), Iraq in 2003 (“Mission
accomplished“), or Libya in 2011 (“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton
on the death
of autocrat Muammar Gaddafi).
