{"id":346925,"date":"2018-02-05T20:08:24","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T19:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/ten-common-sense-suggestions-for-making-peace-not-war\/"},"modified":"2018-02-05T20:08:24","modified_gmt":"2018-02-05T19:08:24","slug":"ten-common-sense-suggestions-for-making-peace-not-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/ten-common-sense-suggestions-for-making-peace-not-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Common-Sense Suggestions for Making Peace, Not War"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"ActivistsActivists display signs during a protest against US military action in Syria on April 8, 2017, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue<\/a>)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror\u00a0involving 76 countries<\/a>\u00a0or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors\u00a0Russia and China<\/a>\u00a0(as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new\u00a0National Defense Strategy<\/a>), the US military is engaged globally. A network of\u00a0800<\/a>\u00a0military bases spread across\u00a0172 countries<\/a>\u00a0helps enable its wars and interventions. By the count of the Pentagon, at the end of the last fiscal year about\u00a0291,000 personnel<\/a>\u00a0(including reserves and Department of Defense civilians) were deployed in 183 countries worldwide, which is the functional definition of a military\u00a0uncontained<\/a>. Lady Liberty may\u00a0temporarily close<\/a>\u00a0when the US government grinds to a halt, but the country’s foreign military commitments, especially its wars, just keep humming along.<\/p>\n

As a student of history, I was warned to avoid the notion of inevitability. Still, given such data points and\u00a0others<\/a>\u00a0like them, is there anything more predictable in this country’s future than\u00a0incessant warfare<\/a>\u00a0without a true victory in sight? Indeed, the last clear-cut American victory, the last true “mission accomplished” moment in a war of any significance, came in 1945 with the end of World War II.<\/p>\n

Yet the lack of clear victories since then seems to faze no one in Washington. In this century, presidents have regularly boasted that the US military is the\u00a0finest fighting force<\/a>\u00a0in human history, while no less regularly demanding that the most powerful military in today’s world be “rebuilt<\/a>” and funded at ever more staggering levels. Indeed, while on the campaign trail, Donald Trump\u00a0promised<\/a>\u00a0he’d invest so much in the military that it would become “so big and so strong and so great, and it will be so powerful that I don’t think we’re ever going to have to use it.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

As soon as he took…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Activists display signs during a protest against US military action in Syria on April 8, 2017, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue) \u00a0 Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror\u00a0involving 76 countries\u00a0or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors\u00a0Russia and China\u00a0(as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":346926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-346925","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}