Djelloul Marbrook

President Obama has Solomonically summoned a bipartisan summit to discuss health care. Maybe he should call a summit of our generals and economists. They could discuss who is winning the war on terrorism, us or the terrorists.

Why economists? Because in our Pavlovian fashion we haven’t been paying much attention to terrorist strategy. The terrorists have brought our economy to its knees, but our politicians are blaming it on high taxes, Wall Street, predatory lenders, spendthrift consumers, socialism, communism, and any other tail they can pin on the donkey.

Before we have a summit about what we can and can’t afford and how to reanimate our moribund economy, perhaps we ought to entertain the notion that the terrorists might be winning because they have so many ways to widen the fiery circle and pull us in.

Gen. Smedley Butler

Here’s Iran looking for all the world like it’s building nuclear weapons. There’ nuclear Pakistan unwilling and probably unable to rein in the Taliban. Here’s Somalia and Sudan and Yemen graciously hosting Al Qaeda. There’s Saudi Arabia preaching militant Islam. Here’s Al Qaeda in North Africa. And the list goes on, but you get the idea. In fact, a hotheaded and ignorant segment of our right wing says the idea is that we’re at war with Islam.

Perhaps economists at the summit could persuade the generals that China, Russia and the United States combined can’t afford to fight wars on all those fronts without impoverishing their people. And the generals could tell the economists how we can do it, since they’re always so certain of victory if we just spend a little more money and blood.

And let’s invite the press to cover this summit, since the President was once all het up about transparency in government. He could demonstrate that all his back-room dealing with Congress in the past year over health care was just a temporary aberration and he really meant what he said about transparency, after all.

The Tea Party, whether it ends up as a profoundly reactionary third party movement or a Republican purification rite, is little more than hogwash—just like the progressive agenda—in the light of an economy exhausted by endless war. Isn’t this how Ronald Reagan brought the Soviet Union to ruin, forcing it to spend so many rubles on military hardware that it didn’t have money left for anything else? When the Berlin Wall came down and the shouting died down what did we learn from the Soviet collapse? Seemingly only that it couldn’t happen to us.

What if this is Al Qaeda’s strategy? What if the terrorist attacks are the stimuli by which the terrorists condition us, predictable as Pavlov’s dog, to spend ourselves into bankruptcy, relying on our patriotism and self-confidence to spend whatever it takes to achieve a victory which when it is won in one place is quickly lost in another?

What if this is a replay of that talk a few years back about whether we were winning or losing the Iraq war when, in fact, the Bush-Cheney team won the war—they made their rich cronies richer, and it’s going on unabated to this day, in spite of all Barack Obama’s tsk-tsking on the campaign trail.

Better heath care, more and better paying jobs, honest lenders, responsible corporations, decent educations—all of it is dishonest talk as along as we are committed to responding to terrorism by waging open-ended war around the globe, because there is no nation on earth that can afford it. There must be better responses, and we had better get on with finding them before it becomes amply clear that Al Qaeda has won by drawing us into ring after ring of fire.

Everything we aspire to as a nation is cheaper than war. Those who think war is the answer to every hostile act haven’t got the imagination or intelligence or patience to keep us out of war. The only thing cheap about war is its politics.

If he convenes a cost-of-war summit, President Obama might ask the participants to undertake some mandatory reading, and one of the books they might read is Marine General Smedley Butler’s 1930s classic War Is A Racket.

Let’s make the generals and the economists talk to each other instead of talking to the press. Let the conservative economists who are blaming social programs for our impending ruin explain to the generals just how much we can afford. Let the progressive economists say whether a society that is endlessly at war can actually afford to be anything but an authoritarian state. And let the generals say whether as Americans they are willing to fight wars that are burying us economically.—DM