Are we the United States of America or War Inc.? Do we the people govern ourselves or do paid stooges govern in behalf of bankers?

Since World War II we have been more or less continuously at war. The authorized version of this is: “War has been imposed on us, first by the Red Menace and then by Islamic terrorists. And we, the hapless victims, have had no choice but to fight.” Isn’t the truth that there will always be some menace, some reason for going to war?

Does the authorized rationale stand up to scrutiny? Did the Communists try to push us around? Sure. And we pushed back. But did that justify Vietnam? And does the threat of mindless Islamic terrorists with their snaky reasoning justify our incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq? And will they justify incursions into Yemen and every other place where Islamonuts choose to bully the locals and train young dupes to go forth and kill the innocent?

And will any of this justify our stubborn refusal to re-examine our view of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which has fueled so much bitterness towards us in the Muslim world?

War sets us up for heroic posturing, high drama and self-righteousness. Diplomacy, alas, lets us in for unfathomable subtleties and boring speeches. War is great for sound bytes. It’s a simple way to create and maintain industries. The bankers love it. Peace is as elusive as a good marriage.

Perhaps the reasons for so much war lie much closer to home. Perhaps the maintenance of such an immense military establishment with the culture that goes with it is a convenient reason for our failing to rebuild a thriving middle class, for putting higher education out of the reach of all but the rich, for countenancing an inferior and costly health care system, for keeping more people in prison and jail than any other nation on earth, for justifying lower and lower wages and fewer benefits and less security, for sending the poor to war and allowing the rich to dodge their responsibilities. And last but not least, for spectacularly failing to promote green technology to end our dependence on oil.

The list is longer and more obscene. We represent five percent of the world’s population. Are we simply more criminal than everybody else on earth or do we incarcerate more of the poor? We spend an average of $29,000 a year on each prisoner. We spend so much on war—and prisons—that we cannot address this long list of social injustices. This militarist policy enriches the bankers who hold our war debt and the profiteers who buy the politicians who make war. Absent from discourse when the deficit hawks speak is the subject of war and all the things we can’t afford because we are at war.

It would be easy to say war is what we do best, but it isn’t true, is it? Losing wars at the cost of bankrupting ourselves is more like it. But the banks profit. And the profiteers profit. And their hands are bloody, and so are those of the politicians who acquiesce to war without declaring it, thereby showing their contempt for the Constitution.

We do many things well. Look at Apple and the markets it has created for its technical magic. But the banks cannot make as much money on Apple as they can on death. In the short term all the flag waving, all the lying, all the Arabophobia may obscure it, but in the end the hard fact will emerge that in contravention of the best ideas of our forefathers we have become—we have willingly become—War Inc.

The 2009 film Big Fan portrays a working class man whose life is ruined by his fanatic devotion to the Eagles football team. He annoys a star player, his hero, and is beaten senseless by the hulking man, suffering brain damage. Is it possible that in our role as fans of militarism it will beat us senseless, impoverishing us? We had meant for militarism to be a last resort, but that is not what it has become for us. The more we fail to do other things right the more we turn to militarism as the thing we can count on doing right. That explains the call of some people for the Navy to handle the BP oil spill when the Navy knows even less than BP about containing such debacles.

One definition of insanity is that you do the same thing over and over again no matter how many times it has failed. Our war policies are beginning to look like that. What we hear about Afghanistan is what we heard about Vietnam. We ruined a generation of young Americans in Vietnam and we are ruining a new generation now. And none of the services that would create social justice for the rest of us—affordable health care and education, for example—will ever be affordable as long as we wage endless wars for the benefit of people who don’t need those services.

Our army does not remotely look like the politicians who send soldiers to die. Our army looks like our demographics, but our politicians look like our perniciously Eurocentric and antique image of ourselves. We refuse to reinstitute the draft, which is arguably more democratic and egalitarian than a standing volunteer army, not because we think it would be less effective, as we claim, but because we know that it would be more difficult to make war if the children of the privileged had to fight it.

Every pronouncement from Afghanistan and our generals, every pronouncement from Washington about it, sounds eerily like all those hollow pronouncements we once heard about Vietnam. Give us more troops, more time, more money, and we will turn this thing around, we will bring democracy to these people. Oh yeah, we’ve heard that before. We’ve been down that road. And we still haven’t provided adequate care to the men and women whose lives were shattered in that war, just as we’re not providing adequate care to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

War Inc. has no intention of caring for these veterans. It has no intention of paying Americans decent wages, of putting higher education within their reach, of securing their futures. But War Inc. will go on urging them to buy with money they don’t have. It will go on writing predatory loans. It will go on firing people whenever the shareholders demand more profit. It will go on ignoring renewable energy in the service of Big Oil. And, above all, it will go on making war.—Djelloul Marbrook

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WAMC, Albany, interview

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