Stoopid Stuff

Blindness to the Madness

It's crazy. It's the craziness that's crazy. A kind of circular, meta-crazy that nobody seems to notice. It's like having an unwashed wino staggering around your cocktail party, vomiting on the buffet and coughing great, hacking gouts of phlegm in the punch. And the people, intelligent, elegantly dressed, merely step gingerly around the puddles and the ranting madman and pretend that it's just another cocktail party, like all the cocktail parties before.

The US is on an utterly unsustainable course, completely out of step with the 21st century world, where nations compete and partner on the basis of economic growth and increased quality of life. A global inter-connectedness fueled by digital and satellite communications and global trade not beholden to national borders, time zones, cultures or languages has created a world where what was long held to be impossible, the end of war, is not only possible, it is the only logical, obvious path. It is only America, the lone superpower in a unipolar world, that continues to cling to the outdated and discredited model of military power projection as the methodology for influencing international affairs.

This has gotten to the point of absurdity, the point where the president of the United States can insist on 200 billion dollar appropriation to sustain the military occupation of a desert nation halfway around the world and veto a 40 billion dollar bill to provide health care to American children. And that's not even the crazy. The crazy, the circular, meta madness in all this is nobody in America is outraged, at least not for the right reason. Let's put it in very simple terms. America could cut her ridiculous military spending in half, immediately, without a single ill effect. But Americans are so conditioned to a paranoid distrust, indeed a genuine fear that all manner of existential threats lurk just off our misty shores, and if we don't simply accept the necessity of a trillion dollar defense budget that includes massive expenditures on strategic weapons we will certainly be overrun, conquered and subjugated in mere weeks.

When examined dispassionately, this is obviously not the case. But to simply propose that America could fund much of it's internal needs in education, health care, infrastructure and entitlement programs by gutting the defense budget is political suicide. If we are not allowed to have the conversation, there is no hope of changing the course, and America will certainly continue her slide into irrelevance. The amazing thing is we have had the opportunity, over the last half dozen years, to see all of this clearly demonstrated. The lessons have been taught, clearly and with audiovisual support, but they have not been learned. The data provided, the wrong conclusions drawn.

First, what has the Iraq debacle taught us about the effectiveness of "hard power" in the twenty first century? Since the end of the second world war, America could always influence world affairs by projecting "soft power" around the globe. A carrier task force, the quiet rattle of the saber, the forward deployment of a bomber wing, and the world stood up and listened. Why? Because, like any good work of fiction, the threat was perfect, while the execution never is. President Bush actually used the American military against a crippled, bankrupt third world regime. And the world saw how limited military power, no matter how mighty, actually is. The vaunted American armed forces, despite unlimited financial support, could not pacify that small, impoverished nation. And now, while most nations understand that America's military has the capability of defeating their armed forces and toppling their government, America has learned a more important lesson with the world watching: That most any nation can, nonetheless make that too painful and costly an endeavor for America ever to undertake anything like it again.

Second, the other side of that coin, the world has learned that in a global economy, with instant communications and any capital no more than a dozen hours away, building and sustaining an insurgency that can bring a superpower to its knees is neither difficult nor terribly expensive. Funds, weapons and fighters flow across seas and borders, easily provided to virtual organizations that can share knowledge and expertise with sympathetic organizations all over the world. And a well-funded insurgency with popular support cannot be defeated by any military, no matter how powerful.

Building a military does not contribute to a nations wealth. Sure, it can create jobs, but that's a chimera. The money contributes nothing, builds nothing, and adds nothing to the future. And if it is then demonstrated for all to see that that horrendously expensive, inflexible military cannot even accomplish the one thing it is expected to accomplish, the imposition of your will on other nations, then there is no reason, no excuse, for building it.

America is in real trouble. The economy is built on shadows, smoke and China, the debt is over 9 trillion dollars, energy costs have gone through the roof, the dollar is in free fall. The US economy is a service economy. We don't make anything. We invent, and then have other nations build and profit from our developments. Other nations have learned to work together, live together, and prosper together. They do not fear different cultures, they do not base their worldview on paranoid fantasies of enemies seeking their destruction and domination.

A sustainable future is built on peaceful coexistence, economic trade and development, and a careful, balanced use of resources. There is no place left in the world for an angry, rogue giant with delusions of conflict and great military victories. The time has come for humans to put down their weapons and begin to think about the future. The world needs peace and cooperation, and people need governments that care about their health and well being.

But the madness is not the insane militarization of American society in the face of a future that has clearly passed her by. The madness isn't even in the fact that it is political suicide to propose peaceful coexistence as a sustainable strategy for international relations. No, the madness is that we are utterly prevented from even having the conversation. We must base our policies on fear and paranoia, and we must never question the value and efficacy of a military larger than all the rest of the nations of the world combined. And to say that money would be better used at home, to make the lives of Americans better? Treason, of course.

Madness...

posted by mikey @ 12:43 PM