WORLD PEACE AND OUR MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
War is the health of the state. – Randolph Bourne
The United States hasn’t tried to seize any new territory for 114 years, but during that time it has fought many more wars than any other country. World War I, The war to end all wars, was to rescue Europe from the Germans; World War II, the largest war in history, was fought after being attacked and war declared on us; four lesser but major "preventive" wars were supposedly necessary to protect us from “evil governments” that didn’t attack us; and many other minor engagements that were just to settle local arguments that had nothing to do with us. Since 1945 none of the wars has been fought with the declaration of war by Congress required by the Constitution.
Civil war in Vietnam caused John Kennedy to sell his domino theory -- the Communists would take over Asia and attack us -- as the reason he had to send military "advisors" there. Then it became an episode of The Pink Panther, with Lyndon Johnson playing Inspector Clouseau and McNamara as Cato, two clowns micro-managing the war from the White House, issuing can't-win rules of engagement, killing 57,000 Americans and after 10 years pulling out with our tail between our legs.
Why all these wars? Do we just like to meddle? Do we believe it’s somehow our responsibility to manage the world, to pick winners and losers in the world’s endless political, territorial, economic, religious and ethnic arguments? Or is it just politicians and bureaucrats who hunger to broaden their influence, and in the process cause us to spend roughly as much on our military machine as the combined military spending of the rest of the world?
With many foreign squabbles, our intrepid leaders call them a threat to world peace that requires us either to get involved directly, often with little or no foreign help, or to increase our military capability in preparation for possible future involvement. Frequently they say new military technology requires that it replace “obsolete” equipment and systems. Newer is better and it creates jobs in their districts. New foreign technology or expansion by “aggressor” nations requires that we counter them with newer and more. Almost everything happening in the world gives our powerful military-industrial complex an excuse to call for more military spending. It also gives the State Department and Pentagon another chance to call for intervention. People with hammers in their hand tend to find nails to hit. Our career soldiers yearn for a chance to use the trades for which they have been trained, to enlarge their organization and improve their promotion opportunities.
There are many crosscurrents in this sea. Our incompetent sophomore president would unilaterally discard our nuclear arsenal and then “through diplomacy” convince the rest of the world to do the same and disarm. The Pentagon says their arsenal is obsolete, starved for maintenance, training and practice funds, and desperately needs billions for new space-age arms, ammunition and technology. They are strongly supported by many congressmen with personal or political interests.
More accurately, our military-industrial complex is a military-industrial-political complex. Congressmen are always desperate for pork to take home, and spending for “defense” (read "offense" – no soldier has defended the U.S. for 68 years -- since 1945) because defense pork is easier to justify than more Harry Reid and John Boehner courthouses, bridges to nowhere and research grants to study the sex life of Belgian rats. New jobs in local factories and shipyards, keeping or adding more unnecessary military bases – that pork is easier for voters to swallow. In short, there are many powerful forces pushing for direct and indirect military spending and only a few relatively impotent tax-cutters in opposition, so we have a perpetually bloated military budget.
We are drowning in unnecessary military bases. California alone has 33 major bases and many smaller facilities. In response to pressure, since 1989 there have been five rounds of “base closures,” but smoke and mirrors cover the true results. The president periodically appoints the nine-man Base Realignment and Closure Commission. They recommend closures to the president. If he approves them, Congress has 45 days for an up or down vote – no changes – and if it doesn’t act, as in 2005, the list is approved. The details of the results are obscure. Many closures are simply mergers, with the activities of two or more bases expensively combined rather than being eliminated. Other bases were obsolete facilities that had not been active for years, such as Fort Douglas in Utah and Fort Sheridan in Illinois. The next round is scheduled for 2015. Obama has $2.5 billion in his 2014 budget to pay for “closure” costs, presumably to move the same operations to favored political friends.
War is the climate in which we exist, and the disastrous stupidity of continual wars is inevitable. Historian Will Durant calculated in 1968 that there had been only 268 years in all of human history during which there was not a war in progress someplace. Man is combative and acquisitive and nations are competitive and acquisitive when strong enough. The U.S. has no potent military enemies, so the politicians create them to justify our military colossus. Al Qaeda might take over Afghanistan or Pakistan with its nuclear weapons, Iran or North Korea might lob one of their two or three nuclear missiles at us or someone else, or shoot down an airliner or fly into another building, and so on. The (George W.) Bush Doctrine called for preventive military strikes on countries that might possibly, conceivably, maybe, unpredictably do us some harm -- we should strike them first.
We are fond of supporting or attacking tyrants and would-be tyrants, selecting good ones and bad ones, but our record of choosing whom to support is poor. As in Africa, white hats eventually slaughter the black hats and eventually become the new black hats, and the corruption and slaughter goes on and on. Once involved in foreign meddling, we stay. Think South Korea – we are still there 63 years after we ended their civil war. Columnist Fred Reed said, “Winning a war isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The promotions and contracts stop. When you are paid to do something, it is in your interest not to finish doing it.”
The U.S. has no enemy to be feared and has no reason to invade other countries or tell them how to manage their affairs, but our meddling leaders always know best and want to control the external and even some internal activities of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and the internal activities of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and Egypt -- and that is just today’s partial list. Without a declaration of war, our leaders have had American soldiers and airmen fighting in the wasteland some call Trashcanistan for more than eleven years, and for what? To kill some Taliban or al Qaeda leader who, like Hydra, is replaced by two more? We should get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of our meddling places, stay out of Syria and Egypt and the next fifteen trouble sites that appear.
The human and monetary costs of our perpetual military meddling are enormous. In 2012 the Air Force Times reported a forty percent increase from the previous year in suicides by American airmen, undoubtedly aggravated by repeated deployments, and few Americans consider the costs to foreigners affected by our global meddling. In Iraq the lowest estimates of dead Iraqi civilians is 200,000. We didn’t kill them all, but we started the war and they died in the aftermath.
According to U.S. GovernmentSpending.com, actual spending for “defense” in 2012 was $849.6 billion. That figure is questionable because the government hides some war and military expenditures off the budget reports and some transfers of funds are made between departments. To fight the guerilla wars, in 2012 our big spenders had 1,477,896 front-line personnel, 1,458,500 reserve personnel, 8,325 tanks, 18,539 armored fighting vehicles, 290 ships, 10 aircraft carriers and 71 submarines – among many other large and small toys.
In 2008 Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote The $3 Trillion War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. While the White House had promised a cost not over $50 billion, Stiglitz estimated the cost of the war including replacing military equipment, caring for thousands of wounded veterans, and rebuilding Afghanistan would actually total $7 trillion. In 2010 the U.S. spent more on “defense” than at the height of the Cold War in 1986 when w
e were building a large nuclear arsenal in an arms race with the Soviet Union, but in 2010 we were involved only with impotent Iraq and Afghanistan and our endless non-war “war on terror.”
Modern offensive warfare is essentially guerilla warfare against shadowy hit-and-run warriors -- daytime civilians and nighttime guerillas. One Muslim game is to embed soldiers in schools, hospitals and churches, daring us to attack them and inflict civilian casualties.
We have a gigantic, improperly designed military monster. We need a major reduction of forces by a wholesale mothballing and scrapping of last-war equipment, ships and aircraft carriers, cancellation or reduction of many last-war contracts -- F-35 aircraft, Bradley armored vehicles and others – and major restructuring of our fighting forces. We could replace many manned aircraft with drones, mothball tanks and artillery, mothball part of our expensive, vulnerable carrier fleet, expand our missile and anti-missile capability and replace much of our huge foot-soldier army with small, mobile amphibious and defensive special forces units. One great part of our forces are our stealthy, mobile nuclear submarines. One Ohio-class nuclear sub carries 24 missiles with a 4,600-mile range and 192 nuclear warheads that can be individually targeted. We have 18 Ohio-class subs and they are only one-fourth of our submarine fleet.
The F-35, billed as the next generation fighter, was planned to cost $400 billion. Critics say it is badly designed and will already be outdated before most of the deliveries are made. The boondoggle has strong political support because 46 of the 50 states have been handed part of the F-35 business. Bradley armored vehicles cost $3.1 million each and are already out of favor because tougher alternatives have appeared, but they will continue in production “to maintain a robust and healthy combat vehicle industrial base.” The Dayton (Ohio) Daily News reported, “New cargo planes are being delivered for the U.S. Air Force straight into storage in the Arizona desert because the military has no use for them… The Air Force almost had to buy more of the planes against its will.” The government picks winners and losers and prints more money to pay the bills.
We still have 70,000 U.S. troops in wealthy Germany, 30,000 in South Korea and almost 1,000 military bases around the world. We should close most of those and close half of the pork-barrel bases in the U.S, many of them on choice real estate that should be sold for productive use and put on the tax rolls. Camp Pendleton alone has locked up 200 square miles of choice Southern California oceanfront.
In 1961 President (General) Eisenhower said, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwanted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” We didn’t guard against it. Thomas Duncan, an economist at George Mason University: “Once the U.S. entered into a state of permanent war, resources were continuously drawn for the nonmilitary sector to support and advance military-related activities in what has become a permanent war economy. The result is a bloated corporate state, a less dynamic private economy. The permanent war economy ultimately stifles the process of wealth creation … In 2008, the Defense and Homeland Security departments made up nearly 49 percent of civilian employment in the federal government … The permanent war economy is not simply resistant to correction. It is self-extending. One profit opportunity creates several new opportunities.”
On December 10,2013, John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, said, "While the fighting forces have steadily shrunk by more than half since the early 1990s, the civilian and uniformed [military] bureaucracy has more than doubled… currently more than 1,500,000 full time civilian employees in the Defense Department… Today more than half of our active-duty servicemen serve in the office on staff." He also said the average time from a draft requirement for a new weapons system has gone from four years in the late 1950s for the complex Polaris missiles to twenty-two years average time now for all weapons. He also criticized a lack of competition for production contracts.
One of the consequences of our endless involvement in other peoples’ wars and arguments is how that fuels the cancerous growth of our government. U.S. wars have helped create many permanent spending programs and bureaucracies, including public housing, third-party medical payments, government interference in labor relations, “progressive” taxation, death taxes, gasoline taxes and permanently increased income taxes.
Military personnel succeed or stagnate according to the size and growth of our military forces. The suppliers of military equipment and technology prosper or wither on government spending. Cities and states are always lobbying to keep or expand the military bases that bolster their economies. There are thousands of well-paid, well-connected lobbyists pressuring 535 cooperative career politicians to spend more money on the military, and 150 million mostly impotent taxpayers who sit on their hands and wait for their next tax bill. It will be large, but small compared with the bills being passed to our children and grandchildren, who are not paying attention, and a large part of it comes from the cost of an unnecessary military establishment capable of conquering the world.
THE UNITED NATIONS, EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES
During the 19th Century, many European countries had colonies scattered around the world -- economic orchards to be plundered. To protect their interests, they kept the colonies under control. The sun never set on the British Empire, and the British East India Company had a large private army to protect their orchards. As the colonies were able to break away, that stabilizing effect disappeared. The post-WWI League of Nations was impotent, but after WWII the United Nations was formed to be the stabilizing force, but it has degenerated into a huge, expensive bureaucracy and an impotent military stabilizer.
The United States emerged from WWII a mighty military power. Because it has continually meddled in global politics and wars, it has evolved into the world's police force and the U.N. does little except talk and do some inefficient humanitarian work.
Years ago, we learned that Saddam Hussein had skimmed an estimated $21 billion from the $80 billion or so the United Nation’s Oil-for-Food program appropriated for food, medicine and other humanitarian purposes in Iraq. With U.N. compliance or connivance, the program became an Oil-for-Palaces program for Hussein. From the New York Post: “After Hussein and his cronies, the main beneficiary of the Oil-for-Food program was the U.N. payroll . . . allowing the United Nations to walk away with $1.9 billion of Iraqi oil money. U.N. staff employed by the Oil-for-Food program ballooned to 3,000, the largest single U.N. program in the world.”
A few months later, it was reported that Secretary-General Kofi Anann’s son had been working for a Swiss company contracted by the Oil-for-Palaces program. Anann first said the U.N. would conduct an internal investigation, but in response to strong protests later announced an independent investigation. The U.N.’s version of “independent” was to appoint the investigator themselves. The U.S. and U.K. news media made a big fuss over the situation, but it was scarcely reported in the rest of Europe, most of which considers the U.N. not to be a political assembly but a kind of religion. As in matters such as supposed global warming and the failed Kyoto treaty, European minds are essentially closed on the U.N. subject; they neither hear nor want to hear the true facts, alternatives or any criticism.
Meanwhile, the Bush, Jr. administration and the neo-conservatives in the U.S. used “pre-emptive strikes” and “nation-building” in other parts of the world, if permitted. President Bush frequently talked about “changing the world,” while the neo-con artists saw our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as necessary holy wars.
The terrorists and would-be terrorists, mostly fundamentalist Muslims, are scattered around the world, not as one organization. In many cases their main connection is simply a passionate hatred of Americans, the West, Christianity, Israel, Western interference in Muslim countries, and the fact that the West is successful and prosperous while many Muslim countries are not. Most important, for many years the U.S. and Britain have aided Is
rael in controlling the Palestinian Arabs.
There are major differences between American and European views of our involvement in the Middle East and a host of other issues including environmental matters, welfare and the rights of labor unions. Americans need to put aside domestic political bickering and have a civil discussion about America’s preemptive strikes, nation-building, change-the-world jihad, and foreign policies involving the United Nations, NATO, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Syria, and other present and future problem countries and organizations, matters now being dictated by Obama. By the time our troops occupied Iraq, Saddam Hussein obviously had destroyed, disassembled, hidden or sold most of the nasty weapons the world knew he had previously and had not accounted for to the U.N. His throwing out the U.N. inspectors made almost everyone believe he had many dangerous needles hidden in a vast haystack that would be very difficult to search. Many Europeans and Democrats now ignore that fact, even though they believed it and said so before we invaded Iraq. Hussein's Air Force Chief revealed in detail how and when their weapons of mass destruction were removed to Syria before our invasion.
The world preaches globalism and practices nationalism, the U.S. included. Bush called for free trade but, imposed tariffs on foreign steel and Canadian lumber. There is growing international resentment over our unwillingness to turn over substantial control of our country to the rest of the world. Clinton agreed to the Kyoto global-warming treaty without congressional approval. It called for the United States to garrote its economy by large, expensive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions while exempting the countries that are the worst polluters. Kyoto never made it to the floor of the Senate, but the environmentally radical Europeans and Japanese still resent our refusal to ratify it. They also want to subject American citizens to rulings of their International Court of Justice and to let the United Nations, under mob rule, decide what the U.S. may and may not do in other ways. Be it ever thus, the jackals wanting the lions to lie down and play nice pussycat.
Another source of anti-American feeling is the difference between the international and American view of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the slaughter of Americans in Beirut, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere. We feel strongly about attacks on us. If the world shouts “Foul!” when we retaliate, let them shout.
For attacking Hussein at a great cost in money and lives, we got little thanks, nor does the world thank us for our twelve years of war and rebuilding in Afghanistan. It is not clear that we were justified in waging either war. Now there is majority agreement with Obama’s plan to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is no agreement on when and what the results will be. What both of those countries would prefer is for us to get completely out and just continue to send money to them indefinitely. President Karzai is calling for us to get out now, while Obama's State Department is pleading for us to stay in Trashcanistan for years and spend many, many billions to rebuild the country.
We should police America and let most of the world solve their own disputes and power struggles. The world is always awash in tribal, religious and political warfare. We are not going to change that and we shouldn’t try unless they harm the U.S. Why do we, only one of 192 members of the U.N., pay 22 percent of the total contributions, while Third World jackal countries continually harass us, vote against us while accepting our foreign aid and asking for more? Jordan votes against the United States 71 percent of the time and receives about $192 million annually from us. India votes against us 81 percent of the time and receives about $14 3million and Egypt votes against us 79 percent of the time and receives about $2 billion annually.
Why are we the largest single contributor to NATO, 22 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and 68 years after we stopped Germany and Italy from conquering Europe? The Europeans are the most prosperous group of countries in the world and should pay for their own defense. Why do we still have troops in the Balkans years later, when many Europeans say, “The Balkans don’t matter -– they have never mattered.” If they don’t matter to European nations, why do they matter to us?
Logic says we should review all such military involvements, make an orderly withdrawal of most of our troops in foreign countries, reduce our contributions to the U.N. to an amount consistent with our fair share and our ability to influence its actions, and recognize the almost complete failure of the United Nations to do anything well or efficiently in recent years. The U.N. is mostly an effective way for the parasitic countries of the Third World to get some control of the United States. Unless there is a drastic change in the U.N. functioning, that bloated bureaucracy should be reduced to a small forum for international discussions and our contributions and participation reduced accordingly. Unless NATO is to be used beyond Europe for activities with which we agree, we should get out of it completely. Why should we provide military aid to prosperous, developed countries? They never aid the Americas.
As a nation, we need to take a long, critical look at who we are, what we have any legitimate reason to do in the world, what we have the ability to do, what we want to do and why. Having the United States police the world is folly. If the rest of the world doesn’t want to get involved, why should we? We should do business with the world primarily on a mutually beneficial basis, not through trying to buy friendships and allies, and leave humanitarian efforts mostly to the United Nations and other non-government humanitarian organizations supported by voluntary contributions, not involuntary taxation of U.S. citizens.
PALESTINE, ZIONISM AND ISRAEL
Few Americans know the history of Palestine and Israel. It’s a long and complicated story, but a typical short version is that Israel became politically extinct in 721 B.C. when the Assyrians took Samaria. Some biblical scholars say the end of the Jewish nation came with the destruction of Jerusalem about 36 years after the Crucifixion by the Roman Emperor Titus, when about 1,000,000 Jews died and 100,000 were taken prisoners. The present Jerusalem is supposed to have been built by Emperor Hadrian for the Romans, who expelled all remaining Jews. On the site of the old temple is a grand Turkish Mosque.
History is a collection of very imprecise tales, varying with the narrators, clouded by time, prejudiced reporters and erroneous translations of words with multiple meanings, but clearly the claim that Palestine/Israel has always belonged to the Jews is not correct.
More recently, from an 1882 article Palestine by George Pitt: “Palestine is now, and has been for 864 years, under the rule of the Turks, who seem too poor and too indolent to do much – if anything – for the welfare of their subjects… The name Palestine is Roman, meaning Land of the Philistines… In possessing this promised land, they were never dislodged." He traveled Palestine by horseback and reported it to be “desolate, barren and accursed. You may travel for days [on horseback] and not be able to find a square yard of ground that is not choked with stones… The inhabitants [of Jerusalem] live in misery and squalor chiefly, their food being coarse or black bread, olives and water…. The Turks, as owners, occupy Mount Zion, as the best quarter, while the poor Jews occupy the lowest and most wretched ones. The interior of the city is irregular and miserable.”
During the late 19th century, a few Jews immigrated and formed agricultural communities in Palestine, notably Russian Jews in 1882. The number of Jewish colonies, mostly subsidized by a leading British Jew, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, rose from 22 in 1900 to 47 in 1918. However, in 1919 the Jews were still only 8 percent of the 700,000 population. Muslim Arabs comprised 81 percent and Christian Arabs 11 percent.
During the First World War, Great Britain took Palestine from Turkey, and after the war the League of Nations made it a British Mandate. In 1917 Arthur Balfour, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, wrote to Lord Rothschild promising British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on the understanding that “…nothing shall be done which will prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” That letter came to be referred t
o as the Balfour Declaration, was eventually endorsed by Woodrow Wilson and others, and as a result of a continuing Zionist effort, there was a gradual increase in the Jewish population in Palestine, particularly during the 1930s. From 1922 to 1939 the Jewish population increased from 83,790 to 445,457, but still was only 30 percent of the total in 1939.
After World War II, President Harry Truman pressured the British repeatedly for immediate admission of 100,000 more Jews to Palestine. The Arabs fought and bombed the British, and the British, afraid to fight Truman, the Jews and the Arab countries, turned the matter over to the United Nations in February, 1947. In November of that year, the U.N. adopted a General Assembly resolution to partition the country, despite the objections of 64 percent of its inhabitants, the Arabs. Thirty-five percent of the population, the Jews, welcomed the resolution because it expanded their landholdings from only 8 percent of Palestine to 55 percent, including the Negev desert. The Arabs were violently opposed, fighting broke out, the U.N. said it was unable to implement partition and the United States told the U.N. to back off and reconsider. The Zionists took over by military force, declared Palestine to be “Israel,” and President Truman immediately recognized the country.
The recent history is better known. Through continual military and quasi-military police actions and activities, notably the Seven Days War in 1967, the Israelis have established effective control of most of Israel, interrupted by random terrorist activities by Palestinian groups and individuals. The Israelis have continued to occupy and develop land in the West Bank and have fortified the hilltops overlooking many Palestinian communities. They have established many checkpoints through which Palestinians must receive permission to pass, and Israel built a fence which further limits the ability of the Palestinians to live, work and move about in Israel. Palestinians are generally at the mercy of Israelis, except for the terrorist activities of Hamas and other militant Muslim organizations.
Apparently because of fear that Gaza was not an area they could control and defend, the population being predominantly Arab, Israel chose to abandon it to the Palestinians, but it continues to be an area of strife, with the Arabs periodically lobbing shells into the Jewish parts of Israel. Most Europeans are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Jews. Americans, on the other hand, are influenced by strong and consistent U.S. government and private support of Israel, with a substantial Jewish membership in Congress and a powerful Jewish lobby in Washington. Since its formation, the largest portion of our world-wide foreign aid money has gone to Israel.
While much of the current Muslim terrorism is tribal and sectarian warfare -- Muslims against Muslims -- our mostly one-sided support of Israel is a significant source of anti-American sentiment among Arabs and to some extent among other Muslims around the world. While changing our policies to a neutral position on the Israeli-Palestinian strife would not by itself stop terrorism by radical Muslims, there is little hope of much decrease in Muslim hatred and terrorism against the U.S. without a substantial change in our policies involving Palestine and Israel.
The whole Middle East is a snake pit, the most dangerous parts now being Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some progress is being made in Iraq, but the Afghanistan situation is no better than it was 11 years ago, Syria is in flames, Iran continues to poke a stick in our eye, and Pakistan is a nuclear tinder box. Any escalation of Middle East conflicts is likely to draw support for both sides, Arab countries and Europeans supporting Arabs and the United States supporting Israel. It could get ugly.
Obama announced a withdrawal of all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, then 2012 but keeping “advisors” there, and lately his teleprompters aren’t telling him when to leave. Like Afghanistan, Iraq is not our problem and we should get out regardless of whether we like the eventual outcome. Recently fighting has erupted again, but that is not our problem.
In Syria, 100,000 have died already in their revolution. Muslim-loving, anti-war Barack Hussein Obama entered the war in Syria, providing munitions to the rebels. With Obama choosing sides in another conflict that is none of our business, his choice was between supporting the present harsh dictator or the rebels who would make Syria into another Islamist theocracy with an al Queda faction. Without Congressional approval, he chose the latter.
There are four principal obstacles to a peaceful, effective end of the strife in Israel. The Israelis have deliberately fragmented the country into scattered developments, a long fence and other control barriers and high control points, making separation into two side-by-side countries virtually impossible. Second, the Palestinian leaders continue refusing to to accept Israel’s right to exist. Third, in the years following World War II when many Jews were moving into Israel, an estimated 711,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced, uprooted or moved in desperation to nearby Arab countries that have refused to absorb them, treating them as outsiders. With their high birth rate, that number has ballooned to over 3 million Palestinian refugees. Sixty years later, many are still prevented from taking any but menial jobs. The Wall Street Journal August 28, 2010: “The dirty little secret of the Arab world is that it has consistently treated Palestinians living in its midst with contempt and often violence.” Fourth, there are three Arabic words for “peace”. In making international political agreements, the Arabs always refuse to use “ suih”, the only one that makes it a binding contract.
It is virtually impossible for two such passionate enemies to share peaceably one small parcel of land when they are so different in so many ways and when many of their people and allies question the other’s right to exist as a nation on that land. To settle the turmoil, they must either find a way to separate themselves or one will try to take over the whole land by force and subjugate or expel the other, and that could only be Israel subjugating or expelling the Palestinians.
This tribal war can be solved only by the two principals, if and when they get so sick of the conflict that they negotiate a workable geographic, political and functional division which effectively separates them -- an unlikely occurrence. Anything is possible; consider the Irish vendetta, quiet now for some time. The Palestinian Gaza enclave has no economy, only international welfare, so it is likely to atrophy and eventually the Palestinians just become residents in Israel, or leave it. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal June 26, 2006 predicted the still-likely outcome, with simply some Arabs – not as Palestinians -- living in Israel: “Palestine, as we know it today, will revert to what it was – shadowland between Israel and its neighbors – and Palestinians, as we know them today, will revert to who they were: Arabs.”
COLLATERAL DAMAGE AND FRIENDLY FIRE
The Wall Street Journal had a front-page feature article, with a full-page continuation, titled “A Marine’s Death Haunts Outpost,” about a Marine sniper accidentally killed by a U.S. tank crew.
Now that our instantaneous graphic communications bring the gory facts and tragedies of war into our TV sets and other electronic devices, the sensation-seeking news people show graphically what goes on in wars, pogroms and squabbles. In earlier wars, thousands of our military personnel were accidentally killed by our own activities and fire. In earlier wars, thousands of civilians were killed when they were merely in the wrong place at the right time. That always happens in wars, but formerly it wasn’t featured in front-page headlines, in living color, with interviews of the victims' families and friends.
Now the news media and the anti-war crowd pounce on every known incident of such deaths or injuries to our own troops and to civilians said to be innocent. The cowardly Muslims hide soldiers with civilians, daring us to attack them there. When civilians are injured or killed, the anti-war people call it an inexcusable event and demand identification and punishment of those responsible. They would require rules of engagement requiring that we attack or defend ourselves only against uniformed enemy personnel and only when there is no chance that anyone else could be injured.
The soldier has to make a quick ??
? often instant – decision: is he or she a friend or an enemy? Shoot or be shot? The Monday-morning quarterbacks in the media have unlimited time to gather all the facts, study the scene and circumstances, separate lies from truth and decide what they think the warrior should have done. If they disagree with the action, or if a civilian or another American was hurt or killed, the guilty warrior must pay! Honey, this isn’t your Wednesday bridge game. This is war.
In modern guerilla warfare, who are the enemies? What is collateral damage? During our foolish interference in Vietnam, a large segment of their population were ordinary civilians moonlighting as warriors, and that goes on in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. That is modern warfare. How can anyone issue fixed rules of engagement for street fighting and guerrilla warfare with soldier-civilians?
The tragedy is not the occasional unintended killing of Americans or of enemy civilians who later have been determined not to have been fighters. The tragedy is that we get involved where it is not our problem. The tragedy is that we, a bankrupt nation, have an enormous, unnecessary military budget. They always call it defense spending, but it isn’t. It’s military spending, designed for offensive warfare.
The real question is why are we fighting such wars? We are simply unpaid, largely unappreciated global meddlers and suckers. The terrible tragedy is not the death of one Marine. It is the terrible cost of thousands of lives and trillions of borrowed American dollars spent by our politicians in fighting wars where we don't belong.
SAUDI ARABIA: ALLY OR FOE?
The United States needs to review its relationships, policies and activities in the Middle East. We should worry less about pleasing our historic allies, more about obliterating terrorists and their supporters, and most about protecting our citizens from Muslim terrorism.
In spite of frequent statements by the Bush and Obama Administrations that Muslims are peaceful people and that Saudi Arabia is our ally, Muslims in general and Saudi Arabia in particular are not arresting their terrorists nor cooperating with us in fighting terrorism. They haven’t for years.
In the past, we’ve had good reason to cooperate with Saudi Arabia. We buy about 15 percent of our imported oil from them, Americans do substantial amounts of business with them, and the U.S. built and used military bases in Saudi Arabia during the Cold War. In April, 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld announced that nearly all American troops would leave the country; only 400 would remain “to train Saudis,” the withdrawal resulting from pressure from Saudi Arabia. However, there are more reasons we may want to distance ourselves from Saudi Arabia. There is internal unrest in Saudi Arabia, due in part to the succession struggle of the Saud family. They have stifled even mild opposition to their power, leaving radical Muslims as their principal opposition. A takeover by radicals and dissatisfied citizens is a possibility, particularly since the country’s shrinking welfare handouts and high unemployment rate have increased dissension.
There are many al Qaedas in Saudi Arabia, and its rulers refuse to cooperate in an international consortium of over 80 nations agreeing to block the assets of terrorist groups. The Saudis also refused to cooperate with the U.S. investigation of their 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in which 19 American servicemen were killed. Fifteen of the 19 9/11 murderers were Saudi Arabians.
In late 2013, Saudis at the top are severely criticizing Obama for having secret negotiations with Iran that resulted in lifting sanctions and releasing $8 billion in frozen assets in return for promises by Iran to slow their nuclear development program, and further criticizing him for backing off from sending more military aid to the Syrian rebels. U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia are definitely deteriorating. The Saudis are sending military aid to the Syrian rebels and Lebanon because Obama isn't, another move away from cooperation with the United States.
On December 15, 2013 Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institution Fellow, revealed that a 7,200 word section of the report by the congressional 9/11 commission had been redacted and the contents never released. Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-MA) read the redacted report and were "absolutely shocked" at the level of foreign-state involvement. Some information already leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, points to Saudi Arabia. One CIA memo found "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi officials -- high-level diplomats and intelligence officers -- helped the 9/11 hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and their consulate in Los Angeles, and Saudi VIPs from coast to coast -- San Diego, Falls Church and Herndon, Virginia, and Sarasota, Florida. Our ally?
Saudi Arabia is an anomaly, a rich Third World country. There are 7,000 Saudi princes who share an estimated one-fourth of the country’s oil revenue, estimated recently at $326 billion annually. Lesser princes receive a stipend of several thousand dollars each month plus other perquisites. Some have their own jet airports and terminals and one prince has his own Airbus 380 airliner complete with a two-car garage, camel stalls and a prayer room that automatically faces toward Mecca, its cost estimated at $500 million.
Saudi royalty are reluctant to risk giving up the good life. Ground-breaking local elections were held in February, 2005, but Prince Mansur, appointed by the royal family to run the experiment, had said, “The will of the people is not the final say for public policy in this country.” As expected, the “elections” were a burlesque. Only males could vote, no political parties were permitted and only the medieval Wahhabi Muslim establishment was permitted to organize. Saudi newspapers are increasingly critical of social and economic conditions, but direct attacks are not permitted. In early 2004, thirteen Saudis signed a petition proposing a constitutional monarchy. Rather than being bought off, as is common, the organizers were thrown in jail.
Carmen bin Laden, ex-wife of one of Osama’s 24 brothers, wrote a book called Inside the Kingdom, a rare glimpse into the gulag world of Saudi Arabian wives. Her mother was Swiss and she grew up in Geneva. She followed her husband to business school in California, but once in Saudi Arabia she became a sub-human pet in a home prison, which she says is typical. Even Saudi men have seemed to live in the seventh century since the primitive Wahhabi sect took over Saudi Islam and spread it around the world.
After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Saudi rulers crushed all liberalizing trends. All citizens must be Muslims and conversion to another religion is a crime punishable by death if the accused does not recant. An eighth-grade textbook teaches that Jews and Christians were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs; the ninth graders learn that on the Day of Judgment, “a Jew will hide behind a rock or tree, and the rock or tree will call upon the Muslim: ‘O Muslim, O slave of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”
In 2004, our State Department finally added Saudi Arabia to its list of the world’s most religiously intolerant nations. Colin Powell, unwilling to let the long-overdue action speak for itself, hastened to apologize to Al Arabiya, the Arab satellite channel: “One should not see this as anything but two friends talking to one another about a problem of mutual concern.” This about the country in which the Mutawwa’in, the state morality police, forced a group of teen-age girls to stay inside a burning school building because they were not wearing the head scarves and black tents that female Saudis must wear in public. Fifteen of the girls died; 52 were injured. (An interesting book on Saudi Arabia, Muslims and the Middle East is by a former CIA Middle East hand: Sleeping with the Devil, by Robert Baer.)
The Saudi leaders are faced with increasing protests, particularly from the 10-percent Shia minority. Political parties are banned and campaigning for political freedom is outlawed. There are about 30,000 political prisoners in mid-2013, with the Saudi family taking a hard line with all dissent, contrasting with their current support of the rebels in Syria.
In sharp contrast, tiny Bahrain, adjacent to Saudi Arabia, demonstrates an effective method for managing opposition. In 1999, Emir Sheikh Hamad al Khau
fa replaced his late father who had failed to suppress violence in Bahrain. Launching an innovative strategy, the emir emptied the jails of political prisoners, abolished the harsh security laws and promised free municipal and parliament elections in 2002 and 2003. He gave every Bahraini, male and female, the right to vote. Bahrain is not a democracy and the constitutional monarchy retains much control of the legislature and courts, but they have shown the Islamic world a better way to keep peace and respect human rights. Recently there has been some civil unrest, with the Saudi government offering the Bahrain government help.
Bahrain is different in other ways from some of the backward, radical Islamic countries. Its 675,000 people are well-educated, prosperous, moderate Muslims. The streets are full of partyers in air conditioned cars, many with Saudi licenses. The city's bars are well-stocked with alcohol and their customers are served by mini-skirted hostesses and entertained by belly dancers. Some local Christians openly wear crucifix necklaces, prohibited in Saudi Arabia, where bibles are confiscated by customs officials. Unlike Saudi Arabia, the Internet is not censored and space in the two newspapers is offered to the opposition.
Bahrain is also home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, the logistics center for two carrier groups and the center of U.S. military strength in the Middle East. Previously, the Bahraini opposition would have brought mass protests against the U.S. presence and personnel would have been afraid to leave the base. Today, anti-U.S. demonstrations like one that occurred in Manama may attract a few hundred people but dissipate quietly without damage. By offering all Bahrainis a constructive role in their government, radical Muslim groups have been moderated. However, recently divisions between the king and an Islamist branch of the royal family have threatened political peace in Bahrain and our military position there.
Turkey is another Islamic country that made some progress, but now there is an internal struggle for control between the Islamists and the secular Muslims. The U.S. needs to work more closely with the Turks and encourage them to come out of their bunker. Until recently they had assumed a fairly cautious posture, standing up to people like Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. For some time Turkey was our most dependable Muslim ally in the Middle East and the world's most successful Muslim democracy. After 9/11, they were among the first to offer the U.S. everything from bases to soldiers, and they could be a great help, militarily and culturally.
Mustafa Kemal, also called Ataturk, was the 1920s George Washington of modern Turkey. Turkey's Kemalist Islam system can furnish other Muslim countries with a moderate alternative to the Wahhabi sect and its cultural influence. Turkey could be to Islam what Hong Kong is to communist China, with the Kemalist system liberating women to work, travel, dress and study like free people, not slaves. Like Bahrain, Istanbul was until recently a contrast to most grim Islamic capitals, but recent elections have strengthened the Islamist factions. The future is uncertain.
Even Iran offers possibilities of moderation. It is not a monolithic culture but a mixture of several ethnic groups and religious sects. Some young Muslims are rattling the cages of the Shiite theocracy in every major Iranian city, a fact not generally recognized by our State Department and news media. Contrary to the desires of our policy makers, the U.S. should abandon the usual American practice of trying to appease antagonists and buy allies. We need to fight terrorism every way possible and let the world choose sides. Muslim-lover Barack Hussein Obama, chief apologist for everything American, also is an apologist for Muslim felonies and refuses to fight their terrorism effectively.
The Saudis have apparently convinced our State Department that we need them, but Saudi Arabia also needs us, and we are developing new domestic oil and gas resources and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Without enough oil income to bribe its own people and neighbors, the Saud regime might collapse. In developing new oil resources, reducing our oil consumption and confronting Saudi Arabia’s tolerance of Muslim terrorists, we should be prepared and willing to give up their oil if they continue to harbor and finance terrorists and promote their medieval holy-war religion around the world.
Another black swan circling above involves the petrodollar. In 1973 Saudi Arabia agreed that all sales of their oil would be made in U.S. dollars and the money invested in U.S. Treasurys, and the U.S. agreed to protect Saudi oil fields from Russia, Iran, Iraq and others. By 1975 all OPEC countries had agreed to use only USDs for all oil transactions. It has been great for the U.S., strengthening the dollar and lowering the prices of imported goods. With relations deteriorating, the Saudis are abrogating the petrodollar agreement and the results could be dire for the U.S., starting a move away from the USD as the world's reserve currency to other currencies, a partially gold-backed yuan or other alternatives. China and Russia are known to want to weaken the USD, as are other countries. Some problems could be a major reduction in global purchases of U.S. Treasury debt and other investments, increased costs of our imports, higher interest rates, and larger deficits. A major depression could result.
There is a glimmer of hope now in the Saudis’ deteriorating relationship to Iran, with two Muslim sects that hate each other almost as much as they hate Christians. The Saudis are Sunni Muslims and are nervous about Shiite Iran developing nuclear-weapons capability. An Iranian plot to murder the Saudi Ambassador to the United States put a new chill on that relationship. The enemy of my enemy is my friend When all three are enemies, who are friends?
UGLY AMERICANS
Among the strange ideas most Americans have concerning our relations with other countries, two are most apparent:
1. Our economic, political and social systems are the best and should be used by all people.
2. We are a very generous and friendly people; the world knows that, appreciates our financial and military aid and they like the United States and Americans.
On the first point, similar systems work satisfactorily in some countries but not all. Replace a well-run colonial government of a black African country with a democracy and it probably will sink into chaos and economic disaster. Or, consider Singapore. After WWII, the Malay States formed Malaysia and excluded Singapore because it had no resources or economic base. In a few decades it became one of the most free and prosperous economies in the world. It also has very low taxes. Politically Singapore is a benevolent police state, but it is very successful and now they are a major financial center.
On the second point, it should be obvious to Americans that the U.S. is not loved by all the world. Current events make it clear that most populations in Muslim countries hate the U.S. For centuries much of the Muslim world led the West in almost everything -- wealth, science, mathematics, language, the arts. Now, except for those with oil wealth, most are backward Third World countries, and their leaders blame the West. There are many reasons why much of the Muslim world is comparatively poor and none of them have to do with us. Aside from their hatred of non-Muslims, another source of their hatred is the fallacious zero-sum theorem, assuming that our prosperity has been taken from them. America’s presence in Muslim countries, support of Israel and our Hollywood and television garbage annoy them further, which they should.
Canada, our good neighbor, is an example of the ambivalent feelings around the world toward the United States. Most Americans have cordial relations with the Canadians they meet, including French Canadians, and assume that Canada feels cordial toward the United States. In fact, in Canada there is some quiet resentment of the U.S. It is partly envy of our success and predominance in so many fields, resentment of the American productivity and innovation that make competition difficult. An examination of one U.S. financial services company found that the productivity per employee of their Canadian branches measured just one-half that of U.S. branches doing similar work.
Canadians also dislike buying so many products and services from America and having to endure the importation of our uncultured culture. For the most part, Canadian resentment, and that of the rest of the world, is simply the re
sult of the United States wielding more global influence than anyone else. Our way of life reaches more corners of the world, including many places where it is strongly resented and resisted. Our language has become the international language in spite of its complexity and irregularity, which infuriates the French, whose language was once the international language and who think everything French is superior. Probably 80 percent of the world's business now is done in English as well as in U.S. dollars, and in non-business communications around the world, English is often the common language used by people who speak different languages.
Americans abroad typically know only English and assume that all things foreign should be like ours -- architecture, food, hotels, laws, tipping, traffic laws and signs, banking, and most of all, language. “Those people are so stupid they couldn’t even speak English!”
Recognizing the inevitable resentment of our success and our often unwelcome influence and meddling around the world, what should we do? We should never try to buy friendships and alliances. Other countries probably appreciate some of the money, military aid and other gifts from us, at least to the extent the gifts get past the rulers and to their people, and when the people actually learn that it came from the U.S. But, like welfare, aid is often resented even while being received, and its eventual termination always causes animosity. We should continually remind ourselves that American ways are not best for everyone. We should think Noblesse oblige, and Never be haughty to the humble. When one is dominant, humility goes a long way.
We need to learn what is successful elsewhere in the world and why, and consider trying it. We really aren’t all that smart, good, and important. Consider the miasma called Hollywood and the garbage on our television, and particularly our incompetent political leadership in both the Demagogue Party and the Stupid Party. All that is much of what the world knows about the United States.
WARTIME INTERNMENT
In recent years there has been much criticism of the relocation of West Coast Japanese during World War II, ordered by super-Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. Most of the criticism has been by people who were not there, do not understand the magnitude of world-wide threats and suffering during World War II, and are ignorant of, or choose to ignore some facts.
Much of the hysteria concerning Japanese internment resulted from textbooks and museum exhibits that reflect the biased 1983 report of the federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Even before the commission commenced their fact-finding hearings, three of the panelists went on record condemning the evacuation, and Chairman Joan Bernstein said it was “a blot upon the history of the United States” and her duty was to determine “how [not whether] it occurred for no reason other than their ancestry.” Commission member Father Robert Drinan, a former congressman, began the first fact-finding hearing with the question, “How much are we going to give them?” It was no surprise, then, when the report concluded that “the evacuation and relocation were based on “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
Understanding the reasons behind the evacuation and relocation requires placing it in accurate historical context. At that time, most Japanese on the West Coast were loyal citizens of Japan, in part because they were denied U.S. citizenship by laws then in place. Furthermore, there were thousands of Japanese living in the United States who had served in the Japanese military, then entered the U.S. before the war, and were regarded as a grave threat to U.S. security. By mid-1941 the Japanese had recruited ethnic Japanese living in the U.S. to set up an espionage network in Hawaii and along the West Coast. Some were also indoctrinated in school. As a teenager in 1938, U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye attended a Japanese language school in Hawaii that taught propaganda urging young Japanese Americans to remain loyal to Japan, in peace or in war. He objected to the brainwashing and was expelled from the school. During World War II he lost an arm while in combat as a U.S. soldier. After Pearl Harbor it was not possible to identify those Japanese who were loyal to Japan and were potential spies or saboteurs. Understanding these facts, it is clear why Americans generally felt it was necessary to intern the Japanese and citizens of other enemy nations where similar threats existed. Many of the internees were German, Italian and other Axis aliens and their family members who were identified as threats, a fact not generally known.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field in the Philippines occurred while Japanese diplomats were meeting with State Department officials in Washington, attempting to negotiate the lifting of a trade embargo imposed on Japan after they violated the Kellogg-Briand Pact by invading China, torturing and killing an estimated 10 million Chinese. After the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, both U.S. coasts remained on high alert for most of the war, particularly the West Coast. Japanese espionage in Hawaii prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor caused concern about similar attacks on West Coast Navy bases, aircraft factories and shipyards. Anti-bombing protection required all-night blacking of all windows, 24/7 Coast Guard Auxiliary patrols, a network of volunteer aircraft spotters, camouflaged aircraft factories and full wartime precautions. Cars driving on coastal roads were required to have blue or slit headlight covers, making night driving dangerous. There was much speculation about a Japanese attack on the West Coast.
In 1942, the war reached the U.S. mainland for the first time since 1812. Japanese submarines shelled the Oregon coast and California’s Goleta oil fields. More than 4,000 balloon-bombs were launched from Japan and some landed as far as the southeastern U.S. Some Japanese submarines carried dismantled aircraft and launched a few bombing raids on the West Coast. In May, 1942 the Japanese bombed Kodiak, Alaska and occupied Kiska and Attu islands in the Aleutians for more than a year. In September, 1942 a submarine-based seaplane dropped incendiary bombs on the national forest in Oregon in an attempt to start large forest fires.
Fear of the Japanese was real and justified, not the hysterical ethnic-bashing many now claim. Michelle Malkin’s book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror, cites many reasons for Americans’ general fear of Japanese spies and collaborators living among the general population.
One incident that raised public fears involved a Japanese fighter pilot, Shigenori Nischikaichi, who crash-landed his Zero on an island 100 miles northwest of Oahu after American fighters crippled his plane during the Pearl Harbor attack. Two hundred Hawaiians and three people of Japanese descent called the small island home. There were no telephones on the island and word of that morning’s attack on Pearl Harbor had not yet reached them. A burly Hawaiian, Hawila Kaleohano, who had been following world affairs in newspapers brought weekly from Kauai, wisely confiscated the pilot’s gun and papers and took him to his home. The pilot said he was not Japanese and demanded that his gun and papers be returned, which included maps, radio codes and Pearl Harbor attack plans. Kaleohano refused and summoned two of the island’s three Japanese residents, Yoshio Harada and his wife, for assistance. They were U.S. citizens who had moved from California two years earlier. A guard was posted on the pilot.
The pilot, aided by Harada and his wife, overpowered the guard on duty. The three then searched Kaleohano’s house and found the pilot’s gun but not his papers. They set the plane and Kaleohano’s house on fire, fired their guns wildly and threatened to kill every man, woman and child in the village.
On December 13, the pilot and the two Japanese Americans captured islander Ben Kanahele and his wife and ordered them to find Kaleohano. They refused to cooperate, and the pilot shot Kanahele three times in the chest, hip and groin. Mrs. Kanahele pounced on the pilot and Harada, her once-peaceful neighbor, tore her away. The wounded man hurled the pilot against a stone wall, his wife bashed the pilot’s head with a rock and Kanahele slit his throat with a hunting knife. The harrowing battle was over.
For ten years prior to Pearl Harbor there had been continual reports from China of Japanese terror -- the Rape of Nanking and other Japa
nese slaughter, torture, starvation and medical experimentation on Chinese civilians and military. The sneak attack on Hawaii by Japan caused general fear of further espionage and sabotage by Japanese civilians, as did broader reports of Japanese beatings, torture, starvation and slaughter of allied military personnel and civilians during the Bataan Death March, in Japanese prison camps and elsewhere,.
All through the war the politest name for them was “the Japs.” More common was “the dirty Japs” or unprintable terms. The war put Americans’ lives on hold, or much worse, for four years. Most of the country was engaged in an all-out civilian and military effort, with 14 million men and women on active military duty and most civilians making substantial sacrifices. Animosity toward the Japanese and fear of espionage, sabotage and military attacks were severe and widespread, a fact not generally understood now. One of the drawings in a Dr. Suess children's book published during the war shows a long line of Japanese with buck teeth and eyeglasses coming from Washington, Oregon and California passing by a building marked Honorable Fifth Column, each being handed a small package marked TNT. A man on the roof has a telescope pointed over the ocean. The drawing is captioned, Waiting for the Signal From Home.