No Words

At this point, what does one say?

I’d guess that most of us know some form of the adage: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. To this I would add: Those who never bothered to learn history in the first place are doomed to repeat it. Further I might also add: Those who never took a history class are doomed, period.

During my life—which began not terribly long after World War II—the United States has fought in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. It has intervened in the Lebanon Crisis, the Dominican Civil War, the invasion of Grenada, the invasion of Panama, the Somalia intervention, the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War, the Libya intervention, the Yemen conflict, and the Syrian civil war. The United States has poured trillions of tax dollars into the military industrial complex despite being warned against doing so by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the Supreme Commander of all of the allied forces in Western Europe and, hence, the man who planned and executed D-Day as well as coordinated the U.S. British, Canadian, and other Allied armies in Europe. When he left the Presidency in 1961, he warned the coming leaders to beware the military industrial complex, using the words: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.”

He understood that, where there was money to be made through the development and sale of armaments, there was also going to be the necessity of having a deadly conflict of some kind in which to use those armaments. The military industrial complex was not reined in, despite President Eisenhower’s advice, and during the ensuing wars and conflicts in which America took part, vast fortunes were made.

Successive American governments were willing to “pay any price, bear any burden…to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” And those ringing words of John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower’s successor, have not only been taken seriously ever since he spoke them, but they have also been taken to extremes. Thus Presidents taking office after Eisenhower have embroiled the country in one conflict after another at stupendous cost: both in the lives of young soldiers and civilians of all ages as well as in the outlay of vast resources that might well have been put to better use. In part, this served to make the country a global leader. But in greater part, this served to rob the very people who were paying the bills. Americans were forced to pay for critical services—like health care and higher education—that people of other countries were supplied through their taxes’ being used to benefit them and not to line the pockets of the shareholders and executives of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrop Grumann, and General Dynamics.

We would like to believe that Presidents take the country to war or send the military to intervene in a conflict to attain liberty and justice for all. But that isn’t always the case. Indeed, I would suggest that that is rarely the case. Scratch the surface of the Iraq war—remember the “weapons of mass destruction”?—and you will find that Dick Cheney’s position at Halliburton as CEO before becoming Vice President made the billions of dollars received by Halliburton to supply troops and rebuild oil infrastructure in Iraq questionable at the very least. The sad truth is that fortunes are made from wars, and the money flows into the bank accounts of people who don’t expend an ounce of energy fighting.

Which takes us to the country’s latest adventure in exporting chaos in the name of liberty. I don’t believe for a moment that this exercise in “liberation via obliteration” has anything to do with freedom. I believe it has everything to do with one war criminal’s skillful manipulation of another war criminal. I believe it has everything to do with reframing and refocusing. If we have a war, we reframe the debate about what’s actually going on in America. We employ talking heads to argue the finer points of warfare versus intervention versus—really?—”an excursion”. Thus what should be the real debate is set aside and the critical issues of that debate are obscured: the building of concentration camps, the imprisonment of people with brown skin, the problems associated with immigration, the need for asylum, etc. Thus the focus alters to aerial views of bombings, fires on ships and fires on the ground, drones, mines, and the solemn repatriation of the dead, while the previous focus on sex trafficking, pedophilia, rape, blackmail, and sedition becomes like a railway car put on a siding and forgotten.

This war has been given a name that rings with righteousness and implies eventual success: Operation Epic Fury. Donald Trump has said he chose it from a list. Leaving aside the inanity—in my opinion—of giving wars a name in the first place like cards drawn in a board game directing where you might put your marker next (“Yay! I got Operation Epic Fury and you only have Desert Storm!”), one might ask several questions about Epic Fury: Why we are furious with Iran in the first place and why is our fury epic? Beyond that, why is the President of the United States being given a LIST OF POTENTIAL NAMES to call his war at all? Does he need to be distracted in the way one might distract a child incapable of self-control or reason (“Here, Donny, look at this! Look what Mommy has for you! You can decide which name for your war you like best, hon! Just sit here quietly so you can make up your mind.”) Or is it an effort to portray the country as having a legitimate reason for committing war crimes, destroying lives, and destabilizing an entire area of the world?

I have no answers. My days of flag-waving for no apparent reason ended with the Vietnam War, William Calley, and the My Lai Massacre. When someone drapes himself with the American flag (or, in the case of Trump, hugs it for the cameras), I am immediately disgusted. The significance of the American flag has been so diminished by Donald Trump and through his wretched “presidency” that I see no reason at all why any national leader other than another war criminal would wish to see it displayed on any consulate or embassy in his/her country.

Donald Trump has laid waste to more than a century of good will that Presidents before him cultivated with other countries. He is an avaricious monster: insatiable and rapacious. I want to believe that we—the people of the country—have the will and the power to rid ourselves of him and his boot-licking associates who are firmly established in the three branches of our current government. If we can’t muster the will and the power to do this—despite what he intends to do to stop us—then we are not only lost. We also deserve to be so.