Sunday, September 2nd, 2018
Stephan: The United States spends more on the military industrial intelligence community than the next seven top-spending nations in the world combined. Children go hungry in the United States, old ladies eat dog food, we have third-rate healthcare, a failing education system, and the country's infrastructure is literally falling apart, but we always have more money for the military. What we never seem to ask is what happens to all that money? Here's at least part of the story.
From my perspective, we have a military designed for the wars of an earlier era, huge armies in conflict on established battlefields. We spend trillions on systems that have little or nothing to do with the actual enemies we face in the endless wars that now define American foreign policy. One can only wonder what might have been if that money had been spent on fostering wellbeing around the world, not for profit but just because wellbeing makes peace easier to achieve.
Credit: Jean-Marc Bouju/AP
It was December of 2003, and I was in Tal Afar, Iraq with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. The Brigade was based at an old Iraqi air force base just outside of the town. I had spent the last week in Rabihya, a small town on the border with Syria. When I say “on the border with Syria,” I mean it literally. The wall along the western side of the Army compound where I stayed was the actual border between Iraq and Syria. You could step up on a pile of sandbags just inside the wall of the compound and see into Syria, where a huge billboard-size photo of the recently deceased Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad stared back at you. While I was there, they succeeded in erecting a matching billboard depicting the new strongman, Bashar al-Assad, next to the one of his father.
It was a noisy, dusty, primitive place. The Army’s compound was only a few yards from the border […]
I am a veteran and I speak to a lot of other veterans. Almost 100% of them agree that the wars we are in are useless and hurt not only the Vets., but many, many innocent civilians as well. As a matter of fact there is even a website for veterans who are against all war. The website is either votevets.com or votevets.org or something like that. I have been on it but just do not remember the name; I’m sorry for that, but you get the point: veterans do not all want wars after they have been in them. My best friend, at the time of my graduation from high school was all “gung-ho” about going into the Marines to prove he was “real” man. We wrote to each other during our time in the service (I was in the US Army). He was 2 weeks away from being released from active duty after spending the better part of his three years in the Marines in Vietnam when he was exploded by a grenade while on guard duty in a tower. This young man was brave and his name was John Zeigler and his whole life was wasted because of a stupid war based upon a lie. How this can be accepted in a “wise” country, I cannot fathom. I miss him, because we had plans when we met up after our hitches were up.