Barriers to Peace

Will Pitt recently pointed out the obvious fact that diverting funds from our defense budget to more productive activities could solve a great many of our problems as a nation. In a post titled “A Simple Way to End This Recession… Forever”, he wrote:


According to one estimate, in 2008 the United States spent $586 billion on military expenditures. That was more than the combined military expenditures of the 14 nations with the next highest amount of military expenditures, and constituted more than 40% of total military expenditures in the world in 2008. Another estimate, which was more thorough in its calculations, put the estimate much higher: $1.45 trillion in 2009, coming to 54% of total outlays of U.S. federal funds in that year.

By one estimate, the United States has been involved in 145 military actions from 1890 through 2009 – many of them lasting for many years. A great many of these interventions were unnecessary, illegal, immoral, and resulted in a vast amount of loss of innocent life. We currently operate more than 700 military bases scattered throughout the world. Our excessive focus on military might serves as a barrier to working with other nations to solve grave international problems, such as the progressive warming of our planet.

This should make us wonder why we spend such an obscene amount of money on the military, to the detriment of so many pressing needs.


WARNINGS AND CONFESSIONS OF WAR PROFITEERING

There have been and continue to be some very powerful people in our country who reap immense profits from war and military expenditures and therefore aggressively seek to perpetuate them. A tiny minority of very well known national figures who have seen this phenomenon from the inside have tried to warn us of this danger:


Smedley Butler

In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history, warned the American people of the dangers of war profiteering, while acknowledging his role in it:



President Eisenhower

President Eisenhower gave us a less radical warning on a similar subject in his farewell address of January 1961. Unlike Butler, he did not imply that war profiteering had historically been an issue in our country. Nor did he imply that our military was currently too big. Nor did he acknowledge any culpability – for giving the green light for the overthrows of the democratically elected governments of Iran in 1953 or Guatemala in 1954. Rather, he simply warned us that, due to the rapidly increasing size and reach of our vast military apparatus, there may come a time in the not too distant future when it presents a serious problem for us. Still, it was a very radical speech for a U.S. President:



John Perkins

John Perkins wrote two books, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and “The Secret History of the American Empire”, in which he exposed American and corporate corruption from an insider’s viewpoint, admitting his own role in the process. He explains his basic role like this:



JOHN F. KENNEDY’S QUEST FOR PEACE

The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) that Eisenhower warned us against was in full power at the time of his farewell address. Probably no president in U.S. history came under such intense pressure for war and resisted that pressure so valiantly as Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy.


President Kennedy’s repeated refusals to be drawn into war and conquest

Four times during JFK’s presidency he successfully resisted intense pressure from the MIC to go to war with Cuba: Following the April 15-19, 1961, CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by a Cuban Expeditionary Force, Kennedy’s military and CIA attempted to pressure him into committing to a full-scale invasion, in order to avoid the imminent defeat of the Cuban Expeditionary Force. Kennedy refused. On March 16, 1962, Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff presented him with a plan called “Operation Northwoods”, a false flag terrorist operation meant to dare our country into war against Cuba. Kennedy refused again. In his handling of the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy repeatedly resisted advice from his military advisors to escalate the situation by invading Cuba. Instead, he resolved the crisis peacefully. And in April 1963 Kennedy undertook vigorous military action against the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group Alpha 66 in order to put a halt to their continuing attacks against Cuban interests, which were meant to draw the United States into war against Cuba.

Against adamant advice from outgoing President Eisenhower and his own military to intervene militarily against Communist forces in Laos, Kennedy instead negotiated a coalition Communist and non-Communist government in Laos, sealed on July 23, 1962, with a “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos”, signed by Kennedy and the representatives of thirteen other nations.

Again against the advice of his military, Kennedy aspired to an independent Congo. James Douglass explains Kennedy’s intentions and the friction that caused with his military and CIA, in his book, “JFK and the Unspeakable – Why he Died and Why it Matters”:



Kennedy’s unprecedented speech on the need for and barriers to peace

According to James Carroll in “House of War – The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power”, President Kennedy’s peace speech at American University on June 10th 1963 was unprecedented in its emphasis on peace by a major U.S. political figure since the onset of the Cold War. Few people knew about the speech before he gave it, and he didn’t discuss it at all with his military because he knew that they would lobby against it. It is inconceivable that this speech was intended to win votes. To the contrary, it posed grave political risks.

On the need for peace
Kennedy began his peace speech:


He talked about how the presence of nuclear weapons meant that that we MUST make peace a priority:


Excessive nationalism and self-righteousness
Though Kennedy’s peace speech did not specifically and directly speak of barriers to peace, those barriers were implicit in the many solutions that he discussed.

The opposite of excessive nationalism and self-righteousness is humility – national as well as individual. Humility enables us to critically examine our own behaviors and attitudes towards things, rather than hold to the certainty that everything we do is good and right simply because we are who we are.

In marked contrast to the prevailing tough anti-Communist rhetoric of the day, Kennedy spoke in his peace speech of the need for Americans to examine their own attitudes:


He even sought to humanize, rather than demonize, our adversary:


The need for international collaboration and agreements
Those who profit from war understand very well that one of the biggest threats to continuing war and militarism is international institutions such as the United Nations and International Criminal Court, whose major purpose is to maintain international peace. For that reason they have continually sought to demonize international organizations devoted to world peace by propagandizing us to believe that the United States is so superior to the other nations of the world that collaborating with them is unnecessary and even unpatriotic.

Kennedy on the other hand spoke of the need for international cooperation and institutions:


He noted that a change in institutional arrangements would be needed to ensure a lasting peace:


The need to stand up to the “Powers That Be” by taking direct actions
All of our presidents have claimed to favor peace over war. And many actual have favored peace over war. But favoring peace over war is not enough. Concrete steps need to be taken – steps that the MIC will fight tooth and nail.

Towards the end of his speech, Kennedy got to the practical matters – the topics that the hawks and arms merchants so hated – detailing numerous concrete steps that he intended to take to put his peace plans into action:



Kennedy’s continuing quest for peace following his peace speech

Soviet Premier Khrushchev declared Kennedy’s speech the greatest of any American President since Roosevelt. And for the first time he allowed an American Presidential speech to be rebroadcast in the Soviet Union.

Six weeks later, Kennedy announced to the American people the first nuclear test ban treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. Following his peace speech he undertook secret negotiations with Fidel Castro in an attempt to come to an accommodation with him. And, he began talking with his close associates about pulling out of Vietnam. Several reliable sources explained that Kennedy’s intentions to withdraw from Vietnam were firm and would have been carried out had he lived much longer.


THE AFTERMATH OF JFK’s QUEST FOR PEACE

Four months following his peace speech JFK was shot dead by an assassin. The next day, JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, vowed that he would not “lose” Vietnam. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War dragged on for nine additional years, officially ending in January 1973. The South Vietnamese government surrendered in April 1975, as Vietnam was united under Communist rule. No U.S. president subsequently challenged the MIC to the extent that Kennedy did.

Could the circumstances of JFK’s death have created a chilling effect on future U.S. presidents with otherwise independent or liberal tendencies? Could these considerations help to explain President Obama’s continuation and escalation of our war in Afghanistan? My tendency is to answer yes to both questions, though I have no way of knowing for sure.

It seems to me that even when U.S. Presidents advocate against war, their rhetoric tends to be bellicose and does not really suggest a desire for peace in the way that JFK expressed it. I believe that Barack Obama’s speech announcing his opposition to the looming Iraq War makes this point. Four times in that speech Obama felt compelled to qualify his opposition to the Iraq War by announcing that he was not opposed to all war. And three times he further qualified that statement by further pointing out that what he is opposed to is dumb wars.

Well, I’m not opposed to all wars either. It is a rare person indeed who believes that no circumstance justifies meeting force with force. But the Iraq War was not a dumb war. It accomplished much of what George W. Bush and his handlers wanted to accomplish, in that it tremendously enriched several corporate allies of the Bush administration.

Those who hold in their hands the power to seek peace or war should be against much more than merely dumb wars. If our world is ever going to see a continuing peace, its leaders and inhabitants will have to be against immoral wars as well. That is, they will have to stand adamantly against war undertaken for the enrichment of the few at the great expense and destruction of the many. That is the purpose for which President Roosevelt conceived and President Truman helped bring to fruition the United Nations. The United Nations, which establishes international law, makes all aggressive wars illegal, not merely dumb wars. If the United States is going to be a strong force for peace in the world it needs to adhere to that doctrine – which means that it will have to aggressively challenge those powerful militant interests that profit from and seek to militarize our country and drag us into war.

"But we don't talk about that stuff. We close libraries, cut education budgets, tax everything, and borrow from our children's future instead of tapping into the awesome reservoir of taxpayer cash shoveled into the Pentagon each and every year."

Thanks for the quote from that article. Recommended.

while simultaneously complaining that we don't spend enough on "defense" is very hard for me to take.

They have such a limited view of our national "defense."

In my view that should have included funding mass transit, alternative renewable energy sources, a stronger more equitable public education system, and national health security for all.

Instead, under misguided anti-socialist crusading over the last few decades, we have privatized so many pillars of our national security. We pretended that doing those services in house was riddled with waste and corruption, when in fact, privatization has led to far more corruption behind closed doors and ceded so much of our national security to multinational corporations driven by the quarterly profit incentive, rather than our nation's best interests.

:kick:


And... please write a book. Please.

:yourock:

I've written an outline. But I don't think I'll start writing it until I retire, which I intend to do in four years.

I think I've saved every thread you've started for the past few years and there's more than enough material, backed by hard facts from publicly available sources.

You write some of the most well-reasoned, accessible stuff on the web; I wouldn't miss one of your OPs for all the taxpayer-donated rivets in the Osprey.

Thanks for constantly elevating the discussion.


wp

It will still be very time consuming to put it all together into a book. I'll need a lot of uninterrupted time. :hi:

James Carroll's "House of War -- The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power".

Carroll is the son of a three star AF General who worked in the Kennedy Administration.

Carroll said about the Pentagon:

If I may add what one imbecile had to say on the topic:

Money Trumps Peace.

Thank you for an outstanding post, yours, Time for change. Thank you for putting it into words for us, Sir.

undecided. I don't know if I've done that with this OP, but I tried.

Very interesting and important article on "Money Trumps Peace". I think that a more general, or generic way of saying that is that greed trumps morality.

Have you read the Bush Dyslexicon, by Mark Crispin Miller? Miller makes the point (if I remember correctly) that Bush's trouble speaking stems from the fact that he tells so many lies that his words rarely paint any kind of a coherent picture. That's very difficult for anyone to do, so it's very confusing to people who try to do it. So he gets easily confused almost whenever he tries to talk, which causes him to get tongue-tied. But he can speak very fluently on those occasions when he tells the truth. Hence, "Money trumps peace".

:kick:

I hope that it falls on much fertile soil. . .

was that it might prompt a re-examination of our defense budget. But we didn't even get a Truth & Reconciliation series of hearings. If we had, the exposure of Bush Cheney war profiteering would have been more concentrated, rather than the news trickling out in isolated exposés.

Millions of Americans voted Democratic, hoping for deep change, which included reassessing our national security and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

But Cheney's concerted military privatization since he was Sec Def (before becoming CEO of Halliburton to reap the rewards of his campaign) has further strengthened the power of the military industrial complex.

And even after we were all bankrupted by the Bush Crash, our Democrats couldn't band together and give us desperate people national health security through the eminently understandable "Medicare for All."

How sad it is that we couldn't get our Democratic legislators to push for renewable energy development and conservation as part of our national defense effort. It certainly could have been promoted that way, IF we had a more independent mass media.

But since we privatized our election campaigns, the "wisdom of the private sector" dictated that billions should be poured into obsolete weaponry and brutal warfare to maintain the supply of enemies we would have to fight.

late to recommend them, and they are a chief reason I even come here anymore.

Here's a kick for another excellent piece.

Off the first page in an hour. Damn.
:(