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In fact, USA Today reported just a month earlier that public support for that conflict “has ebbed to a new low,” according to a Gallup Poll. Americans who regard the attack on Afghanistan as “a mistake” had increased from 9% in 2001 to 42%, a sea change Gates conveniently chooses not to credit.
Gallup also discovered a shift in public opinion from March, 2007, when it asked if the U.S. was spending too much or too little on defense. Forty-three per cent responded “too much” compared with 20 percent who replied “too little.” A decade earlier most Americans didn’t think the Pentagon was on a spending binge with their taxes.
It’s ironic that to prosecute what is now President Obama’s war, the Pentagon is inflicting on Afghan civilians the same cruel deaths terrorists visited on New York City. Human Rights Watch dubbed “inadequate” U.S. military measures to safeguard them.
A like situation afflicts Pakistan, as the U.S.-made Afghan war spills over its borders. According to AP, “Using unmanned aircraft, American forces have carried out dozens of missile attacks in northwestern Pakistan over the last year. U.S. officials rarely confirm the attacks, but say they have killed a string of al-Qaida commanders. Pakistan’s government has publicly protested the tactic, arguing that it kills too many civilians and undermines its efforts to turn tribal leaders away from hard-liners.” The UN says 1.5 million Pakistanis have fled their homes, a repeat of the Afghan exodus.
America’s Afghan war “is not self defense,” writes international law authority Francis Boyle in his new book, “Tackling America’s Toughest Questions”(Clarity Press). “Let’s be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis…(it) constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan.”
Boyle recalls that then Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda but never did, and that Bush failed to get a UN resolution authorizing military force in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon’s aim, he says, is to “direct military control of 50 percent of the world’s oil supply” in the Persian Gulf region, which the Fifth Fleet was “set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control.”
Can the Department of Defense operations be construed “defensive” when it is operating more than 1,000 bases abroad and those 11 mobile carrier attack fleets? According to author Hugh Gusterson, writing in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists of March 10th: “These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country's territory. In other words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup.” (If only the Pentagon spilled just that!)
Few realize the Pentagon’s collection of bases makes it the world’s biggest landlord, about 30-million acres. Excluding Afghanistan and Iraq, USA spends $102 billion a year just to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies.
The Pentagon justifies its appetite for, say, 227 bases in Germany in terms of making the U.S. more secure. In fact, though, “Such forward basing of forces,” writes James Carroll in House of War(Houghton Mifflin), “was designed to control, by means of ‘regime change’ and ‘prevention,’ emerging political trends around the globe, with the unabashed goal of guaranteeing U.S. dominance everywhere.” Indications are the American war machine has triumphed over its closest adversary: the State Department. As Reuters columnist Bernd Debusmann wrote May 14th, “The U.S. armed forces, the world's most powerful, outnumber the country's diplomatic service and its major aid agency by a ratio of more than 180:1, vastly higher than in other Western democracies. Military giant, diplomatic dwarf?”
Debusmann goes on to say, “In terms of money, the U.S. military towers just as tall. Roughly half of all military spending in the world is American. Even potential adversaries in a conventional war spend puny sums in comparison…China's defense budget is $70 billion, Russia's around $50 billion.”
The picture emerging is ugly. No “victory” in its spreading wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq ever will begin to compensate for the vast numbers of Middle Eastern folk needlessly maimed, killed, displaced, and pauperized by U.S. military aggression. “Aggression” is the only word for it and the Middle East’s oil supply is the only reason for it. The Pentagon is on its way to tighten its control of the world---with the help of our newest imperial president’s enabling budget. The American Warfare State marches on.
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