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Pacem in Terra

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And in October, 1962, it very nearly led to a Third, and final, World War.

It was in recognition of this military myopia that Georges Clemenceau, who was the premier of France during the First World War, made his famous statement thirty years before that, "War is too important a matter to be left to the military." The leaders of every nation must always take a broad, holistic approach to policy before, during, and after a war if they hope to win the war, let alone the peace.

Premier Clemenceau's recognition of this principle did not save France from making horrendous errors in the peace thirty years later. Clemenceau's personal myopia, his obsession, his desire for revenge against Germany--going back to the Franco-Prussian War--caused him to fail to take the broad, holistic approach at the end of the First World War. This lack of vision simply ensured that a Second World War would take place.

Corporate America, the Pentagon, and the CIA were so preoccupied with the containment and destruction of Communism as quickly as possible--first in Cuba and then in the rest of the world--and the establishment of American hegemony, that they were willing to risk a full-scale nuclear cataclysm to achieve those ends. We were fortunate to have, in the person of President John F. Kennedy, a man who realized after the massive deception perpetrated on him during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the advent of nuclear weapons had ended the era when peace could be imposed on the rest of the world by the might and will of a single power, or even by a combination of powers.

JFK realized that humanity's real hope for peace arose, as he stated at the American University the following year, from the idea of "a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peaceÍ no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process a way of solving problems."

I believe that this decision on the part of President Kennedy to not go along with the suicidal imperialist dreams of the three most powerful political coalitions in America, led directly to his assassination on November 22, 1963.

Taking direct action against the threat of Communism in Vietnam cost our nation 58,000 dead, and cost us more than $220 billion in 1967 dollars, plus interest. If you count the cost of rebuilding our military, both in terms of men and matà riel, from 1973 to 1988, when Vietnam and its aftermath ripped the guts out of our military, it is probably closer to ten times that amount. This expenditure of our nation's capital and its young people did not prevent the formation of Marxist governments in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Chile, Zimbabwe, Angola, Republic of the Congo, or several other nations. Our direct military confrontation with one of the Soviet Union's client states (Vietnam) did not stop the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan. There is strong historical evidence, presented with copious footnotes in Mr. Douglass' book that President Kennedy intended to eliminate the American presence in Vietnam in 1965.

I believe that it was Albert Einstein who once observed that insanity consisted of engaging in the same action over and over again, while expecting a different outcome. By trying to confront our enemy head on, with traditional military force in the "War on Terror," we are making the same mistake that we made in the Cold War against Vietnam and Cuba.

We are emptying our treasury, as well as mortgaging our children's future; in order to fight the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are wearing out tens of millions of dollars of military equipment, and expending hundreds of millions of dollars in military ordnance. Worse still, the foundation of our military and its esprit de corps, our middle rank officers (majors and lieutenant colonels in the Army) and NCO's (staff sergeants and sergeants first class in the Army), are not re-enlisting, but are leaving to join the private sector.


We are also creating billions of dollars in additional entitlements to our service men and women, as well as their surviving families. These entitlements for our veterans and their families, we are morally obligated to accept, if we are to have any claim to being a just society.

And yet, in spite of all of these expenditures and entitlements, we still have not captured Osama bin Laden. Nor are we anywhere close to ending, let alone winning, the "war on terror."

So, what can we do?

We must come to terms with the fact that modern warfare has become such an expensive undertaking, and that war's very nature has evolved in such a manner, that nations can no longer afford to instigate a symmetrical war (one nation's military goes head to head on a battlefield against another) by choice.

When a squadron of fighter aircraft (24 F-22A Raptors) cost roughly $5,000,000,000 dollars to procure, require almost two hours of maintenance for every hour they spend in the air, and are grounded by inclement weather because it will damage their radar absorbent skin; then our military has once again (as it did with the original F-4 Phantom II, by not equipping it with guns for close-in dogfighting) lost its direction in terms of cost containment and practicality.

I personally believe that the time has come to end the mindset that exists in our society of "He who has the most toys wins." We should begin this process with our military. This is a very dangerous undertaking: when President Kennedy attempted it in 1963 he was murdered.

At some point in the last sixty years, the United States has gone from being the "Arsenal of Democracy," to become the arsenal of warlords and petty dictators. We are far more interested in arming one or even both sides in every conflict world-wide as long as it improves the bottom line of Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, or any of a number of multinational corporations whose primary stockholders and board of directors are American citizens.

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Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to (more...)
 

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