Hawkeye Pierce in TV's M*A*S*H once said (paraphrasing), "War isn't hell. War is war, and hell is hell, and of the two, war is worse. Who's in hell? People who deserve to be there. Who's in war? Mostly innocents who have nothing to do with the war." Like Hawkeye, I'm tired of innocent men, women, and children paying for the greed of the powerful.

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“Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”

Otto Von Bismarck (1815–98), Prussian statesman. Speech, August 1867, Berlin.

“We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.”

Albert Camus (1913–60), French-Algerian philosopher, author. Notebooks, volume 3 (1966), entry for 7 September 1939

“There never was a good war or a bad peace.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), U.S. statesman, writer. Letters to Sir Joseph Banks, 27 July 1783, and Josiah Quincy, 11 September 1783 (published in Complete Works, volume 8, edited by John Bigelow, 1887–88).

The American way of war has always had a remarkable degree of moral inconsistency associated with it. From the beginning, we have the example of George Washington, who insisted upon the humane treatment of prisoners of war (in sharp contrast to the way American soldiers were treated by their British captors). Contrast this with Andrew Jackson, whose practices in the early Indian Wars and the War of 1812 were brutal, presaging America's wars and policy against the Native American population for the rest of the century.

The Civil War brought the concept of “total war” into the American system of warfare, with the actions of Union Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan authoring the basic textbook that the rest of the world was to copy and expand upon for the last one-hundred and fifty years. Destroying your enemy's will to fight, so that abject, unconditional surrender of the enemy is the sole objective of your military, began to embed itself into the minds of the American military as war's real goal.

Our next three wars—the completion of the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine Insurrection—lacked the necessary elements for the use of a strategy of “total war” against our enemies. The Native American tribes were far too diverse and anarchistic to destroy all of the tribes will to fight at once: they had to be dealt with one by one. The Spanish-American War was not a war where we had any desire to conquer Spain: only take her Caribbean and Pacific colonies. The Philippine Insurrection was similar to the Indian Wars, except we inherited the rebellion from Spain; putting it down was a part of solidifying our seizure of the Philippines.  It was not a generalized uprising, but primarily limited to the Muslim dominated Islands of the Southern Philippines. The Philippine Insurrection is of note for no other reason than the many similarities between it and our current difficulties in the Middle East.

Next came the First World War—if you discount chasing revolutionaries in Mexico, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua to protect American commercial interests. We arrived in that war probably just barely in time to forestall a stalemate: Germany was starving and exhausted, Austria-Hungary disintegrating; Russia on the verge of revolution,; Italy retreating; France facing mutiny in its Army; the Ottomans on the verge of collapse; and Great Britain's morale flagging after the Royal Navy barely won at Jutland, while its Army suffered 600,000 casualties on the Somme. Without the intervention of the Americans, the Armistice in November 1918 might well have been for a negotiated peace status quo ante bellum in the West, not a dictated one.

The First World War was only the fourth time in American History that Congress had formally declared war on an enemy country—if you consider declaring independence in the midst of an insurrection different from a formally declared war. The War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, and The Spanish American War were the only three previous instances. It is also the sole instance where the United States Congress has declared peace, rather than have a formal peace treaty negotiated and then ratified by Congress.

Then came the Second World War, and every participating nation practiced Grant's, Sherman's, and Sheridan's concept of total war to a degree that would have sickened the concept's architects. When it was done, Europe lay in ruins from the Pyrenees to the Volga; China, Southeast Asia and Japan were abattoirs. More than seventy million lay dead worldwide: one person in every thirty who was alive when the war started. That war to end the genocidal mania of Hitler and his allies may have been necessary, but the ghosts of more than seventy million people crying out that they had died before their time makes clear that there is nothing truly good about that war, or any other. Benjamin Franklin has been proven a prophet again.

In the six-and-one-half decades since the end of the Second World War, the United States has not formally declared war even once. We have had five major wars (Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War I, Afghanistan, Gulf War II), and countless “brushfire” conflicts (Lebanon, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, the Mayaguez raid, the Aborted Iranian Hostage Rescue, Somalia, in addition to providing advisory support to nations around the world), plus the so-called “Cold War.” Three of those wars (Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War I) ended with a negotiated peace treaty, and the withdrawal of all or nearly all American forces. The other two major wars are pending resolution.

And yet, we count all three of those wars as losses because we did not utterly defeat and/or destroy our opponents.

Why?

Of our five declared wars (six if you count the Revolutionary War), in only one—the Second World War—did we completely and utterly defeat our opponents, capturing our enemies' nations and annihilating their military. The War of 1812 was a negotiated peace, because Great Britain was tired of being at war for a quarter century, not because we had beaten them. (Remember, the Battle of New Orleans occurred after the Treaty of Ghent was signed.)

In the Mexican-American War, we captured Mexico City and forced them to sue for peace, as well as ceding most of the territory we wanted, but they still had armies in the field that outnumbered General Taylor's and General Scott's combined armies. If the Mexican Army had a competent commander, and less infighting, the outcome might well have been different.

The Mexican-American War got us most of what we desired out of the war, but we had to go back to the Mexican government in 1853 and purchase southern New Mexico and Arizona in the Gadasen Purchase to acquire a southern transcontinental railroad route. There is a good argument by historians that the Mexican-American War made the Civil War a certainty, as free and slave states contended for influence in the newly acquired territories. A transcontinental railroad route for the slave states was one of the motivating factors behind the Gadasen Purchase.

We cannot really count the Civil War, as it was not a declared war against a foreign enemy, but a struggle for the future of America. The Union annihilated the Confederacy, but even then Lincoln's instructions to Grant and Sherman were not subjugation, but to, “Let them up easy.” Booth's murder of Lincoln, I believe, was directly responsible for the next century of animosity, suspicion, and segregation.

In the Spanish-American War, the United States plucked the last fruit of a destitute four hundred year old empire. We beat Spain's Navy because their admirals were incompetent. We beat their Army because the Tenth Cavalry (Buffalo Soldiers) saved Teddy Roosevelt's ass on San Juan Hill, permitting him to outflank the Spanish. We never invaded Spain, nor even conquered the majority of Cuba. The peace was negotiated: by a Spanish government that decided her colonies cost more than they were worth, and an American government that was watching its Army fall apart, not from Spanish bullets, but Cuban mosquitoes.

The Spanish-American War allowed us to acquire the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico as dependencies and forced Spain to grant Cuba independence (which American commercial interests immediately dominated economically). These acquisitions, together with our annexation of Hawaii the same year, established us as a naval power in the Pacific. These actions also put us on a collision course with an emerging Japan, guaranteeing eventual war between our two nations.

In the First World War, there was not a single armed Allied soldier on German soil when the Armistice was signed. The Germans lost because too many of their farmers were at the front, ducking bullets. Those left behind could not maintain the food production required to feed both an Army and a nation. The German people were not utterly defeated or destroyed, just starving and tired of war.

The First World War was for the United States, not even a negotiated peace. A newly elected Republican Congress rejected Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's imperfect Treaty of Versailles, and its League of Nations, cutting vital support out from under that treaty before the ink had dried, and guaranteeing the Second World War. In the end, Congress had to declare peace against Germany and the Central Powers, an event unique in American History.

The Second World War was for the proponents of total war and unconditional victory, America's finest moment. Our enemies lay in ruins, and we dominated the world scene in a way not equaled since Wellington beat the French at Waterloo. Our dominance, as is always the case throughout history, did not last long.

Korea ended in stalemate, as much from General MacArthur's hubris as anything. He wanted to go and chase Mao and the Communists out of China - an impossible task. The General's hubris led to an invasion of more than 300,000 Chinese “volunteers,” and his eventual dismissal. In July 1953, a negotiated settlement was reached, with the border essentially where it had been before the war started in June, 1950. An armed truce has reigned ever since.

Vietnam was a war we could have won in 1945-46. Ho Chi Minh had no desire to be a puppet of Stalin and the Soviet Union, and offered the United States an opportunity to help set up a Tito-like regime in Indochina, not aligned with either bloc. We refused his offer, and tried to force a return of French colonialism to the region. When that failed in 1954, the Geneva Accords split French Indochina into its component parts—Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—and then divided Vietnam into a Communist controlled North, and a very corrupt, despotic, capitalist South.

Over the next ten years, we became increasingly mired in the war in Indochina, starting with covert CIA operations that had actually begun long before the French withdrew. This involvement slowly escalated until the false flag operation involving destroyers USS Turner Joy and USS Maddox took place in August, 1964. This incident resulted in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the beginning of direct, open American military involvement in Vietnam.

Nine years later, the United States withdrew from the war in Vietnam in a negotiated settlement. This war should have taught us the lesson that the Assyrians had learned in Babylon and the Romans had learned in Judea: you cannot force another people to submit to your complete political domination unless you are willing to commit quasi-genocide and scatter the survivors throughout your empire as an object lesson. All of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders and soldiers who were interviewed after the war were unanimous in stating that they were willing to fight the Americans for thirty years, if that was how long it took to drive us from their country. There was no way to defeat that level of commitment other than genocide.

Our last resolved war had an alliance that was almost unique in world history. The forces in Gulf War I (or Operation Desert Storm if you prefer), that drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 was a joining of both long-time friends and foes against a common enemy. The only similar occurrence in history I can think of—off of the top of my head—was the alliance of Romans, Visigoths, and Franks under Flavius Aetius, who defeated Attila the Hun at Chalons in 451 C.E. But even our success in Gulf War I did not lead to the immediate military destruction of Iraq or the deposing of Saddam Hussein. And it ended with a stringent, but negotiated peace, not an imposed surrender.

So, what is my point, you ask?

First, almost none of the wars that the United States has fought over the last 233 years have ended in a complete, unmitigated victory for this country, in spite of what ignorant fools on the right seem to think. Usually, we are negotiating a peace at the end of one of our wars, not dictating a surrender. In fact, looked at in that light, only the Indian Wars and the Second World War ended with a peace that was dictated by the American government to a prostrate foe, without negotiation.

Second, the utter failure of our Congress to actually declare war in almost seventy years, makes me ask a question: Why?

I think that Marine Major General Smedley Butler gave us the answer seventy-five years ago in a little booklet he wrote called War is a Racket. Here are some excerpts”

“WAR is a racket. It always has been.”

“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

“In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows"“

“It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum.”

“Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings"”

“Who provides the profits—these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them—in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us—the people—got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par—and above. Then the bankers collected their profits"”

General Butler was hardly some sort of socialist/pacifist. He was twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and is credited with developing the system of close air support that saved thousands of Marines during the Second World War from Guadalcanal to Okinawa.

I think the state of continual fear that our government has been able to inflict upon us since the end of the Second World War, with the Cold War and now the War on Terror, has also permitted what President Eisenhower referred to as the Military-Industrial Complex to act as if our nation is in a continual state of war, without having to declare war. If the Congress actually declared war, then at some point we would either have to utterly defeat our enemy, or negotiate a peace.

By keeping us in this continuous “pseudo-war state,” the Military-Industrial Complex can hide the transgressions of those corporations and military officers who are advancing their own interests at the cost of the nation's best interests behind the cloak of “National Security.” We know that the Pentagon has admitted that it cannot account for more than one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) in funds that have gone missing. My personal suspicion is that as much as forty percent of our national debt could be immediately repaid if we could find and recover those missing Pentagon funds. Unfortunately, it will never happen: it has all gone into the pockets of contractors and officials as bribes and kickbacks.

This doesn't count the billions spent on wasteful military projects including: the F-22A Raptor (which can't fly in the rain without compromising its radar absorbent skin), the B-1B Lancer (the only aircraft in our inventory conspicuous by its absence in Gulf Wars I and II), the Sergeant York Self-propelled, radar aimed, anti aircraft gun, and the whole “Star Wars” SDI program. I would even argue that the last two Nimitz-class carriers (USS Ronald Reagan, USS George H.W. Bush) were not yet needed when their keels were laid, as we still possessed two carriers (USS America and USS John F. Kennedy) that had not reached forty years in their service life. (I also object to naming ships after living individuals. The Reagan should have been named after Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was President during World War II as well as the greatest period of naval construction in our nation's history, and then, after Ronald Reagan passed, the last Nimitz-class carrier could be named after him.)

We must begin as a nation to have a realistic view of our military, its capabilities, and how we should use it. The profligate spending and unchecked waste by our primarily Republican government over the last 28 years, which has increased our budget deficit more than twelve-fold (from $914 billion at the end of 1980 to more than $11 trillion today), with little constructive to show for our expenditures, must end. Supply-side economics has again proven itself a failure for the majority of the American people, just as it did in the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. We have seen an unprecedented transference of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthiest Americans: the top 1% of whom, in 1980, held 20% of our nation's wealth, and today hold 40% of that wealth.

More than two thousand years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero made a simple but accurate observation, “The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.” In their attempt to starve the social safety net that they hate to death, the Republicans have made it impossible to properly feed and maintain the military machine that they believe is the primary pride of our nation. They have shifted the tax burden downward from the large corporations and multimillionaires, to the small businesses, working and middle class. They have allowed these self-same large corporations to ship our industrial base out of the country, and have in fact, given them tax incentives to do so. This has led to the unfortunate fact that we can no longer manufacture and maintain our basic military supplies of matériel and ordnance with domestic manufacturers alone. It should be noted, for example, that we had to buy more than a billion rounds of rifle and machine gun ammunition in 2004 from Israel, in order to supply our troops who were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is tragic: we are a “superpower” who can no longer fully produce what our troops need to maintain our superpower status. And all in the name of profit.

To quote Malcolm X, “The chickens are coming home to roost.”

First, we need to realize that our military serves us best when we don't use it. Teddy Roosevelt said we should, “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” A century later Bill Clinton said that we should lead the world by, “The power of our example, not an example of our power.” Unless the United States or its allies are attacked (and those we consider our allies should be kept to a very small and select number), we should never engage in war. We certainly should never engage in war to extend or protect American commercial interests in foreign lands: it was this habit that helped to undermine Athens' democracy and Rome's Republic.

We have to realize that every time you pull a sword from a scabbard to use it in combat, you always return it to that scabbard dulled and nicked, in need of resharpening and cleaning, and not nearly effective as it was when you drew it out. Our nation, particularly our generals and admirals, should always be hesitant to draw the sword of war: you never know when you might bend or break it, as we did in Vietnam, and as I fear we are doing now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We desperately need to rebuild and improve our nation's infrastructure: physical and human. And what I mean by our physical infrastructure is not only our roads, railways, bridges, dams, water and sewer systems, the electrical grid, communications and information networks, but also our manufacturing base. I do not think we would be ill-served if ten percent or more of our military procurement budget for the next fifteen or twenty years was spent on building and modernizing manufacturing plants and other production facilities, in order to insure that all of the components for the ordnance and matériel our military requires are manufactured here in the United States. Ownership should be localized and diversified to insure maximum financial return for local governments, and subsidies provided as necessary. The merger of so many corporations in our defense industry is dangerous: Boeing, Lockheed, and the rest have become too large to fail, and too few not to collude.

We also must invest in our human infrastructure, the people who make up this nation. The rebuilding and reinforcement of our middle class is a top priority. Health care reform is a vital first step: we cannot afford to continue spending one-sixth of our GDP on an uncontrolled private system whose costs go up at seven times the rate of inflation. It is bankrupting workers, and forcing employers to drop health care coverage right and left. The system we have relied upon for more than sixty years is broken beyond repair: broken by the greed of health insurance company collusion, pharmaceutical company avarice, and health care company profiteering. It is time to start anew.

Education is our second step. Our educational system is failing because we have decided that it is more important to warehouse the failures of that system in prisons, than it is to give them the education they need to avoid prison. We have decided that it is unimportant to re-channel the energy and entrepreneurial spirit of some kid selling drugs or joining a gang into constructive activities, because of the color of their skin.

Just remember, in fifty years these kids, their children and their grandchildren, will no longer be the minority in this country, they will be the majority. If we do not take an active interest in their futures now, the United States may have no future.

The American Dream must be brought into every American's reach. We must return hope to our neighborhoods, our classrooms, our assembly lines, our fields and farms, and our lives. That hope must be color blind, and no respecter of social, economic, or political status. It must demand that the twenty percent of America's wealth that has trickled up into the pockets of multimillionaires and billionaires over the last thirty years be redistributed by a system of progressive taxation—including the estate tax—into the pockets of the ninety percent of Americans who are not as well off in 2009 as they were in 1980. This redistribution of wealth should be done through health care, education, and reestablishment of our manufacturing base with loans, subsidies, tariffs, renegotiation of trade treaties, and antitrust action. It can be accomplished by a fairer system of taxation, and reduction of our military presence overseas, where far too many of our deployments seem to be in the interests of American commercial ventures, not our long term national security.

As President Kennedy said at his inauguration, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

I will leave the last words to the wisest of the Founders and Framers, Ben Franklin, taken from the same letter to Sir Joseph Banks that is quoted at the beginning of this article (I did correct one anachronistic spelling):

'What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements . . . might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.”

Authors Bio:

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 all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'