How do we know these are wars of choice? It's simple: because we could elect to leave whenever we wanted or whenever the heat got too high, as is currently the case in Iraq (even if we are leaving behind a fortress embassy the size of the Vatican with a private army of 5,000 rent-a-guns to defend it), and as we are likely to do in Afghanistan sometime in the years after the 2012 presidential election. The choice is ours. The people without a choice are of course the Iraqis and Afghans whom we'll leave to pick up the pieces.
Even our vaunted Global War on Terror is a war of choice. Think about it: Who has control over our own terror: us or our enemies? We can only be terrorized in the first place if we choose to give in to fear.
Think here of the "shoe bomber" in 2001 and the "underwear bomber" in 2009. Why did the criminally inept actions of these two losers garner so much attention (and fear-mongering) in the American media? As the self-confessed greatest and most powerful nation on Earth, shouldn't we have shared a collective belly laugh at the absurdity and incompetence of those "attacks" and gone about our business?
Instead of laughing, of course, we allowed yet more American treasure to be poured into technology and screening systems that may never even have caught a terrorist. We consented to be surveilled ever more and consulted ever less. We chose to reaffirm our terrors every time we doffed our shoes or submitted supinely to being scoped or groped at our nation's airports.
Our distant permanent wars, our 1% wars of choice, will remain remote from our emotions and our thinking, requiring few sacrifices except from our troops, who grow ever more remote from our polity. This is especially true of America's young adults, between 18 and 29 years of age, who are the least likely to have family members in the military, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.
The result? An already emergent warrior-caste might grow ever more estranged from the 99%, creating tensions and encouraging grievances that quite possibly could be manipulated by that other 1%: the powerbrokers, money-makers, and string-pullers, already so eager to call out the police to bully and arrest occupy movements in numerous cities across this once-great land.
Our Military or Their Military?
As we fight wars of choice in distant lands for ever-shifting goals, what if "our troops" simply continue to grow ever more remote from us? What if they become "their" troops? Is this not the true terror we should be mobilizing as a nation to prevent? The terror of separating our military almost totally from our nation -- and ourselves.
As Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it recently to Time: "Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can't tolerate."
Behold a horrifying fate: a people that allows its wars of choice to compromise the very core of its self-image as a freedom-loving society, while letting itself be estranged from the young men and women who served in the frontlines of these wars.Here's an American fact: the 99% are far too remote from our wars of choice and those who fight them. To reclaim the latter, we must end the former. And that's a war of necessity that has to be fought -- and won.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular. He welcomes reader comments at Email address removed.
Copyright 2011 William J. Astore
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