One way in which war erodes public trust and morals is by its predictable generation of public lies.
Also eroded, of course, is the very idea of the rule of law -- replaced with the practice of might-makes-right.
And, of course, as we have seen above, the nation waging the most wars is not succeeding in generating the most freedom, not even close. War is militarizing police forces, encouraging racism and bigotry, and restricting rights to speech and assembly, while making more and more government activity secret.
While wars fail to increase freedom, they also fail to increase safety. In fact, they endanger. There are more effective tools than war for protection, and war generates hostility. The past 17 years of war against terrorism has predictably increased terrorism and generated anti-U.S. hate groups on a scale that nations not bombing several countries at once cannot even begin to dream of.
In arming, many factors must be considered: weapon-related accidents, malicious testing on human beings, theft, sales to allies who become enemies, and the distraction from efforts to reduce the causes of terrorism and war must all be taken into account. So, of course, must the tendency to use weapons once you have them. And a nation's stockpiling of weapons for war puts pressure on other nations to do the same. Even a nation that intends to fight only in defense, may understand "defense" to be the ability to retaliate against other nations. This makes it necessary to create the weaponry and strategies for aggressive war. When you put a lot of people to work planning something, when that project is in fact your largest public investment and proudest cause, it can be difficult to keep those people from finding opportunities to execute their plans
While the best defense in many sports may be a good offense, an offense in war is not defensive, not when it generates hatred, resentment, and blowback, not when the alternative is no war at all. Through the course of the so-called global war on terrorism, terrorism has been on the rise. This was predictable and predicted. The wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the abuses of prisoners during them, became major recruiting tools for anti-U.S. terrorism. In 2006, U.S. intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate that reached just that conclusion.
We can either eliminate all nuclear weapons or we can watch them proliferate. There's no middle way. We can either have no nuclear weapons states, or we can have many. As long as some states have nuclear weapons others will desire them, and the more that have them the more easily they will spread to others still. If nuclear weapons continue to exist, there will very likely be a nuclear catastrophe, and the more the weapons have proliferated, the sooner it will come. Hundreds of incidents have nearly destroyed our world through accident, confusion, misunderstanding, and extremely irrational machismo. And possessing nuclear weapons does absolutely nothing to keep us safe, so that there is really no trade-off involved in eliminating them. They do not deter terrorist attacks by non-state actors in any way. Nor do they add an iota to a military's ability to deter nations from attacking, given the United States' ability to destroy anything anywhere at any time with non-nuclear weapons. The United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China have all lost wars against non-nuclear powers while possessing nukes.
What about "our country seems so divided"?
Does it really? The primary thing the U.S. government does is wage wars and prepare for more wars. A majority of federal discretionary spending is dumped into that cause year after year with almost no debate. Congress members are elected without ever having commented on the general shape of the budget or on foreign policy in any way whatsoever. The United States is engaged in wars in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and -- on a smaller scale -- in dozens of other nations, and is dealing weapons to almost three quarters of the world's dictatorships plus most of its "democracies," with hardly a peep out of a Congress that has yet to ever end a war. If this is being divided, I'd hate to see what being united looks like.
In 1995-96 and 2003-04 pollsters surveyed people in over 20 countries on how they ranked their countries in general and in various areas of accomplishment. Both in terms of general pride in the United States and in terms of various specifics, the people of the United States ranked second in the earlier study and first in the later one in level of national pride. [xxii]
On some points, there is a sharp divide between two parts of the U.S. public, with some U.S. residents having more in common with other nations' publics than with the U.S. right wing. On some of the most important questions, however, there is less division, and beliefs that would be extreme elsewhere are large-majority views in the United States. Among the latter, is the U.S. belief in national exceptionalism (even among those who haven't heard of the term). In 2010, 80 percent of those polled by Gallup in the United States said the United States had a unique character that made it the greatest country in the world. A 2013 survey of 1,000 U.S. adults found that 49 percent had not heard of American Exceptionalism. But 72 percent agreed or strongly agreed that the United States is "unique and unlike any other nation."
Why all the lies in my in-box every Memorial Day?
We learn a lot about the real motives for wars when whistleblowers leak the minutes of secret meetings, or when congressional committees publish the records of hearings decades later. War planners write books. They make movies. They face investigations. Eventually the beans tend to get spilled. But I have never ever, not even once, heard of a private meeting in which top war makers discussed the need to keep a war going in order to benefit the soldiers fighting in it.
The reason this is remarkable is that you almost never hear a war planner speak in public about the reasons for keeping a war going without claiming that it must be done for the troops, to support the troops, in order not to let the troops down, or so that those troops already dead will not have died in vain. Of course, if they died in an illegal, immoral, destructive action, or simply a hopeless war that must be lost sooner or later, it's unclear how piling on more corpses will honor their memories. But this is not about logic.
The idea is that the men and women risking their lives, supposedly on our behalf, should always have our support -- even if we view what they're doing as mass murder. Peace activists, in contrast to war planners, say the very same thing about this in private that they say in public: we want to support those troops by not giving them illegal orders, not coercing them to commit atrocities, not sending them away from their families to risk their lives and bodies and mental well-being.
War makers' private discussions about whether and why to keep a war going deal with all kinds of cynical motivations. They only touch on the topic of troops when considering how many of them there are or how long their contracts can be extended before they start killing their commanders. In public, it's a very different story, one often told with smartly uniformed troops positioned as a backdrop. The wars are all about the troops and in fact must be extended for the benefit of the troops. Anything else would offend and disappoint the troops who have devoted themselves to the war.
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