Character flaws and circumstances in America's deadly warriors-in-chief

 

5. Global enticements. Globalization is the contemporary euphemism for imperialism. The globe is one giant opportunity for market expansion, resource exploitation and political manipulation. The prospect of installing or protecting dictatorships in the pretext of spreading and defending freedom is just too much of a temptation for CEOs and U.S. presidents alike to resist. The duplicitous and hypocritical Ike with his farewell address warning of the very military industrial complex over which he had presided was a supreme master of secret military operations carried out by the CIA to replace democratically elected presidents with dictators who protected corporate investments and operations and opened up for them rich resources like oil and minerals.

 

6. The powerful corpocracy. The first five circumstantial factors are all part and parcel of this sixth one, the powerful corpocracy. It took me about 10 years to study and then write a book about what the corpocracy is, what it does, and how it can be ended and democracy reclaimed.[6] A U.S. president is a member of the corpocracy and is influenced by it, especially when it comes to making decisions about military interventions.

 

Are U.S. warriors-in-chiefs surrogate murderers?

 

A murder happens when someone is killed intentionally. A surrogate is someone acting on the behalf of someone else. If you accept these definitions, does it not follow that the making and selling of murderous weapons and the authorization by agents at the highest levels of government of the use of those weapons is a form of surrogate murder? And if men, women and children not targeted for killing but killed as part of the "collateral damage," is that not a form of involuntary homicide or manslaughter?

 

Is any war just?

 

President Obama's chief antiterrorism advisor confidently claimed in a speech April 30, 2012 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center that the president's drone strikes were ethical, wise, and efficacious. [7] I think anyone with any conscience could easily refute him point by point, so I did in an article I wrote as soon as I read the transcript of his speech.[8]

 

But to refute the claim made by many authorities that war can be just (their wars in particular) requires not only my bone-deep conviction that no war can be just but also in my summarizing what I think are irrefutable arguments for it. I will not summarize the arguments for a just war. They are rooted in philosophical and theological thinking and all amount to moral rationalizations. Throughout history religion has been an instigator, accessory, or silent accomplice of one war or other cruelty after another. If I had to align my thinking with any religious figure it would be with Erasmus, an early sixteenth century monk. War, he said, was "repugnant to nature," and noted that no one had "ever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere." [9]

 

Howard Zinn wrote that the supreme test for whether any war can be just is the U.S. military involvement in WWII. He then went on to raise several questions about it. Was the U.S. involvement for the rights of nations to independence and self-determination? To save the Jews? Against racism? For democracy? No, not at all according to his review of the evidence; the U.S. involvement in WWII had no such high-minded purposes, and he concluded that "Looking at World War II in perspective, looking at the world it created and the terror that grips our century, should we not bury for all time the idea of just war?" [10]

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