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Thought about a certain way, most of my adult life has been spent at war. No, I've never been to war myself, although I was swept away by the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era. My country, on the other hand, has been more or less eternally at war. In fact, TomDispatch itself began as a reaction to the launching of America's global war on terror, to the very idea that it was faintly reasonable to invade first Afghanistan and then (after this site was up and rolling) Iraq. Both acts seemed like madness to me then and seem even more so after, like every American taxpayer, for 20 years, I've been funding those very disasters and a Pentagon that only gobbled up ever more of our dollars to do so.
I think this site may have been the first "progressive" one to regularly feature military veterans like Andrew Bacevich and William Astore, or even soldiers still on active duty like Danny Sjursen, who had become critical of our wars. I felt then (and still feel now) that few could have a better sense of those disastrous wars and the Pentagon that pursued them than those who actually fought in them and emerged as their critics.
It was an impulse I've never regretted. Take retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore, who first sent an email to TomDispatch in 2007 describing our bemedaled generals as looking ever more like those of the former Soviet Union. He's been writing for the site ever since. It always seemed logical to me that someone like Astore would grasp the essence of our ongoing disaster in a deeply personal way. If only the mainstream media and Washington had been paying attention to the articles he and the others wrote over all these years, we might not be in this desperate situation. After all, those wars of ours have indeed come home, bringing with them the possibility of unbuilding democracy and creating a Trumpian-style autocracy in our own backyard. It couldn't be sadder, as you'll see when you read Astore's latest piece. Tom
America's Disastrous 60-Year War
Three Generations of Conspicuous Destruction by the Military-Industrial Complex
In my lifetime of nearly 60 years, America has waged five major wars, winning one decisively, then throwing that victory away, while losing the other four disastrously. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as the Global War on Terror, were the losses, of course; the Cold War being the solitary win that must now be counted as a loss because its promise was so quickly discarded.
America's war in Vietnam was waged during the Cold War in the context of what was then known as the domino theory and the idea of "containing" communism. Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the Global War on Terror, a post-Cold War event in which "radical Islamic terrorism" became the substitute for communism. Even so, those wars should be treated as a single strand of history, a 60-year war, if you will, for one reason alone: the explanatory power of such a concept.
For me, because of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation in January 1961, that year is the obvious starting point for what retired Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich recently termed America's Very Long War (VLW). In that televised speech, Ike warned of the emergence of a military-industrial complex of immense strength that could someday threaten American democracy itself. I've chosen 2021 as the VLW's terminus point because of the disastrous end of this country's Afghan War, which even in its last years cost $45 billion annually to prosecute, and because of one curious reality that goes with it. In the wake of the crashing and burning of that 20-year war effort, the Pentagon budget leaped even higher with the support of almost every congressional representative of both parties as Washington's armed attention turned to China and Russia.
At the end of two decades of globally disastrous war-making, that funding increase should tell us just how right Eisenhower was about the perils of the military-industrial complex. By failing to heed him all these years, democracy may indeed be in the process of meeting its demise.
The Prosperity of Losing Wars
Several things define America's disastrous 60-year war. These would include profligacy and ferocity in the use of weaponry against peoples who could not respond in kind; enormous profiteering by the military-industrial complex; incessant lying by the U.S. government (the evidence in the Pentagon Papers for Vietnam, the missing WMD for the invasion of Iraq, and the recent Afghan War papers); accountability-free defeats, with prominent government or military officials essentially never held responsible; and the consistent practice of a militarized Keynesianism that provided jobs and wealth to a relative few at the expense of a great many. In sum, America's 60-year war has featured conspicuous destruction globally, even as wartime production in the U.S. failed to better the lives of the working and middle classes as a whole.
Let's take a closer look. Militarily speaking, throwing almost everything the U.S. military had (nuclear arms excepted) at opponents who had next to nothing should be considered the defining feature of the VLW. During those six decades of war-making, the U.S. military raged with white hot anger against enemies who refused to submit to its ever more powerful, technologically advanced, and destructive toys.
I've studied and written about the Vietnam War and yet I continue to be astounded by the sheer range of weaponry dropped on the peoples of Southeast Asia in those years from conventional bombs and napalm to defoliants like Agent Orange that still cause deaths almost half a century after our troops finally bugged out of there. Along with all that ordnance left behind, Vietnam was a testing ground for technologies of every sort, including the infamous electronic barrier that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sought to establish to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail.
When it came to my old service, the Air Force, Vietnam became a proving ground for the notion that airpower, using megatons of bombs, could win a war. Just about every aircraft in the inventory then was thrown at America's alleged enemies, including bombers built for strategic nuclear attacks like the B-52 Stratofortress. The result, of course, was staggeringly widespread devastation and loss of life at considerable cost to economic fairness and social equity in this country (not to mention our humanity). Still, the companies producing all the bombs, napalm, defoliants, sensors, airplanes, and other killer products did well indeed in those years.
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