Everybody, please read Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Repuplic, by Chalmers Johnson. Actually, you don´t need to read the entire book, but just the first couple of chapters and final couple. In other words...a trip to the library. The middle chapters become tedious with depressing detail with which you already are more or less familiar as long as your world view is not totally informed by Fox "News."
You could also read the first two books in Chalmers´trilogy (Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic) but you can get by without them.
Also, put the DVD Why We Fight at the top of your Netflix queue. Yes, Chalmers Johnson is one of the talking heads in that documentary.
Actually, the only reason for reading these books or watching the documentary, unless you are ready to commit yourself to a lifetime of thankless, and probably hopeless, struggle, and I certainly am not (witness my running away to Brasil), is so you won´t be taken completely by surprise when US militarism finally and completely bankrupts the country.
I have long complained that the US economy is a house of cards. We don´t, after all, manufacture anything anymore (just a slight exaggeration). But there still exists one healthy sector of American manufacturing....weapons systems and other equipment designed for the military.
An extremely intelligent columnist, David Brooks, begins his column in todays NY Times with the statement that "for the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do. I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies." The controversies he refers to is the debate within the Obama administration about Afghanistan strategies.
The very fact that he is calling the smartest military experts he knows, as opposed to the smartest people he knows (including some of his op ed colleagues on the NY Times) indicates the extent to which the debate already is skewed in his, and many others´ minds.
Part of the debate we should be having about Afghanistan and Iraq is the economic cost. I don´t want to hear more arguments about whether or not we know how to win a counter-insurgency struggle, nevermind the fact that no country has ever won one. What I want is a debate that considers potential gains versus certain financial and human costs. To my mind, we can neither afford the cost, nor is the military response the best strategy we can adopt to the real threat of Islamic terrorism. In other words, our current approach, which is essentially the Bush approach, is wrong whether considered from a strategic, financial or social perspective.
I am constantly amazed by the congress persons who decry the cost of healthcare reform, which costs a small fraction of what they are willing to rubber stamp for the military or for anything that can remote be twisted into an expenditure for the "the war on terror." We can afford healthcare reform. What we can´t afford is to continue fighting wars with money borrowed from China and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
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