OUR CONTINUING CULTURE OF WAR

9/11/01. A date most of us will never and should never forget. Every year that passes provides us with another opportunity to reflect on what happened that day and on whether the country and the world took actions that created a safer, more secure world, or a more dangerous, volatile one.

Then Vice-President Dick Cheney warned in an October 2001 interview with the Washington Post that the country’s “war on terror” begun immediately after 9/11 might not be over in our lifetimes. “You can’t predict a straight line to victory…It’s different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end, at least not in our lifetime.”

These statements confirmed what some were already thinking — endless war would not end “acts of terror.” In fact, the violence and destruction of war seems to result in more violence. Instead of ending acts of terror, war adds its own acts of terror and fuels the cycle of violence.

A quick look at the world today bears this out.

The war on Afghanistan began under George W. Bush. It continued under both of his terms and both of Barack Obama’s terms in office. Just recently, after months of procrastination and dropping the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal on April 14, 2017, Donald Trump announced yet another 4,000 troops would be sent to Afghanistan. It costs approximately $1 million to deploy one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year.

Why would we think that a strategy that has failed for almost 16 years will suddenly succeed?

Think about it.  Sixteen-year-old men and women in the U.S. and Afghanistan have never known a time without war. In fact, the people of Afghanistan have been engaged in war now since 1979, when the U.S. helped lure the former Soviet Union into war and then Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen fought a proxy war on the U.S. behalf.

The U.S. taxpayer has paid $782 billion for the war in Afghanistan and continues to pay approximately $4 million an hour. At least 2403 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives and 3539 soldiers have been injured. 26, 270 Afghan civilians have been killed and 29,900 Afghan civilians wounded. More than 91,000 Afghan civilians and soldiers have died in this U.S. war of choice and thousands more lives disrupted.

The Afghan war is already the longest war in U.S. history, by far.  And there’s no end in sight.

Moving from conflict to conflict in the Middle East, trying to keep up with the politics and players involved, the unrelenting violence, the rising death toll and refugee crisis, is as difficult as it is depressing. There is a common thread however – from Gaza to Syria to Iraq to Egypt to Libya to Afghanistan — U.S. military intervention and an ever-ready supply of U.S weapons pouring into the region making matters worse.

The U.S. leads the world in weapons sales, including the sale of weapons to undemocratic regimes and nations on the U.S. State Department’s list of human rights abusers, such as Saudi Arabia. A September 8^th, 2017 article in the Washington Post by Ishaan Tharoon states that since the Saudi-led and U.S. supported war in Yemen, “more than 10,000 Yemenis have been killed, 2 million displaced into temporary camps and shelters, close to 20 million Yemenis or more than 2/3 of the population face food insecurity, around 7 million people are on the brink of famine, and in the world’s worst cholera epidemic ever, 2000 Yemenis have died and more than 600,000 have been affected.”

To date, the U.S. has failed to own up to its role in this crisis. More U.S. Senators appear concerned, however, leading to a 53-47 vote on June 13^th to stop part of a $110 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. This shows how important it is for us to continue to tell Congress and the President to stop selling weapons to dictators and governments that turn U.S. weapons on civilian populations.

And then there’s the specter of war against North Korea. The last few months have seen an ever-escalating war of words between the U.S. and North Korea. Instead of waiting to see which country will blink first, or if either country will launch a nuclear weapon, there is a diplomatic way out.

Let’s make a deal — end (finally) the Korean War with a peace agreement, and end U.S./South Korean joint military exercises in the region in exchange for an end to North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons.

Anything short of such a diplomatic solution could be catastrophic!

We need a new foreign policy, one that honors justice and human rights and relies on patient diplomacy and humanitarian assistance instead of weapons and war.

If we stop fanning the flames of war, the world will thank us.