BY KENNY BELFORD
Our nation is now in a perpetual state of war – wars that have no definitive end.
We’ve now gone years and years past the time it took the United States and our allies to defeat Germany and Japan in World War II, and those wars were fought all across the planet.
We’re in a perpetual state of war in Iraq, a nation that never attacked us, that was contained within their borders, that posed no threat to America.
The greatest military might in the history of the world has been at war against this small country, approximately the size of California, for over six years, and it continues. As of Sept. 8, 5,130 Americans have given their lives in a war that should never have been started, and it continues.
We’re in a perpetual state of war in Afghanistan, one of the most primitive nations in the world. We’ve been at war with them for over eight years and there is no end in sight. We’re not fighting an army, just insurgents that fought and defeated the mighty Soviet Union.
Our nation is in a state of financial shambles. Our economy was wrecked during the past eight years and will not fix itself.
Instead of spending our money on our deteriorating infrastructure, education, health care, and a host of morally and socially responsible issues, we’re in a perpetual state of war and we’re borrowing money to buy more bullets, more grenades, more caskets.
Each day all of us go through our daily lives seemingly un-impacted by our perpetual state of war.
It was recently suggested that Congress should pass a war tax imposed on you and me to pay for these wars with no end. That’s a great idea, one that has zero chance of happening, but if we all had to feel the sting of paying for our new status of perpetual war it’s likely that would change quickly.
It is staggering to see how much money – the majority borrowed – is going into these wars with no end. Here’s a link you can click on and watch the dollars spent increase.
This is real money, your money, my money, money that isn’t going to improve any quality of life in America, just to continue our status of perpetual war.
The last five star general in our military was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II, a Republican and the 34th President of the United States. He knew about war. He knew about it, not in abstract terms, but in the most literal life and death terms. On that subject he said:
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
So here we are today, locked in two wars against third world nations that have exceeded the length of World War II by years. Two wars that have no “win” available, no end in sight. Two wars we can’t afford, so we borrow billions and billions from China while their economy continues to deliver body blows to ours. Two wars that have killed thousands and thousands of Americans, and more will be added to the tally. What’s our plan? We want to escalate the wars.
God save us from our own stupidity and inability to learn from our past.
– Kenny Belford lives in Tulsa, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
