Matt Taibbi: How to Stop Going to War

Matt Taibbi concludes that both the Democrats and Republicans cannot resist the allure of future wars. His article: "To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan." Here's an excerpt:

Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.

Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.

The status quo will not offer us any solution. The bad players also include the morally corrupt legacy news media:

Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.

We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party.

On a related note, Taibbi pointed out that the U.S. military is such a mess that it cannot be meaningfully audited. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi's 2019 article, "The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit: When the Defense Department flunked its first-ever fiscal review, one of our government’s greatest mysteries was exposed: Where does the DoD’s $700 billion annual budget go?"

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

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Resisting Wars of Discretion Could Save Lives at Home

Our belief in war as a solution to our foreign policy issues, despite the lack of clear objectives and confirmatory metric of "success," is hemorrhaging the U.S. budget. Where are the voices of politicians demanding that we justify this annual military spending by pointing to real life successes?

In the meantime, many Americans are going bankrupt in an effort to get the necessary medical care to stay alive (2/3 of all bankruptcies). Others simply give up and die.

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If Only There Were a Well-Funded Peace Lobby as a Counterweight to the Military Industrial Complex

If only there were an industry of businesses that manufactured goods and services specifically geared to maintaining the peace (something more profitable and focused than libraries). Then there would be a weighty lobby to counterbalance the military-industrial complex. This Peace Lobby could sponsor NFL half-time shows. Instead of showing pretty photos of missiles taking off, they could show what happens to human beings when those missiles land. And they could sponsor research to explore the extent to which U.S. articulates meaningful objectives regarding its wars and also set forth detailed metrics to show whether U.S. wars actually achieve those objectives, using (as one example) the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

They could investigate the extent to which the U.S. government has been honest with the citizens regarding the need for each war. They could have teams of analysts assess the risks and benefits of going to war or not going to war. They could warn us that many media outlets uncritically and gullibly join in whenever politicians beat the drums to go to war. They could also explore the effect on diverting massive U.S. tax resources to war, and they could run campaigns showing the lost benefits of failing to spend those tax resources on peaceful uses, such as decaying U.S. infrastructure. They could also educate Americans of the dangers of the sunk cost fallacy.

Related Thought: If only were were better incentives for Hollywood to produce storylines where war was averted. Unfortunately, scripts permeated with visual violent conflict sells, especially visual conflict involving physical fighting.  I wonder about the filtering that likely occurs when Hollywood script-writers and producers want the cooperation of of the military to use military resources in their movies (e,g., military hardware and access to military ships, planes and bases). If only we had the following data: How often does the U.S. military turn down cooperation of a movie-maker because the script puts the military in a bad light or makes war look like a bad idea?

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Trump’s Attack on Iran is a Symptom, not the Disease

From what I understand about Trump's decision to attack Iran's General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, it seems to be a dangerous move, an unforced error that puts the U.S. at risk. There is a lot of outrage on the political left. Before attacking Trump, I think it's important to recognize that the U.S. is a bipartisan war-mongering state, and this includes numerous undeclared wars waged by Barack Obama. It also includes the fact that there are few vocal anti-war Democrats running for President. It also includes widespread Congressional nonchalance in the face of the recent report showing "U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found."

It's also important to recognize that Congress has the power to supervise and control these adventures, but won't. War is job-security for many politicians. It makes them look strong and thus more electable. Thus the waging of wars of discretion continues to be our non-stop horrifically expensive and dangerous hobby. War-mongering is a cancer in our bipartisan body politic. I'd urge everyone who is criticizing Trump to keep this in perspective. The problem runs much deeper than Trump, and the reason you won't see widespread protests in the street in reaction to Trump's terrible decision is the same reason you didn't see such protests while Obama was waging numerous undeclared wars, many of them with no clearly defined metric of success.

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