Abby Martin covers the whole truth about the Afghanistan War, from the CIA construct of the 80's through today's senseless stalemate. Two decades, three administrations, tens of thousands of lives; it's time to #EndTheForeverWar.
In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Fred Kaplan about the ever-present threat of nuclear war. I have listened to most of this podcast. It reminded me of the insane peacetime costs and risks of the world's vast nuclear arsenals. Harris describes his reaction to delving into this topic: It is like learning that for your entire life you have lived in a house that is rigged to explode.
From listening to this episode, I learned that a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces, Stanislav Petrov, should be a household name for preventing a nuclear war that would have cost hundreds of millions of lives, American and otherwise. In this episode you will also learn the insanity and technological fragility, past and present, of the American nuclear arsenals and strategies.
There's no paywall on this episode. I highly recommend it.
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.
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?
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.