November 21, 2016
"
War is a
racket.
It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily
the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international
in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and
the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that
is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group
knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the
expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, 1935.
Americans are citizens of a
warring country; we are members of a warrior society.
Our country was founded on
war. We have continued to wage war for the overwhelming majority of the 240 years
since our war of rebellion against a tyrannical form of government led by an
absolute monarch.
The founding fathers wrote
the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and went to war against the king and
his redcoats until they surrendered at the Treaty of Paris in 1783. These same
men established a republic with the ratification of the Constitution of the
United States of America in 1787.
Over the next 74 years, we engaged
in a series of wars against many Indian Tribes and at various times, European powers
including Great Britain, France, and Spain. Major conflicts included the War of
1812-1815 and the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Most of these wars were
based on a policy called “manifest destiny” and resulted in consolidation of
the coterminous territory of the present-day United States.
However, our wartime
excursions were not restricted to the North American continent. We battled
pirates seizing merchant ships and their crews in the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans and the Aegean, Caribbean, and Mediterranean Seas, attacked Pacific
Islanders on Fiji, Gilbert Island, and Samoa, invaded Uruguay and Paraguay,
destroyed a Japanese fleet, and burned a coastal town along the Mosquito Coast.
Following the Civil War of
1861-1865 in which we killed more of each other (about 750,000) than all our other
wars combined, America initiated a second era of Indian Wars in the West from
1866-1886. At this juncture, over 100 years of nearly continuous warring
against Indian Tribes was largely over except for the Wounded Knee Massacre of
1890 and a few minor rebellions that occurred until the mid-1920s.
Small skirmishes in the
latter half of the 1800s included naval expeditions to Formosa, Korea, and
Brazil as retribution for attacks on American ships, battles for control of the
Samoa Islands with German-supported natives, and repeated encounters with
Mexican militias and rebels along the Texas border.
Since its founding 103 years
earlier, the nation then entered its longest period without engaging in warfare,
eight years from 1890 until 1898.
With no more natives to
conquer, the United States of America turned its attention to military ventures
outside the country.
In 1898, a 10-week conflict
in Cuba when it sought independence from Spain soon spread to the Philippines,
Guam, and Puerto Rico. The US annexed these islands and that action resulted in
a three-year rebellion by Filipinos for their promised but reneged upon
independence. The rebels were defeated in 1902 but full independence was not granted
until 1946.
I wrote about this conflict
in a previous essay on America’s torture of prisoners-of-war (
Mercenary Musing, August 8, 2008
).
From 1903 to 1934, the US of
A engaged in regional imperialism with a series of invasions and occupations of
seven countries in Middle America. Small wars were conducted in Panama,
Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Mexico.
These incursions were driven
by Presidential fiat including the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt’s “speak softly
and carry a big stick” policy, and Wilson’s platform of democratic nation-building.
Most were carried out by the Marines, supported by big business interests, and aptly
called the “Banana Wars”. In 1921, the Marine Corp published a manual, The
Strategy and Tactics of Small Wars
based on its experiences.
During the Mexican Revolution
from 1910 to1919, American troops were stationed along the border to restrict
fighting to the Mexican side. Nevertheless, rebels invaded US border towns
several times and we responded with numerous sorties into Mexico and two major
expeditions into interior Chihuahua. In 2014, US Marines occupied Vera Cruz to
stop armament shipments from Germany.
America entered WWI in 1917 when
Germany unsuccessfully tried to entice Mexico into major attacks in the southwest
US by promising return of territories lost in 1848 and 1853.
In urging Congress to declare
war, Woodrow Wilson promised it would be “a war to end all wars. He was
supported by major industrialists who had already profited from exporting goods
during three years of fighting in Europe.
However, the war was
overwhelmingly unpopular with the public. In 1917, we had the 14th largest
army in the world before conscripting 2.8 million men. The conflict served to
enrich segments of the industrial economy but at the expense of over 117,000
Americans who died on foreign soil. In 1919, the federal war debt totaled $25
billion and $17 billion was still owed when the stock market crashed in 1929.
United States Marine Major
General Smedly Darlington Butler was a seven-year veteran and two-time Medal of
Honor winner during the Banana Wars. His book, “War is a Racket”, condemned the
business
of war and windfall profits
during WWI; the introduction of his book is quoted to start this musing.
Excepting the aforementioned
regional occupations in the name of American capitalism, the 23-year period
from 1918 until 1941 was arguably the country’s most peaceful time since its
founding. Of course, nearly half of that occurred during the Great Depression.
Pearl Harbor was bombed on
December 7, 1941 and we declared war against the Axis powers. Over the next four
years, 405,000 American military personnel lost their lives in Europe and the
Asia-Pacific. War ended when the United States dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
After this war of the world,
two superpowers with diametrically-opposed ideological and economic systems
emerged. A 45-year Cold War ensued with the grim consequences of a nuclear arms
race and increased militarization of both antagonists alongside their allies
and satellites. It finally ended with the collapse of communism in 1989 and
dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
In the interim, American
capitalism and Soviet-Chinese communism squared off in Asian countries divided
by decree after WWII. Two major wars were fought: Korea from 1950 to 1953, a
conflict that remains unresolved today; and Vietnam (plus Cambodia and Laos)
from 1965 to 1973, a war that the US lost when the country was reunited under
communist rule in 1975.
Other Cold War theaters where
the US sent military troops included the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba and communist
insurgencies in the Congo, Thailand, and Grenada. We also bombed the palace of
Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, participated in a civil war in Lebanon, and invaded
Panama to depose a corrupt dictator.
With our main enemy and its
entire economic system failing, a new boogie-man rose just in time: Iraq’s
Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait in August 1990. A US-led coalition destroyed
the Iraqi army in six weeks of military operations in early 1991. Following the
war, the United Nations initiated a full trade embargo of Iraq that resulted in
economic collapse, hyperinflation, widespread poverty, and civil wars from
1991-2003. Islamic fundamentalist opposition to a permanent US military force based
in Saudi Arabia led directly to the 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York City and
Washington, D.C.
Other US-led interventions in
the 1990s included: Somalia, 1992-1995, a civil war that remains unresolved;
Haiti, 1994-1995; Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1995-1996; and Kosovo, 1998-1999. The
latter two conflicts were part of the break-up of Yugoslavia, a
cobbled-together country of eight ethnic groups created after WWI.
As the 21st
Century was ushered in with the Y2K fiasco, America was not actively warring.
But that all changed with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 when 2605
Americans died. Nine days later, President Bush proclaimed a never-ending
battle he called the “War on Terror”. In 2009, Obama objected to this term and
his military underlings renamed the perpetual war “Operation Overseas
Contingency”.
We invaded Afghanistan in
October 2001, overthrew the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban government,
destroyed al-Qaeda camps, and installed a new regime. After 13 years of war, we
declared victory and withdrew American troops at the end of 2014. In October
2015, Barack Hussein Obama II resumed war operations and declared the US will maintain
two bases and nearly 10,000 military personnel in Afghanistan indefinitely.
At this juncture, the Taliban
occupies about 20% of a “country” led by local tribal warlords with al-Qaeda
and the Islamic State controlling numerous enclaves.
Collateral to the war in
Afghan territory, the US initiated drone strikes and incursions across the
frontier into northwest Pakistan in 2004 and killed Osama bin-Laden in 2011.
Military actions also continue there.
The big War in Afghanistan
was not enough for powerful neocons in control of Lil’ Bush’s Administration.
In 2003, the United States
invaded and occupied Iraq on the false pretense that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons
of mass destruction”. In reality, it was just an excuse to finish what the Big
Bush Administration did not do in 1991; i.e., remove him as dictator of yet another
“country” with tribal factions that was created at the end of WWI. His minority
Sunni ruling party was destroyed, Saddam was captured and executed, civil war
ensued, a Shia government was installed, and the US withdrew its troops at the
end of 2011, turning the civil war over to the Iraqis.
During the Arab Spring civil
wars of 2011, the United States again attacked Gaddafi and his loyalists in
Libya with cruise missiles. That civil war reignited in 2014 and continues.
Since the US retreat from
Iraq, government forces, dispossessed Sunnis, Shia factions backed by Iran, and
ethnic Kurds have repeatedly clashed in sectarian violence in the northern half
of the country. By 2014, this widespread fighting had merged with a civil war
in Syria.
The chaos in Iraq that started
with the American invasion in 2003 has begotten the radical Islamic State
(ISIS), which now controls large swaths of northern Iraq and Syria. US bombings
and drone strikes continue in a regional war with ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq,
Syria, Libya, Algeria, and Afghanistan.
Much like the decade-long quagmire
in the putrid jungles of Vietnam, there is no end in sight for these secular
civil wars in the stinking deserts of the Middle East.
They are simply the next chapters
in the American encyclopedia of never-ending war.
A lifelong military man and 34th
President of the United States General Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned us of the dangers
inherent in a standing army conjoined with a private armament industry waging war
in perpetuity. Eisenhower addressed this
issue of a military-industrial complex in his
first speech
to the
American people in April 1953 and in his
farewell
address
to the nation in January
1961.
Starting with Ike’s successor,
John F. Kennedy, who escalated US military involvement in an unwinnable civil
war in Vietnam, our leaders have not heeded the sage old warrior’s advice
against war and for peace.
Indeed, since Eisenhower last
spoke as our President, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton,
Bush Jr., and Obama have waged unwinnable and now never-ending wars that
continue to take the lives of our fine young men. The number of dead now stands
at 65,913 and counting in the intervening 55 years.
1972 Presidential candidate
George McGovern said, “I'm fed up to the
ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
”
Unfortunately,
this former WWII Air Force pilot and anti-war populist, was defeated by the
soon-to-be disgraced Tricky Dick Nixon in a landslide and our warring ways
continued.
Que lastima.
Two sequential timelines documenting
America’s history of warfare are shown below (from Wikipedia):
In addition to the tragic cost
in lives, there is a huge financial cost to war. The chart below shows the
massive debt incurred in waging the major wars in American history. Our debt
load with respect to GDP is now at its highest since WWII. Although the
economic crisis and recession of 2008-2009 and subsequent monetary inflation are
mostly to blame, a significant portion is directly attributable to the cost of waging
the forever War on Terror:
Based on the Wikipedia
compilation, the United States of American has fought in a total of 90 wars
since its Declaration of Independence. Only five have been authorized via a
formal Declaration of War by Congress: War of 1812; Mexican-American War;
Spanish-American War; World War I; and World War II.
American was founded on war
and there is little doubt that we will be at war for the duration of our
republic.
And we will endure until the
greatest nation ever on Earth crumbles under a burden of debt and financial
ruin that comes from waging never-ending war.
I think the decorated
warrior-turned-pacifist General Butler said it best:
There are only two things we should fight for. One is
the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.
All we are saying is give peace a chance
(The Plastic Ono Band, 1969).
Ciao for now,
Mickey Fulp
Mercenary Geologist
The
Mercenary Geologist Michael
S. “Mickey” Fulp
is a Certified
Professional
Geologist
with a B.Sc. Earth Sciences with honor from the
University of Tulsa, and M.Sc. Geology from the University of New Mexico.
Mickey has 35 years experience as an exploration geologist and analyst
searching for economic deposits of base and precious metals, industrial
minerals, uranium, coal, oil and gas, and water in North and South America,
Europe, and Asia
.
Mickey worked for junior explorers, major
mining companies, private companies, and investors as a consulting economic
geologist for over 20 years, specializing in geological mapping, property
evaluation, and business development. In
addition to Mickey’s professional credentials and experience, he is
high-altitude proficient, and is bilingual in English and Spanish. From 2003 to
2006, he made four outcrop ore discoveries in Peru, Nevada, Chile, and British
Columbia.
Mickey is well-known and highly respected throughout
the mining and exploration community due to his ongoing work as an analyst, writer,
and speaker.
Contact
:
Contact@MercenaryGeologist.com
Acknowledgement:
I thank Fred Jenkins, former Marine Reserve, retired
geologist, and mentor, for interesting conversations on the business of war
that were the impetus to write this musing.
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