By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
It’s time to bring all our troops home.
Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea, and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad, and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.
It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war.
It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.
That’s not what’s going to happen, of course
The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.
Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of operational security and denying the enemy any advantage. Investigative journalist David Vine explained, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire, in history.”
Don’t fall for the propaganda, though.
America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure, and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.
The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. Vine reported, “Even U.S. military resorts and recreation areas in places such as the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”
It is how a military empire occupies the globe.
After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military finally may have been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.
In an ongoing effort to police the globe, U.S. military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.
This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.
Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making the U.S., or the rest of the world, any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.
War spending is bankrupting the United States.
Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.
That needs to change.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of approximately 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing U.S. citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities.
The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.
The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people. The latest drone strike reportedly killed seven children, ages 2 to 10, in Afghanistan.
The warhawks’ militarization of America is blowback.
James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” President Madison (1809-1817) explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
We are seeing this play out before our eyes.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls
Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.
At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. Historian Chalmers Johnson predicted:
“The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.”
It is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that president Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
We failed to heed his warning.
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.
It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home.
—The Rutherford Institute