What I Believe: About Wars

Proxy wars don’t work: Since the US military industrial complex was established after WWII, its lobbyists, in collusion with Congress, have kept America in nearly continuous wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) for 70 years. None of these, we know now, were about defending our borders, let alone defending our principles or anything else. They were proxy wars, which can be put into place without Congressional approval, and the accounting for them can be easily obscured. None of these wars made America any safer. None made her any stronger. All of them, however, were massively expensive – both in terms of dollars and lives.

Neither do ideological wars:  In 1964, President Johnson initiated another kind of war – the ideological war. His was the war against poverty. Since then, we’ve had the war against drugs, the war on terror, and, most recently, the war against COVID. Like military wars, these wars have been costly and ineffective.