Our Government Is Planning to Stay at War for the Next 80 Years -- Anyone Got a Problem with That?

[laststeamtrain]

Our Government Is Planning to Stay at War for the Next 80 Years -- Anyone Got a Problem with That?
By Tom Hayden, LA Times
Posted on March 31, 2010, Printed on March 31, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146236/

Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that's 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.

The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield "virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors," according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today's younger generation of resources for their future.

The term "Long War" was first applied to America's post-9/11 conflicts in 2004 by Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, and by the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Richard B. Myers, in 2005.

According to David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and a proponent of the Long War doctrine, the concept was polished in "a series of windowless offices deep inside the Pentagon" by a small team that successfully lobbied to incorporate the term into the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the nation's long-term military blueprint. President George W. Bush declared in his 2006 State of the Union message that "our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy."

<snip>

Among defense analysts, Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who teaches at Boston University, is the leading critic of the Long War doctrine, criticizing its origins among a "small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists" who view public opinion "as something to manipulate" if they take it into consideration at all.

<more>

http://www.alternet.org/world/146236/our_government_is_planning_to_stay_at_war_for_the_next_80_years_--_anyone_got_a_problem_with_that

[Chulanowa]

1. Well, we gotta keep Boeing going!

They're not going to keep themselves afloat, for god's sake!

[Demeter]

2. Whoring Out the Army for Corporate Greed

No it is NOT all right with me!

[classysassy]

5. How long can a country founded on greed and violence last?

[DavidDvorkin]

3. That assumes we'd be the world's (very) dominant power for that much longer

Which is highly unlikely. Our dominance is already no longer as great as it was 10 or 20 years ago.

[jotsy]

4. yup yup yup yup yup, major problem with that.

War is terror, all that can stem from it is loss.

[The2ndWheel]

6. Name a decade where the US hasn't been involved in military action somewhere

[Moostache]

7. I have a problem with this shit going on for another 80 MINUTES!!!

This is ridiculous. History is laughing at us already (and our own unborn future generations are crying the acrid and bitter tears of a people sold out by their ancestors before their very births) for the choices we have made to get to this point - allowing ourselves to move from partially dependent on foreign oil to being actually held hostage to it to the extent that we would literally die (too much petroleum inputs into the food supply to stop now) if the spigots were slowed let alone shut off. 40 years ago we knew this was a critical problem and we have done NOTHING about it in the intervening 4 decades!!!!

We should abandon ALL foreign outposts of empire NOW (including those relics in Japan, Okinawa, Germany, and South Korea - as well as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan). We should invest the entirety of our current military budget into retasking the military's mission to developing homegrown and home controlled solutions to the energy crisis. Active duty troops who cannot be trained as technicians or researchers could become laborers and construction workers in repairing and improving our crumbling infrastructure. The actual combat ready troops we would have to maintain could be deployed in border defense and in training to create a true Fortress USA, impervious to outside invasion ever.

Our military should exist to IMPROVE the security of the nation, NOT to imperil the lives of the poor and enrich the pockets of the super wealthy who use it to grab resources from foreign lands.