According to many members of Congress — both Republicans and Democrats — and every president in my lifetime, the United States is NOT at war. In their minds, what common folks call “war” is something else: police action, hostilities, skirmish, collateral damage, surge, overseas contingency operations, shock and awe, pacification, nation-building, authorization for the use of force — anything but what it is, WAR.
Politicians and military leaders use euphemisms to hide from the American people that we are at war. War is what, exactly? Google AI defines war as “a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state.” I suspect most of us would agree with this definition. I define war as sustained conflict between nations, states, tribal groups, ethnic groups, or organized militias. War is violent, bloody conflict that leads to destruction and death, but in this modern age, it is more than that. Cyberwarfare comes to mind, a tool the United States is currently using to wage war against an array of enemies. Are military actions that disrupt instead of outright killing people war? I would say, yes.
And then we have federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA, who are committing acts of war against nations that oppose the United States, going so far as to assassinate heads of state and military leaders. These acts are war too, even if they are never reported in the New York Times.
Many Americans tell themselves that we are not at war unless Congress officially declares war. That means the United States has not fought a war since World War II. Never mind the carnage of the Korean War and the Vietnam War that led to millions of deaths. Korea and Vietnam weren’t wars because Congress didn’t say they were. I suspect the millions of people wounded and killed in these not-wars might disagree.
I am sixty-eight years old. There’s never been a day in my life that the United States has not been at war, either covertly or openly. We are currently at war with Russia, Iran, Yemen, and Palestine. Fighting proxy wars does not absolve the United States of culpability. Our money, our weapons, our support, our war. Just because there aren’t American boots on the ground doesn’t mean we are not at war with a nation. We have no troops on the ground in China, yet does anyone seriously question whether we are at war with them? I know, I don’t.
The United States is a bloody people; a nation willing to use violence to advance its agenda and “protect the American people” or any of the other cliches we use to deflect from the fact that we are the bully who uses its behemoth size to get whatever he wants. Individually this might not be true of us, but as a nation, we have made it clear we will, if necessary, use violence to advance the mythical American Dream, city on a hill, defenders of freedom, or other bullshit we tell ourselves to justify murderous violence and destruction done in the name of WE THE PEOPLE. We have never been a people of peace, and 400 million guns suggest that more than a few Americans are willing to use violence against their fellow citizens to ‘protect the American way of life.”
No, we are a violent people, and if you have evidence to the contrary, please provide it in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Ah well Bruce if it all blows up into nuclear winter, what the eff, we had a good run and we individually have lived long lives. It’s been interesting and I await whatever is next with agnostic curiosity.
What wars did President Jimmy Carter have the US involved in?
Robert Reich pointed out this morning on Coffee Klatch that the US has a long history of political violence. 61 years ago today, one of his old friends Mickey Schwerner, along with Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were murdered by the KKK in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their “crime”: registering black voters during Freedom Summer. Chaney was black while Schwerner and Goodman were white Jews. Schwerner had defended little Robby Reich when he was being bullied at camp because if his small stature and Reich has never forgotten that.
Thanks for that anecdote Carol. I lived those days of freedom riders, marches, and sit-ins. I still had the mindset of the little Nazi “sunset” town I grew up in and I felt the freedom riders brought it on themselves. I moved away forever from that benighted place and way of thinking. If the recent election is any indication, the politics there have not changed in all the years.
Carol,
Carter, a man I deeply admire and respect, kept the U.S. out of major military conflicts. That said, there were minor skirmishes and increased military spending.
I found this article interesting:
On March 7, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed Presidential Determination 79–6, approving the sale of aircraft, tanks, and armored personnel carriers to the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR, aka North Yemen); the same day, he ordered the aircraft carrier USS Constellation to the Gulf of Aden, off the Yemeni coast. The arms sale, according to the determination, was “in the national security interests of the United States.”
Carter’s decision came in response to a crisis on the Arabian Peninsula. The YAR and its communist neighbor, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY, aka South Yemen), had clashed in a border conflict that resulted in a South Yemeni invasion of North Yemen, raising concerns about the security of the United States’ important regional partner, Saudi Arabia. With the ongoing Egyptian-Israeli peace process entering its crucial final stage, mounting concerns about the encroachment of the Soviets and their friends in the region, and the fall of the pro-American Pahlavi regime in Iran, American power and credibility in the Greater Middle East was quickly slipping.
Washington recognized that it needed to “use some muscle,” as Vice President Walter Mondale put it, to reassure regional partners of American steadfastness. As a result, the Carter administration took its most aggressive action in the region to that point, making the Second Yemenite War, as it came to be known, a turning point in both the region’s history and in American policy toward the Middle East.
….
While Carter did not send combat troops to North Yemen, and the conflict had ended through outside mediation by the time American materiel and naval units arrived, his decision in the Second Yemenite War was an important show of force, marking a via media between the relaxed American approach to the Ogaden War of 1977–78, on the one hand, and the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine of 1980 and the disastrous attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran on the other. Indeed, by January 1980, when the Yemeni merger seemed imminent, Brzezinski brazenly suggested the drastic step of a “joint action” with the Saudis “to bring about a fundamental political change in South Yemen.” Although this idea was quickly scuttled, it, combined with EAGLE CLAW and the Carter Doctrine itself, signaled the new, aggressive American policy toward the region.
Some scholars speak of the “shocks of 1979”—the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—as the two most important events in shifting Carter’s Middle East policy. While both events certainly had a profound impact on Carter’s thinking, his thinking on defense and foreign policy had already begun to harden long before they occurred, as other scholars have shown. In some ways, the Second Yemenite War was a smaller “shock of 1979,” which, although it did not garner the same attention as Iran or Afghanistan, it helped push Carter further down the road toward creating what became one of his most lasting legacies in the Middle East—the Carter Doctrine, which opened the door for the last forty years of interventionist American policy in the Middle East.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/jimmy-carter-and-second-yemenite-war-smaller-shock-1979
Good post Bruce. It reminds me of the book War is a Racket by retired USMC Major General Smedley Bulter. I could leave a rather lengthy comment for this subject, but I don’t like to be long winded. It’s no secret that for a very long time the United States has known that warfare can commercially benefit business interests.
I read his book several years ago after a reader recommended it to me.❤️
Ahh Bruce. Democracy isn’t free. It must be fought for and, once won, protected. It’s nothing but an naivete to accuse us of war mongering for protecting our interests. You might not agree with the definition of those interests, nor with the methods, but I’m sure you enjoy living under the benefits our “bloody hands” has provided.
This is a comment that is lifted straight from the MAGA dictionary of popular fantasy, but bears no relation to the real world. America has both intervened in wars it has no business in, and even worse has often incited wars with a view to being able to intervene. Mostly it’s self interest. It had no business becoming involved in almost any war since WW11, from Korea to Vietnam, and all the lesser conflicts, to more recently the invasion of Iraq. This has done nothing to improve democracy in the US, rather it has been a horrible destabilising influence on the world. If you are serious about improving US democracy then you aren’t going to get it under this authoritarian president and his henchman. Quite the reverse.
What interests, exactly? You mean our corporate interests? What possible interest do we have in the Middle East other than a continuing supply of oil.
Most of the threats to our democracy are internal. I can easily argue the biggest threat to democracy currently lives in the White House and is surrounded by sycophants who daily bow to the Toddler King, while using and manipulating the child to advance their agendas. If Trump plans to bomb Iran, he will not do so to protect democracy.
” Radiant” you forgot that the corporations and three letter agencies worked to prop up dictators, and ignored the citizens of these countries,who only wanted the kind of life that Americans once enjoyed. I’m talking about the middle class lifestyle that blue collar workers could aspire to, before 1980. These agencies also ran the drug trade here in the US, which I knew about long before it was covered in the media. Gary Webb, of the San Jose Mercury News did a great expose’s on this, and he was murdered as a result. There are patriotic Americans in government, but they aren’t the majority. American interests shouldn’t be corporate interests that serve the oligarchy! That’s what our military has been used for, especially in South America, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Some parts of Asia too. You can’t support dictators and expect to be loved. Pointing out problems isn’t unpatriotic.
We have what would in times past be called a STANDING ARMY in history these were feared because somehow they always found a way to start fighting some other group because this is what they had been trained to do. I agree with you that after world war 2 we should have stopped sending our military to fight, one of the things to fight was “communism”. In history, once allies won a war, they would start fighting among themselves just a we have done. Now we are finding other enemies to fight.
Republicans are now fighting with our military immigrants and citizens who do not agree with the Republican ideas. I would now be one of their enemies if they looked at me.
Eisenhower’s sage advice has gone unheeded.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
The thing is Radiant, who is protecting who from what? Democracy is under threat yes, but from the very people who claim to champion it. Trump serves his own interests, he always has, and he certainly does not give a crap about democracy.