Friday, October 10, 2014

War

Perpetual war admitted by US rulers.
"Glenn Greenwald has a fascinating piece in The Intercept making the case that the "war on terrorism" is going to be "endless," as he puts it. From a decade to twenty years to Leon Panetta’s recent pronouncement that "I think we’re looking at kind of a thirty years war," Greenwald painstakingly documents statements by Obama administration officials essentially showing that they see the war as having no geographic or temporal limit. And that’s not the worst of it: he goes on to show that not only Panetta but also the person "likely to be the next American president" is projecting our current Middle East intervention into the indefinite future.
Whether Hillary Clinton is "likely" to occupy the White House is debatable, but it’s hard to argue with Greenwald’s conclusion. "At this point," he writes,
"It is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. US officials are now all but openly saying this. ‘Endless War’ is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.""
As I've written for nearly a decade.
"Indeed, all of this is indisputable, and yet it leads us to ask: Why? What are we getting out of this Sisyphean slaughter? Greenwald thinks he has the answer;
"It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the "homeland security" and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the ‘defense sector’).""
He's no genius. He's just parroting Eisenhower.
"Yet this hardly explains enough: after all, there are limits to what the United States – or any single nation – can do to determine the course of world events. Our resources are finite. So why are they being stretched to the breaking point? Why are we flirting with economic disaster as more and more of our tax dollars are shipped overseas to prop up a constantly-threatened empire while our economy is suffering from the "vampire effect" – the draining of productive resources (capital) into the sinkhole of imperialism? Is it to feed the profit margins of Raytheon? Is it to make Eli Lake feel better? "
No. This is a case of the tragedy of the commons. Each war profiteer is trying to maximize his own profits before the government collapses.

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