Wars For Consumption

I can blame my type I diabetes on weigh gain, but I'll tell you, I am grateful for having contracted this disease. It forced me out of the Army on a medical discharge, and for that I have been given the last fifteen years of my life back to me, instead of having wasted it fighting pointless foreign wars.

I presumably would have stayed in the Army and would have been a senior Captain by now, had I not been given the boot in 1998. At that point in my life it might have been simply easier to stay in, as I was only an Army reservist. I could tolerate that. I learned that my local signal unit that I was assigned to was deployed thrice to Iraq and Afghanistan. I just happened to serve in-between wars. What dumb luck.

Since then, I've developed a fantastic contempt for serving in our armed forces. I do not support the troops. I don't ride a motorcycle in a Harley parade for fallen heroes. I don't support the war effort(s). I admonish my own boys not to join. I developed this contempt because I was unable to accept my nation's decision to engage war in 2001-2003, and our nation's prosecution of these wars since. Both were totally and completely voluntary, and have done nothing to promote our national security; indeed, they have only worked to decrease it in my opinion. I see them as nothing but an extension of American Consumption.

I chatted with a fellow Elk Grovian on the bus a few months ago who volunteered for a one year assignment to work as a civilian contractor in Iraq to rebuild their infrastructure, and ended up staying for three. He felt personally empowered by the experience, felt he was making a difference, and felt his efforts were much needed there. He suggested that the U.S. media routinely fails to report on how the U.S. presence there has positively impacted the lives of Iraqis.

That might be absolutely true. But truthfully, I don't give a fuck about how this Elk Grovian on a bus feels about providing indoor plumbing to a Diyala village. I don't give a fuck about building up a foreign infrastructure after having destroyed a sizable share of it during an invasion. It might feel good to do that, yes, but really, did we have to go to war to get this done? Does having invaded two countries, then build them back up, favor improved national security?

I don't think it does.

What it does do is create GDP. Going to war creates gross domestic product even if that product isn't produced domestically, and instead is produced foreignally (sic) by bombing foreign soil. No, I would like to see our wars simply declared "won," and then get out of there. But we can't do that, now can we, because we've entrenched ourselves so damn deep due to our evolving missions of "freeing the Iraqi people" and "removing regimes who harbor terrorists." These are high-minded and noble-sounding phrases, yes? The wars were sold as battles for freedom, for liberty, for democracy, for good-vs.-evil. We will continue to follow these tag lines for the next XX years, for as long as it takes for us to declare the wars finally won. We could have done that five months ago, or five years ago, I believe, but we chose not to. It will be another five years forward, or fifteen, for us to finally see the light and withdraw.

I see these wars as another facet of American Consumption. We think nothing of using a quarter of the world's resources to supply the wants of 5% of its population, and these wars, in effect, seek to continue access to that consumption, regardless of how we cloak them in "freedom," and "liberty." You can hear it at the water cooler at work amongst your coworkers -- "if we're gonna stay in Iraq for the next decade or two, at least make gas prices stay low for that time." Our consumers have a complete disregard for our wars; their sacrifice, back in 2003, was to climb into their vehicles to drive to the malls to do a little extra shopping. Mine is a simplistic and rather ostentatious view of our foreign policy but I believe it rings true.

I don't disregard our wars -- I actively regard them -- and I actively regard them as a total, complete waste of human capital. Interestingly, so does Representative Nadler of NY. Yet he was forced, due to party politics, to vote for the new war funding bill. Our own representatives can't vote their convictions.

Only in my America.