WAR WAR WAR WAR

According to President Obama,the rest of the world must take up the burden USers have shouldered for so many years: the burden of spending. With USers less and less able or willing to spend, the world's economy can't grow.

Of course, a very large portion of USer spending does anything but grow the economy in any but the most simplistic terms. Economists have known for years that the greatest returns on governmental spending come from investment in health care and education--and the US governments do very little of either. Instead, the US government spends massive amounts of money on the military--though any decent economist knows that military spending actually has a negative effect on economic growth.

The first six years of my life--from December of 1935 until December of 1941--the US was not at war. That's the longest period of warlessness I have known in 73 years.

The US was involved in World War II from 1941-1945, and in ther Korean War from 1950-1954. In 1958 we invaded Lebanon, but only got to stay for three months; we managed to destroy all of Beirut's streets, however, and a good deal of the port facility, which we had to rebuild. In 1962 we started training CIA infiltrators into North Vietnam, and began military operations in 1964. When we got out of Vietnam in 1974, we tried a little bit of war, invading North Korean to rescue some US Navy patrol boats that had strayed into North Korean waters: that was Gerald Ford's attempt at war. In 1978-79, while our European allies were trying to arrange a peaceful end to the take-over of the US Embassy in Iran (with its 49 or 51 CIA operatives held captive), Jimmy Carter stupidly tried to invade Iran; luckily, his attempt to start a war was foiled by US military technology--our helicopters crashed in the desert before they reached Teheran. From 1981 to 1989 Ronald Reagan waged his war against Nicaragua, and actually won a little war against Grenada. In 1989 George the First made war against Panama and his former good buddy Manuel Noreiga; then in 1991 he attacked Iraq. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq right at the start of his presidency in
1993, and then sent troops to Somalia and bombed the Balkans fiercely. We had a brief lull in war-making then--our longest since the end of World War II--until George the Second invaded Irag again, and Afghanistan. President Obama doesn't seem ready to end either of those wars of aggression, so we can probably expect to continue being at war through at least 2012, probably longer.

Since 1941 the US has been at war almost constantly. But war is our way of thinking, or dealing with anything. That's all we understand. We have also had a Cold War, a War on Poverty, and a War on Terror.

After the end of World War II, military personnel went back to wearing their dress uniforms in public. They weren't allowed off their bases in combat gear. But for the current wars--Iraq II and Afghanistan--the rules have changed: military personnel always wear their combat gear in public; even the military bands marching in New Orleans' Mardi Gras parades dress in camouflage outfits and boots. That keeps us conscious of our being at war. It makes us remember who and what we are: a warrior state, always ready to shoot and bomb anybody and everybody, always eager to go to war, in need of wars to distract us from the troubles inside our own borders.

If we could quit fighting wars, our economic situation would be a lot better. We would have money to spend on health care and education, on homes for the homeless and food for the hungry. We don't need to ask the rest of the world to start spending more; we just need to quit throwing all our money away attacking other countries, starting wars, buying weapons. We need to quit being belligerent--and stupid.