The “Rationale” of America’s Wars

W.J. Astore

Reason and Rationality Have Little to Do with Them

It is often hard to understand the reasons for America’s wars, especially since World War II, but they always have a rationale backed up by lies.  The rationale for Vietnam was the containment of communism and the domino theory.  The lie was that U.S. naval ships had been attacked at Tonkin Gulf.  The rationale for Iraq was overthrowing a ruthless dictator and spreading “freedom.”  The lie was that he had WMD and that he was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks.

The real reasons for America’s many disastrous wars are opaque.  Domestic politics are almost always paramount.  No U.S. president wants to be accused of losing a war or appearing to be weak, so starting or continuing a war is considered as “strength.”  Congress doesn’t want to be accused of “tying the hands of the president” or of “betraying the troops,” so most members happily go along with wars.  The military, of course, always thinks it can win, and wars are good for promotions and power.  And military contractors, the “merchants of death,” are even more happy to make money off war.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961 warned America of the military-industrial complex, to which Ike had added Congress in an earlier draft.  Ike’s warning has been largely forgotten; even his own monument in DC obscures it.

In Washington today, the Democrats accuse the Republicans of being weak on Russia; the Republicans return the favor by accusing the Biden administration of being weak on China.  Military and industry are happy to play this blame game, knowing the Pentagon budget will soar as a result, as it has.  And thus a dangerous “new cold war” appears to be a certainty.

The folly and fallaciousness of America’s wars, along with their carnage, are enough to make any rational human angry, especially one who has served in one of these wars. Mike Murry, a Vietnam War veteran, is angry, and so am I.  Back in 2017, I wrote a piece on the atrociousness of the Vietnam War, to which Mr. Murry appended this comment.  It merits consideration by all thinking Americans.

The ”Rationale” of America’s Wars.  Comment by Mike Murry in 2017.

An excellent choice of words, “rationale.” Not the reason for doing something in the first place, but a conscious lie made up beforehand just to get things started, or an excuse invented afterwards to avoid accountability and, where required, the necessary punishment that true justice occasionally administers. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler once said that we have only two acceptable reasons for going to war: to defend our homes or defend the Constitution. In not a single case after World War II has either of these conditions applied, so that none of the pointless and ruinous fighting — I won’t dignify these Presidential/Career Military misadventures by calling them “war” — has had any justifiable reason or purpose. Not surprisingly, no Congress has declared war on another nation state since 1941 because no nation state on planet earth has attacked either American homes or America’s Constitution. The United States has not just “gone abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” as our sixth President, John Quincy Adams, warned us against foolishly doing, but has invented imaginary hobgoblins at home before even setting out to vanquish them on the far side of the globe.

Of course, Smedley Butler only made his remarks after serving for thirty years as an admitted “gangster for capitalism,” probably the best summary description of the U.S. military offered to date by one who ought to know. Today, as for the past seventy-plus years, the U.S. military simply fights — aimlessly and disastrously — for the sake of fighting. The fighting has no “reason” other than to provide a steady stream of outrageous corporate CEO bonuses, stockholder dividends, and the pensions and perquisites of retired senior military officers. This Warfare Welfare and Make-work Militarism has secondary beneficiaries, of course, most notably the hothouse orchids, special snowflakes and privileged peacock pugilists known as United States as “political leaders.” Naturally, the feeding and maintenance of this system of corrupt cronyism requires a death grip on over half the nation’s discretionary budget. As George Orwell wrote in “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” (the book-within-a-book from 1984):

“The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.” 

In other words, the entire U.S. military/security monstrosity — which I like to call the Lunatic Leviathan — has only one purpose: to suck the life out of the domestic economy so that the productivity of the people’s labor will not result in the betterment of their station in life, which might in due course result in the discarding of America’s useless parasitic economic and political “elites.” Any transparent euphemism designed and deployed to disguise this ugly, fundamental truth properly deserves the label “rationale.” In no way do the usual and time-dishonored obfuscations amount to a reason. Reason has fled the United States, replaced by a deserved and rancid Ridicule. The country now consumes itself, lost in its own vicarious fears and fantasies featuring the celluloid exploits of our vaunted Visigoths vanquishing visions of vultures somewhere, someplace, at some time, until … eventually … after some “progress” and “fragile gains” … as T.S. Eliot wrote of The Hollow Men:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. 

Men and women so hollow that you can hear their own bullshit echoing in them even before they start moving their jaws and flapping their lips to begin lying.