What we--the US--have become: War as "business"

You might have missed that, this last week, some new papers were found, helping give information on President Dwight Eisenhower's final farewell speech to the nation, in which he warned us of the buildup of a "military-industrial complex."

Boy was he prescient.  Look what we've become.  Look at what we've done and what we're still doing.

I've thought, aloud, several times about what President and former General Eisenhower saw iin our government that he knew he needed to warn us of this.  Now we can see better just what that was:

The papers show that Eisenhower and his staff spent two years preparing for his final speech to the nation. One document features a typewritten note from the president lamenting that when he joined the military in 1911, there were 84,000 Army soldiers – a number that ballooned roughly tenfold by 1960.



"The direct result of this continued high level of defense expenditures has been to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions, where none had existed before," he wrote in the passage, a variation of which reached the delivered speech on Jan. 17, 1961.

The craziness, lunacy and insanity of what we're doing across the world in general but in Iraq, specifically, is that we moved in, we blew them up, we tore apart their society, declared that the war is "over" but remained in the country,  with approximately 50,000 troops and we, the citizens of the US, are okay with that.
 
That is crazy.
 
The soldiers are our brothers and sisters, family and friends.  We should not be continually occupying Iraq---or the rest of the world, for that matter.
 
Why are we still in Italy?  Germany?  Okinawa?  So many parts of the world.  It's crazy and we're letting it happen.  We're far too acquiescent.  It's like we're still fighting "the last war" and/or the Cold War by being in Europe and elsewhere.  We need to recognize and then shrink and dismantle the US military/war "empire" we've created.  Yes, we need to shrink the military and mightily.  We won't be weaker for it--we'll be stronger.  And smarter.
 
We need to speak up.  We need to have these discussions with our government representatives.  By our silence, we are complicit in the wars and killings and bombings and occupations of countries.
 
In closing, I'm struck by the simpleness but the truth and beauty of the following brief quote.  It's something we have to keep in mind, going forward, I think:
 
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."  --Jeannette Rankin

I think General/President Eisenhower would agree.

 

 

With appreciation and recognition to "War is Obsolete", a Facebook group, for a quote and some video ideas.

Links::  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/10/eisenhower-speech-papers-military_n_795309.html
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/12/20/101220ta_talk_newton
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11eisenhower.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a24

You can read President Eisenhower's complete farewell speech to the nation here.  It is brilliant and quite a warning to us all, even now--perhaps particularly now:

http://moravings.blogspot.com/2009/02/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell.html