The same week in which a Washington Post columnist claimed that interracial marriage makes people gag, a USA Today columnist has proposed using the U.S. military to aid those suffering in the Philippines — as a backdoor means of getting the U.S. military back into a larger occupation of the Philippines.
While the Philippines’ representative at the climate talks in Warsaw is fasting in protest of international inaction on the destruction of the earth’s climate, and the U.S. negotiator has effectively told him to go jump in a typhoon, the discussion in the U.S. media is of the supposed military benefits of using Filipinos’ suffering as an excuse to militarize their country.
The author of the USA Today column makes no mention of the U.S. military’s history in the Philippines. This was, after all, the site of the first major modern U.S. war of foreign occupation, marked by long duration, and high and one-sided casualties. As in Iraq, some 4,000 U.S. troops died in the effort, but most of them from disease. The Philippines lost some 1.5 million men, women, and children out of a population of 6 to 7 million.
The USA Today columnist makes no mention of Filipinos’ resistance to the U.S. military up through recent decades, or of President Obama’s ongoing efforts to put more troops back into the Philippines, disaster or no disaster.
Instead, our benevolent militarist claims that budgets are tight in Washington — which is of course always going to be the case for a government spending upwards of $1 trillion a year on militarism.
He claims that the United States “stations troops throughout the world in the hope of shaping the political environment so as to avoid sending them into combat” — a perspective that ignores the alternative of neither sending them into combat nor stationing them abroad.
The terrorist attacks that the U.S. uses to justify its foreign wars are, according to U.S. officials, provoked by the over a million troops stationed in 177 countries, the drone strikes, and other such “preventive” measures.
“[D]eploying military resources for disaster relief is a remarkably effective — and inexpensive — investment in the future. One of the largest such deployments in history, the deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and other assets following the Asian tsunami of 2004, is estimated to have cost $857 million. That’s roughly the price of three days’ operations in Afghanistan last year.”
Or of 15,500 teachers in U.S. schools, or of enormous supplies of far more edible food than an aircraft carrier full of troops and weapons.
Much of the world has long-since learned to fear U.S. Trojan horses. As I noted in War Is A Lie:
“By 1961, the cops of the world were in Vietnam, but President Kennedy’s representatives there thought a lot more cops were needed and knew the public and the president would be resistant to sending them. For one thing, you couldn’t keep up your image as the cops of the world if you sent in a big force to prop up an unpopular regime. What to do? What to do? Ralph Stavins, coauthor of an extensive account of Vietnam War planning, recounts that General Maxwell Taylor and Walt W. Rostow, ‘. . . wondered how the United States could go to war while appearing to preserve the peace. While they were pondering this question, Vietnam was suddenly struck by a deluge. It was as if God had wrought a miracle. American soldiers, acting on humanitarian impulses, could be dispatched to save Vietnam not from the Viet Cong, but from the floods.'”
What a blessing! And how well it helped to prevent warfare!
Of course, today’s enlightened punditry means well. The thought of Southeast Asians marrying their daughters might make some of them gag, but philanthropy is philanthropy after all, even if we’d never stand for some other country stationing its military here on the excuse that it brought some food and medicine along. Here’s the USA Today:
“The goodwill the tsunami relief brought the U.S. is incalculable. Nearly a decade later, the effort may rank as one of the most concrete reasons Southeast Asian nations trust the long-term U.S. commitment to a strategy of ‘Asian rebalancing’ The Obama administration recognizes the value of disaster relief. As the Pentagon attempts to shift more of its weight to the Asian Pacific region while balancing a shrinking budget, this could turn out to be one of the best decisions it could make.”
But good will is dependent on not dominating people militarily and economically — yet that seems to be exactly the goal.
What’s wrong with that, some might ask. The sneaky abuse of disaster relief might be thought to give aggressive war “prevention” an undeserved bad name were it not for the fact that nobody is threatening war on the United States and nobody is about to do so. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to one of our top veteran warmongers, via PopularResistance:
“During a recent speech in Poland, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned fellow elitists that a worldwide ‘resistance’ movement to ‘external control’ driven by ‘populist activism’ is threatening to derail the move towards a new world order. Calling the notion that the 21st century is the American century a ‘shared delusion,’ Brzezinski stated that American domination was no longer possible because of an accelerating social change driven by ‘instant mass communications such as radio, television and the Internet,’ which have been cumulatively stimulating ‘a universal awakening of mass political consciousness.’ The former U.S. National Security Advisor added that this ‘rise in worldwide populist activism is proving inimical to external domination of the kind that prevailed in the age of colonialism and imperialism.'”
If this master warmonger recognizes that the age of colonialism and imperialism is gone, how do millions of Americans still manage to bark out the Pavlovian response “What about the next Hitler?” whenever someone proposes ending war?
The fact is that no governments are plotting to take over the United States. Old-fashioned imperialism and colonialism are as gone as 1940s clothing and music, not to mention Jim Crow, respectability for eugenics, established second-class status for women, the absence of environmentalism, children hiding under desks to protect themselves from nuclear bombs, teachers hitting children, cigarettes being good for you. The fact is that 75 years is a long, long time. In many ways we’ve moved on and never looked back.
When it comes to war, however, just propose to end it, and 4 out of 5 dentists, or doctors, or teachers, or gardeners, or anybody else in the United States will say “What about the next Hitler?” Well, what about the dozens of misidentified next-Hitlers of the past 70 years? What about the possibility that within our own minds we’re dressing up war as disaster relief? Isn’t it just possible that after generations of clearly aggressive, destructive, and criminal wars we describe militarism as a response to the second-coming of Hitler because the truth wouldn’t sound as nice?