The media are beating the war drums, again. Graphic pictures of Muslim atrocities are circulating on the Internet. Congress critters are finding microphones and cameras to get in front of to pledge American money and munitions for Israel. Some are demanding war against Iran, which is said to have aided Hamas in planning its terror attack on Israel. “War, War, War. We need more war!”
But do we? Christians should be slow to call for violence, even violence organized at the nation-state level. We are called to work for peace: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Mat. 5:9. “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” Rom. 12:18. “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” Heb. 12:14. “Let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it.” Psalm 34:14; 1 Peter 3:11. “When a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.” Prov. 16:7.
There is another reason, in addition to mere Christianity and human decency, to be very slow to call for war. War has its own constituency because war is extremely profitable.
Whenever a congressman or senator starts sounding the war tocsins, you need to be very cautious and, indeed, very cynical. Anytime anyone from inside the Washington Beltway mentions war, or military aid, or even says something derogatory about some other country or its government, you should grab your wallet. Because that swamp creature is trying to bulldoze you into funding another pointless foreign war.
War—the military industrial complex—is one of the ways congressmen and senators who make $175,000 a year retire from congress after 28 years with a net worth north of $200 million. It certainly is not the only avenue of graft for our elected officials—there are hundreds of “ways and means” for elected representatives to profit (e.g., they’ve exempted themselves from insider trading prohibitions)—but the military-industrial complex is probably the most common. Our elected officials need massive weapons spending in order for their “public service” to make them filthy rich.
We know why they need war, why do we need it? After all, it is not their children who are killed or have their limbs blown off in godforsaken places like Afghanistan and Iraq. It is your children they want to sacrifice on the altar of the military-industrial complex.
So now we are asked to take on Iran on behalf of Israel. The “Neocons”—the writers, intellectuals, and opinion-shapers of the military-industrial complex—have been demanding war against Iran for decades; now they hope that the grisly images of terrorist atrocities in Israel will be enough to steer America toward the war they have long wanted.
Wait just a minute. Don’t we have recent experience fighting Muslims in the Muslim world? I seem to recall lengthy forays into Iraq and Afghanistan. How did those turn out? Or, as Dr. Phil might say, how is that working out for us? Did we learn anything—shouldn’t we learn something—from those military adventures?
In 2001, within a month after the 9/11 attacks, we began deploying troops to Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war went on for 20 years, two full decades, and killed 2,402 American soldiers, 1,822 “contractors” (mostly American mercenaries), and 18 CIA agents, and wounded a further 20,713, often catastrophically. It cost $2.313 trillion dollars—yes, that is trillion with a “t.”
Why were we fighting in Afghanistan? Al Qaida were based in Afghanistan and were protected by the Taliban, an Islamic government which ruled most of the country. We attacked the Taliban for having harbored Usama Bin Ladin and Al Qaida. We deposed the Taliban within the first few months, but we failed to bag Bin Ladin, who escaped into Pakistan. (Bin Ladin was protected by the Pakistani government for a decade; did we ever punish them for that? Just kidding—Pakistan has nukes.)
That was the first year; what were the last 19 years about? The 9/11 terrorists were motivated by religio-political Ideology, namely Salafist Islam. Hence, one would assume that we were stamping out Salafist Islam in Afghanistan and standing up a secular republic based upon the American principle of separation of church and state, religious freedom, equal rights for women and minority religions, a republic that would provide a broad liberal arts education for boys and girls, and introduce Christianity and Western literature to the masses. I’m just being silly, of course.
In fact, we enshrined Islam into the constitution we drew up for Afghanistan. Article two of that constitution made Islam the official religion of the country, and article three stated, “there shall be no law repugnant to 'the dogma and ordinances' of the sacred religion of Islam.” It should be unnecessary to note that “the dogma and ordinances of Islam” include sharia law, no criticism of Muhammad or Islam, the law of jihad warfare (and dhimmitude for non-Muslims), polygamy, child brides, stoning and amputation as judicial punishments, and that laws passed by elected legislatures are not valid; only sharia law is valid.
So the last 19 years of our military adventure in Afghanistan—which was the lion’s share of the casualties and the money spent—were devoted to defending one kind of oppressive Islamic government from another kind of oppressive Islamic government, and if that’s not worth 4,200 American lives and $2.3 trillion American dollars, where are your values?
In the end, the “Biden Administration” abruptly withdrew the military, abandoning America’s multi-billion-dollar investment in Bagram Airbase, as well as $85 billion worth of American equipment, including state-of-the-art helicopters, armored cars, tanks, rifles, ammunition, and night-vision goggles. So the Taliban were out of power for 19 years, and upon their return to power we compensated them with $85 billion in cutting-edge American military equipment—which will have to be replaced, and that means hundreds of millions spread around Washington D.C. by defense contractors.
Then there was the Iraq war (2003-2011), which started later and ended sooner than the war in Afghanistan, but got more of us killed and wounded. The war’s stated purpose was to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but Hussein was not a Salafist or a Muslim extremist of any description; he was a Baathist. The Baath Party were secular socialists who came to power in the late 1960s and seventies in Iraq and Syria. Neither Saddam Hussein nor the Baath Party’s ideology had anything whatsoever to do with Muslim terrorism or the 9/11 attacks on America.
We were told that Saddam Hussein had to be removed because he was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction” and diabolically hiding them from U.N. weapons inspectors. But no such stockpiles were ever found; they never existed. It was a big lie cooked up by the administration of George W. Bush, who held a grudge against Saddam Hussein because Saddam tried to have W.’s father, George H.W. Bush assassinated after the latter kicked him out of Kuwait in 1991. So 4,431 Americans were killed, 31,994 were wounded, and $1.1 trillion dollars was wasted in pursuit of what was essentially a clan vendetta of the Bush family. (By the way, these casualty figures understate the damage, because many veterans suffer from severe PTSD, and there are elevated rates of suicide.)
The end result was that a secular, non-Islamic government was replaced by a much more Islamic one that, since the country is majority Shia, is more likely to be influenced by the Shia regime in Iran. One decent thing we could have done was to give the Kurdish minority—spread over, and persecuted by, several different nation-states—their own homeland. So as not to offend Turkey, we failed to do even that. (Kurds are of the White race, so what did they expect?) Oh, and the chaos we caused allowed Muslim radicals to devastate and nearly destroy ancient communities of Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, who will likely never recover from our meddling. That is the balance sheet on the Iraq misadventure.
By now, it should be obvious that, in regard to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, we were conned by the grifters of the military-industrial complex, and their hideously corrupt lackeys in Congress. They were a fraud and an unconscionable waste of blood and treasure. These “forever wars” accomplish nothing of any strategic value to the United States. All they do is put money in the pockets of our venal elected representatives and build staggering mansions in Maryland and northern Virginia. They are a disgrace to our nation.
I am by no means a pacifist, but I am through being fooled by this nonsense. Donald Trump was never fooled by it. For those of you who missed my explanation for the white-hot hatred Washington Republicans have for the most popular person in their party, here is one of the more relevant passages:
“It was bad enough that Trump threatened the China project, but to make matters worse (from the point of view of the Uni-party), Trump does not do anything to please the military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex is another huge source of graft—military equipment, ordinance, and ammunition costs billions; the government pays for all that, and kickbacks in the form of campaign contributions (and who know what all else) goes into the pockets of almost everyone in Washington. The ideal conflict for the military industrial complex is a low intensity war that burns through equipment and ammunition at a steady pace, but doesn’t aim at any sort of decisive outcome, much less victory. Donald Trump doesn’t do forever wars. Trump ends wars, stops the death and destruction, and brings troops home.”
One of the strategies the military industrial complex uses to elongate normal wars into “forever wars” is to put absurdly restrictive “rules of engagement” on the American military, so that they cannot win. This technique was pioneered by Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War and perfected by Barack Obama in Iraq, Afghanistan, and with ISIS.
In 2014, in the wake of the chaos caused by America’s invasion of Iraq, and our even more stupid attempt to work with Sunni radicals such as Al Qaida to depose Syrian strongman Bashar Al-Assad, there sprang up a Muslim caliphate calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, funded by mineral wealth from oil fields it controlled. ISIS liked to capture Yazidi women and auction them off as sex slaves.
President Obama (who called the caliphate ISIL, the Islamic State in the Levant—apparently hoping they would expend into Lebanon, Israel and Palestine) nursed ISIS along with absurdly restrictive “rules of engagement.” For example, Obama would not allow the U.S. Air Force to bomb a truck that was hauling ISIS oil to market unless it could be shown and verified that the driver wasn’t coerced into driving the truck. Under these rules of engagement, it was obviously impossible to cut off ISIS’ oil wealth.
The Washington generals (like thoroughly modern Milley) apparently did not tell Trump, when he took office, about Obama’s absurdly restrictive rules of engagement. Trump had to find out for himself; once he finally found out, ISIS was gone in a month. Again, from my column The Radical Moment:
“Go back and watch the Republican debates from 2015-16, and you’ll notice that one of the issues was what to do about ISIS, the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.” Once Trump was able to find the right people, he swiftly ended the ISIS caliphate. One of Trump’s favorite stories is of a flight to Iraq in December, 2018, for a surprise Christmas visit to the troops. Trump met a general with the funny name of ‘Raisin Caine’. Trump got to talking with General J. Daniel “Raisin” Caine, who told him that he could destroy ISIS in a few weeks. The Washington generals hadn’t been telling Trump the truth, and he was frustrated over the lack of progress against ISIS. But armed with General Caine’s advice, Trump destroyed ISIS in about a month. (Even then, in outright mutiny, Mike Pompeo kept 2,000 soldiers in Syria that Trump had specifically ordered be brought home.)
Trump also had the Afghanistan war under control. He was negotiating with the head of the Taliban to end the war. One of his favorite stories is how he sent the Taliban leader a picture of his house to demonstrate that the U.S. military knew where he lived; the offended leader said, “why do you send me a picture of my house?” There were no American casualties in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of Trump’s administration.
Trump would have kept Bagram Airbase and of course would withdraw American troops and equipment only after all civilians were evacuated. Alas, we know what happened: Biden was installed, and the “Biden Administration” disgracefully ran from Afghanistan, leaving $85 billion in equipment, and needlessly getting 13 American marines killed in the process.
An unexpected fact about President Trump, who attended military school and hired generals for several administration posts, including for his initial chief of staff, is that he was a man of peace. He started no wars and diligently tried to end every war he had inherited. He made a friend of, and utterly neutralized, the man who was the biggest threat to America security when he took office, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He refused to launch a retaliatory strike against Iran for their downing of an American drone because it would have killed up to 100 Iranians as collateral damage.
Where is the Adventist Peace Fellowship? If you are for peace, aren’t you opposed to war? If the Adventist Peace Fellowship were really for peace and against war, they would support the only president in recent memory who did not start any new wars, and ended existing wars. But, alas, Leftist organizations are never about what they purport to be about. They’re only about promoting the Left and maneuvering the Left into power. David Horowitz quoted a young SDS communist saying, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.”
So what have we learned from our military adventures in the Dar al Islam? Our congress critters have apparently learned nothing, but then they are paid more than you or I could even imagine to be obtuse, to learn nothing from wasteful foreign wars. The rest of us, I hope, are beginning to learn to stay out of pointless foreign wars that kill people and benefit only the military-industrial complex and their agents in Congress.
None of this is to defend Hamas or its terror. I have nothing good to say about Hamas; their atrocities speak for themselves, atrocities that are not only religiously motivated, but arguably religiously required—a reliable hadith has Muhammad saying, “I have been made victorious through terror.”
Nor do I begrudge Israel the right to defend herself. But she can well defend herself without American tax dollars or, God forbid, American troops. There’s also this: The Mossad is pound for pound much better than the CIA. And the IDF, like the U.S. military, has its own military intelligence branch that is reputed to be the best in the world. They have the Gaza Strip wired; not a sparrow falls in the Gaza Strip that Israeli intelligence doesn’t know about. The idea that they completely missed a coordinated air, sea, and land attack that was at least a year in planning is a non-starter. Israel must have known something like this was coming; apparently, they did not worry too much about it, because they knew they would defeat it and that it would give them an otherwise unavailable freedom of maneuver to deal decisively with their enemies.
But you don’t need to be that cynical. You are free to think that Israeli intelligence is just incompetent, that they somehow forgot that they are, have always been, and will always be surrounded by implacable enemies who would love nothing better than a repeat of the Holocaust, only this time in Israel, and who are religiously committed to making that a reality. And the truth is that it has been 50 years since Israel fought a war, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which their existence was really threatened, so maybe they did forget.
Whatever. It doesn’t make any difference. We are broke. We, the American taxpayers, have no money for them—beyond the $270 billion we’ve given them over the decades; and the $3 to $6 billion we give them every year as a matter of course.
The United States are $33 trillion dollars in debt, and we are running annual deficits of more than $2 trillion dollars; the federal government takes in $5 trillion and spends over $7 trillion every fiscal year, as far as the eye can see. The bi-partisan and absolute abandonment of fiscal sanity is setting up an apocalyptic financial future.
The federal government already, today, spends almost $1 trillion a year on debt service—just paying interest on the debt. In ten years, when we are $53 trillion in debt, if interest rates were to go up to 10 to 12%, we will be forced to spend over $5 trillion a year on debt service, and would have little money for anything else. That means no social security, no Medicare, no defense budget, no nothing. Our only option will be to wipe out the dollar-denominated debt with hyper-inflation, which would make our currency worthless; think Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe.
Engaging in wars of choice to enrich the military-industrial complex and their vile toadies in congress is the luxury of rich nations, and we’re broke. We are forever done with forever wars. Next time you hear a congressman cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, you tell him exactly where to go, and I give you a plenary indulgence on any language necessary to make the point forcefully.
“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” Numbers 6:24-26.