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Despite Trillions Spent, the US Military Hasn't Won a Real War Since 1945
(www.commondreams.org)
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Even on its own terms, the claim is wrong. We very clearly won the First Gulf War. We won in Kosovo. We flattened Grenada and Panama like pancakes. We won the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan easily, and dominated these countries for decades before the sheer cost of occupying such a remote territory ultimately removed us. We have occupied South Korea uncontested for 70 years and reduced North Korea to a hermit kingdom.
We pretty unequivocally won the Cold War.
The problem with all this "winning" is that it has come at the expense of our economic foundations. Or academic sector is crumbling. Our health care sector is three insurance companies in a lab coat. Our transportation and energy infrastructure is 50 years out of date. All that so we can throw trillions into a bloody mess on the frontier that we get to pretend means we're a Superpower.
And what happened after the invasions?
We hung out, playing duck hunt with any "military age male" out of diapers for the next twenty years.
rather optimistic qualifier
We, the people, did not win. The federal government of the United States at the behest of the interests of Capital won.
Living in the imperial core, eating the imperial slop, but claiming we've got no interest in the imperial frontier...
That opium didn't import itself
You criticize society yet you live in it
level take there.
This isn't criticism. You're suggesting "the people did not win" when Americans absolutely enjoy material benefits from our relationship with our satraps.
Very different to say "I criticize how my electronics and energy are produced" and to say "I just don't see any benefit in our relationship to cheap silicon chips and fossil fuels". Again, that opium didn't import itself.
This is criticism. The whatever "material benefits" the American working class "enjoy" comes at the overwhelming expense of the fruits of their surplus labor value that they are not entitled to to be used in exploiting the "free" markets of other nations for their resources at the most minimal costs and in turn taking and transforming those commodities into finished commodities to sell back to the workers in the exploiter countries at artificially inflated prices in order to scrape back the financial losses that are paid out to labor in the form of their paltry wages that barely sustain their existence enough to reproduce the cycle.
Capital very clearly won the First Gulf War. They won in Kosovo. They flattened Grenada and Panama like pancakes. They won the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan easily, and dominated these countries for decades before the sheer cost of occupying such a remote territory ultimately outweighed the profits. They have occupied South Korea uncontested for 70 years and reduced North Korea to a hermit kingdom.
Capital pretty unequivocally won the Cold War.
In the end of this vicious cycle, the only winners are the capitalists in their fetishistic pursuit of wealth.
The people of America did not get the benefit of the iraq war. You can try to use the labor aristocratic rhetoric here, but it falls flat because the surplus labor of the US worker was funnelled directly into defense contractors and then lit on fire. Whatever value was extracted from Iraq simply pales in comparison to what was wasted. The imperialist wars fought in my lifetime have not meaningfully actually served to maintain US hegemony, they've just been pointless wastes of life.
I'm a Houstonian and I watched this city's economy expand significantly during the war's execution.
I know people who personally profited from the Pentagon's spending glut. Haliburton HQ is a short drive from my house and one could argue my mortgage payment on a postage stamp property reflects the enormous real estate price inflation resulting from all that federal money flooding into the region.
Nevermind what Iraq did for the cost of energy, which directly benefits my city's native industry.
Iraq was, in a certain international geopolitical Sense, a labor disciplining war. It guaranteed that energy profits would continue to flow into the West.
One could argue this fight with Russia is a similar exercise in disciplining a rival energy exporter.
in addition to the takes on your use of "we" language, i'd like to press on whether what was done to grenada and panama were "real wars"
I'm an American. These sins are on my shoulders as much as anyone else's.
They're as real as any other mass mobilization of a national killing machine.
oh so you're a congressman? or a boot? or a "defense" executive? don't identify with the imperial machine, especially if you didn't ask for any of its crimes or the maintenance of the empire.
i guess you also think the rodney king beating was a fistfight? the addition of "real" means OP is trying to imply extra qualification.
Why didn't you include Libya?
So many wars, that one slipped my mind