America’s forever war strategy

America is unique among history’s warrior states—prioritizing endless wars, not ending them to achieve a new era of peace and stability.

The notion is anathema to the nation’s military, industrial, and scoundrel media establishment. Wars are waged for power and profits, no other reasons.

All post-WW II US wars were and continue to be acts of naked aggression against nations threatening no one—raping and destroying them, the human cost incalculable, the villainy unprecedented.

Throughout its history, America has been perpetually at war at home and/or abroad, never a time of peace and stability—a shocking indictment of its abhorrent agenda, the nation a democracy in name only.

Its high crimes against humanity continue endlessly in multiple theaters, wars against other targeted nations to be launched at its discretion—unthinkable nuclear war the greatest risk to our survival.

In Tuesday’s testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee members, Defense Secretary James Mattis said America isn’t winning in Afghanistan—nor anywhere else he failed to explain.

He promised a new Afghan war strategy by mid-July. It’s no different from the old one. Here it is before announced: Continue endless war. Get Congress to appropriate tens of billions more dollars for a lost cause. Claim slow and steady progress.

Later in the face of continued failure, promise another new course, much more money needed to pursue it.

Joint Chiefs Chairman General Joseph (“fighting Joe”) Dunford lied to Senate Armed Services Committee members, claiming America’s “competitive advantage is eroding . . . limiting our ability to project power.”

US military spending exceeds what all other NATO members, Russia and China spend combined, with all categories included, including black budgets—more than $1.5 trillion annually, the so-called defense budget one part of it.

The Pentagon and related budgets should be sharply slashed, not increased; America’s empire of bases dismantled; a new era of peace declared—for the first time in US history, swords turned into plowshares.

A polar opposite agenda is pursued. Permanent war is longstanding US policy, bipartisan-supported out-of-control militarism—at the expense of vital homeland needs, social justice and a nation fit to live in, drowning in hubris and arrogance, along with contempt for democratic values and rule of law principles.

No nation caused more harm to more people over a longer duration. None more greatly threatens humanity’s survival.

Endless wars define US policy—waged against invented enemies because real ones don’t exist. The late Gore Vidal’s “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace” explained how America became so reviled.

On America’s Middle East wars, he said “I don’t see us winning. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.”

He explained America is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.”

Peace is a nonstarter. It’s always been this way, notably post-9/11. The vast majority of House and Senate members support America’s imperial war agenda—including self-styled progressive Bernie Sanders.

They glorify them, falsely portraying them as humanitarian intervention and democracy building, ignoring the appalling human toll—genocide by any standard.

If a way isn’t found to end America’s imperial agenda, it’ll end us.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” Visit his blog at sjlendman.blogspot.com . Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

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