Do not repress the thoughts that continue to disturb you

November 12, 2018 2:54 PM

The Stories War Tells Me
Washington has spent between $900 billion and $2 trillion in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11 and certainly killed tens of thousands of Afghans in that never-ending war. Yet, just about everything that happens there is generally ignored here. That’s perplexing in a way. After all, we could have paid for the college education of every student in America for the last 25 years with $2 trillion.

The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them..

posted by adamvasco (21 comments total)

At some point, America will have to come to some sort of reckoning with the fact that war is the only full-employment program, the only education subsidy and the only social assistance that the Republican party will support.
posted by mhoye at 4:24 PM on November 12, 2018 [24 favorites]

It hasn't had to so far.
posted by PMdixon at 4:27 PM on November 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Service Guarantees Citizenship
posted by Thorzdad at 4:36 PM on November 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Unfortunately it does not.
posted by mhoye at 4:39 PM on November 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

The things we could do with all that money, if we weren't using it to create death and destruction. The actual cost of creating the destruction is only one half of the bill; the other half is the value of all that was destroyed, including the lives lost. Such a waste. I don't know why we do it. I really just don't understand. It just seems so clear to me that we shouldn't be doing this, and yet we do, we are. It makes me realize that a great many of my fellow Americans are just very different from me in ways that I will never understand or agree with. It's alienating.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:41 PM on November 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

This is definitely one of those situations where thinking, "We're all just a bunch of monkeys wearing pants, don't expect too much," is somewhat comforting.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:43 PM on November 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

They don’t want people to be too educated - it’s easier to sell them bullshit that way.
I’ve said it for decades: There are 3 things that make Americans stupid; television, junk food and the education system. It seems that the education here is better than, for example, in Congo, but really it’s trash.
posted by growabrain at 4:58 PM on November 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

I always find myself thinking, "We're all just a bunch of monkeys with anger management issues, and nuclear bombs," which is less comforting.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:59 PM on November 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

just a bunch of monkeys with anger management issues

People have largely forgotten that until the 70s there was lead in house paint. Until the 90s there was lead in gasoline. I think that if all goes well, we're approaching a point where our elected leadership isn't made entirely of people who spent their formative years breathing aerosolized lead.
posted by mhoye at 5:29 PM on November 12, 2018 [17 favorites]

"...monkeys with anger management issues, and nuclear bombs,"

Pretty sure Dr. Zaius didn't know about the telepathic bomb cult.
posted by clavdivs at 5:34 PM on November 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Fear and anger after 9/11 got us there, pride and profit keep us there.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 5:43 PM on November 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

It's like America is still suffering from hypervigilance and PTSD after WW2. America was at a huge technological deficit against Japan in the opening years of the war. At the Battle of Midway, the 41 Devastator torpedo bombers launched against the Japanese carriers scored zero hits, despite multiple point blank shots, due to how unreliable and poorly designed the torpedoes were. This was typical of the Mark 13 torpedoes in the early years of the war, which were only corrected by the end of 1943. Only 6 of the bombers made it back to the carrier, the rest shot to pieces by the far superior Zero fighters. None of the Wildcat escort fighters made it back to their carriers - their operational range being half that of the Japanese Zero fighters, they never had the range to fight and return home anyway and the survivors ditched in the ocean. It's really only luck, American heroism and the Japanese own missteps that allowed America to stabilize their position in the Pacific long enough for their scientists to develop better weapons that allowed them to match and then surpass the Japanese. I can easily imagine America never wants to be in a position of technological disadvantage again. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and there's no substitute for actual combat experience and field testing new weapons. Spending just 3% of your output for self defense actually looks conservative relative to perceived existential threats.
posted by xdvesper at 7:05 PM on November 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

After all, we could have paid for the college education of every student in America for the last 25 years with $2 trillion.

For much less, and to greater benefit, we could have paid for the college education of every student in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
posted by JackFlash at 7:28 PM on November 12, 2018 [13 favorites]

xdvesper: I'd say the memory of WW2 is fading out of the memory of the elites, except as a hagiography a la 'Saving Private Ryan'.

Also, I dispute your characterization of WW2. America was always going to out-produce Japan; Japan's only hope for a victory was from a failure of political will on the part of the USA, and they failed to appreciate the deep power of American racism.

I'd say it's more likely that America is suffering from PTSD derived from Vietnam. That explains the unwillingness to leave Afghanistan. There is no policy maker that wants to be associated with a 'helicopter evacuating the Saigon embassy' moment; we're so afraid of seeming weak that it's killing us. And so we carry on, sunk cost fallacy after sunk cost fallacy.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 11:25 PM on November 12, 2018 [8 favorites]

We have always fought and killed each other, often in very creative and unpleasant ways, and as our power had increased we've only done it at greater and greater scales, until now the entire planet is imperiled. This isn't some modern thing, nor is it unique to America. It has ever been thus.

We are our own enemy. We have the power to stop this—we are not just monkeys in pants, we are free moral agents—but I don't know that we ever will. Not in my lifetime, I don't think.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:49 AM on November 13, 2018

Interesting synchronicity LeRoienJaune! I was just reading a book review about the political leadership in Japan during the run up to their attack on Pearl Harbor. The book's main question was "Why did Japan decide to launch a war that it knew it was doomed to lose?" America had ~70 times Japan's industrial capacity and supplied most of its oil, so there were plenty of planners in Japan who recognized what a terrible idea the war was. And the book's answer to the question was basically the same one that you gave, that stopping the march to war would have been better in a global sense, but it also had personal political costs. So you have one official after another who supported the war publicly, leaving it to someone else to pay the cost of appearing weak by not supporting war.
posted by Balna Watya at 4:08 AM on November 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

The cost in money is shameful. The cost in lives is unethical. The cost in our ability to claim the moral high ground has harmed the world order in ways that will echo for centuries. Whether the trauma stems from WWII or Vietnam, staying in Afghanistan is akin to cutting yourself to stop feeling emotional pain. Afghanistan was supposed to be a quagmire for the USSR and not Vietnam: The Sequel for the USA. It didn't work and instead of working with the rest of the world to fix our mistakes, we double down on them.
posted by soelo at 8:19 AM on November 13, 2018

When U.S. forces and their Afghan allies rode into Kabul in November 2001 they were greeted as liberators. But after 17 years of war, the Taliban have retaken half the country, security is worse than it’s ever been, and many Afghans place the blame squarely on the Americans.
Three U.S. presidents have pledged to bring peace to Afghanistan.
posted by adamvasco at 8:37 AM on November 13, 2018

There is no policy maker that wants to be associated with a 'helicopter evacuating the Saigon embassy' moment; we're so afraid of seeming weak that it's killing us.

That's why we didn't leave Vietnam earlier, too. “...a Johnson administration Defense Department memo said that 70 percent of the reason the U.S. should remain in the Vietnam War was 'to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.'”
posted by kirkaracha at 9:45 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

we could have paid for the college education of every student in America for the last 25 years with $2 trillion.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . .This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chance for Peace speech, April 16, 1953
posted by kirkaracha at 9:48 AM on November 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

What bothered me the most about this most recent midterm elections is that no candidate seemed to be talking about "War". Every other election in my adult life, has had some talk or stance on "war".
posted by GreatValhalla at 7:52 AM on November 14, 2018 [1 favorite]