If Firefighters Fight Fires and Crimefighters Fight Crime, What Do Freedom Fighters Fight?

That’s a George Carlin question that he answers eloquently and with his usual forces of logic. We stopped doing wars a half-century ago. These days we bomb and maim and destroy by a process we call police actions, conjuring up a vision of police-cars, sirens wailing and flashers flashing, pulling up to the scene of the war.

Which is all nonsense, but it’s convenient nonsense.

After the excuse of 9-11, when common sense might have had us pull a bit of diplomatic rank on Saudi Arabia, who counted 17 of the 19 attackers as citizens, we looked elsewhere. Saudi had a lot of oil we hungered over and were a major buyer of our weaponry. Afghanistan? not so much. So, we sallied forth (and fifth and sixth and twentieth) into a nation that had never been conquered, from Hannibal to Russia, to try our hand at freedom fighting.

It turned out the Afghans weren’t much interested. Twenty years later, and at a cost of $10 trillion, we slunk off as losers, tails between our legs (the ones that hadn’t yet been blown off), just as we had in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and (soon) Syria.

We know that war is harsh, cruel, destructive, and expensive. But do we know it doesn’t work?

Ostensibly, we entered the damned thing to prevent another attack on American soil. And those who cheered on Cheney and Bush argue that there hasn’t been such an attack. Ergo, it worked. Case closed. Where can we find another opportunity?

Okay, I would argue that preventing another attack was due far more to enhanced intelligence and by that, I mean surveillance, not any hoped-for increase in the IQ of either Bush or Cheney. What is proven, is that every drone attack on a wedding or 500 pound bomb dropped through the roof of a civilian building was a recruiting platform for radical Islam that money could not buy. Which makes war a failure as a business plan, as Madison Avenue could feed almost any addiction with $10 trillion.

What else did we buy for all that cash?

Certainly, we bought the hatred of anyone in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria who lost a child or family member to the white devils from America. You can add to that considerable pot the millions of peace-loving Muslims who watched their religion, their holy book and their brotherhood dragged through the mud, feces and urine of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, stripped naked by female U.S. soldiers, their genitalia held up to photographic ridicule.

Those reputational deficits were shared among all members of a fair-minded world among our allies, as well as those who sat, horrified, before the media representations in America. Those of us who were old enough to remember the images as the Nazi death camps were liberated had flashbacks of the worst elements of Nazi-Germany on display.

Now we see evidence of out-of-control mischief in Syria with the Military’s desperate attempts to destroy ISIS. Drone pilots in office buildings in America targeting suspected militants in Syria? Then going home for dinner with the family and putting their kids to bed? Really?

So, none of the hoped-for results of our international criminality worked in our favor.

It’s a very common thing among left-leaning, soft-hearted, anti-war folks in America and across the world to rise-up against war for humanitarian motives—and I agree with that. Certainly, the world must condemn in the most powerful way possible the Hitlers that overwhelm democratic nations such as Germany.

But, what about the aggressor when he is us? Is America exempt from such contemptuous regard because we are the most powerful nation in the world? I would certainly hope not and the international Criminal Court, along with the Geneva Convention hopes not right alongside us.

We Americans have allowed our successive governments to throw diplomacy out the window and into the yard, for someone else to haul off to sort the plastic from the paper and the garbage from the bottles. War has been defined as a failure in diplomacy. If that’s true—and one has to hope it is—we have continually and criminally replaced any serious efforts at diplomacy with the unending threat of war.

War, if Russia does not remove its troops from the Ukraine border. War, if China invades Taiwan. The cloud of the military hangs over the territory of 159 countries in which we have troops deployed. Good god, there are only 195 sovereign nations in the world. We have an American finger pointed at 80% of them. Is that a posture of friendship and support or intimidation?

As I have written before—and it will leave you shaking your head-- if you count the Indian Wars (the darkest part of our history), America has been at war somewhere in the world in all but 18 years since 1776.

It’s self-evident as well as statistically proven that we are a nation whose foreign policy is war.

Good night Ratheon, sleep well Northrop Grumman, sweet dreams McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin and all you small suppliers shopping for the kids this Christmas.