The United States is a military empire.
It’s not a democracy, it’s an inverted totalitarian state in which a guise of representative government is used as cover for an oligarchy — rule by the wealthy.
It’s no surprise, then, that the United States is, along with its genocidal partner Israel, bombing Iran in an aggressive, illegal, and unprovoked war. That’s what this country does. Over and over and over again.
This country was built by military conquest and either destruction or forced resettlement of indigenous people. The modern American lifestyle is maintained, as Thomas Friedman writes, by the “hidden fist” of the military:
“McDonalds cannot flourish without [arms manufacturer] McDonnell Douglas. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”
The same is true of the theocratic genocide state, Israel. It and its partner, the United States, are the largest purveyors of terrorism in the world.
They do this for a simple reason: power. In 1948, George Kennan, then the Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department, wrote in Memo PPS23 that “[The United States has] about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity...”
I share this quote over and over again, because it reveals nakedly, in their own words, the policy priorities of the United States government.
In the 70 years since Kennan wrote that memo, that “pattern of relationships” has been successfully devised and maintained. The US military is the largest in the world, with $1 trillion in annual funding and more than 2 million personnel (including reservists). And it wages war, openly and in the shadows, on all those who stand in the way of US hegemony.
The costs of this are incalculable. They range from the ecocidal, genocidal destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia to the horrors of Gulf War Syndrome to the toxic remnants of weapons manufactories in cities across the country to the legacy of depleted uranium rounds and birth defects in Fallujah. In Guatemala and El Salvador, the legacy of US-sponsored right-wing terrorism still echoes through shattered societies. In Nevada, Washington State, New Mexico, and across Oceania, indigenous lands remain irradiated from decades of weapons testing and nuclear waste which continues to seep into soils and groundwater which will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. The US military is the single largest polluter in the world, responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other entity.
Bullying psychopaths use violence because it is brutally effective in achieving their goals, and the people and the land are collateral damage. Missiles rain down on Iran. Thousands of civilians are dead. In modern war, 90% or more of casualties are innocent non-combatants: grandmothers and grandfathers, schoolchildren, shop owners, students, laborers. The mythology of precision bombs is a lie.
Wars always unleash unintended consequences. The overthrow of Iran’s prior socialist government by western powers led to the Khamenei taking power (with assistance from the US) in the Islamic Revolution. US weapons and funds bankrolled the mujaheddin and Osama Bin-Laden in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and led directly to 9/11. The invasion of Afghanistan created conditions for opium poppy cultivation to explode and led to the opioid epidemic on American streets. The fall of Saddam Hussein created the vacuum that was soon filled by ISIS. A million civilians died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The toppling of Gaddafi led to the breakup of Libya and the rise of an open slave trade in North Africa. The fall of Assad in Syria led former ISIS-affiliated militants into The People’s Palace. And the endless covert special operations spawned by the Global War on Terror fueled the rise of a black rifle worshipping patriarchal cult in the United States which has destabilized internal politics and driven a wave of violent white supremacism, domestic terrorism, ICE repression, authoritarian surveillance and policing, and fascist consolidation of power.
The ruling class doesn’t care. They care about maintaining and expanding their economic and military hegemony. They care about the great game. People are just pawns. So the bombs must fall. What will happen to Iran’s 93 million people and the rich ecology of the region isn’t important to them compared to the geopolitical value of removing a powerful adversary, consolidating US control over global oil supplies, and opening the way for expanded Israeli domination of the Middle East.
My activism began with opposition to war, back in the early 2000’s as the United States invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq. It was in this time that the political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, speaking from death row, recorded the audio I shared at the beginning of this post:
This war in Iraq isn’t the end; it’s the beginning of wars to come all around the world at the whim of the neo-cons in the White House.
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; war, war and more war. War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show.
This isn’t just a war on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims. It is ultimately a war on us all. That’s because the billions and billions that are being spent on this war — the cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes, even salaries for the 125,000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing, or to train and place the millions of workers who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone.
The war in Iraq is in reality a war against the nations’ workers and the poor, who are getting less and less, while the big defense industries are making a killing - literally.
What’s next? Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela? We’ve already seen the corporate media play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a war based on lies.
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies. We’re seeing the truth of this insight when we see the sad state of American education; the rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians because American drugs are just too expensive; the threat of privatization of Social Security; and the wave of repression that comes with an increasing militarized Police.
This is a war on all of us. And the struggle against war is really a struggle for a better life for the millions of folks who are in need here in this country. To fight against the war is really to fight for your own interests, not the false interests of the defense Industry or the corporate media or the White House.
Down with wars for empire.
We must stop the empire. All empires. This is our work in these times. And it won’t be easy. Join me in coming weeks to discuss how this can be done.
This is Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. I’m author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts, which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.
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