Defund the Military
The echoes of Vietnam are clear as we watch the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Analysts are noting the parallels of the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, connived to provide legal cover for the US military buildup in Vietnam with the congressional authorization of revenge on the 9-11 terrorists. It has been used to justify attacks on 14 nations, with 37 distinct military operations, enabling the longest sustained military engagements in US other than the war on indigenous peoples. The comparison of images of panic, desperation and destruction between the fall of Saigon and the evacuations from Kabul are strikingly clear.
The core of this comparison is deeper than these images. In both cases, in spite of vastly superior technological capacities, military weapons, economic resources and the willingness to inflict for massive death and destruction, the US military was ultimately unable to impose its will on people.
As Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK, observed recently
“After spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait.
Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic.”
Michael Moore made the comparison more bluntly. He said
As with the Viet Cong in Vietnam, we were defeated in Afghanistan by a rag-tag army that did not own a single helicopter, not a single jet fighter, no stealth bombers, no missiles, no napalm, no Burger King at the PX, not one air conditioned tent — not one! — not a goddamn tank in sight, just a bunch of guys with beards in pick-up trucks firing bullets into the air. Oh, and one other similarity with Vietnam — it was their country! Not ours. We were the invaders. In Vietnam we killed 2 million people. In Afghanistan, estimates of the dead go as high as 250,000.
Sonali Kolhatkar, a writing fellow for the Economy for All project summed up the experience, saying
the U.S. went to war against Afghanistan in October 2001 in order to punish the Taliban and Al Qaeda for the September 11 terrorist attacks, spent nearly two decades fighting a “war on terror,” and ended up leaving its ostensible enemy empowered both politically and militarily. American taxpayers, who naively backed the invasion and occupation, spent trillions of dollars in a brutal decades-long exercise in futility that resulted in lost lives, a traumatized Afghan population and a renewal of the forces that terrorized them.
While we may be pulling out of Afghanistan, we are not yet willing to pull out of empire building. Even as military bases are closing in Afghanistan, they are opening in Africa and the Pacific. As Brad Wolf and Patterson Deppen wrote, “Measured in terms of military bases, the United States has the largest empire in world history. It maintains 80 to 90 percent of all the foreign military bases on Earth.” In spite of claims that these bases are “to maintain peace, protect allies, defend trade routes, and support democratic ideals” research shows they have an opposite effect: “They increase global tensions, stoke local resentment, endanger allies, pollute the planet, and increase the likelihood of war.”
After more than a half century of experience, it should be obvious that we need to reimagine security and safety, not only in our local communities. but within our global families. Defunding the military is first step in opening up new spaces for establishing the kind of respectful, positive relationships that are essential for our survival.