US Wars
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 27 Mar 2023
John Scales Avery, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
20 Mar 2023 – Over 300 Wars!
As documented in the Wikipedia timeline of U.S. wars, and in the Wikipedia list of wars involving the United States, the country has been more or less continuously at war ever since the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783, which established the US as a nation. Often several wars took place simultaneously. Many of North America’s early wars were aimed at eliminating the First People, the native inhabitants of the country, and were thus genocidal in nature.
Global Hegemony through Military Force
In recent years, the United States has aimed at “full spectrum dominance”, military dominance over all other nations, global hegemony through military force, and the construction of an empire. We should remember that the threat or use of military force violates both the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.
Incredibly Bloated Military Budgets
The United States Military-Industrial Complex seems to have a hold over both Republicans and Democrats. With almost no dissenting voices, both parties recently voted to give roughly a trillion dollars for weapons and other military purposes
Militarism Is the US National Religion
Here are some quotations from an article by William Astore:
“We believe in wars. We may no longer believe in formal declarations of war… but that sure hasn’t stopped us from waging them. From Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, the Cold War to the War on Terror, and so many military interventions in between, including Grenada, Panama and Somalia, North Americans are always fighting somewhere, as if we saw great utility in thumbing our noses at the Prince of Peace (that’s Jesus Christ, if I remember my Catholic Catechism correctly)
“We believe in weaponry, the more expensive the better. The underperforming F-35 stealth fighter may cost $1.45 trillion over its lifetime. An updated nuclear triad (land-based missiles, nuclear submarines, and strategic bombers) may cost that already mentioned $1.7 trillion. New (and malfunctioning) aircraft carriers cost us more than $10 billion each. And all such weaponry requests get funded, with few questions asked, despite a history of their redundancy, ridiculously high price, regular cost overruns, and mediocre performance. Meanwhile, North Americans squabble bitterly over a few hundred million dollars for the arts and humanities…”
The U.S.-led Invasion of Iraq
March 20, 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq. It was based on a lie, which asserted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When Iraq was invaded, no such nuclear, biological or chemical weapons were ever found. However, as documented in the following article, the invasion ultimately resulted in more than 5 million Iraqi deaths.
Many of those who died were children, deprived of food and medicines by postwar sanctions.
War Has Become Prohibitively Dangerous
War was always madness, always immoral, always the cause of unspeakable suffering, economic waste and widespread destruction, and always a source of poverty, hate, barbarism and endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge. It has always been a crime for soldiers to kill people, just as it is a crime for murderers in civil society to kill people. No flag has ever been wide enough to cover up the atrocities of war.
But today, the development of all-destroying thermonuclear weapons has put war completely beyond the bounds of sanity and elementary humanity.
Today, the existing nuclear weapons have half a million times the power of the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thermonuclear war would destroy human civilization, together with most of the plants and animals with which we share the gift of life.
Research has shown that firestorms produced by a nuclear war would send vast quantities of smoke into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, and blocking the hydrological cycle. The climate would become very cold for a period of about ten years. Human agriculture would fail. Plants and animals would also be killed by the nuclear winter.
Can we not rid ourselves of both nuclear weapons and the institution of war itself?
We must act quickly and resolutely before our beautiful world is reduced to radioactive ashes, together with everything that we love.
Many of my freely downloadable books can be found at the following web addresses:
__________________________________________
John Scales Avery, Ph.D., who was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy and received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent books are Information Theory and Evolution and Civilization’s Crisis in the 21st Century (pdf). Website: https://www.johnavery.info/
Tags: Anglo America, Cultural violence, Culture of Violence, Direct violence, Pentagon, Rogue states, Social violence, Structural violence, US Military, USA, War Economy, Warfare
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 27 Mar 2023.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: US Wars, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.