The Business of War

 Mourners carry the coffin of a child at the funeral procession for those killed in an airstrike on a bus in Yemen. Photograph: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images (Photo from The Guardian)

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With the constant barrage of news stories regarding presidential tweets, cyber attacks, and market trends, we can easily forget that we are still a nation involved in wartime maneuvers. Last week, it turns out, a U.S. made bomb killed 40 children on a Yemen school bus. In that same attack, eleven adults were also killed and 79 injured. According to an article in The Guardian, the weapon in question was “a laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin, one of many thousands sold to Saudi Arabia as part of billions of dollars of weapons exports.”

Our American Empire has troops stationed across the globe, and war seems to be one of our biggest exports. Democrats and Republicans alike are all too ready to make weapons of war our abiding legacy. The Guardian article goes on to say,

The Obama administration offered Saudi Arabia more than $115bn in weapons in the course of its two four-year terms, more than any previous US administration, according to a report in 2016.

After the bombing of a funeral hall in October 2016 that killed 155 people, Barack Obama halted the sale of guided munition technology to Saudi Arabia, on the grounds that improved precision would not save civilian lives if the Saudi-led coalition were not taking care to avoid hitting non-military targets. The sales were reinstated by the Trump administration’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in March 2017.

Whether led by a Nobel Peace Prize recipient or a real estate mogul of reality TV fame, America seems bent on fueling the war industry. It is so much a part of our daily business that news of wartime deaths in a distant country draws little attention. Most Americans have little appetite for further large scale troop deployment, yet by keeping the atrocities of war at a distance we help to set the stage for future wartime endeavors.

Realities of War

In 2014, in an essay, “Let’s Be Honest about War,” I stated that “if we truly saw the realities of war, most of us would be absolutely repulsed by the notion.”

In that essay, I included some notes on the realities of war:

On the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, Paul Fussell wrote a piece for The Atlantic Monthly titled, “The Real War.” In that article, Fussell made the case that most Americans have no notion of the true horrors of war. When we were engaged in WWII, reporters had an unwritten understanding that the true nature of war would not be stated for the sake of keeping people back home optimistic as well as for the purpose of not jeopardizing the war effort. Such a widespread lack of understanding about what front line troops were facing, Fussell points out, led to immense cynicism on the part of American military personnel reflected verbally in such acronyms as SNAFU, TARFU, and FUBAR.

No one wrote about conditions on the front line where soldiers had no latrines, lived in filth, saw the internal organs of their buddies scattered about, and faced the growing knowledge that they would likely not make it out alive. Fussell quotes General Eisenhower who wrote a rare explicit passage on the carnage of war in Crusade in Europe, describing the battlefield at the Falaise Pocket: "It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh." Fussell goes on to tell of why the public was so unaware of the realities or WWII:

How is it that these data are commonplaces only to the small number who had some direct experience of them? One reason is the normal human talent for looking on the bright side, for not receiving information likely to cause distress or to occasion a major overhaul of normal ethical, political, or psychological assumptions. But the more important reason is that the news correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the war effort, and so the large wartime audience never knew these things. As John Steinbeck finally confessed in 1958, "We were all part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. . . . I don't mean that the correspondents were liars. . . . It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies." By not mentioning a lot of things, a correspondent could give the audience at home the impression that there were no cowards in the service, no thieves or rapists or looters, no cruel or stupid commanders. It is true, Steinbeck was aware, that most military operations are examples of "disorganized insanity," but the morale of the home front could not be jeopardized by an eyewitness's saying so. And even if a correspondent wanted to deliver the noisome truth, patriotism would join censorship in stopping his mouth. As Steinbeck noted in Once There Was a War, "The foolish reporter who broke the rules would not be printed at home and in addition would be put out of the theater by the command.”

Recognizing What War Entails

Anyone who advocates for war should first take into account what war truly entails. “The Real War,” by Paul Fussell is one excellent source, describing conventional war in stark and unromantic terms (Fussell's article can be found here). Those religious leaders and politicians who support national military action must make themselves aware of the “disorganized insanity” of battle. They must acknowledge the practices of rape, mayhem, bodily dismemberment, civilian death, and community destruction that are unleashed in wartime. We as a people must acknowledge that many soldiers we send into battle will return badly damaged in body and spirit. They will never overcome the personal horror they witnessed, to which we are blithely oblivious. We as a nation must realize the immense destruction that we leave in our wake when we choose war, as evidenced most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a result of more than a decade at war in the Middle East, we have brought debt to ourselves as well as our children and grandchildren. We have also brought about the destruction of infrastructure and the impossibility of a normal life to hundreds of thousands of people. We have made new enemies and bought at least another generation of ill will. We have forgotten about being a country that welcomes “the tired, the poor and the weary” and have focused on being an empire protecting energy sources. The democracy we pretend to be trying to export is becoming less and less recognizable here at home. In short, our military actions in recent years have brought horror to people abroad and a poverty of national purpose at home.

Our Continued Exporting of War

Those were some of the things I noted in that 2014 essay. Though we have not launched any major military actions in the intervening years, we have continued to facilitate war efforts in ways that the public no longer seems to notice, as evidenced by the bombing in Yemen last week which raised little discussion here at home.

In addition, we continue to ignore the plight of refugees who have been uprooted from their homeland by the war efforts that we have spawned by our reckless foot prints in the Middle East. When we are not putting troops on the ground, we are shipping guns and bombs to other factions. Since we once armed a rebel leader named Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, we should know that even our best intentions are unpredictable when we fuel wartime efforts.



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