Now I Understand Why They Hate Us

By David Hilfiker, AlterNet. Posted January 12, 2009.

But Osama bin Laden and many of the worlds Muslims cared and were impassioned. On Oct. 7, 2001, a few weeks after he unleashed the deadly attacks of 9/11, bin Laden released a video he in which he offered three reasons for his enmity toward the United States; one of them was the Iraq sanctions. "One million Iraqi children have thus far died, although they did not do anything wrong," bin Laden said. Certainly everyone I talked with in Iraq in December 2002 knew why their children were dying; they knew who had blasted their country back into Third World poverty. They knew who was responsible.

A Sense of the Beneficent Amid Pervasive Militarism

I believe that my country has become something different -- almost opposite to -- the country most Americans believe we live in. We see ourselves as benign. We see ourselves as the light of the world. We interpret our actions -- whether military adventures, economic initiatives or cultural exports -- as good and as welcomed by the rest of the world. (In 2005, a majority of Americans believed that most people in the world supported the invasion of Iraq!) We see ourselves as the (perhaps somewhat tarnished) white knight. In other words, we are holding on to a vision that might have had some truth in it right after World War II but that no longer holds true. We see ourselves as a great hope for the rest of the world; others see us as "the greatest danger to world peace."

Although it now shocks me how long it has taken me, how much evidence I previously hid from, only recently have I become conscious of the pervasiveness of American militarism, how it defines who we are and how we are perceived. What do I mean by "militarism?" I mean a general belief within a country that an overpowering military is necessary for national security and a general willingness to spend virtually unlimited funds for that purpose. Militarism means a national conviction that the country must be prepared to use its military power aggressively to maintain its interests. In practical terms, it means that the nation is prepared to turn very quickly toward military solutions to international problems without allowing other measures a real chance to work. The threat of military response becomes ever-present in international conflict and so becomes, at least as far as other countries are concerned, our first response to conflict.

Consider a few examples over the last years: It is militarism that breaks off reasonably successful diplomatic negotiations with North Korea, labeling the country among the "axis of evil" and making take-it-or-leave-it demands not so subtly backed up by our military. It is militarism when the nation refuses to consider internationally coordinated police and intelligence action as a response to al-Qaida's attack on 9/11, but instead insists on invading Afghanistan. It is militarism to refuse to allow the United Nations inspections team to finish its work in Iraq (no weapons of mass destruction had been found) in order to invade in 2003. It is militarism that rebuffs a direct high-level appeal to the Bush administration from Iran (in 2003) to enter into negotiations (in which Iran had suggested trading its nuclear aspirations for a guaranteed non-aggression pact), instead labeling Iran among the "axis of evil" and then leaking repeated threats to invade or bomb military targets.

Since 1941, the United States has been continuously engaged in, or mobilized for, war. That that fact does not seriously disturb or even surprise most of us is a powerful sign of how inured we have become to our nation's militarization. After conflicts prior to World War II, the United States disbanded or sharply reduced its combat forces and military budget when the fighting was over. But instead of reining in our military after World War II, we entered immediately into the Cold War. Even after the demise of the Soviet Union, when there was literally no military threat, our military spending barely hiccuped as we continued our mobilization for war. In addition to the massive expenditures in the Cold War, between the end of World War II and 9/11, the United States conducted approximately 200 overseas military operations in which our forces attacked first. In no case did a democratic government come about as a direct result, although we installed and protected numerous dictators, including the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile and Mobutu in Congo/Zaire, not to mention the series of American-backed militarists in South Vietnam and Cambodia. For decades we also ran what can only be called terrorist operations against Cuba and, for a shorter time, in Nicaragua.

As he was leaving office, President Eisenhower famously warned us against the military-industrial complex, in which the extraordinary power of the economic interests that profit from war push us in that direction. But Eisenhower was not the only president to warn us against war. James Madison, the chief author of the Constitution and later a president wrote, "Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it [contains the seed] of every other. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." George Washington cautioned against a standing army for similar reasons.

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David Hilfiker, M.D., spent his medical career as a physician with low-income people in rural Minnesota and inner-city Washington. He is the founder of Joseph’s House, a home and hospice for homeless men and women with AIDS and/or cancer. No longer in active practice, he is a lecturer and teacher and author of books and numerous articles on poverty and other subjects. His most recent book is Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen.

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