Now I Understand Why They Hate Us

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

Evidence of our extraordinary militarism is everywhere. Although the exact number is unknown, the United States has at least 731 (according to Pentagon statistics) -- but more probably close to 1,000 -- foreign military bases around the world in more than 130 countries. Although many of those bases are small, each nevertheless represents American military presence in another country. Why are they there, except to project military power and threat? If one is trying to understand the anger in the rest of the world toward the United States, one place to start is imagining, say, German military bases in your community surrounded by the usual bars and brothels. Young GIs who speak no English nor know American customs speed drunkenly through your community on their time off, and there is the too-frequent assault or rape of young women, most of which go unprosecuted. Then imagine that your community is socially and religiously very conservative and that the base has been there for decades.

In September 2002, the Bush administration published an updated United States National Security Strategy that, for the first time, elaborated the doctrine of "preventive war." According to this policy, the United States will not wait until threats against us are "fully formed" but will act militarily to prevent them from developing. In other words, if the president perceives a growing threat to U.S. national interests, our military will force its removal. This unilateral doctrine directly flouts centuries of international law, which forbid attacks upon a country unless that country has already attacked or attack is "imminent" (such as when an enemy's troops are massed on one's borders). This newly formulated, and clearly illegal, doctrine justified our invasion of Iraq, much as Japan used its doctrine of preventive war to justify the attack on Pearl Harbor when it wanted to prevent what its leaders perceived to be the U.S. military threat in the Pacific from becoming fully formed.

Cost

One measure of our extraordinary militarism is the amount of money we spend arming ourselves. Total military expenditures constitute almost $1.5 trillion per year or 54 percent of federal discretionary spending. No other country spends anything remotely similar to this; in fact, the United States spends more than the next highest 16 countries combined. U.S. military spending is currently 47 percent of the world's total.

Militarization in our country has become self-sustaining and now drives our foreign and domestic policies rather than the other way around. The economic interests alone of those who benefit from military spending are staggering. Military contractors have dispersed their operations throughout the country so that virtually every congressperson has military spending in his or her district. In fact, lobbyists do not have to argue the utility of continued spending but only point to the economic importance to the congressperson's district. This is how projects that the Pentagon does not even particularly want end up in the budget. This is the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower so strongly warned against. The political power of the recipients of military spending is overwhelming.

As a writer, I struggle to find the words to express my shock, anger and shame at discovering that my country has been among "the bad guys," responsible for the deaths of millions of innocents in the last half-century, and in the view of most of the world's citizens (according to numerous polls of people in other countries) the greatest threat to world peace. It seems, I suppose, a bit dramatic -- an expression of the hyperpartisan posturing that has characterized politics for the last 15 years -- to express shock, anger and shame at something that has been going on my entire life, right under my nose. But, like the legendary frog that does not notice the water temperature rising in the pot until it is too late, I have been aware of many of the particulars but have not until recently pulled them together into a coherent picture that so massively condemns what we have become.

We Americans have allowed our assumptions that we're the good guys -- that we're acting in the best interests of justice, peace and democracy -- to blind us to the reality of the death and destruction we are responsible for. Even several years after the American invasion of Iraq, when it had become clear that there had been no weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had never been a threat to us, close, well-meaning friends kept assuring me that "President Bush knows something that he can't tell us." And now that it is clear that the president had no secret information, many are blaming him for the disaster. But Iraq is atypical only in that the thin-to-nonexistent rationale for invasion has been so clearly exposed. But Iraq is no different in kind from dozens of other military and covert actions that we have unilaterally and illegally taken in the last 50 years -- from Vietnam to Nicaragua to Panama to Grenada.

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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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