Now I Understand Why They Hate Us

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

The Iraq war is another obvious example. It's not surprising that the military power paid for by half the world's budget could easily sweep away the military power of a third-rate power already decimated by a previous war and 12 years of overwhelming economic sanctions. (In fact, Saddam's military hardly resisted; rather, the fighters took their weapons, retreated and waited.) Military power is highly destructive. But how effective has U.S. military might been in overcoming the insurgency or bringing about democracy?

Indeed, in the last 60 years, foreign military force has provided no match for indigenous, insurgent forces anywhere, whether the French in Algeria, the French or the Americans in Vietnam, the "coalition forces" in Iraq, or NATO in Afghanistan. Military force in those cases is not just costly, bloody and violence provoking; it is stupid and ineffective.

Alternatives to Militarism

Unfortunately, there is almost complete agreement among American political leaders that we need more, rather than less, military power and military spending. Even President-elect Barack Obama is part of the post-World War II, bipartisan consensus that views unchallengeable military strength as essential. In his campaign, at least, he called for increased spending on the military. Although he has called for withdrawal from Iraq, he has also called for moving those troops to Afghanistan, a move that will be as futile as the Soviet attempt to tame Afghanistan in the 1980s, unless the endeavor becomes something very different from a military campaign.

What are the alternatives? First, and most importantly, the United States military must become what most Americans believe it should be -- a defensive force that protects the United States from attack. The nearly 1,000 military bases around the world need to be dismantled, and its personnel brought home. Our country must strongly repudiate the pre-emptive-war doctrine of the 2002 National Security Strategy, give up our self-proclaimed role as the globe's policen and follow European nations' examples of having a purely defensive military.

Second, we must take the lead in world nuclear disarmament. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia and the other former Soviet states were eager for the abolishment of nuclear weapons, but the United States government refused to consider disarmament. Instead, we have refused to honor our commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and refused to enter into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The recent tensions between India and Pakistan (while highlighting the hesitation of nuclear powers to engage in open warfare), and the possibility that the political instability of Pakistan would leave nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists underscore the necessity to abolish these weapons from the face of the Earth. Over the last 20 years, the militarism of the United States has been the greatest barrier to their abolition. We must take the lead in destroying them and leading other nations to do the same.

Third, we must strengthen capacity for international police action. For some time to come, international armed force against terrorist and other dangerous groups will be necessary, but this force must be deployed as police action not as war. (Military attacks always kill and wound civilians and damage civilian infrastructure, leading inevitably to the creation of new antagonisms and through them to the recruiting of new terrorists.) The world's current ability to provide such police force has been hampered by the U.S. insistence on being the sole world policeman. Intelligence services and cooperation with other nations to arrest terrorists as "criminals" (rather than the "freedom fighters" they become in military conflict) is the model used by other Western nations and would be far more productive (and far less expensive) than our current military model. Our country needs to encourage the strengthening of the United Nations or other such international organization that could provide military force when needed in failed states or situations of gross human rights abuses.

Finally, we must use the hundreds of billions of dollars saved from disarmament to provide foreign aid to underdeveloped countries. The growth of terrorism and the failure of states stems directly from poverty and ignorance. Providing enough food, shelter, basic education and adequate health care for everyone in the world is, relatively speaking, not an expensive endeavor, certainly less than we've been spending in Iraq. Only the development of the Third World will give us the potential for freedom from terror. The previous discussion of the financial cost of our militarization offers one clear avenue for reversing the current political consensus in favor of militarism. As Kevin Phillips outlines in his book, Wealth and Democracy, a primary cause of the decline of the last three Western empires (Spain, Holland and Great Britain) has been bankruptcy through militarization.

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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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